transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[00:30] Beginning in the early 1960s, one after another, former Nazi scientists and engineers were targeted for assassination in an Israeli intelligence operation called Operation Damocles. The scientists had taken new jobs developing rockets for Egypt, and it was very clear that Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, didn't want that program to continue. So Mossad agents sent mail bombs, organized drive-by shootings, and in one case managed to make a prominent arms dealer named Heinz Krug disappear completely. As New York Times reported at the time, the expert Dr. Krug, who once held a top post with a Stuttgart Research Institute for Jet Propulsion Physics, disappeared in Munich on Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his Munich office for an appointment. Operation Damocles was ultimately a successful program. It terrified Nazi scientists and it certainly made the idea of working for Egypt much less appealing. It was also a good practice for Mossad, which went on to conduct many more assassinations of foreign scientists. Most recently in Iran, just a few years ago, towards the end of Trump's first term, Mossad managed to kill Iran's nuclear scientists using a remote-controlled AI-enabled machine gun that was hidden in the back of a pickup truck that was parked on the side of the freeway, which, there it is right there, Israeli spies programmed the AI to compensate for the machine gun's movement in the back of the pickup truck as well as the input delay from the remote operation of the weapon. So when the scientists drove by, all the Mossad agent had to do was press the button and shoot them. And at the time, Iran had no idea what had happened. They assumed that snipers had been hiding near the freeway. Initial media reports suggested that a gun battle had taken place. And for their part, the Mossad contributed to this confusion by blowing up the pickup truck once the target was dead. Now, we sometimes hear about these kinds of operations when they're conducted by our own intelligence services or intelligence agencies that work with the CIA like the Mossad. That makes sense. It's effective propaganda that sounds like you're reading a spy thriller. And people on our side like to brag about successful operations. At the same time, it's very rare to hear about similar operations that are conducted by foreign governments within our borders. And there's only two possible reasons for that. Either foreign governments aren't conducting any assassination operations on US soil, or they're conducting those operations without being detected, or at least without our government telling us about them. Now, especially with the war in Iran underway, it's not hard to wonder whether indeed American researchers are being targeted without the government telling us. In recent days, as you've probably heard, there's a lot of concern about this possibility. It's gone mainstream, and now the White House is involved. Watch.

Speaker 3:
[03:18] Retired Major General William Neil McCaslin was last seen in his home in New Mexico in late February.

Speaker 4:
[03:25] My husband is missing.

Speaker 3:
[03:27] Tonight, his case is at the center of swirling online conspiracies over the deaths or disappearances of at least 10 scientists that have caught the attention of the White House.

Speaker 5:
[03:37] I just left the meeting on that subject, so pretty serious stuff.

Speaker 3:
[03:41] An FBI spokesperson now confirms the Bureau is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists. So far, there's no evidence linking the cases, but among the disappearances fueling speculation online, Monica Reza, a former NASA scientist who vanished this past summer while hiking in California, and Alabama-based anti-gravity researcher Amy Catherine Eskridge, whose death in 2022 was ruled a suicide. Others have ties to nuclear research, aerospace programs and classified projects.

Speaker 6:
[04:13] That's definitely something I think this government and administration would deem worth looking into.

Speaker 3:
[04:17] McCaslin's disappearance has drawn a lot of attention because at one point he worked inside an Air Force base in Ohio, a long rumored to house extraterrestrial debris despite repeated Air Force denials. And his wife wrote on Facebook, it seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.

Speaker 2:
[04:40] Now, whenever there's a confusing and alarming story like this, the worst thing you can do as a media organization is broadcast a superficial drive-by report and that's exactly what NBC just did in that clip we played. If you're going to suggest that shadowy assassins are taking out American scientists, or might be, then you can't spend 60 seconds on the topic and then move on. It's too important for that kind of treatment. Now, to be clear, this is obviously a story worth pursuing, looking into. It's also a story that's extremely easy for media outlets to mess up. For the most part, they want the number of dead or missing scientists to keep increasing because that creates more drama and as a result, they're not doing a deep dive into each one. Instead, they're making you think that every single case is equally suspicious, which just isn't true. There's a lot of distraction going on here for one reason or another, and it's drawing attention away from the cases that deserve a second look. So today, we're going to go one by one through all of these cases, all the scientists who have allegedly been killed or who died under suspicious circumstances. We'll talk about everyone who was just mentioned in the NBC report and many others, and we'll do our best to look at it objectively and figure out if there might be something going on here. We'll start with Amy Eskridge because on the surface, she's the most disturbing case. Although when you dig into it, there are a lot of issues with the narrative that's circulating around. So Amy Eskridge died in Huntsville, Alabama on June 11th, 2022 at the age of 34. The cause of death was a gunshot to the head, which was determined to be suicide. Shortly before her death in 2020, Eskridge claimed that she was preparing to present major findings on anti-gravity research, which has relevance to UFOs and their propulsion systems, although she needed approval from NASA. To this end, Eskridge started a now defunct website called the Institute for Exotic Science, which she said would provide a public-facing persona to disclose anti-gravity technology. Eskridge was also involved in her father's company, Holocron Engineering, which was supposedly developing a triangle anti-gravity craft, although they didn't get very far. Anti-gravity research for the record is not an established branch of science and Eskridge had no published papers in any peer-reviewed publication. Now, it's not to say that peer review is the most important thing, but it does make it clear that she was not an established leading US scientist or anything like that. Now, in any event, according to Eskridge, she was on the verge of a big breakthrough and somebody wanted to stop her. A month before her death, according to a UFO investigator named Frank Milburn, Eskridge reportedly sent a text message to a friend warning that her life was in danger. And the alleged text read in part, if you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed myself, I most definitely did not. The dominoes are being lined up all over again. Obviously, that's a very conspicuous thing for somebody to write shortly before they die of a gunshot wound to the head. On the one hand, it could indicate exactly what it says that this person was being harassed by people who wanted her dead. On the other hand, you need context for a text message like that because it's also possible that this woman was simply paranoid and mentally unwell. And to make that determination, you need context. David Wilcock, the paranormal content creator, also repeatedly said that he wasn't suicidal. And according to police, he just shot himself on April 20th when they responded to a residence where he was located. So maybe you could fold that into this overall story or maybe not. So with that in mind, here's a podcast interview featuring Eskridge several years before her death, in which she talks about how a suspicious Lexus pulled up near her apartment complex. She describes the apartment complex as low-income and says that a high-end blacked out Lexus is an unusual site in the parking lot. Supposedly, this Lexus is part of the larger plan to harass her. So you listen to this carefully and assess her credibility. Watch.

Speaker 7:
[08:57] Within two minutes of me saying, hey, we should walk over there later and take a picture of the license plate. We were still standing there at the window looking at it, talking about it, and an Eastern European looking mother with a black beanie dressed all in black in his 50s or 60s, walked out of the apartment directly across from ours, holding a license plate. He opened the trunk of the Lexus and he took out some tools, and he changed the license plate right in front of our faces. Then he walked back to his apartment, and he put the old license plate on the front patio and went inside, left it outside. It was literally like, come get the license plate, I have more. I have more where this came from, come get the license plate. Then after that, the Lexus started tailing me, and every time I saw the Lexus, it had a different license plate. It would be like Alabama plates, a different state plate. It would be random dealer plates, none of which were local, just like cardboard temporary dealer plates, none of which were any local dealers. Every time I saw it, it was different plates. It would follow me to the gas station to go get beer. I would go get beer at the gas station, and that Lexus follows me. Even my ex called an Uber once. He called an Uber. The Lexus pulled out from the spot across the parking lot from our apartment, drove over to our apartment and said, hey, I'm your Uber here to pick you up. The license matched in the Uber app, but they didn't have an Uber sticker or a Lyft sticker. You can't drive Uber if you don't have an Uber sticker. Over the past, this has been going on for like, I don't know, four or five years. And over the past 12 months, it's been like escalating, escalating, like more aggressive, more invasive. Digging through my underwear drawer and sexual threats over the past three to six months. And now I'm like, I have to publish. I have to publish because it's only going to get worse until I publish. There's no way out of this. There's no way out of this situation. Until I publish.

Speaker 2:
[11:31] So the problem here is that really what she's saying doesn't make much sense. I mean, there's no logical reason why somebody would do any of this. If she's a threat to somebody because of her research, it doesn't make much sense for them to send Alexis and changed its license plates in front of her or a moonlight as her Uber driver or break into her house or look through her underwear drawer. She also doesn't mention any police report or any surveillance footage or anything. She's asking us to take her word for all of this. And you might say, well, the Lexus driver is trying to intimidate her so that she doesn't publish her research. These people are supposedly sinister enough that they're capable of murdering her and yet they held off for several years, hoping they could scare her by changing some license plates around. But in that case, you have to ask why didn't you simply publish her groundbreaking research online? Why did she feel the need to wait for NASA or peer review or anything like that? Why would these shadowy figures allow her to talk about their pressure campaign online for years before they took her out? These are all important questions and no major news outlets are remotely interested in answering them. One of the things you need to be careful about as you read stories about these scientists is that a lot of outlets are extremely sloppy with details. Many of them are probably using AI to generate their stories. For example, as you could see here, The Daily Mail reported, Journalist Michael Schellenberger testified before a public hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, that Eskridge was murdered by a private aerospace company in the US because she was involved in the UAP conversation. Now, when I read that quote, I did a double take because Michael Schellenberger is a serious journalist. We cite his work on the show all the time. If he did the research and concluded that Eskridge had been murdered by a private aerospace company, then I'd be very inclined to at least take that story seriously. But if you pull up the actual testimony, Schellenberger didn't say anything like that. The attribution is just completely wrong. It's just not right. He didn't say anything about Eskridge or how she was supposedly murdered. In reality, the claim came from a retired UK intelligence officer named Frank Milburn who got in touch with Eskridge before her death. He told investigators that in his view, Eskridge was indeed being harassed. In fact, he claimed that Eskridge had been targeted with a directed energy weapon, is what he said. So who is Frank Milburn? Well, he's also the source for the alleged text message where Eskridge says that she's not suicidal. It turns out he's a British paratrooper veteran and intel officer who claimed that in the late 1980s, the British Special Forces shot down a non-human craft in Northern England. Milburn who doesn't have firsthand knowledge of the shoot down, but he claims that he spoke to an MI6 officer, named, codenamed John, and the UK Air Force crew that fired on the UFOs, which were supposedly traveling at hypersonic speeds. So that's where this all comes from. This is from The Daily Mail. According to Milburn, quote, John said they were tasked to secure and retrieve the craft in the north of England. They were flown in by helicopter. They established a cordon, a perimeter, and they approached the craft. He didn't describe the craft. He just said it was obvious that it was non-human. It was obvious that there were occupants who had fled the scene on foot or whatever you call it. He said then it became a task of tracking down these beings to try to bring them into custody. Part of the unit was left protecting the craft. They would have left maybe six to eight blokes to cordon the craft and others who would have been on foot, quad bikes or four by fours trying to track down these entities that escaped from it with helicopter supporting. He said after that it was totally passed over. He said, scientists and technicians came in, and it was completely out of our hands. We were flown away by helicopter, and we knew nothing after that. We don't get a description of the UFO. We're only told that the aliens ran away, and that there was a hot pursuit of some kind involving quad bikes like something out of a movie, and then the whole thing was just dropped. The government didn't kill John to keep him quiet or anything like that, so he just told all his friends. Put simply, Frank Milburn has a history of making unverifiable outlandish Hollywood style claims, and now he's making another one. He's saying that this woman was hit with a mysterious energy beam, and harassed, and targeted for assassination. So it's simply not much to go on. Well, the numbers don't lie. Financial stress in this country is through the roof, and if debt is crushing you, you're not alone. But doing nothing doesn't fix it. It just lets interest keep bleeding you dry. You don't need another loan. You don't need bankruptcy corps. You need a real plan. Luckily, our sponsor, Done With Debt, can help. They don't offer gimmicks. They build smart, personalized strategies that actually reduce what you owe. Whether you're facing 10,000 in debt or 10 times that, their goal is simple. Get your payments down and your freedom back. Debt is horrible. It ruins lives and opportunities, but you can start doing something about it today. Take five minutes for a free consultation, lay out your situation, see what's possible, because no matter how bad it feels right now, you don't have to stay stuck there. Go to donewithdebt.com. That's donewithdebt.com. Now, on the other hand, there are disappearances that are obviously worth a deeper investigation. Consider the case of 29-year-old Joshua LeBlanc. He's a NASA scientist who worked on rockets and nuclear propulsion. Last summer, he died in a car accident, and here's how local news reported on his death at the time. Watch.

Speaker 8:
[17:03] Joshua LeBlanc grew up in New Iberia, but he was working in Huntsville at NASA as an electrical engineer. His family reported him missing earlier this week. His car was found Tuesday afternoon, two hours away from his home with no signs of him anywhere. Joshua LeBlanc was well-known in New Iberia where he graduated from Catholic High and later attended and graduated from UL Lafayette. His family tells me he last communicated with them at 4:32 AM Tuesday. They also told me he never showed up for a job that he loved that morning as well. What we do know about his disappearance is this. Alabama authorities did track his blue Tesla Model 3. According to the Tesla car data, it stopped for four hours at the Huntsville International Airport, which is about 12 minutes from his apartment. The data shows his car left the airport, traveled west on Alabama back roads before crashing in Florence, Alabama. Tuesday, 2 PM, the car was discovered and a body inside, but the body was found burned beyond recognition, according to family members. But the case has only raised more questions. LeBlanc's phone, his personal belongings, and even his dog were all left behind in his Huntsville apartment. Family members say the detour and disappearance don't match anything Joshua had planned for that day, and now they believe he may have been abducted from his home.

Speaker 2:
[18:26] Now, by itself, does any of this reporting prove or even suggest that LeBlanc was targeted by an intelligence agency? No, it doesn't. Nor does it make much sense for someone to use a Tesla to kill him, since Teslas have cameras that are constantly recording. And while the family has their concerns, it's also possible that they're mistaken. But given the circumstances, you'd think the authorities would have investigated and come up with some kind of explanation for what LeBlanc was doing and why he would have left his phone behind. Normally, it's not hard to figure out these kinds of basic details, but in this case, none of those details have been forthcoming. Maybe now that it's getting more attention, that will change. Then there's another case NBC mentioned, the disappearance of 68-year-old US Air Force Major General, William Neil McCaslin. This is where the cases are worth paying more attention to. Now, unlike Eskridge, McCaslin had an established scientific career. According to the New York Post, he served in senior Pentagon roles involving nuclear science, space research, and defense initiatives. He also commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at New Mexico's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where wreckage from the 1947 Roswell crash was purportedly shipped. Well, the Air Force has denied that. During his career, McCaslin also oversaw research at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which was famous for its work developing the first atomic bomb. And Congressman Eric Burleson of Missouri says that he had contacted McCaslin concerning his research into UFOs. And according to the Post, quote, McCaslin also appears in the WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton campaign manager, John Podesta's emails. Former Blink 182 singer Tom DeLonge was in frequent contact with Podesta regarding UFOs and identified McCaslin as his insider source on alien intel. Leaked calendar notifications showed a meeting schedule between Podesta, DeLonge and McCaslin on January 24th, 2016. Now, on February 27th of this year, McCaslin, an experienced hiker, left his home in Albuquerque without his phone or prescription glasses. All he took with him apparently was his wallet and his hiking boots, and a 38 revolver. Now, before leaving at 10 a.m., he spoke to repairmen at his home. His wife left for a doctor's appointment at 11 a.m., 11, 10 a.m. to be precise. And by the time she returned an hour later, he was missing. A couple of hours later, his wife called 911. Listen.

Speaker 9:
[20:50] This is April. How may I help you?

Speaker 4:
[20:52] Hi, April. My name is Susan Wilkerson. My husband is missing. And it's been about three hours. And I have some indication that he must have planned not to be found. He's left his phone. He changed his clothes into, I don't know what. I think he's on foot. All of our cars and bicycles are in the garage. I left for a doctor's appointment at about 11, 10. And he was here at that time at the house. And I got back from that at noon and he was gone. He turned it off and left it behind, which seems kind of deliberate, because he's always got his phone. He has a smart watch. I don't know if that's with him or not.

Speaker 9:
[21:40] Has he ever done this before?

Speaker 4:
[21:42] Never. Nothing even remotely like it. He's a retired Air Force Major General. He's very responsible, but he's also facing some medical issues.

Speaker 9:
[21:54] Do you have any video at your home? No. Has he been diagnosed with any mental disorders or anything like that?

Speaker 4:
[22:03] Well, we've been seeing a doc for both physical and mental in terms of anxiety, short-term memory loss, lack of sleep. The same doc I went to see today, other than saying if his brain and body keep deteriorating, he didn't want to live like that. But it seemed to me that was just a, man, I hate how this is going kind of thing, because I told him, yes, you do.

Speaker 9:
[22:33] Okay. We're going to send some deputies up to talk to you, see if we can search a little bit and see what's going on. Okay?

Speaker 4:
[22:38] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[22:39] So he has both mental and physical issues. He's retired, he's given indications that he might not want to continue on with his life tragically, and his wife believes that he doesn't want to be found, and he left with a gun. The police dispatched a helicopter with an infrared scanner to try to find him, but they said it was too hot outside for the scanner to be useful. Quote, the mountain was just lit up like a candle, the sheriff said. We couldn't differentiate from heat signatures and the heat from the rocks. So again, the simplest explanation is clear. You can easily make the case that in all likelihood, this elderly man with mental health problems may have committed suicide or becoming capacitated while he was on a hike or attacked by an animal or fallen or any number of possibilities. There aren't any indications that he was actively involved in any high level research or was on the verge of any kind of breakthrough at all. What makes this case interesting is that in a relatively short period of time, several other people with connections to national laboratories basically went missing the same way. Within around 10 months, they all disappeared without taking their cell phones with them. Some of them had weapons. So let's go through those cases, starting with 78-year-old Anthony Chavez, a research and development engineer who also worked at Los Alamos. Spent most of his career working on a dual-axis radiographic hydrodynamic test facility, which is involved in nuclear weapons research. Chavez had long retired. He hasn't been working since 2017. Unlike McCaslin, Chavez was last seen leaving his home on foot with his car parked in the driveway. Only unlike McCaslin, Chavez left behind his wallet. He was reported missing in May of 2025 and still has not been located despite an extensive search for him. Then three months after Chavez disappeared, 48-year-old contractor Steven Garcia also went missing. He disappeared in pretty much the same way. He was last seen on August 28th, leaving his home in Albuquerque at 9 AM, carrying only his gun, leaving his wallet and his keys behind. Police said they had some reason to believe that he may have been in danger to himself. Watch.

Speaker 10:
[24:43] This one is chilling to me because as you said, it echoes Neil McCaslin's disappearance right down to the same thing. The same thing, the state of New Mexico. So Steven Garcia, I mean, he had a top security clearance at KCNSC.

Speaker 6:
[24:58] Is that per a source though? A source said that.

Speaker 10:
[25:00] This is per a source. Yes, per a source that was close to Garcia. But look, where he worked at KCNSC, I mean, they manufacture 80% of non-nuclear components that go into building military nuclear weapons. And I mean, he oversaw tens of millions of dollars of assets, equipment, some classified, some not. I mean, we don't know what was going on in this guy's head, right? The officials had said that he may have been a danger to himself. He was seen carrying a gun. And it sounds crazy, but between Garcia and General McCaslin, I have to wonder, and again, I know this sounds crazy, but it could be an option here. I mean, is the government doing this? Or are they taking out their own people because of XYZ?

Speaker 2:
[25:51] Now, the Albuquerque facility of the Kansas City National Security Campus manufactures most of the non-nuclear components that are used in weapons. At the same time, a property custodian isn't the most essential employee in that facility, so it's not clear to anyone why he would be a potential target for any reason. But again, the similarity of these disappearances is striking. And there's another disappearance to add to the list, the case of 53-year-old Melissa Casius, who also worked at Los Alamos. And Melissa Casius was not a UFO researcher or a nuclear weapons expert, she was an administrative assistant. There's no indication one way or another that she had access to sensitive information or research at all. She was last seen in June of 2025, entering her car in the afternoon after shopping downtown. She reportedly dropped lunch off for her daughter before saying she was going to work from home. It's the last site there you could see. Investigators have since recovered a pair of shoes that matched the ones that she was wearing. They've also discovered that her phone has been factory reset. But based on this information, if we're being honest, there are about 10 million explanations for why she might be missing. The most likely explanation, of course, is that she was attacked by a criminal who had no idea where she worked. When that happens, contrary to what you might see on television, it's actually not easy for police to figure out who did it. Think about the Nancy Guthrie case, which is still unsolved. If the FBI can't find out what happened to Nancy Guthrie, then the odds are low that anyone's going to be able to track down a random administrative assistant. People are much, much less safe than we might like to think. It's one of the reasons we have the Second Amendment. But the fact that we have so many people, all of them affiliated with national laboratories at one point or another, all disappearing in a relatively short frame of time, is obviously worth further investigation. That said, we do have to acknowledge that sometimes people die in strange ways. Sometimes people kill themselves. Sometimes people who say they aren't suicidal, they're not going to kill themselves, do. In fact, that happens a lot. Sometimes they trip and fall while they're hiking, and sometimes these people tend to live nearer each other and work in the same kinds of places. Los Alamos alone employs well over 10,000 staffers. It's not unreasonable to think that two or three of them, over the course of more than a year, might become suicidal independent of one another. Recall that after January 6th, several Capitol police officers committed suicide. In fact, within months of January 6th, four officers killed themselves. The media tried to link that to January 6th itself. They were claiming that these all counted towards that day's death toll. A death toll that was actually just one, Ashley Babbitt. Now in that case, the attempt to draw a connection was absurd. Is this another example of that sort of thing, of an erroneous connection being drawn in order to prop up a media narrative? In the case of January 6th, the media narrative was driven by politics, of course. In this case, it's driven by, if it is just a narrative, is it being driven by ratings, by clicks? We don't know yet. But let's keep going because there are more names to get through, and I promised that we would go through this objectively and just give you all the facts. So we'll continue to do that. And again, some of them are worth a closer look. Fox reports that, quote, NASA Materials Engineer Monica Reza, who served as Director of the Materials Processing Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also remains missing after disappearing during a hike in California in June 2025. Reza is one of four cases that are linked to Los Angeles County, including Caltech's Carl Grilmair, and two other jet propulsion lab experts, Frank Mywald and Michael David Hicks. So let's take these in turn, starting with Reza, who incidentally or not worked on projects that were overseen by McCasland at one point. So the local Fox affiliate reports that, quote, Reza disappeared while hiking with a friend near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest. According to her companion, they were roughly 30 feet apart when they made eye contact. She smiled and waved to indicate that she was fine. Moments later, when the friend turned around again, she had vanished. She disappeared in June of 2025, and her body still has not been found, despite an extensive search and recovery effort. Right away, we should be able to point out the obvious, which is that it's extremely unlikely that a CIA assassin snatched her during this hike. I mean, if you're going to run an operation like that, it's probably a good idea to do it when the target is alone, not right next to their friend. So again, the default assumption here should be that she fell off a ravine or something like that. I mean, that's the Occam's razor, that's the simplest possible explanation. But the other missing scientists from Los Angeles County scientists are a little harder to explain away. So here is Carl Grillmeyer, the Caltech scientist. He was 67 years old, specialized in astrophysics at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center on campus. That center also partners with NASA. Grillmeyer was a renowned scientist who was famous for his work on dark matter and galactic structures, as well as for discovering the existence of water on a distant exoplanet. A few months ago, he was shot to death on his front porch in Antelope Valley. Watch.

Speaker 11:
[31:18] The Caltech campus is in mourning tonight after a renowned astrophysicist was killed during a carjacking.

Speaker 5:
[31:24] Carl Grillmeyer was described as a brilliant man, a man who helped us better understand our own planet and the vast universe that surround us. CBSLH's Hunter Soutwards live at Caltech in Pasadena with the very latest on this story. Hunter.

Speaker 12:
[31:39] Juan, Suzy, Carl was known here on this campus for his humor and for his creativity. Those I spoke to today said this is not only a huge loss for loved ones, it's a huge loss for the entire field of science. Shock and sadness on the campus of Caltech as colleagues mourn the loss of groundbreaking astrophysicist and astronomer Carl Grillmeyer.

Speaker 5:
[32:03] We are shocked.

Speaker 1:
[32:04] This was so unexpected.

Speaker 8:
[32:06] Carl was full of life.

Speaker 12:
[32:07] The 67-year-old killed Sunday in the Antelope Valley, spent decades devoted to understanding the galaxies, studying the Milky Way and making groundbreaking discoveries, helping scientists better understand our planet. According to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, they responded early Monday morning to a shooting in the town of Lano, southeast of Palmdale. They say around the same time, reports of a carjacking eventually led them to the suspect accused of shooting Gero Meyer, who was quickly arrested and charged with murder and carjacking.

Speaker 2:
[32:37] The suspect who allegedly shot the scientist before apparently carjacking someone has been identified as 29-year-old Freddie Snyder. Good luck finding a picture of him. For some reason, the authorities haven't released one. I certainly couldn't find it. If they did release one, it's hard to find. According to local reports, Snyder had been arrested several months earlier for trespassing on Grillmair's property while armed with a rifle, and there's still no official motive. But hearing these facts, it's hard not to think of the murder of MIT professor Nuno FG. Larrero in front of his home in a Boston suburb. As you probably remember, a gunman shot the professor after killing two students at Brown University. In that case, it was pretty clear that the killer was upset that his career was a failure, and he blamed Brown while also harboring illicit jealousy for the professor's success. At the same time, the Brown shooter did kill himself, so we don't have a definitive understanding of his motive either. Some of these lists mention Michael David Hicks, who died in July of 2023. I've seen his name come up at News Nation, The New York Post, Newsweek and other outlets. He was a veteran researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for more than two decades. There's no indication of how he died exactly, so there's not much to go on. No cause of death has been released. For all we know, he might have been hit by a car, or died of a heart attack. A lot of outlets are adding his name and picture to other lists of missing or dead scientists, which tells you something that a lot of them are trying to pad the statistics a bit. They're trying to sell a narrative that may not be entirely true, and many of these outlets don't really care if it's true or not, because they want the narrative, they just want the clicks. This is one aspect of the story, it's why it's worth looking into, is the total breakdown in trust. We can't trust the news outlets, we know that we can't trust, who can we trust? When something like this happens, it's not clear what the actual facts are, and that's why we're trying to lay them out. Now, the magazine Unheard ran its own deep dive recently into several of these missing scientists, and while they're more skeptical about the narrative even than I am, they did include this paragraph on the origins of the story, which is pretty interesting. It's always important to try to figure out when everyone's talking about a particular topic where it began exactly. And here's what they came up with. Quote, Where did this narrative even come from? The earliest article on this topic is dated March 22nd, was published in Daily Mail. It notes five missing scientists. Two days later, a website called the Liberty Line added another name, expanding the list to six. According to its ex account, the website specializes in Philadelphia sports and whatever else comes to mind. Right-wing media and influencers kept adding names until we reached Eskridge with old cases treated as breaking news. Finally, the story made its way to Fox News and the White House briefing room. What's frustrating about this is that indeed there are several disappearances and deaths that are worth further investigation. I don't think any reasonable person can deny that. We simply don't have many details about deaths that are obviously suspicious, and that involve very high-level scientists, including retired scientists. But by the same token, no reasonable person can deny that the tabloids and even some major media outlets that function as tabloids are mainly interested in turning this whole story into a circus. They're adding names to the list that obviously don't belong, just so they can create paranoia and drive clicks. And in the process, they're distracting from some actual investigations that need to happen, particularly investigations into LeBlanc, MacCaslin, Chavez, Garcia, and Cassius. And show us the picture of the man who killed the Caltech scientists. Otherwise, as usual, a legitimate story is at risk of being derailed, whether deliberately or not. Doesn't really matter. Anywhere worth going is worth going in good boots, which is a problem in a culture where grown men think sneakers and sweatpants count as formal wear. Well, Tecovas fixes that by making quality Western boots for everybody, from ranchers and lifelong cowboys to first-time boot buyers who just want to look like adults again. Their boots are handcrafted in over 200 meticulous steps for a broken-in comfort right out of the box. No stiff, miserable break-in period. Pull them on and go. Tecovas has timeless, tasteful silhouettes and premium genuine leathers. 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Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com/walsh. Now, yesterday we talked at some length about false flag, the false flag operation that took place in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right Rally during Trump's first term. It was well-funded, well-organized, highly effective. Whole thing was engineered to give Democrats a pretext to suspend civil liberties, which they did. We might choose to believe that these kinds of operations don't take place on American soil, but they do all the time. At the same time, you have to be willfully blind to think that some intelligence agencies, including potentially our own, wouldn't want to make certain people disappear, or at the very least, they might lie about what happened to those people. Just the other day, for example, we were told that two CIA officers died in a tragic and very strange car crash in Mexico. Watch.

Speaker 3:
[39:24] This is what Mexican authorities say was a massive drug lab hidden in the woods. You can see rows of canisters, bags and ovens. A rare look inside a secret meth lab in northern Mexico. But tonight, what happened after the law enforcement operation is raising questions about US involvement in the crackdown. A source with knowledge of the matter tells NBC News, two CIA officers along with two Mexican officials died following the operation this weekend in a car accident. Mexico's president, Claudio Schoenbaum, is promising a thorough investigation.

Speaker 2:
[39:59] This is like the line from Mission Impossible about how the US government will disavow all knowledge if you're caught or killed. Everyone knows those CIA agents did not die in a car crash, but that's the cover story the US government is going with. Again, it happens all the time. For that reason, we simply cannot be satisfied with the information we have so far about these missing or dead scientists. We don't know what's going on. It would be nice if I could end this monologue by saying, well, I've gotten to the bottom of it, here's what's really happening. That would make for a better title anyway. Gotten to the bottom of this story, I haven't gotten to the bottom of it, I don't know. That's my conclusion. I'll be honest with you, that we need an independent investigation, one that's not conducted exclusively by the government into each of those deaths that I mentioned. Put all the facts out there. Let us debate the merits of every single case. Without transparency, bodies keep piling up, theories multiply. Tabloid articles spiral out of control. Most of them will be way off the mark. And in that environment, when an intelligence agency does take out one of its targets, no one, even the most discerning observer, will have any way of knowing. That will do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday of a great weekend. Godspeed.

Speaker 13:
[41:32] I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of America, their statues should not be in the Capitol.

Speaker 2:
[41:41] History is written by the victors, and since the 1960s, we've been told mostly by people whose ancestors didn't even live here during the war, the South committed treason. But if the Confederates were traitors, then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason? What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson afraid of? Did they know something they're not allowed to say today?

Speaker 3:
[42:07] It's time for the truth.

Speaker 2:
[42:08] So here it is. Robert E. Lee was a military genius and a man of immense honor. He was beloved by Americans from the North and South for a century after the war. This is the real history of the Civil War.

Speaker 1:
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