11 and counting

0:00 Reports indicate a NASA scientist has died in LA in July 2023, with no cause of death disclosed. A principal researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory dies on the 4th of July 2024. No cause of death released. A decorated Air Force intelligence officer, bronze *3 intelligence agencies scheduled to testify before Congress about classified government programs, is found dead at his home in Virginia months before his testimony. June 2025 An aerospace engineer from NASA's JPL goes missing on a hike in California.

0:31 Never found. Former Lowe's Alamos nuclear facility employee vanishes on foot from his home in New Mexico. No trace on May 2025. December 2025 A physicist who LED MI TS Fusion Energy Centre is shot dead outside his home in Massachusetts. February 2026. A retired Air Force Major General, the man who once commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, walks out of his Albuquerque home, Leaves behind his phone, his glasses, his watch. Never comes back. Unusual practice breaking the

1:04 law, lighting up pathways. Both new.

1:10 A reporter walks into a White House press briefing in April 2026 and asks out loud on camera whether the US government is investigating the fact that 10 scientists with access to classified nuclear and aerospace research have either died or vanished in the last two years. The press secretary says she'll look into it. The next day. She's asked the same question, this time by the president himself walking out of the building. And he says, I just left a meeting on that subject. Pretty serious stuff.

1:48 I hope it's random. I hope it's random. The president of the United States about 10 missing or dead scientists. I hope it's random. I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message. Unusual practice.

2:09 Breaking the Law. This is the Unusual Practice podcast, and I'm your host, Charlie. And today we're talking about what's actually going on, who these people are and what happened to them and why the story took two years to reach the White House. And at the end, I'm going to tell you about an 11th person, someone who didn't make the original list, someone who saw all of this coming. This is the most unusual practice. Rethink. What you think you know with Charlie?

2:49 So the list, you see, all of these people had one thing in common. They worked on stuff the government doesn't talk about. Nuclear weapons, space missions, advanced military technology. And some of them had security clearances. Some of them knew things. And between 2023 and 26, they started one by one dying or disappearing. Now, look, I have to be honest with you up front. Some of these cases, when you look at them individually, have some form of explanations, whether it's a car crash, a random shooting, an older man with health problems who went for a walk.

3:35 Taken on their own, most of them are sad, but they're not shocking. It's when you put them all on the same page that your brain starts doing something weird. So let me walk you through them. The first one, NASA scientist, Planetary Defense Research, literally the team figuring out how to stop an asteroid hitting Earth, dies in 2023. No cause of death ever publicly given. None. His obituary listed his achievements. It didn't say how he died. Then another NASA researcher dies. July 4th, 2024. Same thing, no cause of death released ever.

4:18 He managed a project to detect signs of life on other planets and he is gone. No explanation. Then there's Matthew Sullivan, and this one is a bit different because Matthew was 39. He'd spent his career in military intelligence, three of the most sensitive agencies in the country. Bronze * He was the real deal. He had agreed to testify before Congress about what he described as a classified government program involving UF OS. And I don't mean little green men. I mean official, documented unidentified aerial phenomena that the government has been sitting on for decades.

5:01 He was going to talk. In November 2024, he died. Guess when? In May 2024, six months before his testimony, the official cause released two years later, an accidental combination of alcohol and prescription medication. At his funeral, a retired general who had run the Department of Defense's most classified program stood up and said Matthew had carried the burden that a select few in his nation have of truly understanding what's going on. That quote has never been walked back. Next, a female aerospace engineer at NASA, 60 years old, disappears in June 2025 while on a hike in Los Angeles.

5:56 But here's the thing never found two people from Los Alamos. That's the facility that built the first nuclear bomb and still manages the US nuclear stockpile today. One was a man in his late 70s who walked out of his house 1 morning on May 2025 and never came back. His friends said it was completely out of character. The other was a woman who vanished in June 2025, last seen walking along the highway with no phone, no wallet and no keys. When her phone was eventually found, it had been factory reset.

6:34 Nobody has explained that a government contractor from the Kansas City facility that makes 80% of the non nuclear components for every American nuclear weapon just poof disappeared August 2025. Last seen on CCTV leaving his house on foot carrying a gun, a physics professor at MIT leading the university's fusion energy research shot dead outside his house in December 2025. The suspect was a stranger who'd also shot up a university campus days earlier. Random. Horrific, but sure random. A pharmaceutical researcher who disappeared from his home in December 2025.

7:21 His body was found in a lake three months later. Yeah, no foul play. An astrophysicist at Caltech shot dead on his own porch in February 2026. The suspect didn't know him. Another stranger, of course. Another random act. 10 people. NASA, MIT, Caltech, Los Alamos, the nuclear weapons complex, the Air Force over 2 years. Mostly quiet, nobody connecting them publicly until the general went missing. Discover insights on business growth, leadership challenges, and human impact with unusual practices.

8:10 Insightful 3 part Corner Office series. Unlock transformation at the very top. Listen now. Reshape your perspective on true success. This general's name is William McAllen, retired Air Force Major General, 68 years old, and his career classified space weapons, director of special programs at the Pentagon and most significantly, commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Now, Wright Patterson, well, you need to know this name. It's the facility that has been at the center of every serious UFO conversation for almost 80 years.

8:52 I mean, since 1947 when something crashed near Roswell, NM. And we've had that discussion before. We have a lot of series about that. Whatever was recovered, the rumor never officially confirmed, always officially denied, is that it ended up at Wright Patterson, the research lab there, the one McAllen ran. Now here's where this gets weird. In 2016, a bunch of emails got leaked from inside Hillary Clinton's campaign. Remember that? And buried in there were messages from Tom Delong, the guy from Blink 182 who became one of the main figures pushing for UFO disclosure.

9:40 In those emails, Delong talks about McAllen. He names him, says he's been advising him, says McAllen is very, very aware of classified material, says he is one of a small group of insiders guiding a slow, controlled release of information about what the government actually knows. Mcallen's wife has been clear it was a brief, unpaid thing. After retirement. He helped with a fiction book. He doesn't, she says, have special knowledge about Roswell. On February 27th, 2026, just days after Donald Trump announced he was releasing government UFO records, McAllen left his house in Albuquerque.

10:27 A repairman had been there that morning. His wife came home at noon, and he was gone, left behind. Who leaves behind his phone, his glasses, his smartwatch, and he took his wallet, his hiking boots and a 38 caliber revolver. 8 days later, a Gray Air Force sweatshirt found a mile and 1/4 from his home. No blood and no sign of him. Well, there. Doesn't seem to be any other explanation unless you believe in the supernatural. His wife told the 911 operator that her husband had planned not to be found.

11:10 She says he'd been struggling with anxiety, memory issues and not sleeping, the investigators said. And this is a direct quote. He would still be the most intelligent person in any room. As of right now, William McAllen has not been found and it was his disappearance that finally made everyone stop and look at the list as a whole. Earth. What is that, Jerome? A planet smaller than our own, situated on the other side of the sun. It's inhabited by a race of people similar to ourselves. So here's what I keep thinking about.

11:47 Most of these cases started in 2023. Some of them have been sitting in plain sight for 2-3 years. Public obituaries, local news, news reports. Not secret, just separate. Nobody joined them up. Now what changed? A general one name with enough weight attached to it that suddenly a journalist asked the question at a White House press briefing and it went from the Internet to the Oval Office in 48 hours. And then it all came out at once. The FBI said it's now leading the investigation into possible connections.

12:23 Congress opened its own probe. The House Oversight Committee chair, who admitted he initially thought this was some kind of crazy conspiracy theory, said the details made him dig deeper. He sent letters to NASA, the FBI, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, asking for briefings, calling it a potential national security threat. A former FBI assistant director went on the record and said, if these aren't random, it's espionage. China, Russia, Iran, systematically targeting the people who hold America's most sensitive secrets, not to silence them, to extract what they know.

13:01 And on April 30th, Trump was asked again, are these cases connected? He said. So far we're finding that there's not much of A connection. Some were sick, some self-inflicted and some had other things. Not much of A connection so far. The investigation is still open. We. Can't do anything right. Our military has to be strengthened, our vets have to be taken care of, we have to end Obamacare and we have to make our country great again. And I will do that. When this story went national last month, something happened that most of the mainstream coverage missed.

13:45 People started looking back further past the original list, and they found a case that had been sitting there completely unnoticed in this context for four years. Case 11. Her name was Amy Eskridge. She was 34. She lived in Huntsville, AL, a city so dense with aerospace engineers and scientists that it's literally nicknamed the Rocket City. Her dad worked at NASA, and Amy spent her career chasing one of the biggest questions in physics. Is gravity actually as fixed and untouchable as we've always been told?

14:24 Or is there a way, using the right materials, the right frequencies, the right conditions to interact with it, to basically change how it works? She wasn't some lone crank in a basement. She was building hardware, running experiments. She had documented results, small, strange and unexplained, but she was trying to publish it. But she needed government permission. As a private researcher, she needed NASA to authorize her paper before she could release it. She applied. She waited. She kept asking.

15:01 And of course, she couldn't get it. And then in 2020, the way she talked about her work started to change. The science was still there, but there was something else now, she said in a recorded interview. If you stick your neck out in public, at least someone notices if your head gets chopped off. She described being watched, cars outside her home, people she believed had moved into nearby apartments to monitor her, burns appearing on her hands. She couldn't explain and before she died she sent a message to a colleague and it said if you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not.

15:44 If you see any report that I overdosed, I most definitely did not. Amy Eskridge was found dead on June 11th, 2022, a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to the official record, no full investigative report has ever been publicly released. Her father, who built this work alongside her, who was there every single day, says he doesn't believe her death is suspicious. People should realize that scientists die. Also, her family said not make too much of this. So he is probably right. I need you to hear that he is probably right.

16:27 But she left that message. She knew to leave it. She had thought about the possibility clearly enough to write it down and actually send it to someone. And now she's on the federal list four years later. Alongside a general who went missing the day after UFO records were ordered released. Alongside a man who died before his congressional testimony. Alongside people who walked out of their houses and never came back, the story finally caught up to her. Trump's latest word is not much of A connection.

17:08 So far, the FBI investigation is ongoing. No official link between any of these cases has been confirmed, and some of them almost certainly are coincidences. Random violence, illness, accidents, Lives ending. The quiet and brutal ways that lives end like. Comment. And subscribe. But some of them have details that don't sit still. A factory reset phone? Really. A man who took his gun but left his glasses seriously. And a woman who wrote down what she was afraid of before it happened. Like what the.

17:45 And underneath all of it, underneath this whole story, is a question about what these people actually knew, what they were working on, what they had found. Amy Eskridge had found something, or at least she was close to it. close enough that she needed government clearance to talk about her own research. Close enough that she was scared. She wasn't the first person in Huntsville to get that close. There was a scientist before her, working on the exact same problem in the same city, funded by the same government.

18:26 Who also, by the way, disappeared from public life after her research was classified, who spent the last years of her life unable to remember what she had discovered. Her name was Ning Li, and Amy Eskridge spent years picking up exactly where she left off.

18:49 Two women, Same city, same question, same silence at the end. In the next episode, we're going to go inside that lab, inside the actual science, inside what Amy was building, what she found, and why the question she was asking might be the most important, or rather dangerous one in modern physics. And this is all relevant to who we are. And that's next time. Until then, don't forget to like, follow and share the story because we're about to understand, possibly marginally, why we've ever existed.

19:37 Mom, somebody just followed me. Ciao. Ciao.