Another individual with ties to top secret U.S. research has reportedly vanished without a trace. According to a new report, witnesses last saw Steven Garcia, 48, leaving his Albuquerque, New Mexico home on foot, carrying only a handgun on August 28, 2025.
Steven Garcia was a government contractor who worked for the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), according to an anonymous source who spoke to DailyMail.com. The KSNSC facility in Albuquerque reportedly plays a key behind-the-scenes role in America’s national defense, as it manufactures more than 80 percent of the non-nuclear components used to build the U.S. military’s nuclear weapons.
Garcia allegedly served as a property custodian at KCNSC’s New Mexico facility, a position which granted him top security clearance. The source described his work as “a very high-level, overseeing position for all the assets. Tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and assets, some of which are not classified, others would be classified.”
According to Albuquerque police, cameras last captured him leaving his house in New Mexico wearing shorts and a green camouflage shirt shortly after 9 a.m. local time on August 28, 2025.
Authorities cautioned at the time that Garcia “may be a danger to himself” as he was spotted carrying a handgun. However, the DailyMail.com source refuted any claims that the nuclear official was experiencing mental health problems or suicidal thoughts.
Steven Garcia is now the tenth American with ties to top secret space or nuclear research to go missing or die under mysterious circumstances in recent years. Four of the others went missing without a trace in almost the same manner as he did.
Several people with ties to top secret research have vanished
In 2025, Anthony Chavez, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory employee, disappeared. The Los Alamos Police Department reports that the search for Chavez is still ongoing and that, almost a year later, no new information has come to light.
Two months later, Melissa Casias, who authorities believe had security clearance for sensitive data at Los Alamos National Laboratory, disappeared under almost identical circumstances. The case is still unsolved.
Four days prior to Casias, Monica Reza, the Director of the Materials Processing Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, vanished. As part of a U.S. government project headed by retired U.S. Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland, she reportedly worked on creating a unique metal for rockets. McCasland vanished in almost the same way as Chavez and Casias. Authorities last saw him on February 27, 2026.
Several others have died under suspicious circumstances
Michael David Hicks, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1998 to 2022, passed away on July 30, 2023. The authorities never revealed the cause of his death, and there is no proof that anyone ever conducted an autopsy.
On July 4, 2024, Frank Maiwald, a NASA scientist employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, passed away. Authorities have admitted that they never conducted an autopsy, but they have never disclosed the cause of his death. Furthermore, NASA has never released a statement to the public about the scientist’s passing.
Over the past year, three other researchers – Jason Thomas, Carl Grillmair, and Nuno Loureiro – also passed away inexplicably.
An unidentified attacker shot and killed Loureiro while he was working on nuclear fusion as an endless energy source. Another unidentified assailant shot and killed Grillmair, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who took part in NASA-led space telescope missions. And, after going missing three months earlier, authorities discovered Thomas, a pharmaceutical researcher at Novartis testing cancer treatments, dead in a lake.