The Missing General: Neil McCasland, UFO Claims and an Unfolding Mystery
Written by Christopher Sharp - 16 March 2026
Two weeks have now passed since retired U.S. Air Force General William ‘Neil’ McCasland vanished from the edge of Albuquerque, and the facts, such as they are, remain spare, cold and strangely resistant to meaning.
On the morning of Friday, 27 February, McCasland was at or near his home in the area of Quail Run Court.
It was an ordinary day, at least on paper. At about 10:00 a.m., a repairman visited the house and interacted with him.
At 11:10 a.m., his wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, left for a medical appointment. Less than an hour later, at 12:04 p.m., she returned. He was gone.
What remained behind has only deepened the sense that something did not fit. His phone was still at the residence. So were his prescription glasses and wearable devices.
According to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, investigators believe his red backpack, wallet and a .38 calibre revolver with a leather holster are unaccounted for. Speaking at a press conference today, the Sheriff’s Office said it could not confirm what footwear McCasland was wearing when he left the home. It added that hiking boots previously thought to be unaccounted for have now been located, along with a green shirt initially believed to be missing. They were found at another property of McCasland’s in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
By 3:07 p.m. that afternoon, after family and friends had been contacted and efforts to locate him had failed, he was reported missing. A Silver Alert was issued. It remains active.
Since then, the search has widened, but the picture has not become clearer.
The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, which is leading the investigation, has coordinated with partner agencies, including the FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office, when specialised tools or techniques could help.
Search resources have been managed through the New Mexico Department of Public Safety and the New Mexico State Police Search and Rescue system, with volunteer teams assisting when requested. More than 700 homes have been canvassed.
Investigators have asked residents for security footage and information. Drones have flown. Helicopters have searched overhead. Ground teams and K-9 units have worked the terrain.
The United States Air Force, McCasland’s former employer, told Liberation Times on 9 March that its Office of Special Investigations had ‘assisted with some initial information gathering’, but had not opened an investigation into his disappearance.
And yet, there is still no confirmed sighting of McCasland. No confirmed video has surfaced showing him leaving the area. No direction of travel has been established.
At today’s press conference, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that McCasland had been experiencing mental fog, which he cited for stepping down from some different groups he had been working with. The Cleveland Clinic describes this as a common group of symptoms that can affect thinking, memory and concentration.
The Cleveland Clinic says mental fog can make everyday tasks more challenging and may cause someone to lose their train of thought in the middle of a conversation.
Of note, victims of Havana Syndrome have reported mental fog as a symptom. Although there is no credible evidence to suggest he was a victim of such an attack.
Speaking to Liberation Times, retired senior police detective Mike Morgan zeroed in on the unaccounted .38 calibre revolver as a key detail:
“Although guns are very common in the USA, I would question whether he took the gun on previous hikes. If he didn’t, that may indicate a fear and need for self-protection.”
His wife confirmed to the Sheriff’s Office that he would not usually bring a weapon hiking with him.
However, the Sheriff’s Office said it does not presently believe anything nefarious has happened, although it has not ruled out that possibility. The Office added that he had no known enemies.
The case is puzzling, and McCasland is no ordinary missing person.
Above, Neil McCasland alongside Representative Mike Turner
He was a former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, whose career placed him at the centre of some of the Pentagon’s most advanced aerospace research.
After his military career ended, he became involved with Blink-182 rocker Tom DeLonge and his UFO-related efforts, which helped lay the groundwork for the modern congressional push for disclosure on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP.
In January 2016, Tom DeLonge emailed John Podesta about McCasland. Podesta had served as White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, as senior counsellor to President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2015, and later as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Podesta has taken an interest in UAP, and said in March 2016 that he had convinced Hillary Clinton to explore declassifying any government documents that may relate to UFOs.
In an email released by WikiLeaks in 2016, Tom DeLonge described McCasland as an important figure and claimed he was aware of matters connected to Wright-Patterson and Roswell. Those claims remain disputed, and McCasland’s wife has rejected suggestions that his disappearance is linked to special UFO knowledge.
DeLonge wrote:
‘He mentioned he's a "skeptic", he's not. I've been working with him for four months. I just got done giving him a four hour presentation on the entire project a few weeks ago.
‘Trust me, the advice is already been happening on how to do all this. He just has to say that out loud, but he is very, very aware- as he was in charge of all of the stuff. When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago.
‘He not only knows what I'm trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisory team. He's a very important man.’
A Google Hangout meeting was scheduled for Monday, January 25, 2016, drawing together an unusual cast: Neil McCasland, John Podesta, Clinton campaign aide M Fisher, believed to be Clinton staffer Milia Fisher, Tom DeLonge, Lockheed Martin Skunkworks Vice President Rob Weiss, and retired Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, who had previously commanded the Twentieth Air Force and U.S. Strategic Command’s Task Force 214.
The Twentieth Air Force is responsible for maintaining and operating the Air Force’s ICBM force. In its U.S. Strategic Command role as Task Force 214, it provides on-alert, combat-ready ICBMs to the President.
Notably, while Carey and McCasland were both retired at the time, Rob Weiss was still serving at Lockheed Martin and accepted the invitation from his company email address.
In a Facebook post addressing rumours that followed his disappearance, McCasland’s wife confirmed that, after leaving the Air Force, he had been involved in a limited, unpaid capacity with Tom DeLonge’s UFO-related work.
She said that contact with DeLonge and others around that effort tailed off after John Podesta’s emails were hacked and later released by WikiLeaks, in an intrusion U.S. intelligence attributed to Russian actors.
McCasland’s wife stated:
‘After the Russians hacked John Podesta's emails (see Neil's Wikipedia page), there was less contact with Tom and the community pushing for release of UFO information. This connection is not a reason for someone to abduct Neil. Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt.’
Liberation Times spoke to an Air Force source who worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and knew Neil McCasland.
Speaking of McCasland’s reputation and their worry over his disappearance, the source stated:
‘Major General (USAF, Retired) Neil McCasland is a brilliant Aerospace Engineer and an excellent research scientist who was very well respected by all who knew him. I was never aware of his detailed knowledge on the subject of UFO/UAP & Reverse Engineering until that came out recently.
‘I sure hope nothing bad has happened to him. As far as has been publicly released, the local search teams and FBI have yet to recover any evidence about his disappearance.’
Asked whether they believed rumours that debris and bodies from the 1947 Roswell UFO crash in New Mexico had been taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the source responded:
‘I do believe that material, possibly including both craft and NHI biologics, was transported to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. The base was originally known as Wright Field, since the Wright brothers carried out a great deal of testing and improvement on the Wright Flyer there after their first successful flight at Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.’
The source added:
‘The National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) was/is the most highly classified building/compound on the base. It is just the kind of organization that UFO wreckage (or foreign adversary aircraft wreckage) would have been taken to be analyzed.
‘It remains the Department of the Air Force's primary analytical hub for assessing foreign air, space, and cyber threats through technical intelligence and "exploitation" of captured or acquired foreign hardware. There is also a cryogenic facility at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH.’
Following the Second World War, Operation Paperclip brought more than 200 German scientists and technicians to Wright-Patterson, then known as Wright Field, where they worked alongside American counterparts.
Above, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Some were assigned to laboratories at the base. In that context, if an unconventional craft had ever been recovered and transferred there, Wright Field would have been one of the few places in the United States with the technical expertise to examine it.
After the war in Europe ended, Colonel Harold E. Watson and a handpicked group of pilots gathered captured German aircraft from the battlefield and sent or flew them back to Air Materiel Command’s T-2 Intelligence Department at Wright Field and Freeman Field, Indiana, for study.
That effort helped cement Wright Field’s role as a hub for the analysis of advanced foreign aerospace technology.
One source alleged to Liberation Times that, beginning in 1946, the Atomic Energy Commission worked with Italian and German scientists at Wright Field in an effort to reverse-engineer a non-human craft said to have crashed near Magenta, in northern Italy, in 1933.
The source claimed this work was built on earlier research allegedly undertaken by the fallen regimes in Germany and Italy.
Another source linked the Roswell crash to a mid-air collision. However, others have described it instead as a dogfight between two purportedly human-made craft that were allegedly reverse-engineered, with non-human assistance, from the vehicle said to have fallen near Magenta in 1933.
According to that account, one craft, described as being of Nazi design, was moved from Spain to Argentina after the war. At the same time, the other was said to have been assembled at Wright Field by a joint Italian-American-German team. The source further alleged that a Nordic non-human faction had assisted in the engineering of both craft and that the crews were biological clones.
McCasland is not a typical missing person case. If the claims around UFOs are true, he would have knowledge of secrecy which dwarfs the Manhattan Project.
His career placed him inside some of the Air Force’s most sensitive research environments, and it is reasonable to assume that at least some of the information he encountered remained classified long after his retirement.
That background helps explain why his disappearance has prompted unusually intense scrutiny
When Liberation Times asked the FBI and the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office whether his disappearance could pose a national security risk, given the classified information McCasland had access to during his time in the U.S. Air Force, neither provided an answer.
