On June 22, 2025, NASA scientist Monica Reza vanished from a marked trail in the Angeles National Forest. She waved to the two friends hiking ahead of her, smiled, and was gone.

She was sixty years old, an experienced weekly hiker, and — in her family's words — not a risk-taker. She was also one of the most important materials scientists the American rocket program has ever had. Under her maiden name, Monica A. Jacinto, she is an inventor of record on the patent for Mondaloy 200 — the alloy that let a U.S. rocket engine survive hot, high-pressure oxygen without burning through, a problem Russia had solved forty years before the United States did. For fifteen years, she was the person who made that alloy work inside hardware that actually fires.

The only trace anyone has ever recovered is a red beanie, found three hundred and sixty feet down a slope, a tenth of a mile from where she was last seen. Search teams flew Mount Waterman into November. No body. No scene. One red beanie.

And there is a connection. Monica Reza's boss was Neil McCasland — the retired Air Force general whose own disappearance opened this series. The documented bridge runs through one alloy and one co-inventor into the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, the base from which the United States ran Project Blue Book and its two predecessor inquiries into unidentified flying objects, the laboratory McCasland once commanded — and which, after he retired, he left to consult for Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy.

Four days into the search — while helicopters were still over Mount Waterman — a memorial page appeared on Find A Grave. It carried her full name, a death date of June 22, 2025, and a place of death no body has ever confirmed.

In Episode Two, field reporter Tom Devereux files from the 6,000-foot gate on Angeles Crest Highway, where the trail begins. We separate what the public record actually proves from what the internet has decided it means. We hear Monica's family, who told Los Angeles Magazine that "people should realize that scientists die also." We hear the White House answer the entire story with two words — "if true." And we follow the four theories this show is tracking across the season: foreign intelligence; UFO disclosure and legacy programs; MKUltra-style domestic operations to silence somebody about to talk; and the boring possibility that what we are watching is a country teaching itself a new conspiracy theory in real time.

Next week: Amy Eskridge.

Chapters

00:00:00 Missing on Mount Waterman
00:00:35 Where Is Monica Reza?
00:02:23 Poodle Dog Bush
00:03:08 McCasland Was Her Boss
00:04:07 Field Report: The Trail
00:06:27 The Red Beanie
00:09:32 The Alloy Called Mondaloy
00:12:23 The Documented Bridge
00:15:38 The Find A Grave Page
00:16:56 What the Record Says
00:18:47 "Scientists Die Also"
00:19:31 "If True" at the White House
00:20:51 What If They Walked?
00:22:09 Next Week: Amy Eskridge
00:24:15 Until We Know More

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Missing Scientists is a long-form investigation into the eleven deaths and disappearances the FBI is now reviewing — Neil McCasland, Monica Reza, Amy Eskridge, Melissa Casias, Matthew Sullivan, Nuno Loureiro, Carl Grillmair, and four more — and the theories that have attached themselves to all of them.

Hosted by Mike Davis in Washington DC, with co-host Catherine Lee and field reporter Tom Devereux. New episodes weekly.

If you have something we should know, the case file is at missingscientists.com.

Until we know more.

A production of The Narrative. Produced by Hunter Powers and Deborah Cavenaugh. Directed by Hunter Powers.