He Ran the Lab Where Roswell Debris Allegedly Went. Now He's Missing.: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Retired Major General William Neil McCasland, once responsible for overseeing the Air Force's $4.4 billion combined research and technology portfolio, has been missing since the morning of February 27.

The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) issued a Silver Alert for the 68-year-old after he was last seen near Quail Run Court NE in Albuquerque, a residential neighborhood tucked against the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. Authorities say they do not know what he was wearing or which direction he traveled. New Mexico Search and Rescue, working alongside the FBI, has joined the effort, with no success as of Tuesday morning.

"Due to his medical issues, law enforcement is concerned for his safety," BCSO spokesperson Deanna Aragon said in a statement reported by the Albuquerque Journal. The nature of those medical issues has not been disclosed.

Anyone with information about McCasland's whereabouts is asked to text BCSO to 847411 or call 505-468-7070.

McCasland, a 34-year service veteran, is no ordinary military retiree, holding a doctorate in astronautical engineering from MIT, and even allegedly cultivating a relationship with seminal Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge. From 2001 to 2004, he ran the Air Force Research Laboratory's Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, then cycled through senior posts at Hill and Los Angeles Air Force Bases before moving to the Pentagon as director of Space Acquisition and later director of Special Programs. In 2011, he took over the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright‑Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio (where, according to longstanding UFO lore, debris from the alleged 1947 Roswell crash was supposedly sent for analysis years prior), a job he held until his 2013 retirement.

In short: if the U.S. military had secrets about unidentified phenomena, McCasland could have been one of the people with a key to the vault.

That possibility entered the public record in October 2016, when WikiLeaks published a trove of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Among them was a January 25, 2016 message with the subject line "General McCasland" from DeLonge—who in the mid‑2010s reinvented himself from rock star to ufologist, founding a multimedia company devoted to UFO disclosure and co‑authoring a series of fiction‑adjacent books.

In the email, DeLonge told Podesta that McCasland "not only knows what I'm trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisory team. He's a very important man."

"When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago," wrote DeLonge.

Those emails are publicly available on WikiLeaks.

McCasland never publicly confirmed or denied DeLonge's characterization. DeLonge himself acknowledged the leak on Instagram at the time, writing that "Wikileaks really messed some important stuff up," as Rolling Stone reported.

Kirtland Air Force Base has acknowledged the situation. "We are coordinating closely with local authorities and defer all updates regarding the search efforts to the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office," Col. Justin Secrest, commander of the 377th Air Base Wing, told the Albuquerque Journal.

"Our thoughts are with his family during this difficult time."

As the search continues, McCasland's ongoing disappearance has raised fervor online after colliding with a darker current running through internet conspiracy communities. In December, MIT plasma physicist and fusion‑energy researcher Nuno Loureiro, 47, was shot and killed at his Brookline, Massachusetts, home. His alleged killer, a former university classmate, later died of an apparent suicide and has been linked by authorities to a mass shooting at Brown University two days earlier that left two people dead and several others wounded. This was followed by the February murder of Carl Grillmair, 67, a Caltech astrophysicist known for detecting water on a distant exoplanet, who was shot dead on the porch of his home in California. A 29-year-old suspect was arrested after a nearby carjacking and charged with his murder, according to local law enforcement.

While the two cases have no established connection to each other, and neither has any substantiated connection whatsoever to McCasland's disappearance, that hasn't stopped some corners of the internet from weaving all three events into a single dark tapestry. Reddit threads have fixated on the coincidence of prominent scientists with ties to space research dying violently in quick succession, even though both seem to have clearly identified suspects and appear to have prosaic, if tragic, explanations.

McCasland's disappearance has not been linked to foul play by any authority. The Silver Alert suggests his medical condition is the most pressing concern.

But when a two-star general with deep ties to America's most classified aerospace programs vanishes without a trace in the same state where the modern UFO mythos was born, the internet is going to have questions.

Anyone with information regarding McCasland's disappearance is asked to text BCSO to 847411 or call 505-468-7070.