Aliens? Or not?

A dozen of the nation’s most gifted, cerebral and important brainiacs on the scientific frontlines have vanished in rapid succession. They leave their secluded cottages in the middle of nowhere during the choking witching hour of evening with nothing.

No wallet.

No car keys.

Only a gun.

Some bullets. And an anxious, heavy conscience.

This is not a new episode of The X-Files. Nor is it from a hit Chinese science fiction novel.

Not even its Netflix adaptation.

Or so the news feed would tell you.

But as always — the truth is much more complicated. Some of these deaths are apparent suicides or explained homicides.

After that, it gets downright trippy.

Looking back

First, some necessary history lore. During the second half of the 20th century, the two greatest Goliaths of military, academic, cultural and diplomatic power exercised every piston of their respective engines to threaten complete power over another.

One of the most potent of those engines was espionage (or spy-craft) and the research into it.

Remote control dragonflies, umbrella guns that shoot heart attack darts, the cell phone, lipstick guns, animated masks (which agents insist are not as good as the ones from Mission Impossible, but also much better than one would expect) and the classic pushing people out of windows onto concrete have been used for these exact purposes for years.

Making disappearances look like deaths, homicides look like suicide and obscuring every detail about it all is practically a field of study within foreign affairs.

One of the most common techniques within this sort of media manipulation is called “flooding the zone.”

It is a devilish, classic and effective strategy.

Fill the airwaves with so much nonsense all at once — make it all sound so incoherent that no mentally stable person can reasonably expect to form a coherent narrative or adhere to their mental stability — and that’s when you know you’ve flooded the zone.

The basic facts

A dozen deaths and disappearances. That’s scary.

The American military industrial complex is a behemoth. It employs a lot of people.

Even the tendrils of its research arm employ a lot of people.

The National Science Foundation reports that, as of 2020, there were 281,000 engineers and scientists with at least a four-year degree working for the federal government. And that number does not even include contractors.

“The defense industry employed 1.1 million U.S. workers and encompassed 59,678 companies as of 2021. In [fiscal year] 2023, DOD on contracts with DIB suppliers in the 50 states and the District of Columbia totaled $440.7 billion,” Congress reports.

That’s a lot of money. And a lot of people.

In that scale, a dozen mysterious deaths sound a lot less grandiose.

The deaths break down a lot less mysteriously as well.

Amy Eskridge’s death represents the first in the reported timeline. She was 34 years old and died of apparent suicide in 2022. She was studying antigravity technology.

She was claimed to have been hit by an energy weapon. However, messages she sent to friends before her death assured that she had no suicidal ideations and was not in danger.

Alternatively, her father believes she committed suicide and suggests she had a drinking problem. Alcoholics do kill themselves. Often, unfortunately.

Alcoholics are 120 times more likely to commit suicide than their peers who are not addicts.

Her passing is a tragedy, but it is filled with very grounded explanations.

More recently, retired Air Force General William Neil McCasland vanished into a fog on a mysterious stroll from his New Mexico residence.

He left almost all his belongings, taking his clothes and a revolver into the deep desert twilight.

His wife insists he was of sound mind but suddenly became very paranoid.

To play devil’s advocate, the general was 68 years old. He reported mental fog months before his disappearance, causing him to rescind many of his professional consulting responsibilities and other roles.

Sometimes people lose it and just wander. It is a tragedy when it does.

The 2025 MIT shooting is also frequently lumped in, with its victims being trailblazers in nuclear fusion research.

Merely lumping in the actions of last December with the rest ignores broader national trends. Luigi Mangioni, the recent Correspondent’s Dinner attack and a myriad of instances of violence dating back to Ted Kaczynski suggest an emergence of a novel criminal profile: a high-IQ killer with socio-political intentions.

In that respect, being in a highly educated and competitive lab can literally put one in the line of fire.

Not to mention the current state of geopolitical affairs is very worth covering up.  A stumbling war effort, a billionaire-pedophile conspiracy, AI emerging into super-intelligence and a wealth divide slowly separating the species in a way only HG Wells might have expected.

Many more lay waiting to infect the newsfeed, so why not then throw an alien conspiracy into the mix?

The dark reality is that all these deaths, although tragic, may be relatively predictable — hazards of the trade.

Perhaps a dozen dead scientists over a few years is to be expected after trying to run the most powerful military-industrial complex known to human history. There is an unimaginable amount of interest in adversaries killing the best scientists.

One does not have to look far. Countries publicly claim to unveil new secret weapons simply to most effectively take out a nation’s best intellectuals in their sleep.

America’s best minds then, for obvious reasons, carry a heavy risk.

To live by the sword, to die by the sword, so to speak.

So the greater question news readers should contemplate is why the hype?

Perhaps rather than a fomenting alien invasion or a grand conspiracy finally falling apart at the seams, the mass media, technology and government have decided to highlight the same story at the same time. A story that the public should never expect real answers for.

Maybe the best thing to do is to turn off the TV, stop scrolling, switch the Apple Watch for a Timex, set do not disturb and take a walk.

Perhaps then society might start to remember the real problems, and not the extraterrestrial distractions.