(NewsNation) — UFO researcher and former FBI agent Ben Hansen visited the northeast Albuquerque neighborhood where retired Air Force Gen. William McCasland disappeared in February, and says the area’s landscape and proximity to mountain trailheads could explain why investigators have struggled to find him.
McCasland, 68, was last seen Feb. 27 near his home before vanishing without his phone or other personal belongings.
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Hansen, who hosts “UFO Witness,” told NewsNation’s Jesse Weber that he made the trip out of personal interest to see the terrain for himself.
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Investigators have said they were unable to locate any doorbell camera footage showing McCasland leaving his home. Hansen says the neighborhood’s layout offers a possible explanation.
“Having seen the layout and how these are kind of southwest adobe style houses, they’re not like the house that I have, you know, on my street, everything’s facing the street,” Hansen said. “A lot of these doorbell cameras are covered by scrubs and bushes. And I could really see how somebody could leave their home and not be picked up on camera.”
McCasland’s home sits close to Sandia Mountains
Hansen says McCasland’s home sits close enough to the Sandia Mountains that he could have reached the trailheads on foot in about half an hour, an area search teams targeted early in the investigation.
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“Going just about 1.5 miles from his house, he could have walked in about 30 minutes to the Sandia Mountains, to the beginning of these trailheads,” Hansen said. “That’s the first place they started searching for him.”
Hansen said the vegetation beyond the trailheads is thicker than much of the surrounding high desert, which he says could complicate search efforts.
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“There’s a lot of junipers and scrub oaks, some thick vegetation,” Hansen said. “So my concern is that if he did go up there, and they’re looking for evidence and heaven forbid some form of self-harm or foul play, it could be a while before they find that evidence.”
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The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office has said McCasland resigned from his position with Riverside Research, a nonprofit that does advanced technology research for the Department of Defense, days before he disappeared. His wife told investigators he had been experiencing “brain fog” and had grown “down” and “clingy” in the days before he went missing, according to police reports.
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McCasland is one of more than a dozen people with defense or aerospace ties who’ve gone missing or died under unusual circumstances in recent years.
Among them is Anthony Chavez, a retired Los Alamos lab technician who disappeared in 2025; a friend told police Chavez had been working with a researcher there on the concept of “matter existing in two places simultaneously” when he disappeared…