This story is so crazy, it feels like made up. The FBI Just Added another one to a List of Eleven.

The disappearance

On the morning of June 22, 2025, Monica Jacinto Reza, 60, was hiking in the Mount Waterman area of Angeles National Forest with a friend. Per the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the friend was roughly 30 feet ahead. Reza smiled and waved, signaling she was fine. The friend turned back to the trail. Moments later, she was gone.

Search and rescue deployed. No body has been recovered.

The paper trail

Reza was Director of Materials Processing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. She co-developed a nickel-based alloy used in rocket engines — work funded in part by the Air Force Research Laboratory. She also had ties to Aerojet Rocketdyne. That's the official paper trail.

The sheriff's office remains lead on her missing persons case. That hasn't changed in ten months.

What changed is context

On April 17, 2026, the Trump administration confirmed the White House is working with the FBI on a "holistic review" of eleven scientists and government employees with access to nuclear or aerospace material who have died or disappeared since July 2024. The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration is also investigating. Ten have been publicly named. The eleventh has not been disclosed in the reporting available so far.

The ten named

• Ret. Maj. Gen. William "Neil" McCasland, 68 — oversaw classified Air Force Research Laboratory and National Reconnaissance Office programs.
• Monica Jacinto Reza, 60 — NASA JPL Director of Materials Processing.
• Steven Garcia, 48 — government contractor, Kansas City National Security Campus.
• Carl Grillmair, 67 — Caltech astrophysicist, NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor missions.
• Nuno Loureiro, 47 — MIT physicist, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
• Frank Maiwald, 61 — NASA JPL principal researcher.
• Michael David Hicks — NASA JPL scientist, DART Project and Deep Space 1.
• Melissa Casias, 53 — administrative employee with security clearance, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• Anthony Chavez, 78 — retired Los Alamos National Laboratory employee.
• Jason Thomas, 45 — associate director of chemical biology at Novartis.

Three worked at JPL (Reza, Maiwald, Hicks). Two worked at Los Alamos (Casias, Chavez). The rest span Caltech, MIT, a National Security Campus contractor, and pharmaceutical research. The window — July 2024 to April 2026 — runs about 21 months.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt framed the review as precautionary. President Trump told reporters: "I hope it's random, but we're going to know in the next week and a half. I just left a meeting on that subject."

What's not yet on the record

Family statements. Cause-of-death findings for the deceased. Any shared link across the eleven beyond security-clearance adjacency. Any hostile-actor attribution. Any tip-line specific to the review. The identity of the eleventh person. The sheriff's department has not released a case number in publicly available reporting.

Eleven people. One federal review. Twenty-one months.

That is a pattern. What a pattern means is the separate question — whether these eleven share a single cause, several, or none is exactly what the FBI and NNSA are there to determine. But you do not assemble a White House review of eleven scientists in adjacent fields on a fluke. The pattern itself is the news. What comes next is whether anyone gets to finish a sentence about cause.

What to watch

• The "week and a half" timeline Trump floated — roughly May 1, 2026. Whether the White House returns with findings, extends the review, or goes silent will tell you which version of this story the administration is working with.
• Whether the FBI files or unseals anything. Federal cases leave paper.
• Whether any of the eleven move from "under review" to a specific predicate — accident, foul play, natural causes. Eleven cases will not resolve the same way.
• Whether the list grows. The eleventh is already unnamed.

Ten names, one not yet, none that can be asked. That's the paper trail.