The Disappearance of William McCasland: Grusch's Claim and Podesta's Dispute
The former research chief of the US Air Force disappeared from his Albuquerque home on February 27, days after Donald Trump ordered the release of all UFO files. More than seven months later, David Grusch claimed on a podcast that McCasland took part in a project preparing for disclosure, but John Podesta disputes this interpretation.
William Neil McCasland, former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, disappeared from his Albuquerque home on February 27, 2026, just eight days after President Trump announced that government files related to UFOs and extraterrestrial life would be released. The 68-year-old McCasland previously led the laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and also directed its Phillips Research Site at Kirtland Air Force Base. He has been missing since then, that is, for more than seven months, and local police have released no new information on the case.
What do we know for certain?
When he disappeared, McCasland's phone, wearable devices and glasses remained at his home. His wife, Susan Wilkerson, told police in February that she did not believe foul play was involved, and she told 911 dispatchers that it appeared her husband had planned not to be found. David Grusch, who testified under oath in 2023 that the US government had for decades operated secret programs to recover and reverse-engineer debris of non-human origin, has previously also claimed that McCasland oversaw such classified programs and did not cooperate with lawmakers when they sought to interview people about extraterrestrial contact.
What does Grusch claim, and what does Podesta dispute?
On Joe Rogan's podcast, Grusch now also stated that McCasland took part in a working group that was meant to prepare Americans for disclosure. Grusch connected this to Hillary Clinton's 2016 pledge to release the UFO files if elected president, and claimed that the project was approved by John Podesta. In an email responding to an inquiry from Paradigm, Podesta disputed this characterization, although he acknowledged that, at the initiative of Tom DeLonge, former Blink-182 frontman and later an activist campaigning for UFO disclosure, there had been a conference call with McCasland about declassifying Department of Defense files. According to Podesta, Americans would be able to take in information about unidentified aerial phenomena even without being prepared.
The connection between McCasland and DeLonge is not new: in 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from Podesta's account, including a letter dated January 25, 2016, titled 'General McCasland,' in which DeLonge wrote that he had been working with the general for four months and had recently given him a four-hour presentation on the entire project, and that McCasland had helped assemble his advisory team. The same letter also repeated the longstanding, unsupported claim that debris from the Roswell incident had been taken to Wright-Patterson.
Two clearly separate threads thus run through the case: McCasland's unexplained disappearance, which according to police nothing so far links to the UFO topic, and Grusch's disputed claim, partly refuted by Podesta, that the researcher took part in a project preparing for disclosure. Whether the two are actually connected cannot yet be confirmed by an independent source.
The sober take
According to McCasland's wife, it appeared her husband had planned not to be found, which points more to a deliberate disappearance, one in which police do not suspect foul play, than to a UFO matter. The claims about the Roswell–Wright-Patterson connection and the project preparing for disclosure were made by Grusch in a podcast interview, and Podesta disputed the characterization in an email.