A List Is Not a Cluster, and Gravity Has No Free Off Switch: An Evidence Audit of the 2022–2026 "Missing Scientists" Roster, the NASA Bismuth-Rotor Experiment and the Antigravity Claims Attached to Them

Since early 2026 a list of ten to fifteen people tied to US nuclear, aerospace and defence work, who died or disappeared between 2021 and 2026, has circulated as evidence that researchers were silenced, often to protect “antigravity” technology. A US House committee and the FBI have said they are looking for connections. This paper audits the claim in three parts. First, the roster: of fifteen names on the most complete public list, eleven are deceased and four missing, and their deaths have different documented explanations (two homicides with charged or identified perpetrators, illness, drowning, a traffic collision, deaths reported as suicide, one undetermined). At most two had any published connection to gravity research. Second, base rates: in any plausible population of people tied to sensitive work (70,000–700,000), four years produce tens to hundreds of suicides, dozens of homicides and hundreds of missing-person reports, so the roster is a small selection from a much larger stream of ordinary events. The strongest local coincidence, two Los Alamos-linked disappearances seven weeks apart, has a chance of about 1–44% at one institution in one year, depending on the assumed rate, but 71% to over 99% of appearing somewhere among thirty comparable institutions over four years. Third, the physics: a switchable gravity shield would be a perpetual-motion machine unless switching costs at least mgh, and precision tests of the equivalence principle, of antimatter, of spinning rotors and of spin–gravity coupling find nothing. The most-cited experiment, NASA’s 2021 bismuth-rotor test, reported a 0.3 g change, about 1,500 times larger than its own theory predicts at the rotor’s thermal nuclear polarization, and larger than even an ideal, undriven Overhauser transfer could supply; its reversal test also reverses ordinary aerodynamic and magnetic forces. The P47/P52 “future humans” narrative has a traceable 2006 antecedent and no testable content. I find no evidence of a common cause, while several individual cases remain genuinely unresolved, and I list the specific records and a controlled rotor experiment that would change these conclusions.