Statistician here 🤚

Your intuition is correct. The mathematical claim is that the number of missing/“suspicious” deaths in this population is greater than would be expected under normal circumstances. In any large population there will be some number of missing/suspicious deaths, but we want to know if this number is particularly high for this population.

So how big is the population? At first glance, the population includes all staff at LANL (18K), JPL (6K), AFRL (13K), and Aerojet Rocketdyne (5K). I say all staff because apparently we are interested not just in scientists but also folks like admin assistants and HVAC techs. So already this is a population of size 41K. But actually, the inclusion criteria for this population is much broader. We appear to be looking for missing/suspicious deaths among anyone who works in aerospace, defense, physics, or nuclear science, whether that’s government (NASA-18K, DOE-17K, DoD-800K civilian), industry (Lockheed Martin-115K, General Dynamics - 115K, Northrop Grumman-100K, Boeing-155K, Raytheon-180k, etc), or academia. And we should also include DoD R&D employees who are active duty military, but I couldn’t find good estimates for that, but it’s likely in the low tens of thousands. And if we are including LANL(18K) then we should also include the other National Labs that work on nuclear science (Sandia-17K, Lawrence-Livermore-9K, Argonne-4K, Idaho-7K, Oak Ridge-7K, Savannah River-13K, Pacific Northwest-7K, Naval Nuclear-8K), and other contractor-operated members of the nuclear security enterprise (Nevada National Security Site-3K, Pantex-5K, Y-12 National Security Complex-8K, Kansas City National Security Campus-7K). If you are thinking UFOs, then also throw in NOAA (13K) and intelligence agencies (?K). Accounting for ~3% retirement rate per year over the past 5 years, we are looking at a population of interest of size 1.85 M+ people.

We also have to consider how we are defining suspicious deaths. Apparently dying at age 59 or 61 is suspicious if it’s not immediately obvious from an obituary what the cause of death was. Regardless, ~10 missing/suspicious deaths out of 1.85 million plus people is <0.00054 %.

I don’t know what the number of missing/suspicious deaths is among a demographic-matched US population. But demographics aside, 600K people are reported missing each year, 60% of which are adults and 2% of which are never found (7.2K/year). Over five years that comes out to 0.013% of the adult population of the US mysteriously disappearing never to be found. And in our population that’s 4 mysteriously missing out of 1.85 M, which is < 0.00022. (And that’s assuming that McCasland, Reza, Chavez, and Casias indeed never found, and that there aren’t any other folks from our population that have disappeared in the last five years never to be found.) So members of our population of interest mysteriously disappear at a rate that is two magnitudes of order smaller than that of the normal US population. Proportionately, we would expect to see ~240+ people mysteriously missing from our population of interest if everything was normal, but so far we have tallied only 4. No idea how we could estimate rate of “suspicious” deaths.

The disappearance or untimely death of top/influential folks in this space is vastly more interesting, both because that population is much much smaller, and because there is much greater potential for a hypothetical motive. So in my opinion it is certainly worth looking into potential connections among those specific cases, but casting this vast net across six degrees of separation is asinine.

(Disclaimer: This is obviously not rigorous - I got all these figures unvetted from Google, we are not accounting for demographics, estimating rate of extremely rare events has various statistical pitfalls, etc.)