Morning radio shows often did live prank calls to keep things entertaining. DJs would pretend to be the president or do some other ridiculous bit, and it was usually silly / harmless / funny.

I remember driving to class that morning and hearing the first reports on the radio. My initial thought was, “If this is a prank, it’s not funny.” When I got to class and the professor cancelled because of what was happening, only then did I finally realized it was real.

With the advancement of image and video generation, I think I'd have to see one in person!

That said, I would assume the government would monitor statistics like this as part of standard counter intelligence operations so they could see any patterns of potential issues as they pop up.

The single debunking claim says there are 700k "US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce" so normal mortality rates should be higher.

Were these people all part of the normal workforce or a smaller category? Are those death rates total deaths or deaths under suspicious circumstances?

Anecdotally, Amy Eskridge went on a podcast and texted friends saying she was at risk and had no intention of killing herself before supposedly killing herself. Will McCasland and others disappeared under strange circumstances and Will was clearly not just part of a 700k person workforce, he was a general who directed a largely classified $4B annual research budget.

I'm not saying there is a broad conspiracy here but it's worth exploring. I miss real journalism. What a waste of an opportunity to write a good story.

Now, the hoax has taken a life of its own on the Web, with waves of naive people believing its silly made-up claims about scientists working in certain fields mysteriously disappearing.

The hoax has even made the HN front page.

Sigh.

I was completely unaware until seeing this very article that there were people on "the more excitable corners of Substack and YouTube" talking about a specific conspiracy that aerospace and nuclear research scientists were mysteriously disappearing. Although if you had asked me, say, an hour ago before I started reading this article, "hey, are there people on Substack and YouTube who are promulgating a conspiracy theory about the US government nefariously disappearing aerospace and nuclear research scientists?" I probably would have answered "yeah, this sounds like the sort of thing that someone on the internet is claiming is happening".

> On examination, these claims collapse. The “scientists” actually worked in disparate fields, from chemical biology to plasma physics. Several were actually administrators. Two had retired. One died of natural causes; another in a shooting spree. In any case, as the debunker Mick West pointed out, the “US top secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce” is around 700,000, so normal mortality rates would predict far more deaths over the 22 months concerned – about 4,000.

If I had been aware of people online talking about this, I probably would have assumed that they were uncritically reading conspiracy into a particular reading of some banal facts like the above - if I had even bothered to spend more than a second investigating the claims.

Here's a thought - how much credence should I put into this reporting by The Guardian about the existence of an internet-spread conspiracy theory in 2026 about the US government disappearing scientists, that is loosely based on a 1970s British hoax TV show in the vein of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds called "Alternative 3", that I have never previously heard of? This article is actually kind of light on details about how this modern-day conspiracy theory is operating, and indeed how it connects to this British TV show. Are they actually related, or did the modern-day theory just happen by chance to involve phenomena that sound kind of similar to what the writers of Alternative 3 came up with?

Here's another thought - did the editorial staff of The Guardian choose to write and publish an article about this 70s TV broadcast (which maybe some of them remembered seeing as kids, or seeing referenced in British culture decades ago?) because the Mars colonization angle reminds people of Elon Musk, a public figure who has been publicly talking about Mars colonization for many years, and who the sorts of people who work at The Guardian openly dislike for political reasons? Maybe that's the actual conspiracy - people who work at a well-known newspaper with a specific political stance published a thinly-sourced article that lets them subtly imply that a thing associated with one of their political enemies is sinister?

The problem is that there are real mysteries that are connected to a bunch of social media bullshit and more than half of the purported "mysterious disappearances" of people are people that aren't even connected to nuclear research. And then people who hate Trump like the media want to make it seem like Trump himself is being duped and is personally directing the investigators. The multiple layers of indirection here is the real problem, let the investigators do their jobs because at least a few of them need to be investigated properly.