A new twist has complicated one of the strangest ongoing stories in America.
Late last week, investigators told Los Angeles Magazine that the skeletal remains of missing Los Alamos National Laboratory employee Melissa Casias, discovered last month in a New Mexico forest alongside a handgun, showed no evidence of projectiles in her skull.
Moreover, in an interview this past weekend with NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas, Los Angeles Magazine contributor Lauren Conlin, author of the investigative piece that revealed the absence of projectile evidence, said that on the day Casias disappeared she took her toothbrush and thyroid medication with her.
Conlin characterized those personal items as “things that might indicate you’re planning to stay alive.”
In her investigative piece, Conlin emphasized that authorities have drawn no conclusions about how Casias died.
Still, the contributor noted that the evidence, which initially pointed to suicide, now looks murky or even suspicious.
“The scene initially appeared to point to suicide, but with no bullets located in the skull… Casias’ case is especially chilling. Was the scene staged?” Conlin wrote.
Do you think she committed suicide?
Casias disappeared after leaving her home on June 26, 2025. A hiker discovered her skeletonized remains on May 28 of this year.
Earlier this year, in a segment that aired on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show,” host Will Cain mentioned Casias’ case as one of seven recent deaths or disappearances involving high-profile scientists and others connected to government research through NASA, the Air Force, or the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In fact, the report that originally caught Cain’s attention focused on Casias, an administrative assistant who reportedly had security clearances and who, in that capacity, according to former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker, would have been a prime target for kidnapping.
The case of the dead or missing people with connections to government scientific research even reached President Donald Trump.
“Well, I hope it’s random,” Trump said in April in response to a question from Fox News’ Peter Doocy. “But we’re going to know in the next week and a half.”
The president also indicated that he had “just left a meeting on that subject.”
On Monday, veteran investigative journalist Catherine Herridge told NewsNation’s Katie Pavlich that one theory behind the deaths of scientists and other government employees involves directed energy weapons.
“It’s no longer isolated to overseas,” Herridge said of the weapons’ use. “What I have been able to document in the last year as an independent journalist is multiple cases inside the United States.”
“I think this idea that there aren’t domestic attacks and that they haven’t targeted civilians is just not correct,” she added. “The trend that I’m seeing is that the cadence of attacks inside the United States, I think, has escalated.”
Herridge also explained how directed energy weapons work.
“In simple terms, [it’s] like putting your cell phone in a microwave just for a couple of seconds,” she said. “When you take it out, it looks undamaged, but in fact, the electrical networks have been completely disrupted.”
In other words, according to the theory, the U.S. government murdered its own scientists to keep what they knew secret.
Investigators have not raised that possibility in Casias’ case, though with this story nearly anything remains possible.
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