\n<\/p>\n
Proponents of some variant of the conspiracy, Radford adds, are working backward. \u201cThey\u2019re finding people who are already dead or missing and then trying to find some connection, however tenuous,\u201d Radford says, \u201cto the defense industry, the Pentagon, UFOs, UAP, NASA.\u201d (McCasland\u2019s flimsy link to the UFO community is, among the scientists, the most substantive connection to these subjects.) In a comprehensive rejoinder<\/a> to the theory, UFO investigator and pseudoscience<\/a> 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\u2014as of this week, Rogan, Kraus, et al. are working with 11 cases.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople just kind of go looking for names,\u201d West tells me, \u201cand if you go looking for names, you\u2019re gonna find them.\u201d<\/p>\n What West describes as \u201cdeath-list fallacies\u201d have a rich history as a kind of conspiracy theory folk tradition. Beginning in the 1960s, the early JFK-assassination conspiracy theorist Penn Jones Jr. kept a list of witnesses whom he claimed had likely been \u201csystematically and skillfully eliminated,\u201d with the number eventually exceeding 100 in his calculation; the so-called Clinton body count theory, which asserted that the former president and first lady arranged for the murders of their political opponents, originated with the militia-movement extremist Linda Thompson, though she acknowledged, per a 1994 U.S. News & World Report<\/em> story, that she had \u201cno direct evidence\u201d of Bill Clinton killing anyone. In both cases, an ever broadening category of deaths functioned as inexhaustible proof of an expansive government cover-up.<\/p>\n In Radford\u2019s view, the trope runs deeper still: think the Bermuda Triangle, the conspiracy surrounding King Tut\u2019s tomb (newspapers suggested in the 1920s that anyone who disturbed it would be cursed), or even a child\u2019s notion that death comes in threes. \u201cIt\u2019s really a psychological thing where people want to see patterns in the world around them for various cognitive reasons,\u201d he says, adding that the missing-scientists conspiracy \u201cis only the latest in a long, long line of what you might call mystery-mongering data mining.\u201d<\/p>\n There is no singular Jones or Thompson in this instance, according to experts who have monitored the evolution of the missing-scientists list, but a few sleuths can lay claim to stoking the flames after McCasland\u2019s disappearance. Australian NewsNation investigative correspondent Ross Coulthart has described the engineer\u2019s disappearance as a \u201cgrave national security crisis,\u201d and former State Department analyst Marik von Rennenkampff told the network that \u201cwe might have passed that threshold\u201d where the list can no longer be attributed to coincidence. Republican watchdogs in Congress, including representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, and Anna Paulina Luna, have appeared on the Rogan-adjacent podcasting circuit to air their claims about a government scheme to conceal the truth regarding unidentified aerial phenomena. (\u201cHe\u2019s the guy that had a lot of nuclear secrets,\u201d Burchett has said<\/a> of McCasland. \u201cI\u2019ve been told by several sources that he was the gatekeeper for the UFO stuff.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n