Bombshell Development Emerges From Mysterious Disappearance Of UFO Expert And Air Force General

The mysterious disappearance of retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland is putting fresh heat on an earlier, still-unsolved case involving aerospace engineer Monica Reza, who vanished while hiking months before he went missing.

Reza previously worked on a government-funded rocket materials project that was overseen by McCasland, and her case has resurfaced as authorities widen a multiagency search for the former general. The overlap has also lit up online speculation about McCasland’s post-retirement ties to the UFO world, even as investigators stress there is no confirmed link between the two disappearances.

It remains unclear whether the cases are connected. The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department told Newsweek, “Detectives are looking into this to see if there is any connection at all.”

Reza was last seen in June during a hike in a Los Angeles-area forest, according to NewsNation. She was reportedly smiling and waving about 30 feet behind her hiking companion when she suddenly vanished. Reza, an aerospace engineer, had worked on developing a special metal used in rockets through a U.S. government-funded project that NewsNation reported was overseen by McCasland.

McCasland disappeared Feb. 27 after leaving his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on foot around 11 a.m. local time, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office said. A Silver Alert was issued because of unspecified medical issues. Officials have not announced evidence of foul play, but his vanishing has sparked intense interest because of his long career overseeing sensitive Air Force science and technology efforts and his later connections to UFO-related circles.

Journalist Ross Coulthart, known for his work investigating UFOs, called the case a “grave national security crisis.” He said McCasland is a man “with some of the most sensitive secrets of the United States in his head.”

Coulthart also pointed to the timing. The week before McCasland was last seen, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to begin identifying and releasing any government files related to UFOs and aliens.

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., who serves on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, which has held hearings on UFOs and government transparency, said it was “really disturbing” for someone “that we believe has a lot of information” to disappear.

But McCasland’s wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, has pushed back hard on the runaway theories, saying she doubted her husband was kidnapped over classified material or his “brief association with the UFO community.”

After McCasland retired, he worked briefly with Blink-182 frontman Tom DeLonge, founder of To The Stars, which previously did research on UFOs. Wilkerson said, “Neil worked with Tom for a bit shortly after his Air Force retirement as an unpaid (Neil’s choice) consultant on military and technical/scientific matters to lend verisimilitude to Tom’s fiction book and media activities,” adding there was “less contact” between the men and the “UFO community” after a Russian hacking incident.

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Wilkerson also dismissed the more sensational claims head-on: “Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt,” she said.

She added, “Though at this point with absolutely no sign of him, maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership.”

Wilkerson added, “However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported.”

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