GONE DARK: Two NASA Scientists Dead, No Answers — And They Are Not Alone

When Michael David Hicks died on July 30, 2023, almost nobody noticed. He was 59 years old, a veteran NASA scientist who had spent 24 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. He had worked on some of the most important space missions in American history. And then he was gone, with no statement from NASA, no public cause of death, and no record of an autopsy.

That silence would have been the end of the story. But it was not.

Less than a year later, Frank Maiwald, another senior JPL scientist, died in Los Angeles on July 4, 2024. He was 61. Like Hicks, there was no public cause of death. No autopsy. No statement from NASA. The only proof that Frank Maiwald ever lived and worked at one of America's most important scientific institutions is a short obituary posted online.

Then came Amy Eskridge. Then came eight more.

In total, 11 American researchers and scientists with ties to advanced physics, aerospace, nuclear technology, and classified government programs have died or gone missing in the past 33 months. This is the story The Pennant has been quietly working on, and it starts with two men whose deaths almost nobody reported.

Michael David Hicks was not a minor figure. He worked at JPL from 1998 to 2022, publishing more than 80 scientific papers and contributing to four major missions, including the Deep Space 1 probe, the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking project, the Dawn Mission, and the DART project, which confirmed in 2022 that a spacecraft impact could measurably alter the trajectory of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. 

Frank Maiwald's record was equally impressive. He spent 25 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, rising to the title of JPL Principal, an internal designation awarded to scientists making outstanding individual contributions. Just 13 months before his death, he led a breakthrough in passive radio detection of subsurface liquid water in Jupiter's icy moons, a technique relevant to both climate monitoring and military navigation. 

Both men held deep institutional knowledge of what America's most advanced telescopes and sensors were detecting. Both are now dead. Neither death has been fully explained.

Most news coverage of these cases has reported that no cause of death exists for either man. That is not entirely accurate, at least in Hicks' case.

Men's Journal found that the Los Angeles County Coroner lists a cause of death for Hicks, saying he died of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease at his residence, with morbid obesity listed as a significant contributing condition. The manner of death was listed as natural. At the same time, the medical examiner still lists the 2023 death as open.

That last detail has gone largely unreported. A case listed as natural and also listed as open is uncommon. It means the medical examiner has not fully closed the file.

For Maiwald, the situation is even less clear. Officials confirmed that no autopsy was performed, and the cause of death has never been publicly disclosed. NASA has never publicly commented on Maiwald's death, despite his status as a JPL Principal. No police report has been made public. No government agency has acknowledged his passing in any official capacity.

Amy Eskridge was 34 years old when she died in Huntsville, Alabama, on June 11, 2022. She was researching anti-gravity technology and had co-founded the Institute for Exotic Science with her father, a retired NASA engineer. Before her death, she warned publicly that she feared for her safety. Listen to Eskridge here. 

Neither the police nor the medical examiners have publicly released any details of an investigation ever taking place. Authorities say she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but no investigative report has ever been released to the public. She is now listed as the 11th case in this growing pattern.

Huntsville itself has a long history with this kind of research. Physicist Ning Li conducted anti-gravity work at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the 1990s, later received Department of Defense funding through a company called AC Gravity LLC, and died in 2021 after years of illness. Her case, too, was marked by institutional silence.

In a typical unexplained death, especially one involving a prominent public employee, institutions respond. Colleagues make statements. Agencies issue notices. In cases involving national security personnel, there are sometimes restrictions on what can be said, but there is usually some acknowledgment.

That is not what happened here.

NASA issued no statement on Hicks. JPL issued no statement on Maiwald. No agency has publicly connected any of the cases. No coordinated federal investigation has been announced. (Above The Norm News)

Three things stand out as genuinely uncommon in these cases taken together. First, the medical examiner's file on Hicks remains open despite a listed cause of death. That combination is rare. Second, no autopsy was performed on Maiwald, a senior government-linked researcher whose work touched on classified technology. Autopsies are not required by law, but they are standard practice when the cause of death is unknown. Third, NASA has said nothing about either man, despite both spending decades as public employees contributing to taxpayer-funded missions.

Three of the first nine cases involve direct connections to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Hicks worked there for 24 years. Maiwald was a JPL Principal. Reza was the incoming Director of Materials Processing. Three people from the same institution. NASA has not commented on any of them. 

No federal agency has confirmed a connection between these cases. That needs to be said clearly. Some deaths have identified suspects. Some disappearances may have personal explanations.

But a pattern does exist in how these cases have been handled, and that pattern is worth examining.

Every case on this list shares at least one of the following: no public cause of death, no autopsy, no official statement from the employing agency, or an open file that has never been explained. In several cases, all four are true at once. The people involved were not low-level employees. They held senior titles, security clearances, and direct knowledge of programs connected to asteroid defense, nuclear technology, advanced propulsion, and classified aerospace research.

Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker told the Daily Mail that multiple foreign intelligence services, including China, Russia, Pakistan, India, Iran, and North Korea, have been targeting Americans with sensitive technology knowledge for decades. That context matters. It does not prove anything. But it does raise the question of whether the silence surrounding these deaths is a coincidence or a policy.

The Pennant is not claiming these cases are connected. What we are saying is that the following questions have not been answered, and the public has a right to ask them.

Why is the Hicks file still open? If the Los Angeles County medical examiner listed his cause of death as natural, why does the same office still carry the case as open nearly three years later? What is unresolved?

Why was no autopsy performed on Maiwald? He was a senior researcher at a government-funded institution whose work touched on classified technology. The absence of an autopsy in a case with no known cause of death is not standard. Who made that decision, and why?

Why has NASA said nothing? Both Hicks and Maiwald spent decades as public employees at a taxpayer-funded agency. NASA has not acknowledged either death in any public statement. That is not normal institutional behavior.

Why has no one connected the JPL cases? Three senior JPL employees, Hicks, Maiwald, and Reza, are now on this list. One is dead with an open file. One is dead with no records at all. One is missing. NASA has not commented on any of them.

The Pennant is filing public records requests with the Los Angeles County Coroner and the Los Angeles Police Department on both the Hicks and Maiwald cases. We are also continuing to report on the full list of 11 deaths and disappearances, including the cases of Nuno Loureiro, Carl Grillmair, Monica Reza, and retired Air Force General Neil McCasland.

We will report what we find. We will also report when sources go silent, because as we said at the start of this series: sometimes silence is the story.

This report is part of The Pennant's ongoing series, Gone Dark: Tracking the Deaths and Disappearances of America's Scientists.

You may have seen the name Chris Swecker come up in coverage of this story. Swecker is a former FBI Assistant Director who spent 24 years at the bureau and ran its Criminal Investigative Division. He is a credible voice on matters of espionage and national security. His comments on this case are worth paying attention to.

But here is something we think you should know.

Every outlet carrying his quote traces back to a single source: the Daily Mail, a British tabloid. Newsweek, OAN, IBTimes, and dozens of blogs have all repeated his words, but none of them conducted their own interview with Swecker. They are all citing the same one story. We checked.

That itself is a little odd. A former senior FBI official gives a lengthy, on-record interview to a British newspaper about the deaths and disappearances of American scientists tied to classified government programs, and not a single major American news organization picks up the phone to follow up with him directly. No CBS. No NBC. No Reuters. No AP.

We noticed that too.

The Pennant is currently working to secure our own interview with Chris Swecker. Until we do, we will continue to attribute his comments to the Daily Mail and be transparent about where that quote comes from and where it does not.

If and when we speak with him directly, we will report exactly what he says.

That is how we are doing this.

The Pennant is committed to sourcing transparent journalism. If you have information relevant to this series, contact us directly.