The case of the missing scientists
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday that the Trump administration is looking into whether there may be a link among nearly a dozen American scientists who have reportedly died or gone missing in the past almost three years.
Leavitt wrote in a post on social platform X that the White House is working with the FBI and other relevant agencies “to holistically review all of the cases together and identify any potential commonalities that may exist.”
“No stone will be unturned in this effort, and the White House will provide updates when we have them,” she added.
A string of at least 10 mysterious deaths and disappearances of U.S. experts in space, defense and nuclear topics has raised concern in the scientific community since the unconfirmed reports surfaced this month.
Might be a series of coincidences. Might not.
The old saw is “Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”
Not sure what 10 or 11 is but it’s definitely not good. Perhaps time to check small volcanic islands in the Pacific for odd colonies? Also any long haired white cats gone missing?
Total coincidence? Asymmetric warfare against us by an enemy? Some kind of false flag operation? Some of each?
It is odd, though, that so little was apparently done, or at least reported, about efforts to find the General with a head full of top secret information.
Summer of the Shark all over again.
They’re scraping up anything in the last ten years that’s involved anyone kinda sorta sounding sciency or spacey. Even a victim of the Brown shooter. Even crackpots who don’t actually have anything to do with science or space (recently added by the Daily Mail as number 11, who died in 2022). Even administrative assistants. And they’ve managed to find 10-ish out of many hundreds of thousands or millions of people, and now they’re drawing lines in red yarn between them after the fact.
Daily Mail needs something to generate clicks after Epstein. You have to click through two levels to find that link: Yahoo News links to Spectrum Local News which links to the Daily Mail.
Like the Epstein thing, a couple of sources drive this, and everybody links to things that link to things that link to things but they’re all copying each other.
I don’t think the Daily Mail ginned it up, probably someone was reading Reddit and thought they could get some clicks by piling on. Appears to be working.
I believe a FoxNews person first identified these odd deaths and disappearances, not our esteemed government.
I know nothing about this, as far as I know they went out for some fried chicken.
I…………um……
Hope they all remembered to bring a towel along.
Now that the Epstein list has been shown not to exist, the conspiracy industry has to find something new to write about.
First question should be, are these deaths statistically significant? People die all the time, across across all career fields, and some others go missing. So someone noticed a common thread connecting a handful of deaths. I could probably pick a job field, surf some obituaries, and find a number of folks in those jobs who recently died. So what?
The hard part of debunking this is that the base population is not defined except after the fact, by the Daily Mail or whoever it is spreading this. Every new person they count as a “missing scientist” can hugely expand the base population: scientists, scientists who retired years ago, military officers, admins, and harmless nuts who think they are scientists. They could be at an airbase, an national lab, a university, working at a pharmaceutical company, or an “institute” they made up with one other person. That’s potentially millions of people in the base population but it’s uncertain, because the Daily Mail or whoever are drawing their bullseyes around anything they hit.
In addition, since they are counting people now who have died four years ago, that multiplies the base population even further.
There’s roughly 90,000 people in the US who are known to have gone missing and never been found. (About 600,000 go missing annually and almost all are found again, about 70% within 72 hours.) The rate is not evenly spread through the population, and some states like Alaska have much higher rates than others. But for the US as a whole this number represents 0.03% of the population.
If 10 people have gone missing, and they’re 0.03% of some population, then how big is that population if it matches the national average? About 35,000. The three biggest national labs alone have about this many employees, let alone military bases, universities, NASA, pharmaceutical companies, etc. Of course they are not going to be representative of the US population and so it’s not likely the base rate would be the same, but we have almost nothing else to go on.
Because we don’t know who is going to count as a “missing scientist” until the Daily Mail or whoever tells us. The last one was a harmless nut in Alabama who called herself a scientist and invented her own institute with her dad. What does that do to the base population?
The Case of the Missing Bee Gees.
It’s been months! ;-(
They may be missing but they are Stayin Alive
The case of the missing CONSCIENCE (not to mention the absence of any shred of morality, ethics or legality)….
“…Proud Boys were innocent;
“The star witness who convicted the Proud Boys of seditious conspiracy just recanted….”—
https://instapundit.com/790897/
One should have known they were being railroaded by the likes of “Biden”, not to mention Sleazewell and Cheney.
Shipwreckedcrew (and others) can stand tall.
And the beat (of insanity) goes on…
“Marjorie Taylor Greene Amplifies Viral Doubts About Butler Assassination Attempt”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/marjorie-taylor-greene-amplifies-calls-transparency-butler-trump-assassination-attempt
She jumped the shark long ago.
WRT the Butler case, appearances would be less “curious” if we knew one tenth as much about Crooks and family as we do about others who have taken a shot at POTUS or other important figures.
@Tregonsee314 : The old saw is “Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”
That was Goldfinger’s line to James Bond, after Bond had gotten in Goldfinger’s way three times.
Speaking of spy movies … “The case of the missing scientists” reminds me of one of my favorite spy films, “The Ipcress File,” which was Michael Caine’s breakout role.
The plot is that some nefarious group is kidnapping British scientists. If they are returned, they have been brainwashed so they can no longer do science.
It was the first anti-James Bond film. Caine plays a clever blackmarket criminal, who has been forced into spying, but there is no glamour to it. His upperclass bosses are plotting against him and he is plotting not to go back to jail and how to wangle an 8% raise to buy better cookware and French mushrooms.
The acting, dialog, cinematography and music (early John Barry!) are all top-notch. I can’t recommend it enough.
–The Ipcress File (1965) Original Trailer [HD]”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHbvZ1FBqjI
It would seem the base population in this case is smaller.
Among other things, those who go missing include children, the elderly, those with mental issues, few of whom are scientists or linked to a particular field of science. Not seeing any of these folks doing agriculture or medicine, for example.
So the base population is quite a bit smaller. And, as I say, the circumstances of their disappearances are not the usual. As in….just not there. Or, looked back at her…then next time she wasn’t there.
Didn’t show up for work. Or anything else. Not home. Personal effects were. So far, no known preps for disappearing–reports of large cash withddrawals, heavy clothes gone, Just….not there. Not tracks–except Reza’s which, as a matter of scent, just end. How does that happen?
And, as I say, the base population is sciene in a relatively narrow field. The association with UAP may be out of date but with, say, advanced metallurgy, more current and more connective.
Unicorns don’t need no stinkin …. nickel-based superalloys.
@Richard Aubrey:And, as I say, the base population is science in a relatively narrow field.
But it isn’t, if you look at the 11 people that are touted as being part of a “trend”. There’s nothing narrow whatever about those 11 people. Only about half of them are even scientists at all, and the ones who are, are not in the same field:
An administrative assistant
A UFO nut
A pharmaceutical researcher
A physicist studying fusion killed by the Brown University shooter
A general
A long retired HVAC tech
An physicist studying galactic structure, murdered at his home
A physicist studying asteroids
An applied physicist who built remote sensing instruments for astronomy
A property custodian
And this person, who worked on metals.
@Niketas Choniates: There’s nothing narrow whatever about those 11 people.
Yes. That’s my problem too.
One common thing, they were all people! Other than that …… Just asking questions ….. Were any of them Jewish (or Amish)? ,,,,,, Will it go there?
Thanks for recommending The Ipcress File, huxley. I saw it decades ago, so may revisit it. It was based on a novel by Len Deighton, who passed recently. I think that Deighton’s best fiction work was the three trilogies which began with Berlin Game. I believe their main character, Bernard Samson, has things in common with the hero of the Ipcress File (who I think was not named) and the later Deighton/Caine characters named Harry Palmer.
Berlin Game et al are intricately plotted, and Samson is perhaps a rough-edged 80s replacement for the 60s’ James Bond character.
Selfy:
After Ipcress I became a big fan of Len Deighton. I read all nine of the Samson books. I was in London when the final book, “Charity,” came out. I saw billboards advertising it everywhere. Deighton was a lot bigger in England than here.
I even got his “Action Cook Book,” a collection of his recipes plus illustrations. Deighton was a serious cook himself. As I recall, it was Deighton himself who did the one-handed egg cracking in the film, not Caine.
I always thought the name Harry Palmer was nudge-nudge, wink-wink for going blind. Caine said he choose it after the most boring kid he knew in school.
@ Barry > I hope that story of the recanting witness is true, but it’s going to need some verification.
Maybe the Atlantic made Patel mad enough that he will throw the alleged Fibbers under the bus.
(the source linked at Instapundit)
https://x.com/gitmo99/status/2045561876868698512
I was in London several weeks ago visiting X-boy and new grandson. The in-laws have a large collection of Deighton books. I was introduced to the Sampson books. Now I am well into Berlin Game. I am looking forward to many hours of reading pleasure for the remainder of the series! I looked into purchasing the Action Cookbook on Amazon. At 200 GBP a little over my budget.
Always thought I was more of a Le Carré type…but I discovered, finally (and to my great delight) that Deighton is fabulous.
NIketasl
If we’re talking about the same guy, the UFO nut had left that field of work–whatever that looked like in the government–some years ago and was currently or very recently involved in advanced metallurgy, which is represented in several other cases. And an administrative assistant to….what? It’s not a know-nothing job in the field. At the very least, you know who came in to visit and where the principal went on trips. So, what was the field? I believe one report had that person was admin to another missing type,
@Richard Aubrey:If we’re talking about the same guy, the UFO nut had left that field of work–whatever that looked like in the government–some years ago and was currently or very recently involved in advanced metallurgy,
We’re not. Only one person on the list of 11 is in metallurgy. Only person on the list is a UFO nut. They are not the same person.
The reason the Daily Mail and other outlets can gin up stuff like this is because people don’t dig in to the actual facts. Some outlets are calling them all “nuclear officials” which is just hot garbage.
Does P. T. Barnum still work in journalism? It sure seems so. Lucy still controls the football.
Lucy still controls the football.
==
Peppermint Patty will always be more engaging and attractive.
==
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sZjpStFNY
than Jen Ptaski or Lucy. One is a cartoon character the other has less depth.
Re: Len Deighton
Deighton said he spent a lot of time in East German interviewing people for the Sampson books.
A serious writer. It showed.
Yes indeed Huxley. In the 90’s I worked in Berlin-former East and West. Many colleagues from the East. Interesting times.