EP7 - 5 Strange Cases Involving Scientists and Defense Employees

EP7 - 5 Strange Cases Involving Scientists and Defense Employees

From The Scarecast: Scary Stories, Mysteries, and True Crime by Michael Crutchfield

April 4, 2026 · 45 min · Season 7

About this episode

This episode explores a series of mysterious disappearances and violent deaths involving scientists and defense employees linked to America's air and space power.

n this episode, we follow a chilling pattern that no official agency has ever laid out in one place: a nine‑month window where scientists, analysts, and officers tied to America’s air and space power either vanished or had their lives ended violently, while the official narratives stayed fragmented and strangely incomplete. We start by going much deeper into the disappearance of rocket‑alloy pioneer Monica Jacinto Reza, whose work on the Mondaloy superalloy helped the U.S. break its dependence on Russian RD‑180 rocket engines, and who walked into the Angeles National Forest on a familiar trail in June 2025 and simply never came back. From the scrubbed “green burial” memorial and missing cell‑phone forensics, to a mysterious hiking companion known only as Subject A. Then we move to New Mexico, where Los Alamos employee and DOE advisory board member Melissa Casias returns home in the middle of the day, only for her family to later find both her personal and government LANL phones apparently wiped back to factory state on the very day she vanishes along Route 518. At Wright‑Patterson Air Force Base, we revisit the brutal triple incident involving AFRL project manager Jacob Prichard…

People in this episode

Host: Michael Crutchfield

Topics covered

  • disappearances
  • scientists
  • defense employees
  • true crime
  • mysteries

Keywords

  • disappearance
  • scientists
  • defense
  • true crime
  • mystery
  • Air Force
  • Los Alamos

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Los Alamos, Air Force

Places: Angeles National Forest, New Mexico, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

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