Color me skeptical. Whenever I see this come up in a social media feed it's a UFO influencer. It's leaked out into the legacy news presenters who have great haircuts and no critical thinking skills.
Maybe he wants to frame it as the scientists being abduced by aliens. We now know that the whole UFO narrative of the 90s was a government psy ops to distract people from stealth fighter testing and dismiss the sightings as 'aliens'.
The critical thinking skills you need are that they were connected to nuclear research. UFO is a distraction. The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the deaths are connected.
The critical thinking skills you need are the understanding that people die sometimes, and the question is how it compares to the normal rate of death among this population.
And not just rates, but also how they died and whether malicious actors were particularly likely to bother about disappearing them in ways which are actually really much harder to stage than happen naturally like disappearing someone trailwalking in mountains with friends, or whether someone so incompetent they were arrested on the retired professor's property a couple of months before he was shot and then caught still driving a car full of the victim's stuff after the murder was discovered is particularly likely to be part of a big cover up.
An disappearance of a retired major general without his personal possessions and someone committing suicide whilst due to testify in court, sure those things warrant an investigation even though those things happen as the result of mundane crime or mental breakdowns as well as conspiracy. But another thing entirely for the "nothing much to see in those Epstein files" FBI to spin the grand narrative that connecting all these dots is a legitimate question because UFOlogists on YouTube.
> The FBI now says it “is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists,” adding that it “is working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state … and local law enforcement partners to find answers.”
> Separately, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced Monday it will investigate ...
So, do we not want the news reporting what the government is doing? That's the FBI, DoE, DoD, and the House Oversight Committee putting effort into this.
Like, no, i want this reported, not because there is anything that will come from it, but because we should report one what the government is doing.
Why do you think CNN should NOT report one what the government does?
> "The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people," science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West wrote on 16 April on his Substack.
> "Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10 … The deaths are real. The families' grief is real. The pattern is not."
I guess being an asshole is just the standard now on HN? How is this attitude acceptable? What did I do to you? I didn't even realize it was paywalled until you mentioned it. But don't let that stop you from being a dick to somebody who's just trying to help fight misinformation. I guess I'll just go fuck myself.
Unfortunately, this is a sign of the times we live in now. Nobody extends a little grace to others. They assume every act is an intentional slight.
There's no room for mistakes or even differences of opinions, and it's tearing us apart.
Part of it, I think, comes from the anonymous nature of online communications, and little to no ramifications to bad behavior. It's the end result of "I can do whatever I want, the established rules and societal norms don't apply anymore."
If anything, it is you who were closer to being the a by posting what you did without corresponding unpaywalled links. Moreover, it is you who resorted to namecalling, not me. You should know what you're posting; you don't get to be ignorant about it. Even the BBC link you posted is paywalled and therefore unreadable.
Whether the concern is real or not is precisely for the FBI to determine. National security is too serious to leave in the hands of random journalists and overly-comfortable citizens. I fully understand that the data is almost certainly a coincidence, but the consequences of being wrong are so serious that it's best to definitively rule it out.