Breaking News Exclusive: There Is a 14th Missing or Murdered American Scientist. We Are The First News Outlet to Connect Her to the Others.
We were told she was a bipolar musician who went hiking while possibly suicidal. We were not told she was also a neuroscientist with ties to Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico.
The FBI is now investigating the deaths and disappearances of thirteen scientists, researchers, and workers connected to America's nuclear weapons and aerospace programs, reacting to pressure from a public increasingly alarmed by what appears to be a troubling pattern. Nearly half of the thirteen people have direct ties to Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, large weapons science labs in New Mexico.
As of today, I’ve identified a potential fourteenth missing scientist: Ingrid Coleen Lane. No other news outlet has yet tied her disappearance to the others. That’s probably because in news stories and press releases when she vanished in 2023 Lane has only been described as 37-year-old married bipolar Buddhist musician struggling with her mental health. But that’s been an incomplete portrait of Lane, who was also a bioengineer and neuroscientist with the Mind Research Network at the Univ. of New Mexico, who also worked at or with Sandia and Los Alamos labs. Lane’s husband, Louis Scuderi, is an astrophysicist contracted through the Department of Defense, who builds directed energy weapons software for the Air Force at Kirtland Air Force Base, next door to Sandia Labs. He has published several research papers about earth-like planets near other stars.
When taken in the context of the unfolding story of other missing scientists, these omissions in the official story of Lane’s disappearance are as mysterious as the disappearance itself.
Ingrid Lane vanished October 15, 2023, on State Route 144, a narrow dirt road that runs through the Jemez Mountains. She had begun a weeklong retreat at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center the day before, but left the next morning, telling the director she had to go to Albuquerque and Los Alamos and would be hiking, too, but would be back later. Her plans were for a very busy day covering hundreds of miles of driving, odd for someone who is supposed to be on a Zen retreat. Her black 2019 Subaru Impreza hatchback was found on 144 October 18, 2023, about 11 miles north of NM-126, near San Antonio Mountain and the Valles Caldera National Preserve, at 9,100 feet elevation and out of cellular range.
The last confirmed sighting of Lane was on the afternoon of October 15th, when two hunters encountered her on that same road. They said she flagged them down after her car had been damaged. They helped air up her tire and offered her a ride back down to the main road. She refused, telling them she was determined to get to the top of a mountain. She seemed coherent and purposeful. That was the last time anyone reported seeing Ingrid Lane alive.
On October 18th, an Apple AirTag led sheriff’s deputies to her car. What they found has never been adequately explained. The Sandoval County Sheriff’s Department reported a “large boulder rock” crashed through the rear hatch window. The front bumper of the car showed significant collision damage that has never been accounted for in any official report. Three laptops were inside. An unactivated burner phone. Her keys were still in the ignition. Investigators said they found forensic evidence that Lane had been outside the car, near the car — but there was no trace of her departure. No footprints leading away. No trail for search dogs to follow. She has never been found.
Lane's educational background reflects someone operating at the highest levels of scientific research. She attended Johns Hopkins University, studied at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and completed biomedical engineering coursework at the University of New Mexico. She was presented publicly as a neuroscientist from the Mind Research Network at UNM — a collaborative research ecosystem with documented ties to both Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories — in a listing on KUNM, UNM's public radio station. Her name appears in an official March 2023 NNSA Strategic Outlook Initiative report, catalogued as SAND2023-04694R and co-produced by Sandia National Laboratories and the Kansas City National Security Campus, as a Sandia contributor who participated in workshops and reach-back conversations on the future of the nuclear security enterprise workforce. That report was published seven months before she vanished.
Lane’s childhood friend Emma Mincks, with whom she had reconnected in the years before her disappearance, told the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper that Lane had been pushing diversity initiatives at Sandia and they were not well received. The stress of that conflict led to mental health difficulties. Lane was pursuing a new role at a Los Alamos-affiliated organization when she disappeared, and Mincks said she believed Lane was feeling better about “the Sandia stuff.”
The NNSA report Lane contributed to explicitly calls for greater diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the nuclear security enterprise — the precise work her friend said was not well received. Lane herself was disabled. She had bronchopulmonary dysplasia, the result of being born nearly three months premature and hospitalized for six months as an infant. She was told at one point she would need a lung transplant by age 30.
Search dogs at the site where Lane’s car was found could locate no scent trail. Drones, helicopters, and more than eighty volunteers found nothing across multiple searches.
Lane’s mother, Rebecca Lane, a retired teacher, told the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper that the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office failed to fully investigate.
“They didn’t even do forensics on the car,” she said. “They just really put no effort, even the token amount.”
The sheriff’s office made an official determination in the Lane case, issued within twenty-four hours of finding the scene: no signs of foul play.
Rebecca Lane also told Porter that during the searches, a personal item belonging to her daughter appeared on a roadway where it had not been the day before. It was never explained.
The mental health narrative introduced immediately after Lane's disappearance — suicidal ideation, a recent breakdown, erratic behavior — presents a specific evidentiary question. Many roles at Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratories require Department of Energy security clearance, and DOE protocols mandate review or suspension of clearance when serious mental illness, suicidal ideation, or documented erratic behavior are present.
Whether Lane held such a clearance is not publicly known. But if she did, the mental health narrative her family provided to police would have created an institutional problem that has never been publicly addressed. Either her role did not require clearance — which raises its own questions about what she was actually doing there — or it did, and the contradiction between her documented mental health history and her active Sandia affiliation has simply never been examined. Law enforcement has never addressed this publicly either way.
As for the boulder: a rock large enough to shatter the entire rear car window would have had to be carried through dense forest somehow. Law enforcement found no footprints, no tire tracks, no sign of any other human presence. How the boulder got through that window in an area investigators described as “just trees,” has never been asked by any investigating authority.
Lane’s husband, Louis J. Scuderi, has been portrayed in the news media and on social media mostly as a touring musician. He is a member of an Albuquerque band called Mandology, whose website say he “studied physics and astrophysics in college and graduate school, specializing in extrasolar planets, planetary sciences, and the planet Mars” and that “he currently works at Stellar Science.”
Scuderi holds a graduate degree in astronomy from the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy and published peer-reviewed research on extrasolar planets in the Astrophysical Journal during his academic career, including work conducted as a NASA Space Grant intern with over 100 nights of telescope observing experience.
Stellar Science, his employer, is an Albuquerque-based Department of Defense contractor whose portfolio includes directed energy weapons modeling and simulation, high-power microwave systems, laser weapons simulation, and space domain awareness — work performed under contract directly at Kirtland Air Force Base.
His dad’s interesting, too.
Scuderi’s father — Ingrid Lane’s father-in-law — Louis Anthony Scuderi, is Professor Emeritus of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico, where his research specialties include surface processes, sedimentology, and the mechanics of how geological materials — including rocks — move through landscapes. The elder Scuderi maintained an extensive research collaboration with Chinese scientists over multiple years, co-authoring numerous peer-reviewed papers with researchers from Chinese institutions on fieldwork conducted in Inner Mongolia and China’s dryland regions. Father and son also published together, co-authoring a 2011 conference paper on remotely mapping surface roughness on alluvial fans — comparing terrain in Death Valley to the surface of Mars.
What any of these connections mean in the context of Ingrid Lane’s disappearance, if anything, is unknown. None of it has ever been investigated. None of it was ever reported.
But I do find it interesting that Lane, her parents (her late dad, Kelly, was a science teacher), her husband and her father-in-law are all scientists and teachers who appear to be progressive, politically.
Lane and her husband were both working in the military industrial complex in New Mexico at a time when the nation was/is experiencing a steady creep towards an anti-enlightenment-science type of authoritarianism that favors tech-bro-exploitative science.
The Trump administration has been actively purging many other agencies of people who do not share the Project 2025 mindset, including scientists in less classified fields. When you purge the education department or something like USAID, the people who are fired might be angry, and might even file a wrongful termination lawsuit.
But if you should purge the military weapons science agencies and contractors of liberal and progressive scientists, you might get more than a lawsuit. You might risk national security if they decide to take all those juicy secrets and sell them to your enemies. There are safer ways to clear the system of the “wrong” kinds of scientists, I’d imagine. Ways that keep them quiet forever.
I’m not saying that’s absolutely what happened to Ingrid Lane or any of the other 13 missing or murdered scientists, researchers and workers associated with US nuclear military science and astrophysics. I don’t know enough yet to make any kind of declaration.
The evidence for Lane’s vanishing seems to support several possibilities. She might have been extracted — willingly or otherwise — by a foreign or domestic intelligence operation, with the scene staged, by those who knew her, to produce a narrative that would foreclose investigation.
Or:
She might have been targeted by intelligence forces, domestic or foreign, because of what she knew or what she was carrying.
Or:
She might have been removed from her life and placed, along with others, into work so classified that disappearance was the only operationally viable cover.
A friendly extraction and a hostile one can look identical from the outside, and both can serve the same ultimate purpose: ensuring that a person with sensitive knowledge is removed from public life without generating the kind of scrutiny that a reported abduction or death would produce.
Or she might have just parked her car in the middle of nowhere during a bipolar episode after a boulder crashed through the back window, and inexplicably walked away from civilization, up the mountain, in October, as night began to fall, with no way down and a disability that made it hard to breathe.
Or she might have been abducted and killed for reasons totally unrelated to her job, her husband’s job, her father-in-law’s job, and the other missing thirteen.
What is certain is that the story told to the public about Ingrid Lane was incomplete in ways that appear, in retrospect, to have been functional. A bioengineer and neuroscientist with ties to two nuclear weapons laboratories was reduced in the news narrative to an emotionally unstable chick who went hiking and probably killed herself.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about the missing-and-murdered scientists story is that Trump’s FBI is investigating the thirteen known cases at all. Trump himself has even made a statement about the investigation, saying it’s serious stuff. Given how little he cares for scientists generally, mostly holding them in contempt, I find his sudden performance of concern for these particular scientists and workers… interesting.
Just like I find it interesting that there is a fourteenth person whose vanishing we were never supposed to realize might be part of what is starting to look like a larger purge.
Which leaves one question that I don’t quite trust Kash Patel’s FBI to ask, much less answer: if Ingrid Lane’s identity and professional life as a scientist could be erased so completely from the police and news narratives, how many other disappeared scientists are out there we haven’t heard of yet?
And how many more are there to come?
Dear Ingrid - May you rest in peace, or be found, wherever you are.
Sources: Gabrielle Porter, Santa Fe New Mexican, May 2024. Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office case number 23-001710. Sandia National Laboratories Center for Computing Research organizational directory. NSE Workplace of the Future: Enabling a LPS Ready Workforce, NNSA Strategic Outlook Initiative Final Report, March 2023, SAND2023-04694R. USASpending.gov federal contract records. Fox News missing scientists report, May 1, 2026. House Oversight Committee press release, April 2026. Tips can be submitted to the House Oversight Committee. Contact The Pugilist securely at newstipsalisa@proton.me.
Holy Crap! Apparently the weirdnesses will just keep surfacing…kudos as always to Alisa for putting pieces together that haven’t been brought to light
Yeah, this one was absolutely meant to be published now. Many thanks for doing that.