THE MISSING GENERAL AND HIS COLLEAGUES

THE PLOT THICKENS

The search for retired Air Force General William Neil McCasland is approaching its fourth week. The 68-year-old McCasland walked away from his Albuquerque home late on the morning of February 27, leaving his wallet and cell phone behind, and has not been seen since. As chronicled in my March 7 substack, before his retirement in 2013 McCasland served as commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB, where he oversaw a portfolio of some $4.4 billion that funded the most sensitive aerospace research in America.

U.S. Representative Eric Burlison (R. Mo.) weighed in on the March 13 Weaponized podcast. The General “definitely is connected to the UAP topic,” said Burlison, who’s been championing Congress’ efforts for disclosure. “I know that he is someone that we have been waiting to try to talk to. ….Every time that anybody’s reached out to him, he’s said that he has nothing to say on the topic….but we believe that he has a lot to say.”

While coverage of McCasland’s disappearance has appeared on ABC News and CNN, major print media like the New York Times and Washington Post have ignored the story altogether. The questions - and they are increasing - have been largely exposed by an online portal calling itself the Sentinel Network, self-described as “an independent research organization tracking anomalous phenomena and the institutions that manage public knowledge of them.” Just who is behind its investigations is unclear, but they are exhaustive in “applying forensic data analysis, open-source intelligence methods, and what we call Scientific Brutalism.” That’s where most of what I’m drawing on for this substack has come from.

Let’s start back in 1999, when McCasland was soon to become Systems Program Director of the Pentagon’s Space Based Laser Project Office. At the same time, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB preceded NASA in funding the work of two female metallurgists who’d come up with a nickel-based superalloy that could power the next-generation rocket engines of America’s national security satellites. The women patented their new metal as Mondaloy. The “Mon” was in tribute to Monica Jacinto Reza, the research assistant to her co-inventor Dallis Hardwick at California’s Rockwell Science Center.

While Reza went on to join another company, Aerojet Rocketdyne, as a Technical Fellow with a team to produce Mondaloy, her mentor Dallis Hardwick ended up a senior civilian scientist at Wright-Patterson. There she would oversee the government side of their partnership. There General McCasland eventually funded both women’s work from 2011 to 2013.

Diagnosed with cancer in 2012, Hardwick stepped down, snd died two years later. Reza - also an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics - was listed as remaining a Technical Fellow with Aerojet Rocketdyne until 2023. That year, in July, the company was acquired for $4.7 billion by L3Harris., a Florida-headquartered Pentagon contractor. At some point in that time-frame, Reza left to do unspecified work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The only public record about this is a listing on the 2024-2025 Dean’s Advisory Board, which says: “Monica Reza. JPL NASA.”

It’s never come to light what Reza was doing at JPL, but she could easily have rubbed shoulders with astrophysicist Carl Grillmair because their studies were located on the same corridor at JPL. For almost thirty years he had worked on data processing for NASA out of Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, which was based at the JPL. A specialist in galactic astronomy, dark matter and exoplanets, Grillmair ;ed a team that gained notoriety for detecting water on a distant planet that could sustain life. One collaborator said he’d “reshaped how scientists map and understand the structure of the cosmos.” Grillmair also operated the first space telescope specifically designed to locate objects that could potentially hit the earth.

Let’s turn now to what happened to Reza. On June 22, 2025, now sixty, on a clear day she took her customary once-a-week hike inside Southern California’s Angeles National Forest, accompanied by two (still unnamed) companions. One of them later told authorities that she’d been walking along the ridgeline path some thirty feet behind him, waving and smiling, before he turned around to realize she was no longer there. Placed on a Missing Persons flyer, a massive search for Reza ensued. The only evidence, sparse at best, was her beanie discovered after 24 hours by scent dogs in a steep and largely inaccessible ravine leading down into Devil’s Canyon.

Oddly, there was no public announcement or press release about Reza’s disappearance from JPL or NASA. No space industry publication discussed her disappearance. Odder still, four days after Reza vanished and while the official search was still going on, a memorial page for her showed up on the Find A Grave website. It listed her birthdate (December 30, 1964) and alleged death date (June 22, 2025) and its forest location, along with “Remains: Green Burial.” This implies a body that had gone right into the earth.

One post, on the Reddit website, came from an apparent insider. “Any updates on the search? I’m a JPLer and something is not right about this story. She needs to be found.”

Reza wasn’t. Nothing further about remains, no obituary, no death certificate or funeral announcement. No resolution from the Homicide Bureau’s Missing Persons Unit.

Around six months after Reza vanished, a private investment firm called AE Industrial Partners issued a press release on January 5, 2026. They were acquiring a controlling interest in her former company, specifically the Space Propulsion and Power Systems business of L3Harris Technologies. Harris, remaining the minority investor, would restore the “Rocketdyne” name and keep alive Reza’s “historic engine the RL10,” although she wasn’t specifically mentioned.

Then, on the early morning of February 16, 2026, JPL/Caltech’s Carl Grillmair was shot and killed on the front porch of his home in the Antelope Valley. He’d been a key making the physics work for planetary defense and missile systems. As noted, Grillmair’s lab, and Reza’s JPL, occupied the same campus corridor of Caltech’s JPL lab.

The oddities continued in the aftermath of his death. In the latter part of December 2025, Grillmair had contacted the authorities after noticing someone on his rural property who didn’t belong there. They arrested 29-year-old Freddy Snyder for carrying a loaded unregistered rifle. But on February 5, 2026, two felony charges were dismissed “in the furtherance of justice” by a local judge who the Sentinel Network says has not been identified in accessible public records.

Eleven days after that, Snyder returned to Grillmair’s porch and killed him. Snyder was apprehended not far away. No motive has been publicly disclosed. The man’s arraignment is scheduled for March 26.

Less than two weeks after the Grillmair murder, came the disappearance of General McCasland. The investigative team at The Sentinel pursued yet another very strange circumstance surrounding him. This concerns “an anonymous X [formerly Twitter] account called “@TMBSPACEHIPS” with the display name of “ELECTRIC PROPULSIVE SPACECRAFT.” Since November of 2022, whoever this is “has been posting about exotic electric propulsion, plasma physics and ionized flight mechanics.” Altogether, 1,645 posts. A biography that reads; “38 year Active Duty USAF PhD Engineer.”

It’s not posting anymore. The final entry occurred “roughly 30 minutes before he [McCasland] was last seen” on February 27, 2026.

A little more than two years earlier, on December 30, 2023, the anonymous account had posted a picture of a hand-drawn schematic diagram on lined notebook paper. The Sentinel found it in the account’s archive.

A KC-135 Stratotanker is a military aerial refueling aircraft. Bleeding through the back of the page was a component list of what seemed to be a reverse-engineered propulsion system.

Writes The Sentinel: “The drawing shows a bright object — labeled ‘Ball with Light’ surrounded by a corona, descending through the atmosphere in sharp 90-degree steps. Behind it trails a multicolored ionization field in rainbow-layered bands. Annotations identify specific emission zones: green for ionized helium, yellow for fluorescence, purple for a ‘Dissipative Trailing Relaxation Zone.’”

The description block at the bottom contained this sentence: “I have seen the Bright Royal Green in Ionized Helium experiments before.” As The Sentinel’s analysis concludes; “The author isn’t theorizing. They [the observers] watched something in the sky and recognized a specific emission color from hands-on laboratory work. They’re claiming direct experimental experience with plasma physics.”

Plasma physics is considered by many to be intrinsic to how UAPs get around. A scholarly article in the Journal of Modern Physics (February 2024) described how ten NASA space shuttle missions had filmed plasmas “accelerating, slowing down, stopping, congregating, engaging in’hunter-predatory behavior.” The science around this had been the focus of yet another astrophysicist, Nino Loureiro of MIT, who directed the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT - before he was murdered at his Massachusetts home on December 16, 2025 (see my substacks of January 2 and January 5, 2026.) General McCasland, it might be noted, was also a product of MIT. After graduating from the Air Force Academy, he received a Master’s degree in aeronautical engineering and controls in 1980 and returned to MIT five years later to complete a doctorate in astronautical engineering.

Since June of 2019, McCasland has sat on the Board of Trustees at Riverside Research, a nonprofit that conducts both classified and unclassified research for the government on optics, electromagnetics and plasma physics. Another board member is Reginald Brothers, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and appointed by NASA in 2022 to a study team for investigating the UAP phenomenon (which concluded that E-Ts don’t really exist). Brothers is an executive with AE Industrial Partners, which last January became the forementioned majority owner of Reza’s former company.

Riverside Research recently initiated a job search for “an immediate opening in its Plasma Research Program,” researching “topics such as ionospheric physics, plasma turbulence, electromagnetic wave phenomenology and interaction, and space weather physics,” with a full-time position open at Wright Patterson AFB.

So, the tentacles keep extending. According to The Sentinel’s analysis of the mysterious anonymous emails: “The @TMBSPACESHIPS author knows plasma physics from the inside of a lab. McCasland’s career put him in command of the laboratories that do this work….

“SENTINEL ASSESSMENT: The technical profile embedded in the @TMBSPACESHIPS account overlaps McCasland’s documented career at multiple points. The focus on ionized helium propulsion maps directly to the research domains of institutions he commanded. The absence of any published record for this body of work is itself consistent with someone whose expertise was developed inside classified programs.”

So, had a colleague of the General’s conceivably been using this forum to get the word out about certain high-level technological secrets? Or could it even have been McCasland himself, utilizing a pseudonym - before everything went black. Might the General have been “abducted” - by the Americans, or maybe the Chinese or the Russians.

To be continued?