One does not have to be a Bible-believing Christian or a conspiracy theorist to appreciate the possible scenarios, but it helps.
On the evening of April 17, 2026, a single-engine Mooney M20 went down over South Carolina, killing all four people aboard. The pilot was James “Tony” Moffatt, 60 — a decorated military veteran, experimental test pilot trained at the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, and a man who had spent 14 Space Shuttle missions supporting ISS construction as a payload and flight crew specialist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. His wife Leasa, 61, and their two sons — Andrew, 30, a research engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and William, 28, an IT professional — died alongside him. An entire family. An entire repository of knowledge. Gone in one moment.
Moffatt founded an aerospace consulting firm after retiring from the Army in 2008. He worked on the Army’s Degraded Visual Environment Mitigation program and the Next Generation Unmanned Aircraft System technology demonstration. He was, by any measure, exactly the kind of man whose expertise sits at the intersection of advanced propulsion, military aviation, and the kind of classified aerospace research that governments do not discuss at press conferences.
He is also the twelfth name on a list that the United States Congress has now formally asked four federal agencies to explain.