By T.M. Brown, CNN
(CNN) — In an April 15 press briefing, Fox’s Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt an unexpected question. “There are now 10 American scientists who have either gone missing or died since mid-2024. They all reportedly had access to classified nuclear or aerospace material,” he said. “Is anybody investigating this to see if these things are connected?”
Leavitt told Doocy she would look into it; the next day, Doocy asked President Donald Trump about it in person, and Trump said he had “just left a meeting” on the subject. On April 17, Leavitt announced that the White House would launch an investigation.
On April 20, the House Oversight Committee announced that it was planning an investigation of its own. “If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets,” Republican lawmakers James Comer of Kentucky and Eric Burlison of Missouri wrote in a statement.
Behind all the high-level talk about getting to the bottom of a mystery, though, was a different puzzle: where did this story about a purported pattern of dead or missing scientists come from?
Doocy’s questions and the White House’s responses were the culmination of a four-month journey from the fringes of the internet to the center of the federal government — a journey that demonstrated how alternative media platforms and social media can swiftly and deeply penetrate contemporary politics.
In January, Daniel Liszt, who runs the website Dark Journalist and writes about extraterrestrial life and deep-state conspiracies, recorded a three-hour YouTube stream in which he discussed the death of Nuno Filipe Gomes Loureiro, the MIT physicist who was killed by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente in December days after Valente had killed two people and wounded nine in a mass shooting at Brown University.
Liszt, who has 188,000 YouTube subscribers, compared Valente’s movements around New England to those of the Boston Marathon bombers and of the lead September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. He offered up the theory that Loureiro was “working on something that is potentially so transformative, that if you get a real leg up in the research — if you learn something, then you become a sort of database that needs to be erased potentially.” From there, he went on to describe a purported historical set of deaths among scientists who had worked on the United States’ Strategic Defense Initiative, and then ran through some other contemporary cases, proposing that a similar pattern was emerging.
“I had put all these things out there and I was amazed that people weren’t picking up on the missing people,” he said in a phone interview this month. “And then everybody picked up on it.”
On February 20, writer and influencer Jessica Reed Kraus wrote a post on her Substack publication, House Inhabit, discussing both Loureiro and Carl Grillmair, who was killed on his porch in a rural area north of Los Angeles in 2026, eight weeks after Loureiro’s killing. (Local law enforcement arrested a suspect and charged him with the killing and a separate carjacking and burglary.) Grillmair was a highly decorated astronomer and astrophysicist, working with NASA on investigations of exoplanets light-years away from our own solar system.
Kraus found the close proximity of both deaths suspicious and offered her own theory. “[A]s we stand on the verge of a president potentially disclosing life on other planets… I’d argue the slaying of two men re