The UAP “Body Count” Doesn’t Add Up
A preview of research I’m doing for a Skeptical Inquirer piece.
Last Wednesday, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about “10 American scientists who have either gone missing or died since mid-2024” with “access to classified nuclear or aerospace material.” Leavitt said the administration would look into it. Rep. Tim Burchett has called it a pattern. Ross Coulthart called it a “grave national security crisis.” Joe Rogan tied it to suppressed fusion and zero-point energy.
I’ve been working on a piece for Skeptical Inquirer on death-list fallacies — the genre that runs from Penn Jones Jr.’s JFK deaths in the 1960s through Linda Thompson’s Clinton Body Count in the 1990s to this. While researching it, I went through each of the ten names in detail (with the help of AI research and analysis tools). The full case-by-case analysis, with 49 sourced endnotes, is attached as a PDF below.
A few things I found:
The individual cases collapse on examination. Michael Hicks’s “undisclosed cause of death”? The LA County Coroner recorded arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, natural causes. Jason Thomas, the “Novartis researcher found dead in a lake,” worked on cancer drugs — no aerospace or nuclear connection at all — and had lost both parents the month before (his father died of a heart attack in his arms, two hours after his mother died of dementia). Nuno Loureiro’s killer has been identified, confessed on video to planning it for years, and was a personal-grievance classmate from the 1990s in Lisbon. Carl Grillmair’s killer was arrested for trespassing on his property with a rifle two months before the murder.
The geographic clustering is real but illusory. All ten cases fall in three metros — LA, New Mexico, and Boston. Proponents note these are UFO-narrative-eligible hubs. True, but those same three metros hold the largest concentrations of cleared aerospace and nuclear workers in the country (~150,000 people combined). Any cluster drawn from that population lands in those metros by geometry alone. And the specific people on the list aren’t UAP insiders — they’re asteroid researchers, plasma theorists, materials engineers. Oak Ridge and Huntsville, which house comparable cleared populations with their own UFO lore, produced zero cases. The list is Texas-sharpshooter geography: the target painted around where the bullets already landed.
The base rates dismantle the rest. The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people. Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10. Even restricted to the cluster populations, the math stays one to two orders of magnitude below ordinary background.
The deaths are real. The families’ grief is real. The pattern is not.
Full case-by-case PDF below — ten deep-dives with speculation analysis, cluster-specific base rates, and comprehensive clickable endnote cross-references.
Sidebar on the "new" 11th case:
Sidebar: Amy Eskridge and the parallel lists. A reader familiar with UAP-adjacent body-count coverage will notice a name missing from the ten above: Amy Eskridge, a 34-year-old entrepreneur in Huntsville,Alabama, who died by self-inflicted gunshot on June 11, 2022. Eskridge founded the Institute for Exotic Science, a small public-benefit corporation working on speculative propulsion and gravity-modification topics.
She is the subject of a November 2023 congressional submission by journalist Michael Shellenberger conveying retired UK intelligence officer Franc Milburn's claim that she was murdered by a "private aerospace company" using directed-energy weapons, and she is cited as a suspicious death
across the same UAP-adjacent coverage that drives the ten-name list.
She does not appear on the Doocy/Leavitt White House list because that list is curated around a different frame: "classified nuclear or aerospace material" (Doocy's exact words), which Eskridge did not work with. Her case predates the list's mid-2024 start date by two years, her work was self-directed rather than cleared, and her primary amplifier network (Milburn, Shellenberger) is distinct from the network pushing the ten names (Burchett, Burlison, Coulthart, Swecker).
Two overlapping curators produced two overlapping lists with most cases shared and some not. The existence of parallel lists with different cutoffs is itself evidence that the pattern is in the curation rather than in the underlying data.
This reminds me of the Mummy's Curse stories from the 1920s and 1930s.