A newly surfaced 911 call from the wife of retired Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland paints a disturbing picture: a 68-year-old man with access to some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets who walked away from his New Mexico home on February 27, left his phone powered off on the counter, and, in his wife's own words, appeared to have "planned not to be found."
Susan Wilkerson placed the call roughly three hours after McCasland vanished. She told the dispatcher her husband had changed clothes while she was away, abandoned every vehicle and bicycle in the garage, and set out on foot into the New Mexico landscape carrying little more than a backpack, his wallet, and a.38-caliber revolver.
That last detail, the revolver, is the kind of fact that stops you cold. A man who once commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the installation synonymous with Project Blue Book and decades of government UFO investigations, walked out of his house armed, phoneless, and apparently determined not to be tracked.
The call, first reported by The U.S. Sun, lays out Wilkerson's growing alarm in real time. She catalogued what McCasland left behind and what he took, giving dispatchers a picture of a methodical exit rather than a confused wander.
Wilkerson told the dispatcher:
"He's left his phone. He changed his clothes into I don't know what. I think he's on foot. All of our cars and bicycles are in the garage."
She zeroed in on the phone. As the New York Post reported, Wilkerson also told dispatchers McCasland had left behind his prescription glasses, an item he apparently relied on daily, adding to her belief that the departure was deliberate rather than disoriented.
On the call, Wilkerson said of the phone:
"He turned it off and left it behind which seems kind of deliberate because he's always got his phone. He has a smartwatch. I don't know if that's with him or not."
The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office confirmed that McCasland had taken only the backpack, wallet, and the.38-caliber revolver. Bernalillo County issued a Silver Alert. Four days after the disappearance, the FBI joined the search.
McCasland's background is what elevates this case from a tragic missing-persons report into something far more unsettling. He was in command at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson, the same Ohio base where the Air Force ran Project Blue Book, its official investigation into unidentified flying objects during the 1950s and 1960s.
In March, weeks after his disappearance, Wilkerson addressed the speculation directly in a public statement. She acknowledged the obvious:
"It is true that when Neil was in the Air Force, he had access to some highly classified programs and information."
She also pushed back on suggestions that McCasland had simply wandered off in a fog of cognitive decline. Wilkerson stated publicly that her husband did not have dementia and "was not confused or disoriented." She did disclose on the 911 call that he had been struggling with anxiety and short-term memory loss, but the distinction she drew was clear. In her telling, this was not a man who got lost. This was a man who left.
That distinction matters. A confused retiree who walks away from home is a medical emergency. A retired general with top-secret clearances who methodically strips himself of every trackable device, arms himself, and disappears on foot is something else entirely. It raises questions that neither the sheriff's office nor the FBI has publicly answered.
McCasland's case is troubling enough on its own. But in 2025, three other people with ties to the Air Force Research Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of America's most important nuclear facilities, also vanished under circumstances that remain unresolved.
Monica Jacinto Reza, 60, a NASA airspace engineer who worked directly under McCasland's supervision, disappeared while on a hiking trip in California in June 2025. The case of a loved one vanishing without explanation is every family's worst fear, and Reza's disappearance deepened the unease surrounding McCasland's own case.
Anthony Chavez, 79, who retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2017, was last seen leaving his home in Los Alamos on foot on May 4. Melissa Casias, 54, an administrative assistant, was reported missing on June 26 after she failed to show up for work at the nuclear lab.
Four people connected to two of the most sensitive research installations in the American defense and nuclear apparatus, gone. The U.S. Sun described the circumstances as "mysterious," and while that word gets thrown around loosely, it is hard to argue with here. No public explanation has been offered for any of the four disappearances.
The gaps in this story are as striking as the facts. Whether McCasland has been found remains publicly unknown. The FBI's involvement, joining four days after the disappearance, suggests the case was treated as more than a routine welfare check, but the bureau has offered no public update on its findings.
We do not know what prompted the FBI to enter the case. We do not know whether the other three disappearances are being investigated in connection with McCasland's. We do not know what, if anything, McCasland's classified background has to do with his decision to walk away.
Wilkerson's 911 call is the most detailed public account of the hours immediately following the disappearance. Her words suggest a woman who understood, almost immediately, that her husband had not simply gone for a walk. She told dispatchers plainly that she believed he "had planned not to be found." That is not the language of someone reporting a confused spouse. It is the language of someone describing a deliberate act.
Cases involving long-unresolved disappearances remind us how easily these stories can slip from public attention. McCasland's case should not be allowed to do so, not when a retired general with knowledge of highly classified programs vanishes from American soil and the federal government goes quiet.
The intersection of national security, personal crisis, and institutional silence is a volatile combination. When federal agencies face disruption and public trust in government transparency is already thin, the refusal to provide answers about a missing general with UFO-linked credentials does not inspire confidence.
McCasland's career placed him at the center of programs the American public has been told, for decades, either did not exist or were not worth discussing. His wife says he was not confused. She says he planned this. And the people responsible for finding him have said almost nothing.
When shocking revelations emerge from a spouse in the aftermath of a crisis, the public has a right to ask hard questions. In McCasland's case, the hardest question is also the simplest: Where is he, and why won't anyone say?
A government that asks its citizens to trust classified programs ought to be able to account for the men who ran them.