Prior to the retirement of General William “Neil” McCasland in 2013, Monica Jacinto Reza was one of the most important materials researchers at  Rocketdyne, who had developed a material called Monalloy, which freed the United States from the need to use Russian-made rocket engines to move classified satellites into orbit. Listen as Whitley unpacks the ways in which her work as a Technical Fellow at Aerojet Rocketdyne would have been connected to the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson AFB, which was commanded until mid-2013 by General Neil McCasland, who disappeared on February 27. 

The Air Force started funding Reza’s superalloy work in 1999, and McCasland’s budget directly funded the programs that depended on Reza’s alloy — including the AR1 engine, the Hydrocarbon Boost program, and Air Force propulsion. When Reza’s team in California shipped data to the government for qualification, it landed inside McCasland’s laboratory.

While law enforcement has not made any connection between the two cases, the question has to be asked: why have both of these people disappeared?

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