THE BLIND SPOT: Rocks Are Falling Through Our Roofs. The Man Who Tested Whether We'd See Them Coming Was Shot on His Porch.
Independence Day, 2024 another manager in the same sensor pipeline died. His obituary is the only proof he existed.
SUBJECT: FRANK WERNER MAIWALD // ANTHONY CHAVEZ // DETECTION GAP // PATTERN UPDATE
DATE: MARCH 25, 2026
CROSS-REF: [THE LONG COUNT] [THE GREEN BURIAL] [THE GHOST GENERAL] [THE DEAD DROP] [THE SKY IS FALLING] [THE PHONE GAP]
DATA CONFIDENCE: HIGH (FRANK MAIWALD OBITUARY / LEGACY.COM, NASA TECHNICAL REPORTS SERVER, TAOS NEWS, CNN, KRQE, ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL, NEWSNATION, NEWSNATION / COULTHART, NEWSWEEK, ABC NEWS, FOX NEWS, BOOMTOWN LOS ALAMOS, LOS ALAMOS POLICE DEPARTMENT)
They’re Running It Now
One week ago, we published THE LONG COUNT. Nine names connected to the defense aerospace corridor. Deaths and disappearances spanning nine months. We mapped the AFRL funding chain. We documented the institutional silence. We laid out the Marconi parallel. We said nobody was looking at this list as a list.
In seven days, the wall cracked.
CNN ran the McCasland story with details we surfaced about his AFRL command history. Fox News did the same and mapped the one-hour vanishing window. ABC News ran our connections and detailed the search operations. Newsweek brought in a former FBI agent and talked about details first covered here. And on Saturday, NewsNation reported the connection this publication documented first: that Monica Jacinto Reza, the inventor of Mondaloy, vanished nine months before the general who oversaw the budget that funded her work. They named the specific directorate: the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate.
None of them credited us. That’s fine. The point was never credit. The point was that somebody with subpoena authority would look at this list as a list. That is now happening.
While the networks ran our connections, we kept investigating. This briefing contains two new names, new evidence on existing cases, and a question that connects two Sentinel investigations that were supposed to be separate. We’ll take them in order.
The Instrument Manager
On July 4, 2024, Frank Werner Maiwald, 61, died in Los Angeles. Nearly a year before anyone else in this investigation vanished or was killed.
Maiwald was a technical group supervisor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His obituary and his publication trail on the NASA Technical Reports Server document a career spanning radiometry, terahertz spectroscopy, and orbital remote sensing. He managed the development of the SBG-VSWIR instrument, a visible shortwave infrared spectrometer designed for the Surface Biology and Geology mission. He had previously overseen the successful delivery of instruments for the AMR-C program, and contributed to AMR/SWOT, COWVR, AMR/Jason 3, and HIFI.
These are not obscure academic instruments. Visible shortwave infrared spectroscopy detects anomalous surface emissions and identifies materials from orbit. Advanced microwave radiometry enables all-weather target tracking and maritime domain awareness. The civilian applications are climate monitoring and oceanography. The defense applications are intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. The technology is inherently dual-use, and Maiwald managed programs on both sides of that line.
His obituary contains no cause of death. No illness is mentioned. No decline is described. Born June 24, 1964, in Ratingen, Germany, educated at the University of Cologne, he is survived by his wife of 25 years, YeonJae Maiwald, his father, and his siblings.
Entries in the public memorial guest book from colleagues make clear the death was sudden. Colleagues noted he had been actively engaged in ongoing projects and making plans for the future. The shock documented by his peers is not the language of a long illness.
No press release from JPL. No memorial statement from NASA. No acknowledgment from Caltech. No local news coverage from the LA Times, Pasadena Star-News, or any regional outlet. No entry located in the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner public database. His obituary is the only public record that Frank Werner Maiwald existed and then stopped existing.
JPL is where Monica Reza was working when she vanished eleven months later. Caltech/IPAC, where Carl Grillmair ran quality assurance on the NEOWISE data pipeline, is the same institutional family. Three people from the Southern California aerospace corridor. Reza invented the alloy. Grillmair validated the sensor pipeline. Maiwald managed the instruments. All three are gone.
SENTINEL ASSESSMENT: A senior JPL technical group supervisor managing cutting-edge dual-use remote sensing instruments died suddenly at 61. No cause of death has been disclosed. No institutional acknowledgment exists. The same silence that met the deaths and disappearances of Reza, Grillmair, and the Wright-Patterson personnel met Maiwald nearly a year earlier. If this pattern has a beginning, it may be here: Independence Day, 2024.
The Question We Have to Ask
Three days ago, we published SPECIAL REPORT: THE SKY IS FALLING. Eleven confirmed fireball events in twenty days. Three meteorite falls reaching the ground. Since our report 4 additional structures struck on two continents bringing the total to 7. Two daytime airbursts with sonic booms over major American cities four days apart. No major active shower. No known debris stream. ESA’s Planetary Defence team assessed that the Koblenz object was a size class that “impacts Earth infrequently and is often undetected by current sky surveys.”
Undetected by current sky surveys.
The system designed to close that detection gap is NEO Surveyor, the first space telescope purpose-built to find objects that could hit Earth. Its data pipeline runs through IPAC at Caltech. The man who was validating whether that telescope’s instruments would perform to specification, the instrument characterization specialist whose job was to find the blind spots before the telescope launched, was Carl Grillmair. Shot dead on his porch. His killer’s charges had been dismissed eleven days earlier.
Grillmair ran quality assurance on the NEOWISE Science Data Center and validated the instruments for its successor. His work sat at the center of the detection layer: find the dark, cold object against the black of space before it finds you. That layer is now missing the person who tested whether it actually works.
We are not asserting a connection between these cases and the fireball cluster we documented in that special report. We are documenting that the person best positioned to identify the blind spots in the detection infrastructure currently failing to see objects before they hit is on this list. That is a question. It deserves an answer from someone with a badge and a budget. We do not have either. We have a keyboard and a pattern.
The Third Man in the Corridor
Maiwald extends the timeline backward. This next name widens it.
After THE LONG COUNT published, a reader pointed us to a case in Los Alamos that we had not investigated. In THE LONG COUNT, we documented Melissa Casias, a DOE advisory board member connected to LANL whose husband is a Superintendent III at the laboratory, who vanished from Taos on June 26, 2025. McCasland vanished from Albuquerque eight months later. Both from the New Mexico defense corridor. Both gone without a trace.
There was a third. And he was first.
Anthony Chavez, 78, was a longtime LANL employee who worked at the laboratory until approximately 2017. He lived on 37th Street in the Denver Steels, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Alamos. The homes are prefabricated structures assembled from kits in the late 1940s by the Atomic Energy Commission to house workers during the postwar expansion of the nuclear weapons complex. The neighborhood exists because the laboratory exists.
His landline records show he last made calls from his house on the evening of May 5, 2025. He did not carry a cell phone. On May 8, when friends and family could not reach him, the Los Alamos Police Department conducted a welfare check. His car was locked in the driveway. Inside, his wallet, keys, and cigarettes sat on the living room table. No forced entry. No blood. No signs of struggle.
Detective Ladislas Szabo, lead investigator, described the scene: “There was no evidence of a scuffle. There was no blood. There was nothing. It was just like he left.”
Specialized cadaver dogs from the Sandia Search Dogs and Mountain Canine Corps searched his home, his sister’s nearby house, and the trails along Pueblo Canyon. All searches returned negative. His bank activity ceased around May 5. He has never been found.
Carl Buckland, a close friend and attorney who had known Chavez since childhood, publicly disputed the idea that he left voluntarily. He described Chavez as “healthy, and extremely [mentally] stable.”
The Los Alamos Police Department issued two missing-person announcements in mid-May 2025. After May 20, all media coverage ceased. A single local Substack article from Boomtown Los Alamos, published June 25, 2025, remains the most detailed public account of the case.
We have not been able to confirm Chavez’s specific role or division at LANL. That matters, and we are transparent about the limit. What we can confirm is that a longtime laboratory employee vanished from a town that exists because of the laboratory, six weeks before Reza and seven weeks before Casias, under circumstances that will look very familiar by the time you finish this briefing.
Nobody Saw Him Leave
Two new names. Now the new evidence on the names we already have.
The narrative around McCasland has been that he “left his home on foot.” Every outlet reported it that way. We reported it that way.
On Saturday, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart pointed out something that had been sitting in the timeline all along. In an interview on NewsNation, Coulthart said: “One hour, he was there with a repairman who saw him in the home, and when his wife came back a little over an hour later, he had disappeared.”
Nobody witnessed William Neil McCasland leave his house.
A repairman interacted with him around 10 a.m. on February 27. His wife left for a medical appointment at 11:10 a.m. When she returned at 12:04 p.m., he was gone. Between those two data points, there is nothing. No confirmed video from any surveillance camera on his street. No neighbor sighting. No trail camera. No doorbell footage. The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office has canvassed over 700 homes and reviewed footage from both ends of his street. Zero confirmed sightings showing his direction of travel.
The assumption that he left on foot is exactly that. An assumption. The evidence shows only that he was inside his house, and then he was not.
The Signature
The March 17 press conference disclosed new physical details about McCasland’s disappearance. Among the items unaccounted for from his home: his wallet, a .38-caliber revolver with leather holster, and a red backpack. He left behind his phone, prescription glasses, and wearable devices. BCSO confirmed McCasland had reported experiencing a “mental fog” in the months before his disappearance and had stepped down from groups he was involved with. Investigators pushed back hard: “There’s no indication, and we are not putting forward that Mr. McCasland was disoriented or confused. Arguably, he would still be the most intelligent person in the room that any of us would be in.”
Clothing believed to be his, a light green long-sleeve shirt and hiking boots, was recovered at his second home in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, approximately 200 miles from Albuquerque. A gray US Air Force sweatshirt was found 1.25 miles east of his residence on March 7 but has not been confirmed by family.
While we tracked the press conference, we also pulled a thread on Melissa Casias that changes the texture of her disappearance. The Taos News reported details we had not previously documented. Surveillance footage from a Talpa residence on NM-518 captured Casias walking eastbound, carrying a backpack, roughly an hour after she dropped off lunch to her daughter on June 26, 2025. Her husband Mark Casias, a Superintendent III at LANL, relayed what a witness reported: “He said she was staggering across the road like she was hurt or intoxicated, which she’s not a drinker.”
Now lay them side by side. Three people vanished from the New Mexico defense corridor between May 2025 and February 2026. A fourth, Monica Reza, vanished from the Angeles National Forest in California under similar circumstances. In all four cases, the signature is the same.
Chavez (May 2025, Los Alamos): wallet, keys, cigarettes left on table. No cell phone to track. Negative cadaver dogs. “It was just like he left.” Never found.
Casias (June 2025, Taos): both phones factory-reset. Carrying a backpack. Staggering on camera. Not a drinker. Never found.
Reza (June 2025, Angeles National Forest): waved at her hiking companion from 30 feet, then ceased to exist. FLIR-negative search. Scent trail ended at a misplaced beanie. Never found.
McCasland (February 2026, Albuquerque): red backpack missing. Phone, glasses, wearable devices left. “Mental fog” reported but investigators say no impairment. No confirmed video of departure. Nobody witnessed him leave. Never found.
Personal effects abandoned in every case. Negative searches in every case. Zero confirmed sightings in every case. Zero bodies recovered in any case. Two states. One hundred miles of New Mexico desert and one California ridgeline. The same outcome every time.
SENTINEL ASSESSMENT: We are not asserting that these disappearances share a cause. We are documenting that they share a signature. The physical evidence at each scene, the negative results from every search technology deployed, and the complete absence of any confirmed sighting or remains describe the same event happening to different people across two corridors.
The Updated Timeline
When we published THE LONG COUNT, we documented nine names across a nine-month window beginning with Monica Jacinto Reza on June 22, 2025. With Maiwald and Chavez, the window is wider and the list is longer.
July 4, 2024. Frank Werner Maiwald, 61. JPL. Technical group supervisor. SBG-VSWIR and AMR-C programs. Dead. No cause disclosed. No institutional acknowledgment. No news coverage.
May 5-8, 2025. Anthony Chavez, 78. LANL. Specific role undisclosed. Wallet, keys, and cigarettes left on table. No cell phone. Negative cadaver dogs. Missing.
June 22, 2025. Monica Jacinto Reza, 60. JPL. AFRL-funded contractor. Inventor of Mondaloy. Vanished from a ridgeline in the Angeles National Forest. Missing.
June 26, 2025. Melissa Casias, 53. DOE advisory board member connected to LANL. Both phones factory-reset. Staggering on surveillance footage. Missing.
October 25, 2025. Jacob Prichard, 34. AFRL Sensors Directorate. Jaymee Prichard, 33. AFLCMC. 1st Lt. Jaime Gustitus, 25. AFRL 711th Human Performance Wing, TS/SCI cleared. Dead. No motive determined.
December 15, 2025. Nuno Loureiro, 47. MIT. Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics. Director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. LANL Ulam Distinguished Scholar. Shot in the foyer of his apartment building. Perpetrator identified. Dead.
February 16, 2026. Carl Grillmair, 67. Caltech/IPAC. NEOWISE pipeline. NEO Surveyor instrument characterization. Shot dead on his porch. Charges against the killer had been dismissed eleven days earlier.
February 27, 2026. William Neil McCasland, 68. Former AFRL Commander. Red backpack, wallet, and revolver unaccounted for. Phone, glasses, and wearable devices left behind. Nobody witnessed his departure. Missing.
Behind them: Dallis Hardwick. AFRL Materials Directorate. Reza’s mentor. Mondaloy co-inventor. Died of cancer in 2014.
Ten people on the active timeline. Eleven names across five briefings. Nineteen months. Four states. One institutional ecosystem connecting every name through patent filings, OSTI publications, congressional testimony, DTIC records, and federal contract databases.
One week ago, nobody outside this publication was looking at these names together. Now CNN, Fox, ABC, NewsNation, and Newsweek are all running pieces of the picture.
They are catching up. We are not slowing down.
SENTINEL ASSESSMENT: Every name sent to this publication has survived rigorous verification against federal databases, OSTI records, NTRS publications, patent filings, police press releases, and newspapers of record. The pattern does not shrink under scrutiny. It grows. Maiwald extends the timeline to July 2024 and adds a third name from the JPL/Caltech corridor. Chavez adds a third disappearance from the New Mexico corridor, joining Casias and McCasland, with the same physical signature documented across all four missing persons cases. National broadcast media is now running the connections we published. The jurisdictional walls that prevented pattern recognition are developing cracks. We are not asserting causation. We are not asserting conspiracy. We are documenting that nobody was looking at this list as a list, and now they are. If you have a name, send it. We will verify it the same way we verified these.
Keep looking up.
-- The Sentinel
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Previous briefings: THE LONG COUNT | THE GREEN BURIAL | THE GHOST GENERAL | THE DEAD DROP | THE VERDICT | THE ANCIENT ENGINE | THE CURATED ORBIT | THE SKY IS FALLING
At this point you might as well map their circles of contacts, especially professional, and see who *isn't* missing. The individuals where the circles maximally intersect present some interesting questions.
Don't stop. Keep going.