Tag: directed energy weapons

US Military Shoots Down 3 Mexican Cartel Drones With Laser

A laser system was used to shoot down three drug cartel drones in southern Texas, close to the Mexican border, the U.S. military said on Aug. 27.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, in a joint statement, said an Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) was used overnight on Aug. 25-26 in the Rio Grande Valley.

The Joint Task Force-Southern Border (JTF-SB) deemed the three drones to be hostile and posing a physical threat to U.S. military personnel and their partners in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commander of JTF-SB, said the successful operation against the drones was a testament to the readiness, vigilance, and technological edge of his force.

US Will ‘Not Tolerate Hostile Surveillance’

“Cartel networks are increasingly employing unmanned aircraft systems to facilitate illicit human-smuggling and actively spy on our personnel and law enforcement partners,” Taylor said. “By integrating layered countermeasures alongside advanced directed-energy capabilities like this laser system, we have made it clear that we will not tolerate hostile surveillance.”

Ammon Blair, a former U.S.Border Patrol agent and senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Secure & Sovereign Texas Initiative, told The Epoch Times in March 2025 that he recalled hearing cartel-operated drones overhead while working along the Texas border.

“You’d be running, and you’d have a drone right above your head and tracking every move you made,” Blair said at the time.

In February, the airspace around El Paso International Airport was closed for 7 hours for “special security reasons.”

The White House told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement at the time that Mexican cartel-operated drones had breached U.S. airspace and that the Department of War took action to disable them.

In other parts of Mexico, cartels have used drones to drop explosives in deadly attacks, but there is no suggestion the drones in the Texas incident were armed.

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Huntsville Defense Firm Unveils Homegrown “Firefly” Laser That Zaps Enemy Drones in Seconds

A Huntsville, Alabama defense company gave an up-close demonstration this week of a powerful new anti-drone laser system designed to knock unmanned aerial threats out of the sky before they can endanger U.S. military personnel or American civilians.

KBR and its Huntsville-based subsidiary Kord demonstrated FIREFLY, a mobile high-energy laser weapon designed to detect, track, and destroy unmanned aircraft before they can reach American troops, civilian gatherings, or critical infrastructure.

Attendees were required to put on laser-protection goggles before the test began. On a live screen, observers watched as the system’s sensors and AI-assisted targeting technology identified and followed a drone.

Then FIREFLY took it down.

Axios reported that the truck-mounted 20-kilowatt system disabled the quadcopter in under four seconds. Kord officials said the onboard batteries provide roughly 15 minutes of total “laser-on time,” the unit can be deployed in about 30 minutes, and an operator can learn the controls in as little as five minutes.

“This is a homegrown product,” KBR’s David Zoller said, according to WAFF.

“I think often we can look at the work that happens in Huntsville, you see Redstone, you see all the traffic and everything, and you kinda have to wonder what’s going on over there,” Zoller continued. “Well, it’s protecting the people, and this is one of the methods that we’re doing it.”

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Former FBI Agent Claims Nuclear Lab Worker May Have Been Killed With DIRECT ENERGY WEAPON

A former FBI agent has advanced a bombshell theory that the Los Alamos National Laboratory worker whose remains were recovered from a New Mexico forest was eliminated using a direct energy weapon, complete with psychological manipulation technology that could explain her sudden, out-of-character departure from home.

The claims inject a technological dimension into the pattern of mysterious deaths and disappearances among those with access to nuclear and classified aerospace secrets—suggesting outside actors may be deploying exotic tools to silence key personnel and block public knowledge.

Melissa Casias, a 53-year-old administrative assistant at the elite lab, vanished on June 26, 2025 after dropping her husband, a lab superintendent, at work.

Her actions that day were atypical: she claimed she needed to retrieve a forgotten security badge even though she had it, visited her daughter to drop off a sandwich while saying she would work from home, then returned to the house, wiped both phones clean of all data, and walked away without keys, identification or purse.

Surveillance last placed her walking alone eastward on State Road 518 roughly three miles from the family home in Ranchos de Taos around 2:20 p.m.

Her skeletal remains turned up on May 28, 2026 in the Carson National Forest, discovered by a hiker near a handgun the family said did not belong to her. As previously reported, identification followed in early June.

Forensic teams reconstructed the skull from fragments found at the scene. New Mexico State Police confirmed that “the initial CT scan did not reveal any projectiles in the skull.” No official cause of death has yet been issued by the medical examiner.

Former FBI agent Ben Hansen examined the details shared so far and concluded they point strongly away from suicide. “Just what they have shared is highly highly suspicious,” he stated on the Brian Entin Investigates podcast. “I don’t know if I give a percentage but it’s kind of more like an 80 percent foul play versus someone who’s depressed is the way I see it.”

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Gabbard Rescinds Intelligence Reports on Mysterious Syndrome

Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has retracted intelligence community reports on mysterious health problems known as Havana Syndrome, according to a memorandum released on June 11.

Gabbard found that the intelligence community assessments of the anomalous health incidents, released in 2023 and 2025, failed to meet the community’s analytic standards.

That included selectively excluding intelligence and evidence that did not support the conclusions and relying on an “ethically flawed medical study without noting methodological critiques,” Gabbard’s office said in the memo, sent to members of Congress.

The 2023 assessment concluded it was very unlikely that a foreign adversary was behind the incidents, which have impacted staffers in countries such as Cuba and China.

The updated assessment released in 2025 said most intelligence agencies still held it was very unlikely an enemy was responsible for the syndrome, but two components judged there was a “roughly even chance” that a foreign actor had used a novel weapon to target Americans, or had developed such a weapon.

Gabbard’s team said future assessments on the matter would adhere to “rigorous ethical standards incorporating all available intelligence sources and engaging a broad range of experts from agencies including the CIA.”

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Former Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times Reporter Claims She Was Attacked with ‘Direct Energy Weapons’ at Her Home Over Epstein Reporting

A veteran journalist who has spent months covering Jeffrey Epstein’s sprawling Zorro Ranch compound in New Mexico says she is permanently leaving the United States after suffering what she describes as two “direct energy weapon” attacks inside her home office in New Mexico.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, a former Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times reporter turned bestselling novelist and independent investigator, announced her plan to flee the country in a post on her Substack last week.

The reporter claims the attacks left her with symptoms matching “Havana syndrome” and forced her to abandon her New Mexico residence immediately.

“Okay, folks. It appears my home has been located by, well, whomever is unhappy about my reporting about Zorro Ranch and the local cover up here and the military intelligence roots of the child sex trafficking operation Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were running here in New Mexico,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote.

The post continued, “This morning, I was hit in my home office by two episodes of what I later learned were likely Direct Energy Weapon attacks. Look up Havana Syndrome. My symptoms are consistent with such attacks, and entirely new. We wasted no time in leaving the house, for good. We will be staying in safe houses while we finish plans to permanently relocate abroad.”

“The hardest part will be transporting our pets. It is very expensive. I am going to set up a gofundme to help cover that expense and a security detail until we are out of the USA. Yes, it has come to this. We kind of figured it might,” the post concluded.

The U.S. Department of Defense defines DEWs as systems that use concentrated electromagnetic energy, rather than kinetic energy, to “incapacitate, damage, disable, or destroy enemy equipment, facilities, or personnel.”

The U.S. has researched DEWs since the 1960s, with billions invested. The first operational U.S. DE weapon was a 30 kW laser installed on the USS Ponce in 2014.

Other nations, including China, Russia, and Israel, are also actively developing DEWs.

Valdes-Rodriguez wrote in a later post that the attacks may have involved a “backpack-sized” device placed on or near her roof by “private military contractors” and a second incident from “the back of a large semi truck that parked across from my house.”

“These are the most cowardly weapons ever created. They attack you at your most vulnerable and trusting, in your home, in bed, and do not kill right away,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote.

No police report or independent verification of the attacks has been made public.

Valdes-Rodriguez was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and built a respected career in mainstream journalism before transitioning to fiction and, more recently, independent investigative work.

Earlier this year, after the Department of Justice released millions of pages of previously unseen Epstein files, Valdes-Rodriguez began systematically combing through the documents with a laser focus on Epstein’s 7,500-acre Zorro Ranch, now renamed Rancho de San Rafael, located roughly 30 miles outside Santa Fe.

Key elements of her Zorro Ranch investigations include claims that Epstein hired Bradbury Stamm Construction, New Mexico’s largest industrial contractor, known for building facilities at the state’s nuclear weapons labs to construct the remote ranch.

The firm’s phone number appeared in Epstein’s personal contacts.

Valdes-Rodriguez linked this to Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, and alleged Israeli intelligence penetration of U.S. nuclear programs in the 1980s.

Additionally, she reported on a still-active private microwave communications license at the property and its strategic location forming a near-perfect triangle with the two top-secret nuclear labs. She has alleged the ranch may have been used for surveillance operations.

Drawing on FBI tips and DOJ files, she has reported on allegations of buried victims, “two foreign girls,” young girls allegedly raped at the ranch, and possible disappearances of American scientists tied to the area.

Valdes-Rodriguez also reported that former U.S. Attorney for New Mexico John J. Kelly served as Epstein’s personal power of attorney for the 1993 purchase of the ranch from then-Governor Bruce King.

Kelly has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and called the insinuations “categorically false.”

She also highlighted the Zorro Trust’s $85 million Oklahoma Lottery win shortly after Epstein’s 2008 prison stint.

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UFO-linked scientist claimed a top secret energy weapon blasted her before her death… now the Pentagon admits they are real

A futuristic weapon often dismissed as a conspiracy theory has been publicly acknowledged as being part of the US military’s vast arsenal. 

The US Department of War chose ‘Star Wars Day’ on May 4 to state that ‘directed energy weapons are a fine addition to our arsenal.’

Directed energy weapons are devices capable of firing rays of energy, such as microwaves, at a target. Simply put, they fire lasers at the enemy, often to scramble and physically damage electronic equipment.

In the Pentagon’s post on social media, they confirmed that DEWs produced ‘beams of concentrated electromagnetic energy or atomic or subatomic particles.’

Monday’s post cemented decades of rumors that the military has been working on futuristic weaponry that was once thought of as science fiction or unrealistic experiments by Pentagon researchers.

However, the revelation comes as stunning claims from a dead scientist were recently unearthed, alleging that she was the target and victim of a DEW attack in her own home in 2022.

Amy Eskridge, who reportedly took her own life on June 11, 2022 at age 34, shared shocking images that allegedly showed the damage these weapons could cause to the human body.

Pictures and text messages shared with the Daily Mail by a former British intelligence officer revealed burned skin, lesions and painful blisters Eskridge allegedly suffered after a beam from a DEW was fired into her home by an unknown assailant.

Franc Milburn, a retired paratrooper, investigated the Eskridge case and concluded she was ‘murdered by a “private aerospace company”‘ to stop her research on futuristic propulsion technology and national security threats.

The images shared by Milburn also revealed how a microwave from an alleged DEW scorched the window of Eskridge’s Huntsville, Alabama home as the beam passed through the glass.

Eskridge’s death was reportedly ruled a suicide from a gunshot wound to the head, but the scientist allegedly consulted a former CIA weapons expert about the DEW attack in early 2022.

On May 19, 2022, Milburn said Eskridge messaged him to say: ‘My ex-CIA weapons guy on my team saw my hands when they were burned really badly a couple months ago, and he saw that window pane in person,’ she wrote.

‘He said he had built things like that, and that it was most likely an RF k-band emitter run by five car batteries strung together from inside an SUV.’

While there has been no physical evidence to confirm Eskridge and Milburn’s claims regarding a DEW attack, the theory that such a weapon uses a k-band emitter does match what the military is currently using in its laser weapon tests.

The k-band is a specific range of invisible radio waves, or microwaves, that military directed energy weapons can use to send out powerful beams at enemy targets.

These beams can travel well, focus tightly on a target and are especially good at damaging electronics inside drones, missiles or vehicles from a distance.

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FBI Joins Search for Missing Retired Air Force General Who Led U.S. Military Research Lab That Develops Directed-Energy Technology

The FBI has now joined the search for retired Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, who was reported missing in New Mexico.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, retired Maj. Gen. McCasland, who previously commanded the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, has been reported missing since Friday.

McCasland served three years as the commander of the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, which is notable for its directed-energy weapons and advanced space technologies.

The investigation into McCasland’s disappearance is being led by the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, and on Tuesday afternoon, the office announced it has partnered with the FBI Albuquerque Field Office.

In a post on X, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office stated, “Due to his background and established partnerships, BCSO is coordinating closely with multiple agencies, including the FBI Albuquerque Field Office, which is assisting as standard practice when it has a tool, tactic, or technique that may benefit the investigation. BCSO remains the lead agency.”

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Retired Air Force General Who Led U.S. Military Research Lab That Develops Directed Energy Technology Goes Missing in New Mexico

A retired U.S. Air Force general was reported missing in New Mexico on Friday.

Retired Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, who previously commanded the Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, has been reported missing after being last seen on Friday at 11 a.m.

The Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base is notable for its research into advanced space and directed-energy weapons technology.

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, which is leading the search for McCasland, has issued a Silver Alert for his disappearance.

Per The New York Post:

A retired U.S. Air Force general was reported missing in New Mexico, with authorities warning that medical concerns have heightened fears for his safety.

Retired Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland, 68, was last seen around 11 a.m. Friday near Quail Run Court NE in Albuquerque, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office said.

Officials said they do not know what McCasland was wearing or in which direction he may have traveled. The sheriff’s office has issued a Silver Alert. “Due to his medical issues, law enforcement is concerned for his safety,” the sheriff’s office said.

McCasland was a longtime leader at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and previously commanded Kirtland’s Phillips Research Site and Air Force Research Laboratory.

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This Is The LOCUST Laser That Reportedly Prompted Closing El Paso’s Airspace

An AeroVironment LOCUST laser directed energy weapon owned by the U.S. Army was central to the chain of events that led to the recent shutdown of airspace around El Paso, Texas, according to Reuters. Though many questions still remain to be answered about how the flight restrictions came to be imposed, LOCUST was designed to respond to exactly the kinds of drones that regularly fly across the southern border from Mexico.

Readers can get caught up on what is known about the clampdown in the skies above El Paso on Wednesday in initial reporting here.

Multiple outlets had already reported yesterday that the use of a laser counter-drone system was a key factor in the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) sudden decision to impose the temporary flight restrictions over El Paso. Reuters‘ report says “two people briefed on the situation” identified the laser system in question as LOCUST. TWZ has reached out to AeroVironment and the U.S. Army for more information. U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), which oversees U.S. military operations in and around the homeland, declined to comment.

Last July, the U.S. military released a picture, seen below, showing Army personnel assigned to Joint Task Force-Southern Border (JTF-SB) conducting sling-load training with a LOCUST mounted on a 4×4 M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) at Fort Bliss. This had prompted some speculation that LOCUST systems might be in use along the U.S. border with Mexico. JTF-SB was established in March 2025 to oversee a surge in U.S. military support to the border security mission. Fort Bliss, situated in El Paso, is a major hub for those operations. It is also home to the 1st Armored Division and a significant number of Army air defense units.

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Eyewitness video of mysterious craft hovering over El Paso upends Trump administration ‘party balloon’ claims

Claims that US airspace was shut down because of a party balloon have been popped by new video appearing to show a large, hovering UFO over El Paso, Texas.

An eyewitness driving near El Paso International Airport on Tuesday pulled over to record what they described as a mothership floating above the ground in the distance, which was releasing smaller objects from its underside.

The sighting, shared with crowdsourced UFO-reporting platform Enigma, occurred just hours before a large swath of US airspace was abruptly closed for ‘special security reasons’ at 11.30pm MT on February 10.

The mysterious shut down was originally announced to last for ten days and included all commercial, cargo, and general flights within a ten-mile-wide area roughly five miles southwest of El Paso, from the ground up to 18,000 feet.

However, the chaotic shut down by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was quickly called off, with the Trump Administration changing the story of what triggered the alert multiple times within a matter of hours on Wednesday.

White House officials initially announced the US had taken down a Mexican cartel drone flying across the southern border, only to claim hours later that the object struck by a high-powered laser was a party balloon.

Now, UFO researchers and witnesses in the area have alleged that something other than a balloon or drone was spotted on multiple days near the US-Mexico border before the FAA warning.

‘Looks like the mothership. It’s huge. And there are stuff coming out from the bottom of it and going off to the left a little bit as it landed,’ the driver on Tuesday said. 

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