MANHUNT FOR A MISSING GENERAL

AN ADVOCATE FOR UFO DISCLOSURE

Let me start by saying that speculation about the fate of William Neil McCasland may be making a mountain out of a molehill. But given the timing, and all that’s swirling around right now about UAPs/UFOs, I feel I need to lay out the facts. These include the gentleman’s wife just posting on Facebook that she needs “to dispel some of the misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance.”

On February 27, around 11 AM in a residential section of Albuquerque, the 68-year-old retired Major General left his home and vanished without a trace. His family has described him as very physically active and familiar with the area. He left behind his watch as well as his phone, which his wife found unusual for someone known to be an experienced outdoorsman who had a passion for hiking and skiing.

More than a week has now passed, and at the request of local law enforcement, the FBI has joined the search for McCasland. There is even talk of bringing in the National Guard. According to his wife Susan McCasland Wilkerson, a Facebook post by Celebrity Today is “a complete fabrication” maintaining that he contacted a relative by phone and said cryptically “I’m getting ready to do this thing, it’ll probably take some time.” Herself an astrophysicist, she went on to add: “It is true that when Neil was in the Air Force, he had access to some highly classified programs and information.”

Ross Coulthart, the prominent Australian podcaster who specializes in the UAP subject, went further. “If anyone knows the darkest secrets of the UAP Legacy Program, it is Major General Neil McCasland. He is one of the most important people in the U.S. military establishment in terms of secret stealth programs….He recognized the importance of having a controlled disclosure.”

Here is what we know about McCasland’s illustrious career. Commissioned in 1979 after graduating from the Air Force Academy with a degree in astronautical engineering, he started out in Colorado’s Aerospace Data Facility before his career took off. Soon he became commander of the Phillips Laboratory out of Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, a focal point for space and missile-related research and technology - including propulsion systems, directed-energy weapons and space vehicles.

Later McCasland served as Director of Special Programs at the Pentagon’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. There he did double duty at the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the government’s most secret agencies. His final posting in 2011 was as commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, from which he retired in 2013. There, McCasland had overseen a $2.2 billion science and technology portfolio, as well as an additional $2.2 billion in customer-funded R&D.

According to a colleague, Gen. Janet Wolfenbarger, “General McCasland has played a pivotal role in developing several unique capabilities that this country is not only using now, but will rely on in the future to face emerging threats.” She added that his contributions “will continue to provide this nation with a technological edge for decades to come.”

Upon leaving the military, McCasland became Director of Technology for an Albuquerque company (Applied Technology Associates) that specialized in real-time processing systems for ground, air and space applications.

A few years later, McCasland’s name surfaced in a 2016 WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman during her unsuccessful presidential run. Podesta was well known for pushing the government to release its classified files on UFOs. In that capacity, Podesta received an email on January 25, 2016, from Tom De Longe, the guitarist for Blink 182 who’d become a prominent UFO researcher. It concerned a meeting being arranged in Washington and the email was headed: “SUBJECT: GENERAL MCCASLAND.”

“He mentioned he’s a skeptic. He’s not,” De Longe wrote to Podesta. “I’ve been working with him for four months. I just got done giving him a 4-hour presentation on the entire project a few weeks ago. Trust me. The advice is already, has been happening on how to do all this. He just has to say that out loud. But he is very, very aware as he was in charge of all this stuff. When Roswell crashed [referring to the famous 1947 case of a recovered ‘flying saucer’] they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson AFB. Gen. McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple of years ago. He not only knows what I’m trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisary [sic] team. He’s a very important man.”

The Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, was not only where debris from Roswell was sent for analysis, but became the home of Project Blue Book in the 1950s and 60s, where 12,618 alleged UFO sightings were investigated and 701 of which remained “unidentified.”

McCasland’s wife wrote that her husband “retired from the AF almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him….This connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil. Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt. Though at this point with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership. However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported.”

So it may be hyperbole or at least exaggeration for Newsweek, in its March 3 online edition, to headline: “Who Is Wiliam Neil McCasland? Ex-US General Linked to UFO Research Missing.” It’s indicative, though, of how much is heating up around this. After Barack Obama came out recently on a podcast saying aliens were “real,” President Trump announced on February 19 that he planned to issue an executive order for the Pentagon and other agencies to release their files.

Then, on February 26, while giving a deposition before the House Oversight Committee on her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Hillary Clinton was asked whether she was pleased about the president’s call for disclosure, as her former campaign manager John Podesta had sought. “I am pleased,” she replied, adding that “this will have to be carefully scrutinized so that no national security information is disclosed. But it’s an issue of importance to so many people and I think whatever can be disclosed should be.” As for Podesta, he “was deeply interested in this issue and if I had been elected, I would certainly have listened to his advice.”

The next day, Major General McCasland disappeared. It’s also worth noting that this is the third strange incident to occur over the past three months. Two prominent astrophysicists - Nuno Loureiro at MIT, who devoted his life to unlocking fusion energy, and Carl Grillmair of CalTech, an expert in exoplanets and galactic structure - were both murdered at their homes by assailants without any explainable motive. (See my earlier substacks of January 2, January 5 and February 25).

Today, Representative Eric Burlison (R., Mo.), who’s been the most outspoken Congressman pushing for releasing the classified files and has begun visiting locations that are said to have housed non-human technology, said to an interviewer: “Someone that has had experience in Special Forces and the intelligence community, [when] I was running by the list with them, said ‘You need to take those two names off your list and never talk about those two people ever again. They’d have no problem having you killed.’”

Meantime, the search for General McCasland continues.