THE STANDARD: A Congressman Named One on Fox News. A Tabloid Added Another. Both Tested Our Bar.

Matthew Sullivan cleared every criterion. Michael David Hicks cleared none. The methodology is the investigation.

Apr 28, 2026

SUBJECT: ATTRITION SERIES METHODOLOGY // INCLUSION CRITERIA // WORKED EXAMPLES: SULLIVAN AND HICKS

DATE: APRIL 28, 2026

DATA CONFIDENCE: HIGH (USPTO, DTIC, SAM.gov, USASpending.gov, NASA ADS, CONGRESSIONAL ON-CAMERA STATEMENT, DIGNITY MEMORIAL OBITUARY, FOREST LAWN OBITUARY, LOS ANGELES COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER RULING)

We are building the video side of this operation. If you want the briefings in a format you can watch, subscribe to The Sentinel Network on YouTube.

THE PREFACE

A pattern is only a pattern for as long as the criteria that define it hold.

The moment an investigation accepts a name because the name is interesting, or because the death is strange, or because a reader sent the tip with conviction, the pattern stops being a pattern and becomes a list of unrelated people who happen to have died.

The ATTRITION roster is now thirteen names. We added the most recent one last week. A foreign parliament put six of them on a slide and opened a national security proceeding with them. A sitting member of the House UAP Caucus named another on live television and confirmed his complaint had been deemed credible and urgent by the Intelligence Community Inspector General. The names landed in the Japanese National Diet, in a federal whistleblower channel, and in a congressional referral to the FBI because the cases cleared a threshold hard enough to survive scrutiny from authorities that had no reason to extend us the benefit of the doubt.

This briefing documents that threshold.

It is published now because the methodology has been tested in two opposite directions in recent weeks. One name was added to our roster after a congressman put him on the record. Another name was added to our pattern by a tabloid that has never been able to access our work. The first cleared the bar by every criterion that has ever mattered to this investigation. The second clears none of them. We are publishing the bar so that anyone tracking this story, in good faith or otherwise, can run any future name against it themselves.

Show the work. Show the math. Let the record sort itself.

THE THRESHOLD

A name enters the ATTRITION roster when the subject meets at least one of the following primary-source categories, with the institutional relationship active at time of death or disappearance.

One. Patent filings. USPTO records showing the subject as inventor or co-inventor on technology with documented defense or national security application. Mondaloy. Propulsion components. Imaging systems. Patents have filing dates, assignees, and continuation histories. They are the hardest evidence there is.

Two. DTIC technical reports. Defense Technical Information Center filings authored or co-authored by the subject. DTIC catalogs the unclassified-but-controlled research output of the U.S. defense establishment. A DTIC record is institutional proof.

Three. Active defense contracts. SAM.gov and USASpending.gov records placing the subject inside a funded defense program at time of death or disappearance. Principal investigators. Program managers. Named technical leads. Contract numbers are public. Contract performance is public.

Four. Classified program affiliation. Documented security clearance, Special Access Program oversight, or classified portfolio leadership surfaced through congressional testimony, statutory whistleblower findings, corporate filings, obituary language, or verified source reporting.

Five. Institutional affiliation at a qualifying node. AFRL. DARPA. DOE national laboratories. NRO. AARO. Naval Research Lab. NASIC. Air Force Intelligence Agency. NSA. NASA JPL when the role is dual-use or managed through defense-adjacent programs. The affiliation must be active. Emeritus status does not qualify. Retirement does not qualify unless the subject remains on advisory boards, classified review panels, or active consulting engagements that place them inside the ecosystem.

Six. Documented connective tissue to a roster member. Co-inventorship. Command relationship. Program co-PI. Advisory board co-membership. Same base, same unit, same classified portfolio. The connection must be primary-source, not inferred from shared employer or adjacent geography.

One category clears the bar. Most roster members clear three or more.

THE ANCHOR

The ATTRITION pattern begins on May 12, 2024.

That is the day Matthew James Sullivan died. He was thirty-nine years old. He was an Air Force Intelligence officer. The Intelligence Community Inspector General had assessed his whistleblower complaint as credible and urgent. He was scheduled to give that testimony to Congress. He died, per Rep. Eric Burlison’s on-camera statement to Fox News on April 17, 2026, within two weeks of being scheduled.

Sullivan replaces Frank Werner Maiwald as the chronological anchor of this investigation. Maiwald died on July 4, 2024, fifty-three days after Sullivan. Maiwald was discovered first in our reporting. Sullivan was documented thirteenth. Documentation order and chronological order are not the same thing, and any methodology worth running has to be willing to reorder its own timeline when primary-source evidence demands it.

The anchor matters because a pattern with no temporal floor can accept any death, anywhere, for any reason. The anchor is what keeps the roster from collapsing into a general lament about scientists who die. Anything older than May 12, 2024 enters the pattern only on extraordinary primary-source evidence of a connective chain that would not be visible otherwise.

THE FIRST WORKED EXAMPLE

Run Matthew Sullivan against the threshold.

Patent filings. Not surfaced. Sullivan was an intelligence officer, not a research scientist. We expect zero. We get zero. This category is silent.

DTIC technical reports. Not the documentary footprint of his job. Intelligence officers leave classified products inside compartmented channels, not on DTIC servers. We expect silence here. We get it.

Active defense contracts. Sullivan transitioned from active duty to Acquisition Systems Associates of Great Falls, Virginia, a federal defense consultancy listed in DCAA contractor records. The firm’s president and CEO, Gary J. Gray, signed a public tribute on the memorial guestbook addressing Sullivan as a colleague. Active employment at a defense contractor at time of death. This category clears.

Classified program affiliation. The Intelligence Community Inspector General assessed his whistleblower complaint as credible and urgent under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. That is not a casual descriptor. It is a statutory finding. The same finding was made for David Grusch in 2022. The finding is itself proof of access to classified material that the ICIG determined warranted congressional notification. This category clears at the highest level it can clear.

Institutional affiliation at a qualifying node. Sullivan served at the 27th Fighter Squadron at Joint Base Langley-Eustis. The same base swarmed by unidentified drones for seventeen consecutive nights in December 2023. He served at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson. He served at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade. He served at the Air Force Intelligence Agency. He deployed to U.S. Central Command and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the two combatant commands where many recent military UAP encounters have been documented. Five qualifying nodes in one career. This category clears five times over.

Connective tissue. Sullivan’s career mirrors David Grusch’s biography position for position. Both were Air Force Intelligence officers. Both served combat tours in Afghanistan. Both earned decorations in Operation Enduring Freedom. Both went on to sensitive intelligence postings. Both filed whistleblower complaints assessed as credible and urgent. Both were scheduled to testify to Congress. One of them did. This category clears.

Five of six. The exceptions are the categories where his job description made primary-source documentation impossible by design.

Matthew Sullivan is on the roster because a sitting member of the House UAP Caucus put him there on live television, because the Intelligence Community Inspector General put him there in a statutory finding, and because the documentary record clears every criterion that the nature of his profession could possibly leave a trace in.

THE SECOND WORKED EXAMPLE

Run Michael David Hicks against the same threshold.

Hicks died in Sunland, California, on July 30, 2023. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1998 until his retirement in 2022. He is currently appearing in coverage of the ATTRITION pattern as an additional data point.

He is not on the ATTRITION roster. He will not be on the ATTRITION roster.

Patent filings. A USPTO search returns zero results. No patents as inventor. No patents as co-inventor. No continuation applications. No assignments. Zero.

DTIC technical reports. A DTIC search returns zero results. No authored reports. No co-authored reports. No cited contributions to defense technical literature. Zero.

Active defense contracts. A SAM.gov search returns no contractor records. A USASpending.gov search returns no recipient records. His funded research, where publicly documented, flowed through NASA science directorates to open civilian programs. Zero.

Classified program affiliation. No documented security clearance. No classified portfolio. No Special Access Program language anywhere in his public record, his obituary, or his institutional profile. Zero.

Institutional affiliation at a qualifying node. Hicks worked at JPL, which is a qualifying node only when the role is dual-use or defense-adjacent. Hicks’s published corpus on NASA ADS runs across eighty-plus papers on comet and asteroid spectrophotometry, near-Earth object tracking, and small-body photometry. The work is open civilian science. The data is publicly archived by NASA. The Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program he supported used USAF-owned telescopes under a cooperative agreement, but the use of federal hardware does not classify the underlying research. Hicks’s own body of work carries no defense application. His Lunar and Planetary Laboratory memoriam and American Astronomical Society obituary document a career devoted entirely to civilian planetary science. Zero.

Connective tissue. No co-inventorship with a roster member. No command relationship. No co-PI roles with a roster member. No advisory board overlap. No primary-source document places him inside the same programmatic infrastructure as any of the thirteen. Zero.

Zero of six.

The same methodology that put Matthew Sullivan on the roster keeps Michael David Hicks off it. That is not a contradiction. That is the methodology working.

THE ACTIVE PROGRAM TEST

The threshold requires that the institutional relationship be active at time of death or disappearance. This is the test that ends the Hicks case beyond any further discussion.

Hicks left JPL in 2022. He died in July 2023.

He was not active in any program when he died. He was not advising any program when he died. He was not consulting on any program when he died. The year between his departure from JPL and his death is documented in his own institutional footprint, or rather in the absence of one. No new publications after 2022. No conference participation. No follow-on affiliations.

A pattern about the attrition of active defense-adjacent personnel does not include people who left the ecosystem a year before they died. Sullivan transitioned from active duty into a federal defense contractor in the months before his death. Hicks transitioned out of the ecosystem entirely. The methodology can tell the difference.

THE OBITUARY

The primary source on Hicks is his Forest Lawn obituary, carried on Legacy.com. It contains the information his family chose to make public. Among that information is the line that closes the case.

Memorial donations were directed to al-anon.org.

Al-Anon is the fellowship for family members and friends of people with alcohol use disorder. Obituary donation directives are not random. Families choose them because they reflect the cause, the struggle, or the context of the death. The directive is not proof of cause. It is a signal.

A signal that is now corroborated by the public medical record. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled the manner of death natural. The cause of death is recorded as arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with morbid obesity listed as a significant condition. There is no homicide investigation. There is no suspicion. There is a fifty-nine-year-old man with documented cardiovascular disease who died in his residence of natural causes one year after retiring from JPL.

A family asking for donations to Al-Anon is telling you what happened. A coroner ruling natural manner of death is telling you what happened. The ATTRITION pattern has a shape. This is not that shape.

THE NINE-MONTH GAP

Hicks died nine months before Sullivan. The pattern begins with Sullivan.

To place Hicks inside the ATTRITION pattern, an investigator would need to reach backward past the anchor. Reaching backward past an anchor requires primary-source evidence of a connective chain that would not otherwise be visible. None exists. Hicks is connected to the roster by nothing except the profession of astronomer and the geography of Southern California.

If profession and geography were enough to clear the bar, the roster would contain hundreds of names. It contains thirteen. That is the methodology working.

THE WRIGHT-PATTERSON FINDING

The methodology is not only defensive. It surfaces clusters that would not be visible without the criteria.

Six names on the ATTRITION roster have direct institutional ties to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Dallis Hardwick spent her career at the AFRL Materials Directorate at Wright-Patterson. She co-invented Mondaloy. She retired in 2012 with a stage-four cancer diagnosis and died in 2014.

Retired Major General William Neil McCasland commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson from 2011 to 2013. He disappeared from his Albuquerque home on February 27, 2026.

Jacob Prichard was an Acquisition Project Manager in AFRL’s Sensors Directorate at Wright-Patterson.

Jaymee Prichard worked at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright-Patterson.

1st Lt. Jaime Gustitus was an Operations Research Analyst in AFRL’s 711th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson, holding a Top Secret/SCI clearance.

Matthew Sullivan served at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson.

That concentration was not visible until we ran the names against the threshold. It became visible because the threshold sorts on institutional affiliation rather than profession, and Wright-Patterson is the institutional center of gravity for U.S. military aerospace intelligence. A bar that lets Hicks in lets noise in. A bar that keeps Hicks out reveals that six of thirteen names cluster at one base.

This is what a working methodology produces. Real concentration, surfaced by discipline, not invented by enthusiasm.

THE INJECTION RISK

A pattern that accumulates institutional credibility attracts noise. Some of that noise is well-meaning. A reader sends a tip. A commenter heard something third-hand. A local paper notices a strange death and reaches for a bigger story to hang it on. Most of these signals never enter the pipeline because the threshold filters them out.

Some of the noise is not well-meaning. When an investigation documents a pattern that is becoming politically inconvenient, the cheapest way to discredit it is to inflate it. Add a name that does not fit. Add a second. Add a third. The pattern begins to look sloppy. The outlets that cited the original investigation begin to hedge. The threshold dissolves under the weight of people who never had to clear it.

This has happened to other investigations. It is being attempted on this one. The defense is the methodology.

The roster is thirteen. Each name cleared the bar documented above. When a name appears in coverage of this pattern without clearing that bar, it is not on the list. It never was. That is not a disagreement about editorial judgment. That is the methodology doing its job.

THE SENTINEL ASSESSMENT:
The pattern is real because the threshold is hard.
Every name on the ATTRITION roster carries at least one primary-source institutional connection to the defense-aerospace-national security ecosystem, active at time of death or disappearance, anchored inside a window that begins May 12, 2024 with Matthew James Sullivan. Most carry three or more. The roster is verifiable because the underlying records are public, the patents are searchable, the contracts are indexed, the DTIC filings exist on a government server you can query right now, and in the most recent case a sitting U.S. Congressman put the name on the record on Fox News and referred it to the FBI.
Michael David Hicks does not clear that threshold on any dimension. He left JPL before he died. He held no defense portfolio. He filed no patents, authored no DTIC reports, carried no classified affiliation, and produced no work with defense application. His family directed memorial donations to Al-Anon. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner ruled his death natural. His death predates the pattern anchor by nine months.
Sullivan is on the roster because the threshold lets him on. Hicks is off the roster because the threshold keeps him off. Run any future name against the six criteria above. If it clears, we will publish it. If it does not, we will not. And neither should anyone else.
The roster is thirteen.

We built the methodology before we needed it.

We are publishing it now because we do.

Keep looking up.

-- The Sentinel Network™

Every briefing we’ve published is free. That’s not changing. This publication has no institutional backing, no sponsors, and no editorial board. We’re doing the work the newsrooms won’t, sourcing papers, filing FOIAs, building tools, and writing at the pace a once-in-a-civilization event demands.

Paid subscribers fund the investigation directly. They also get access to THE SIGNAL (weekly market intelligence derived from our forensic work), primary source documents, the comment section on every briefing, Fieldcraft Labs, and the FIELDCRAFT series. No ads. No sponsors. No strings. Your subscription is a data point against the suppression gradient.

If you can’t subscribe, we don’t care. Read everything. Share everything. The mission is the mission.

Subscribe to The Sentinel Network™

Top 100 Science publication on Substack.

Share this investigation. THE SUPPRESSION GRADIENT documented what happens when this coverage reaches platforms that do not want you reading it. Every share, every restack, every forwarded link is a data point against the gradient.

The Sentinel Briefing™

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?