> Over the past few months, a strange story has been seeping into the mainstream media from the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube. Its claim: scientists whose work related to aerospace and nuclear research are either dying or going missing. According to an influential report in the Daily Mail in March, the disappearances form a “chilling pattern”: two, for instance, had worked together at an air force laboratory. The implications, in some accounts, are Hollywood sinister, with scientists working on top-secret breakthroughs running into dark forces who wanted to get hold of what they knew – or ensure their silence. And it all seems to have something to do with what we used to call UFOs.
I was completely unaware until seeing this very article that there were people on "the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube" talking about a specific conspiracy that aerospace and nuclear research scientists were mysteriously disappearing. Although if you had asked me, say, an hour ago before I started reading this article, "hey, are there people on Substack and YouTube who are promulgating a conspiracy theory about the US government nefariously disappearing aerospace and nuclear research scientists?" I probably would have answered "yeah, this sounds like the sort of thing that someone on the internet is claiming is happening".
> On examination, these claims collapse. The “scientists” actually worked in disparate fields, from chemical biology to plasma physics. Several were actually administrators. Two had retired. One died of natural causes; another in a shooting spree. In any case, as the debunker Mick West pointed out, the “US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce” is around 700,000, so normal mortality rates would predict far more deaths over the 22 months concerned – about 4,000.
If I had been aware of people online talking about this, I probably would have assumed that they were uncritically reading conspiracy into a particular reading of some banal facts like the above - if I had even bothered to spend more than a second investigating the claims.
Here's a thought - how much credence should I put into this reporting by The Guardian about the existence of an internet-spread conspiracy theory in 2026 about the US government disappearing scientists, that is loosely based on a 1970s British hoax TV show in the vein of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds called "Alternative 3", that I have never previously heard of? This article is actually kind of light on details about how this modern-day conspiracy theory is operating, and indeed how it connects to this British TV show. Are they actually related, or did the modern-day theory just happen by chance to involve phenomena that sound kind of similar to what the writers of Alternative 3 came up with?
Here's another thought - did the editorial staff of The Guardian choose to write and publish an article about this 70s TV broadcast (which maybe some of them remembered seeing as kids, or seeing referenced in British culture decades ago?) because the Mars colonization angle reminds people of Elon Musk, a public figure who has been publicly talking about Mars colonization for many years, and who the sorts of people who work at The Guardian openly dislike for political reasons? Maybe that's the actual conspiracy - people who work at a well-known newspaper with a specific political stance published a thinly-sourced article that lets them subtly imply that a thing associated with one of their political enemies is sinister?