11 Scientists Are Dead or Missing. It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Conspiracy Theories Hit the White House.
Proponents of some variant of the conspiracy, Radford adds, are working backward. “They’re finding people who are already dead or missing and then trying to find some connection, however tenuous,” he says, “to the defense industry, the Pentagon, UFOs, UAP, NASA.” (McCasland’s flimsy link to the UFO community is, among the scientists, the most substantive connection to these subjects.) In a comprehensive rejoinder to the theory, UFO investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West pointed out that the US top-secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce includes about 700,000 people. Ordinary mortality rates over the time span of some of the purportedly linked deaths and disappearances would predict, he said, around 4,000 deaths, 70 homicides, and 180 suicides in this community—as of this week, Rogan, Kraus, et al. are working with 11 cases. “People just kind of go looking for names,” West tells me, “and if you go looking for names, you’re gonna find them.” What West describes as “death-list fallacies” have a rich history as a kind of conspiracy theory folk tradition. Beginning in the 1960s, the …
