Explosive rumors are circulating about the whereabouts of Texas State Rep. James Talarico (D-50th District), and if they prove true, his Senate campaign is over.

Sara Gonzales of The Blaze reported Thursday that she had received a tip she was still working to confirm.

Gonzales didn't say what the information was, but GOP strategist Caroline Wren did, and what she's hearing, though unconfirmed, is huge.

"James Talarico is straight up missing one month before the election," Wren told Steve Bannon on Real America's Voice.

To recap, Talarico was last seen in Texas at a football game on Sept. 26. Invitations show New York City fundraisers with Robert De Niro on Sept. 28 and Sept. 29. Then, on Sept. 30, Talarico appeared by video at a Hispanic business event he was supposed to have attended in person, and said he had come down with the flu and visited a Dallas clinic. Wren concludes that account would put him in a Dallas medical clinic on the same night he was supposed to have been at a fundraiser in Manhattan.

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Nobody has seen him in public since.

After Bannon floated the possibility that Talarico was simply off raising money in New York or Los Angeles, Wren said photos from those events would have surfaced by now.

Then she shared what her sources in Texas are telling her.

"I'm hearing that he checked himself into a mental institution, that he had a full-blown mental breakdown sometime around, I guess, September 29th or September 30th," she said.

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Now, to be clear, nobody has verified this. Wren said so herself, and she deserves credit for not dressing up a tip as a confirmed fact. "So, I heard this from someone in Texas," she said. "I have no idea what the truth is." She called on investigative reporters to chase it down, and that's the right call. A claim like this about any candidate, Republican or Democrat, needs proof before anyone treats it as settled.

But the rumor has legs because the Talarico campaign is acting like it’s hiding something, and its public explanations don’t make sense. The official story is the flu. Twelve days of it.

"I've had the flu many times. We've all had the flu," Wren said. "You are not out for 12 days. Like, give me a break — that is not an excuse for this."

She also pointed out that a candidate who was that sick would be in a hospital, and his campaign would be posting updates and asking for prayers, which would probably earn him some sympathy votes. Instead, Wren pointed out how the campaign's social media account has been posting old rally footage in a way that makes it look current. "So they're hiding, they're hiding something," she said.

Bannon raised the obvious point about how a campaign responds when a rumor is false. "Wouldn't the campaign come at it right away and say, ‘Caroline Wren is dead wrong?’” he asked.

It hasn't. According to Wren, the campaign said nothing for days, and the only movement came in a CBS report in which staffers speaking on background admitted that Democrats are concerned but expect the candidate back soon. Wren, who has worked on plenty of campaigns, said staffers always know why a candidate's schedule gets wiped clean. She can't understand why no Texas reporter has gotten a straight answer out of one of them.

If the rumor is true, this would be a campaign-ending revelation. If it's false, one unscripted public appearance would kill it in minutes.