The recent probe into a collection of missing scientists has reignited the debate over a decades-old string of deaths among those researching UFOs.
There have been at least 11 deaths and disappearances among prominent scientists, nuclear officials and experts linked to UFOs, such as retired Major General William Neil McCasland, since 2022.
Federal investigators have been looking into the cases, with FBI Director Kash Patel saying that the bureau is ‘spearheading the effort’ to uncover any possible links between cases.
However, UFO researcher Timothy Hood and others have alleged that there was a much older series of deaths, including mysterious ‘suicides,’ stretching back to the late 1940s – also known as the dawn of the UFO era.
Conspiracy theorists have suggested that hundreds of deaths could be linked to exotic research, including staged plane crashes and incidents made to look as if researchers took their own lives.
Nigel Watson, author of Portraits of Alien Encounters Revisited, told the Daily Mail that many of these suspicious events took place shortly after early civilian researchers and even military officers investigated witness reports of UFO sightings.
To this point, the US government has maintained that there has never been any evidence of UFOs or extraterrestrials, dismissing many incidents as explainable phenomena such as weather balloons or bird sightings.
However, many of the incidents researched by Hood and written about by Watson involved physical encounters with strange aircraft – including one incident which sent deadly debris raining down from the sky.
One of the most notorious cases allegedly took place at the start of the ‘flying saucer’ era in 1947.
Harold A Dahl, along with his son Charles and two crewmen, was in a tugboat off Maury Island in Puget Sound between Washington State’s Seattle and Tacoma.
The men said they saw six golden and silver doughnut-shaped objects flying above them, with one ‘wobbling’ before releasing a rain of thin metallic strips and black lumps.
One struck the boy’s arm, burning him, while others killed their dog. Dahl’s boss, Fred Lee Crisman, visited the site and recovered some of the debris.
Dahl was then confronted by a dark-suited man driving a black sedan, who drove him to a diner in Tacoma and warned him to keep silent about the entire incident.
Kenneth Arnold, who had spotted flying saucers just days earlier, asked for help from Air Force Intelligence.
On July 31, 1947, Captain William Davidson and Lieutenant Frank M Brown were dispatched to Tacoma, but found no evidence of a rain of molten lead, and thought the sample fragments were slag from a smelting plant.
Davidson and Brown died when their B-25 crashed on their way back to base. Many of the samples and photographs associated with the case have vanished.
Hellbound and Down 