The Lifeboat News: This post seems to echo my first inclination

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1sutiws/whats_going_on_with_the_11_scientists_who_have/

Answer: It's a total nothingburger. The “11 missing scientists” thing falls apart the second you actually look at it. it’s not one event or even a real pattern, it’s just a bunch of unrelated cases over a few years—suicides, accidents, a couple murders, and some normal missing person stuff

There’s no actual connection between them. Different jobs (one of the 11 is an administrator, not a scientist. She just worked at a lab and one was a "science enthusiast"), different places, different circumstances. Investigators have said there’s no link. Conspiracists and people who grift for views start with one weird case, then go digging for anyone even vaguely “science-adjacent” who died and lump them together after the fact to make it look like something.

Also the scale alone kills it as a theory. There are a ton of people working in defense/aerospace/etc so , statistically some of them are gonna die over a few years. thats just like how numbers work.

edit to add even more context from my other comment-

Of the 11 "missing" scientists 6 aren't missing at all and we know the circumstances of their deaths and whether or not foul play was involved and who was responsible.

These include an "anti-gravity enthusiast" (read not a scientist) who killed herself after a public mental health crisis, two guys who worked for JPL who died of natural causes at home with their families present, one died in a mass shooting at the school he taught, one drowned in an accident, and one was murdered in a carjacking and the guy who did it was caught. Over a time period of 4 years.

Of the missing, they are among the 25,500 open missing persons currently missing and among the 600,000 missing persons reported per year.

edit 2 for even more context

The 5 missing people are a property custodian, a retired construction foreman, a metallurgist, an administrative assistant, and a retired Air Force general with undisclosed health issues who left his home with his 38 pistol. Of those 5 people only one is tangentially related to sensitive research (in that he retired from a Pentagon position so he HAD had access to sensitive information at one point) and his disappearance is being treated as a Silver Alert and a medical situation by the authorities and his family.