A Second Person Vanishes
March 16, 2026 – March 22, 2026
- Daily Mail reveals aerospace engineer Monica Reza, who worked on a rocket project McCasland oversaw, vanished on a California hike in June 2025
- McCasland search produces almost nothing after three weeks – 700 homes canvassed, no confirmed leads
- Wife Susan says Neil 'does not have any special knowledge about ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt'
- Coulthart calls disappearance a 'grave national security crisis' – retired FBI agent suspects suicide
Friday, March 21
A Rocket Scientist Who Worked Under McCasland Also Vanished – Five Months Earlier
The Daily Mail reported that McCasland’s disappearance is not the only unsolved missing-person case in the aerospace world. Monica Reza, a 60-year-old material scientist known professionally as Monica Jacinto at Aerojet Rocketdyne, vanished in June 2025 while hiking the Mount Waterman Trail in California’s Angeles National Forest. She was 30 feet behind a companion, smiling and waving, when she disappeared. Her body has never been recovered.
Reza’s career connects directly to McCasland. She engineered a nickel-based superalloy that could survive extreme oxygen environments – technology that helped build the AR1 engine, designed to replace Russian RD-180 engines on United Launch Alliance rockets. McCasland oversaw the Air Force group that funded early-2000s research on exactly this kind of advanced material for reusable spacecraft and weapons systems, first as director of the Space Vehicle Directorate’s materials wing and then as commander of the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland AFB.
The article also compiled the most detailed public accounting of the McCasland search to date: 700 homes canvassed, drones, helicopters, K-9 units, and ground crews deployed across the Sandia foothills. A U.S. Air Force sweatshirt was found 1.5 miles from his home – no blood, not confirmed as his. Lt. Kyle Woods said there is no indication of foul play but acknowledged: “The likelihood of surviving this time frame would be very low.”
McCasland’s wife Susan wrote on Facebook that his UFO ties came through Tom DeLonge, for whom he volunteered unpaid after retirement. She said contact dropped after the Podesta email hack, and added bluntly: “Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt.”
Investigative journalist Ross Coulthart called McCasland “a man with some of the most sensitive secrets of the United States” and said the timing is “screechingly relevant.” Retired FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer offered a different view, writing on X that she suspects McCasland may have died by suicide. Full article
“We are many weeks in, and if he were to have gone into the mountains, the likelihood of surviving this time frame would be very low.” – Lt. Kyle Woods, BCSO