The recent probe into a collection of missing scientists has reignited the debate over a decades-old string of deaths among those researching UFOs. There have been at least 11 deaths and disappearances among prominent scientists, nuclear officials and experts linked to UFOs, such as retired Major General William Neil McCasland, since 2022.
Federal investigators have been looking into the cases, with FBI Director Kash Patel saying that the bureau is 'spearheading the effort' to uncover any possible links between cases. However, UFO researcher Timothy Hood and others have alleged that there was a much older series of deaths, including mysterious 'suicides,' stretching back to the late 1940s - also known as the dawn of the UFO era.
Conspiracy theorists have suggested that hundreds of deaths could be linked to exotic research, including staged plane crashes and incidents made to look as if researchers took their own lives. Nigel Watson, author of Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited, told the Daily Mail that many of these suspicious events took place shortly after early civilian researchers and even military officers investigated witness reports of UFO sightings.
To this point, the US government has maintained that there has never been any evidence of UFOs or extraterrestrials, dismissing many incidents as explainable phenomena such as weather balloons or bird sightings. However, many of the incidents researched by Hood and written about by Watson involved physical encounters with strange aircraft - including one incident which sent deadly debris raining down from the sky.
The Maury Island Incident
One of the most notorious cases allegedly took place at the start of the 'flying saucer' era in 1947. Harold A Dahl, along with his son Charles and two crewmen, was in a tugboat off Maury Island in Puget Sound between Washington State's Seattle and Tacoma. The men said they saw six golden and silver doughnut-shaped objects flying above them, with one 'wobbling' before releasing a rain of thin metallic strips and black lumps. One struck the boy's arm, burning him, while others killed their dog.
Dahl's boss, Fred Lee Crisman, visited the site and recovered some of the debris. Dahl was then confronted by a dark-suited man driving a black sedan, who drove him to a diner in Tacoma and warned him to keep silent about the entire incident. Kenneth Arnold, who had spotted flying saucers just days earlier, asked for help from Air Force Intelligence. On July 31, 1947, Captain William Davidson and Lieutenant Frank M Brown were dispatched to Tacoma, but found no evidence of a rain of molten lead, and thought the sample fragments were slag from a smelting plant. Davidson and Brown died when their B-25 crashed on their way back to base. Many of the samples and photographs associated with the case have vanished.
Watson said: 'As they were returning to their base at Hamilton Field, California, the port engine of their B-25 aircraft caught fire and they were killed when [they] crashed near Kelso, Washington State.' An anonymous caller to the local newspaper named the victims before the crash was made public and claimed the aircraft was shot down by a 20mm cannon because it was carrying fragments of a flying saucer. Two men and a dog had been killed, and Kenneth Arnold was nearly added to the list. When he took off from Tacoma, his engine failed, and he had to make a crash landing. On checking his aircraft, he found that his fuel valve had been switched off. Paul Lance, a reporter for the Tacoma Times, who covered this story, died suddenly two weeks later of meningitis.
Watson said that many ufologists have suspected the case was an elaborate hoax that got out of hand, and may have been instigated by US intelligence agencies to discredit Kenneth Arnold's original sighting. To further stoke the conspiracy fires, Crisman was later investigated in a case related to the assassination of President Kennedy. A district attorney writing in a press release said: 'Mr. Crisman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years.'
Other Mysterious Deaths
Other UFO researchers have died under extremely mysterious circumstances, with relatives refusing to accept the 'official explanation.' New York-based UFO researcher Jennifer Stevens said she was contacted by two boys in February 1968 who claimed to have seen a 'glowing fireball' over the Mohawk River. The boys' friend thought he saw a white-suited humanoid in the bushes, highlighting a series of similar sightings in that area at the time. Another 16-year-old boy's body was found nearby after leaving a note with his grandparents to say he was going for a walk.
Watson wrote: 'The coroner's verdict was death from exposure, but Stevens was convinced that his death was connected to UFO activity in the area. She noted that the boy's tracks in the snow indicated he had been running at first, then it seemed as if something had dragged him from above.' After the sighting, Stevens' husband, Peter, was accosted by a man who allegedly said: 'People who look for UFOs should be very careful.' The 'saturnine' man contacted Mr Stevens in a store in downtown Schenectady and reportedly claimed: 'There have been people watching the sky every night down by the river in Scotia.' Shortly afterwards, Peter Stevens, a healthy man in his 30s, died suddenly, and Jennifer Stevens 'retired' from UFO investigations.
Watson said: 'Many of these cases could be coincidences or people trying to make something out of nothing. There are certainly some strange incidents.' In 1971, researcher Otto Binder claimed that 137 UFO investigators had died in mysterious circumstances during the 1960s. These strange incidents include multiple reported 'suicides' among the UFO community, which have been met with suspicion over the decades.
Schneider and Spiers Cases
UFO researcher Philip Schneider claimed that he was being followed by 'government vans' and attempts had been made to run him off the road. In January 1996, a friend broke into Schneider's apartment in Wilsonville, Oregon, where his dead body had been rotting for several days. Initially, it was presumed he had died from a stroke, but then rubber tubing was reportedly found wrapped and knotted around his neck. Watson revealed that the 'official verdict was suicide but his former wife, Cynthia, and several friends could not accept this.' He was found with his legs under his bed and his head resting on the seat of his wheelchair - an unusual position for a suicide - and there was blood nearby that did not seem to be Schneider's. His lecture material and UFO writings were missing from the apartment, yet valuables had gone untouched.
Watson said that many of the cases were murkier than they seem, with UFO experts claiming that deaths which have been ruled accidents or suicides were in fact murders. There is also a hotspot in South America, where 'UFO deaths' may actually have been related to military operations. Other deaths seized on by conspiracy theorists have turned out to have natural explanations.
In 2016, conspiracy theorist and UFO hunter Max Spiers feared he would be murdered and told his mother to 'investigate' if anything happened to him shortly before his death. Spiers, who claimed to have survived a secret government 'super soldier' program, was found dead at the house of friend Monika Duval in Poland, allegedly after 'vomiting black fluid.' Conspiracy fans were convinced Spiers was killed to silence him, with his own cryptic writings about conspiracies stirring the pot. However, an inquest found he died from taking a combination of powerful prescription drugs, including Oxycodone and Xanax, while suffering from pneumonia. Local police were heavily criticized for their initial investigation, which allowed rumors about the incident to flourish.
Coroner Christopher Sutton-Mattocks said: 'Max was a conspiracy theorist and a well-known one at that. If there was anything that was bound to excite the interest of other conspiracy theorists, it was the wholly incompetent initial investigation into his death.' In fact, officials determined that Spiers fell asleep on Duval's sofa after taking about 10 tablets of a Turkish form of Xanax, after reportedly purchasing a pharmacy's 'entire stock' while on holiday. A post-mortem examination also found deadly levels of oxycodone, an opioid, in his system.
Watson said: 'Many of these stories sound outlandish and many of these deaths do have credible explanations. So they don't go much beyond the UFO community and they only get reported as individual incidents, when you collect the information together, there are a surprising number of ufologists who have died in strange ways and circumstances since the 1950s.'
