14 scientists connected to LANL, Sandia & NASA are dead or missing. The FBI opened an investigation. Congress asked for answers.
Three agencies went silent.
¿Dónde Están?
The List Keeps Growing. The Agencies Went Silent. And the Story Is Closer to Home Than You Think.
📍 Albuquerque · Los Angeles · Boston · The Jemez Mountains
La Madriguera, Vol. 2 | May 2026
by Three Sonorans
The number keeps changing. When this story first broke online, it was ten. Then eleven. Then thirteen.
On May 2, journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez identified a potential fourteenth case: a quantum computing researcher at Sandia National Laboratories who vanished in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico in October 2023. Her car was found three days later at 9,100 feet on a roadless dirt track: three laptops, an unactivated burner phone, a shattered rear window, and an atom symbol on the bumper. The Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office declared “no foul play” within 24 hours, without forensics, without explanation.
By the time you finish this article, there may be a fifteenth.
We are talking about scientists. People who built America’s most dangerous secrets, who understood the physics of mass destruction at a level only a handful of humans on this planet can match, who spent careers inside classified facilities in New Mexico, California, and Massachusetts — and who, one by one, are gone.
Not retired.
Not transferred.
Gone.
This story moved from Reddit threads to a formal FBI investigation in three weeks, and from the internet to the White House in one month. And the three agencies asked to brief Congress by April 27 are the FBI, NASA, and the Department of Energy?
They went silent.
Ahora nos interesa.
🧵 What the internet is saying:
“This isn’t a coincidence. This is the largest intelligence breach in American history and they’re calling it hiking accidents.” — r/conspiracy
“Eleven names assembled from four years of unrelated deaths... connected by retroactive biography searches. What they constitute is a list that grew because people went looking for one.” — Hannah Howell, independent analysis
“My dad worked at Sandia for 30 years. I believe every word of this.” — r/NewMexico
“The fact that Congress asked and got silence is the only confirmation I need.” — r/politics
“Wikipedia has already labeled this the ‘dumbest conspiracy’ — which, ironically, is exactly what they said about Epstein’s island before the flight logs dropped.” — r/UFOs
That last one stings a little, doesn’t it?
The healthy instinct to be skeptical and the traumatic memory of being right before — occupying the same brain, at the same time.
Bienvenidos a 2026.
PARTE UNO: EL CHISME
What follows is the theory as its believers tell it, presented fully and without hedging. We dig in Part Two. That’s how La Madriguera works.
📋 The Cases at a Glance
“This table grows faster than the investigations.”
Picture the map.
At the top: Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project was born, and the U.S. nuclear arsenal is still designed.
Next to it: Sandia National Laboratories, responsible for the non-nuclear components of every weapon in that arsenal.
Down in California: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the brain behind America’s deep space program.
In Massachusetts: MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, the leading academic institution working on nuclear fusion, the clean energy technology that will make whoever controls it the dominant player in the global economy for the next century.
Now watch the people at those institutions start to disappear.
It begins in 2023. Ingrid Coleen Lane, a quantum computing staff member at Sandia, named in an official NNSA Strategic Outlook Initiative report just months before she vanished, leaves for a hike in the Jemez Mountains on October 15. She tells the director of the meditation center where she’s staying that she has to go to Albuquerque and Los Alamos and will be back later.
She never comes back.
Her car is found three days later at 9,100 feet on a roadless dirt track: three laptops, an unactivated burner phone, a shattered rear window, and an atom symbol on the bumper. The last confirmed sighting: two hunters who helped her air up a tire and offered her a ride down.
She refused, said she was determined to reach the top of the mountain.
She seemed coherent and purposeful.
That was the last time anyone reported seeing Ingrid Lane alive.
The sheriff declares no foul play within 24 hours.
Without touching the car.
Summer 2025. Monica Jacinto Reza, co-inventor of a rocket-engine alloy used in advanced propulsion systems and aerospace engineer tied to Air Force and NASA programs, goes hiking in the Angeles National Forest northeast of Los Angeles.
She never comes back.
No body. No trace.
Case open.
Within days, Melissa Casias, a LANL staff advisor, comes home, resets her phones, and walks toward the woods.
She is not found.
Anthony Chavez, listed as a Los Alamos employee, leaves his house without his phone in May 2025.
Gone.
Steven Garcia, an NNSA contractor at the Kansas City National Security Campus, disappears in August 2025, last seen leaving home with a handgun.
October 2025. Jacob Prichard, an Air Force Research Laboratory analyst, is involved in a violent incident that leaves three people dead, including himself.
December 2025. Nuno Loureiro, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the world’s foremost nuclear fusion researchers, is shot and killed inside his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
February 2026. Carl Grillmair, Caltech astrophysicist, NASA Spitzer Space Telescope researcher, a man who spent thirty years mapping galaxies and detected water vapor on a distant exoplanet, is found shot dead on his front porch in Llano, California. He had called law enforcement two months earlier when a man trespassed on his property with a rifle; the felony charges were dismissed. Less than two months later, the man came back.
Early 2026. Retired Air Force Major General William “Neil” McCasland, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory and overseer of classified aerospace and UAP research programs, disappears from his Albuquerque home with a .38 caliber revolver. Albuquerque. Nuestra tierra.
And then the internet does what the internet does.
Someone builds the map.
Clean rows. Institutional language.
Functional roles.
At the center: Peter Thiel.
His nuclear fuel startup, General Matter, founded in 2024 and backed by $50 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund, is developing HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium, the specific grade used in next-generation reactors) to replace America’s dependence on Russian nuclear fuel.
In January 2026, the same government that would fire hundreds of Q-cleared nuclear workers handed General Matter $900 million in DOE contracts.
In February 2025, DOGE fired 300 to 400 NNSA workers, Q-cleared nuclear weapons specialists, the people who literally maintain the American arsenal. The administration panicked and reversed it days later. But the workers had been fired. Their subsequent employment is publicly untracked.
Nobody knows where they went.
The map argument: plasma physicist, eliminated. Rocket alloy engineer, vanished. LANL weapons administrator, gone. AFRL commander, missing. Quantum computing researcher at Sandia, erased.
Each filling a functional role in a covert advanced program.
And at the center of the web: a billionaire who has publicly stated he does not believe in democracy, who bankrolled JD Vance’s Senate campaign and half this cabinet’s political careers, and who is quietly building a private nuclear empire with government money while the government dismantles its own nuclear workforce.
Nothing says “national security” like outsourcing your nuclear future to a man who once said democracy and freedom are incompatible. ¡Qué patriota!
“You have the killings. You have the disappearances. You have the NNSA purge. And at the center of the web — a billionaire who said publicly he doesn’t believe in democracy.”
This is not fringe internet noise anymore. House Oversight Chair Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, publicly stated “something sinister could be happening.” Trump called it “pretty serious stuff.” A former FBI assistant director suggested “modern day espionage” by foreign adversaries.
Even The Atlantic weighed in to call it a conspiracy theory, which at this point only serves to remind people that The Atlantic also once thought Epstein’s island was a fringe concern.
Congress demanded briefings from four agencies by April 27.
Three of those agencies said nothing.
One thing is certain: somebody knows where these scientists went.
Article continued below:
⸻ Ahora, bajamos. ⸻
The theory you just read has been shared millions of times, screenshotted, posted, and panic-texted to family group chats from Albuquerque to Brookline. Now here’s what we found when we actually went looking.
PARTE DOS: LA MADRIGUERA
Let’s do what we always do here: separate the wood from the nails.
The Thiel Trilogy map is disinformation built on a scaffold of real tragedies, the most effective kind, braiding real facts with false connections. This map is expertly braided.
Several elements are completely true. Several others are invented whole cloth. And in the gap between the two lives, the actual story, which is scarier, more systemic, and more politically actionable than any assassination map.
Here is what is verified:
General Matter is real and received $900 million in DOE contracts in January 2026. The NNSA fired 300-400 Q-cleared nuclear weapons specialists in February 2025 before reversing in a panic, and nobody publicly tracked where those workers went.
Monica Reza, Melissa Casias, Anthony Chavez, and Gen. McCasland are genuinely missing without resolution. Nuno Loureiro and Carl Grillmair were genuinely killed. NASA never commented on Frank Maiwald’s July 4, 2024, death at JPL, and no autopsy was performed, which is unusual by any standard.
The FBI investigation is real.
The congressional probe is real.
The institutional silence after the April 27 deadline is real.
Now here is what the map invents.
Jacob and Jaymee Prichard were not mysterious eliminations of defense insiders. Jacob Prichard murdered his wife Jaymee, killed fellow officer 1st Lt. Jaime Gustitus, and shot himself, all documented on camera, with criminal records supporting a domestic violence history. The map frames it as targeted. It was not.
Anthony Chavez, described as a 30-year nuclear engineering expert with classified weapons knowledge, appears, per Reddit investigators who dug through New Mexico records, to have been an HVAC technician at a heating and plumbing company. His disappearance is genuinely mysterious. His expertise was almost certainly invented to fill a role on the map. An HVAC tech maintaining ventilation at a classified site still has sensitive site access, but that’s a meaningful distance from “30-year weapons designer.”
The Thiel-as-orchestrator leap has no evidentiary foundation. General Matter works with reactor-grade uranium enrichment for commercial energy, not weapons-grade material. The map’s visual format mimics intelligence analysis to lend itself false authority. It is real people’s deaths assembled into a causal chain the evidence does not support.
But, pero escúchame bien, this is where the base rate skeptics also miss something important.
The standard debunking argument: the U.S. employs hundreds of thousands of cleared defense workers; statistically, some die or disappear in any year; human brains find patterns in random clusters.
True, as far as it goes.
Grillmair’s death has a mundane documented explanation: a local man, dismissed charges, came back. Loureiro’s killer had a documented personal grievance and died by suicide.
Two of the most prominent deaths have individual explanations.
But your mathematician’s mind already knows the flaw: the skeptics are applying the wrong denominator. The base rate argument works against all cleared workers.
The relevant question is the posterior: given the specific institutional overlap between Reza, Casias, McCasland, Maiwald, and Lane, what are the odds of this particular cluster?
These five share overlapping program ties, overlapping funding streams, and a pattern of coordinated institutional silence. That posterior is meaningfully higher than the naive base rate. Not proof of conspiracy, but sufficient reason for a fully resourced investigation, which three agencies just declined to provide.
📍 Why New Mexico?
Los Alamos and Sandia are not just “federal labs.” Together they design, maintain, and certify every nuclear weapon in the American arsenal. New Mexico has the highest concentration of Q-cleared workers per capita in the nation, and some of the most under-resourced journalism infrastructure to cover them.
What happens in the Jemez Mountains does not stay in the Jemez Mountains.
La Vecina Más Escondida: Ingrid Lane
Of all the cases on this list, the one most hidden from public view, whose professional identity was most completely erased, is also the one closest to home.
Ingrid Coleen Lane was 37 years old. A bioengineer, a neuroscientist, a quantum computing staff member at Sandia National Laboratories, the institution responsible for the non-nuclear components of every weapon in the American arsenal. She is named in a March 2023 NNSA Strategic Outlook Initiative report as a Sandia contributor, published seven months before she vanished. Her husband, Louis Scuderi, builds directed energy weapons software for the Air Force at Kirtland AFB through DOD contractor Stellar Science.
The public narrative described her almost entirely as a mentally fragile musician who wandered into the mountains. What was omitted: the Sandia affiliation, the NNSA report, the three laptops, the burner phone, the shattered rear window, and the sheriff’s office declaring no foul play within 24 hours without touching the car.
“They didn’t even do forensics on the car. They just really put no effort, even the token amount.”
— Rebecca Lane, Ingrid’s mother, to the Santa Fe New Mexican
Kirtland Air Force Base. Sandia. Los Alamos. The Jemez Mountains.
This is happening in our backyard, in the high desert communities between Albuquerque and Santa Fe where Yaqui, Pueblo, Diné, and Chicano families have lived alongside these classified institutions for generations as their workers, janitors, maintenance crews, their unacknowledged labor force.
The person whose name appeared in the NNSA report had her professional identity quietly stripped from every news story about her disappearance.
That is not a base rate problem. That is a specific failure to apply basic investigative protocol to a specific person whose professional history raises questions that those institutions may not want examined.
And Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who spent years investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico when legacy media looked away and who has made a practice of finding the people the official narrative erases, is the one who found Ingrid Lane. She is not a conspiracy blogger. She is a former Boston Globe and LA Times journalist and novelist who returned to New Mexico and began doing the work the national press had abandoned.
That distinction matters. It is what separates a sourced investigation from a screenshotted Reddit map.
El Silencio de Washington: The Timeline That Matters
April 19: House Oversight Chair Comer demands formal briefings from FBI, DOE, NASA, and DOD by April 27.
April 20: FBI announces it is “spearheading” the investigation with DOE, DOW, and state law enforcement.
April 27: Congressional deadline. Only the Department of War provides a substantive reply. FBI, DOE, and NASA go silent.
April 29: FBI says it will deliver a “final report” on missing scientists “shortly.” No date. No scope. No accountability.
May 2: Valdes-Rodriguez publishes the 14th case. The list is still growing.
The Department of War answered. The Department of War, which runs two active military theaters, found time to reply to Congress. NASA, the agency that has managed to communicate with a probe three billion miles from Earth, went silent in response to a domestic congressional inquiry.
Qué conveniente.
Three agencies stonewalled a formal congressional inquiry into deaths and disappearances on their own watch, then promised a report without a date, without scope, without accountability.
¿Cuántas veces has that sentence been the last thing families heard before the file went cold?
El Verdadero Pedo: When Policy Manufactures Tragedy
Step back from the map. Look at the structural reality underneath it.
DOGE fired 400 Q-cleared nuclear weapons specialists in February 2025, people who spent careers in classified, high-pressure work, then rehired some in a panic days later, publicly humiliating the workforce that maintains the American nuclear arsenal. It slashed DOE and national laboratory infrastructure.
It created a population of demoralized, financially destabilized people carrying classified knowledge, with no mental health support and no community to catch them when they fell.
Several of the missing people left home without their phones. Several left with weapons. The clinical word for what that pattern describes is: crisis.
The political word is: DOGE.
And then — y aquí está el chiste más negro de todos — you hand $900 million to a Thiel-backed nuclear startup to rebuild what you just destroyed.
Privatize the capability.
Socialize the wreckage.
Pocket the profit.
That is not a conspiracy. That is policy.
And as any mathematician will tell you: policy has consequences.
“The conspiracy theory is the symptom. The disease is a government that has spent generations earning exactly that level of distrust — and keeps earning it.”
We’re not here to tell you Peter Thiel is having scientists killed; the evidence does not support it, and presenting unsupported evidence as truth is what the other outlets are for.
We are here to tell you this: four people connected to LANL, JPL, Sandia, and AFRL are missing without resolution.
A Sandoval County sheriff declared no foul play in a woman’s disappearance without running forensics on her car: three laptops, a burner phone, and the name of a Sandia contributor on an NNSA report.
Three federal agencies stonewalled a formal congressional inquiry.
And the Q-cleared workforce DOGE scattered to the wind?
Still unaccounted for.
These people deserve to be found. Their families deserve answers. And the institutions that failed them, the judge who dismissed Grillmair’s killer’s gun charges, the sheriff who closed Lane’s scene without touching the car, the agencies that went quiet on April 27, deserve every ounce of pressure la gente can bring.
The real story is always underneath the theory.
That’s why we go down.
Nos vemos en La Madriguera, Vol. 3.
Because somewhere in Washington D.C., there’s a hearing room where nobody showed up — and the empty chairs are the whole story.
Three Sonorans is an independent Substack rooted in Tucson, the borderlands, and every community these institutions would rather keep quiet and unquestioning. We cover the stories that die in committee, disappear in the desert, and get filed under “no foul play” without anyone touching the car. If this piece moved you, share it; that’s how the word spreads when the watchdogs get muzzled. And if you’re in New Mexico, Los Angeles, or Massachusetts and you know something about any of these cases: our door is open.
Have a scoop or a story you want us to follow up on?
Send us a message below or via ENCRYPTED email (all messages kept CONFIDENTIAL) at ThreeSonorans@protonmail.com.
