Wife Dispels “Misinformation” About Missing Air Force General’s Disappearance

The wife of retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Neil McCasland has taken to social media to counter what she calls “misinformation” circulating about her husband, who disappeared in New Mexico on February 27.

Susan McCasland Wilkerson addressed several claims in a Facebook post after her husband’s disappearance gained national attention, particularly regarding his alleged connections to UFO research and his current medical condition.

“It is true that Neil had a brief association with the UFO community through Tom DeLonge, former frontman for Blink-182 and founder of the organization To The Stars,” Wilkerson wrote. She clarified that McCasland worked with DeLonge “shortly after his Air Force retirement as an unpaid consultant on military and technical/scientific matters to lend verisimilitude to Tom’s fiction book and media activities.”

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office has issued a Silver Alert for McCasland, describing him as 5 feet, 11 inches tall, weighing about 160 pounds, with white hair and blue eyes. Authorities have expressed concern for his safety, citing unspecified medical issues.

FBI agents have now joined the search, working alongside investigators from the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office. Local media reported that officials were seen canvassing the neighborhood where McCasland was last spotted. The FBI typically joins missing persons cases at the request of local law enforcement, providing additional resources like access to the FBI Identification Division and Laboratory.

McCasland’s distinguished military career includes serving as commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. In that position, which he held from 2011 until his retirement in 2013, he managed a $2.2 billion science and technology program and an additional $2.2 billion in customer-funded research and development.

His career began after graduating from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1979 with a degree in astronautical engineering. He served in various space research, acquisition, and operations roles within both the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.

In her Facebook post, Wilkerson specifically addressed several claims that she described as fabrications. Regarding his medical condition mentioned in the Silver Alert, she noted that while her husband does face some health risks, they are not related to dementia as some media outlets had speculated.

She also firmly denied reports of a “concerning phone call” to a close relative before his disappearance, calling this “a complete fabrication.”

Addressing speculation about her husband’s access to classified information, Wilkerson wrote that while McCasland had access to “highly classified” documents during his active-duty career, he “has had only very commonly held clearances” since retiring 13 years ago. “It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” she added.

Perhaps most pointedly, Wilkerson disputed claims about McCasland’s connections to UFO research: “Neil does not have any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash stored at Wright-Patt.”

McCasland’s name had previously surfaced in a 2016 WikiLeaks release of emails from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager at the time. In those emails, Tom DeLonge claimed he had been working with McCasland and that the general was aware of materials DeLonge was investigating because McCasland had allegedly been “in charge of the laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the Roswell wreckage was shipped.”

However, no official record substantiates these claims, and McCasland has neither confirmed nor denied them.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base does have historical connections to UFO research, having hosted Project Blue Book in the 1950s and ’60s. This U.S. government initiative documented 12,618 UFO sightings, with 701 remaining “unidentified” after investigation. The project was created amid Cold War security concerns and growing public fascination with extraterrestrial life.

As the search for the retired general continues, authorities are asking anyone with information about McCasland’s whereabouts to contact the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office.