The Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced it is probing the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths or disappearances of 10 U.S. nuclear or aerospace research scientists in recent years. Republican Congressman James Comer has further fueled speculation by saying, “there’s a high possibility that something sinister is taking place,” as it is hard to imagine it’s a coincidence with so many people involved. To many people, such a cluster may feel too unlikely to be a coincidence. But this reaction may tell us more about human psychology than the cases themselves. The evidence tells a different story that is rooted in how our brains process information after we have been primed to see danger.
While such claims are dramatic and headline-grabbing, the problem is that the U.S. has thousands of nuclear and aerospace scientists. Deaths in large populations are inevitable; out of such a large pool, some people will die unexpectedly, have accidents, or go missing for reasons unrelated to their work. These cases only become sinister when we try to connect them. Then there is the motive. With so many scientists working in their respective fields, their deaths would have little impact on the broader research programs.
The cases date back to 2023 and began with the death of 59-year-old Michael Hicks, who spent 25 years working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His daughter Julia said he had been struggling with medical issues just prior to his death. “I don’t understand the connection between my dad’s death and the other missing scientists…I can’t help but laugh,” she said. Her skepticism is warranted. Why would domestic actors or even foreign agents target someone at NASA who specialized in the study of comets and asteroids? It makes little sense.
One of the victims was a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working on nuclear fusion. Dr. Nuno Loureiro was shot to death in December 2025 during a mass shooting by the same gunman who terrorized the Brown University campus when he opened fire on a class of students. Loureiro had attended school with the gunman years earlier, and the killer appeared to hold a longstanding personal grudge against him. While his death is tragic, there is no evidence that he was targeted over his research.
Another victim was Carl Grillmair of the California Institute of Technology, who was murdered outside his Los Angeles home. Homicide investigators determined that it appeared to have been a crime of opportunity. Police said the perpetrator did not appear to have known him. While Grillmair worked at NASA in the search for water on other planets, it is difficult to imagine how this research would have motivated a foreign or domestic actor to kill him.
Some of the scientists have gone missing, but with no evidence of foul play, it is important to put their disappearances in perspective: each year, thousands of people go missing. They may have suffered an accident, a medical emergency, or left voluntarily. That a small number were scientists is a coincidence, not a conspiracy.
The Search for Patterns
This case underscores the human tendency to see what we expect to see. Human beings are meaning-oriented creatures. The brain is wired to seek out patterns – an adaptation that helped our ancestors to detect predators stalking in tall grass. This poses problems for us today because the same mechanism works even when there are no patterns. Psychologists refer to this as apophenia: the tendency to see meaningful links in unrelated events. When this occurs in visual form, it is known as pareidolia: the tendency to see meaningful patterns in ambiguous stimuli. Examples include the famous “face” on Mars, which later turned out to be a mesa – a mound of shifting dust that, when photographed from a particular angle, looked like a human face. Other examples of this process include the image of Jesus on a corn chip or the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich. Another common example involves clouds. The human brain is programmed to look at fluffy white clouds on a partly sunny day and see images such as a horse’s head.
The problem is that our pattern-seeking tendency can occasionally get us into trouble, especially with real-world events. Once news reports and social media postings plant the idea that there has been a coordinated attack on American scientists, we have become primed to reinterpret random deaths and disappearances as suspicious and sinister. This is reinforced by “confirmation bias” — our tendency to notice evidence that supports our beliefs, while ignoring or downplaying evidence that does not.
As journalist Walter Lippmann once wrote: “Under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and…in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.” Indeed, humans have a long history of deceiving themselves. When journalists, influencers, and members of Congress suggest that something sinister is afoot, they provide a lens through which otherwise ordinary deaths and disappearances become extraordinary.
