The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 563. “Something Non-Human Has Been Here A Long Time” | Dr. Garry Nolan
Episode Date: July 17, 2025Dr. Jordan B. Peterson interviews Stanford professor and prolific biotech entrepreneur Dr. Garry Nolan, covering the cutting-edge of cancer research and atomic-level imaging as well as his work with t...he U.S. government on anomalous health effects linked to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). Nolan explains how his scientific curiosity—and integrity—led him from debunking the infamous Atacama “alien” mummy to analyzing bizarre materials and biological effects tied to UAP encounters. Artificial intelligence, intuition, consciousness, and the blurry line between science fiction and scientific frontier, culminate in Nolan’s provisional belief: “something non-human has been here a long time.” This episode was filmed on July 7th, 2025 | Links | For Dr. Garry Nolan: On X https://x.com/garrypnolan?lang=en
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I'm a professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford.
It's pretty obvious that you have a multitude of abilities and a stellar track record.
You started to become interested in unidentified aerial phenomena.
Somebody representing the CIA and an aerospace company showing up at my office at Stanford
showed me their credentials and said,
we need your help looking at patients who've had harm done to them.
And then a small subset of them said that they'd been
in proximity to things that you would call a UFO.
I thought it was a joke at the beginning.
Let us know if you would,
what the hell you think is going on.
That there's something non-human here
and it's been here for a long time.
Well, I imagine it's put a bit of a bump into your life.
I mean maybe one that's mostly interesting but still to call it strange is to barely
scrape the surface.
If something is here it's likely been here longer than humans have even been civilized. Dr. Gary Nolan is an immunologist, academic inventor, and biotech entrepreneur, serial
biotech entrepreneur.
He's a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, and somewhat surprisingly, a UFologist.
We talked about his career, his research interests,
the rise of AI, and his interest
in unidentified aerial phenomena.
So Dr. Nolan, Gary, before we get to the heart of the matter
with regards to your interest
in unidentified
aerial phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs, let's talk a little bit about you so that
we can situate you in the minds of our readers.
So you have a remarkable research background and a technology background.
Clue us in a bit and tell us who you are.
So, I'm a professor in the Department of Pathology. I hold the Ratchford and Carlotta
A. Harris endowed professorship. And the major focus of my lab's research, frankly, over the last
30 years since I've been at Stanford, has been on the immune system and creating
technologies that allow us to collect more and more
data about the immune cells and or cancer cells that
we're interested in. And so that's led me from the
development of retroviral techniques for gene delivery
and gene therapy. So all the retroviruses and
lentiviruses that are used in the world
today for gene therapy were developed based on a technique
that I came up with called the 293 T cell technique. And
frankly, that's old technology to me, but it still generates
a nice royalty stream. So, and then from
there, it's about measuring more and more what we call
parameters per cell, which are events that relate, we
think, to the biology of the cells. And so, we've
created and spun out, I don't know, probably at least
half a dozen companies on that side of things alone.
Lately, we've been moving into artificial intelligence. We've started and spun out two
companies there. And now I'm actually moving into atomic
imaging because I sort of feel like that's the next level
down of information that I need to get at to understand
gene function. So, I've raised the money to create a whole
new kind of instrument that can measure things at the atomic level.
Tell me about that a little bit.
I mean, that's electron microscope territory.
You have a new technology that you're, I know that's an
old technology now.
It's a fusion of two technologies, something called
atomic probe tomography and field ion microscopy.
And it's a way to bring the two together
because previously they couldn't sort of exist in the same machine. So by
bringing them together, we can go another order of magnitude lower. We can
get down to what's called subangstrom. Like the bond length between two atoms
is in the subangstrom realm. But this technology that we've
developed not only can see down at that level, but can also
determine what kind of bond structure we have locally. And
that has a range of applications all the way from
biology through to metals, alloys, nanotechnology, et cetera.
And actually the instrument is already half built down at a
lab here in Cupertino that we've set up.
So we're excited about that.
So how many companies have you started or been involved in starting approximately?
About a dozen. And we've had about eight successful exits so far.
Hmm. That's pretty good track record, all things considered.
All things considered.
One complete failure, but that's okay.
One failure out of that many isn't so bad.
Yeah, well if you don't fail, maybe you're not trying enough diverse things.
I mean that seems to be particularly true on the entrepreneurial side, right?
It's very difficult to invent something and then equally difficult to make it profitable or maybe perhaps
more, right? So, on the medical side, tell me a little bit more
about your research into viruses.
So, our research into viruses was, well, first of all, the
retroviruses. I got involved with HIV research back in the
day, and that was mostly trying to understand what turned
the virus on and off in the immune system. So, I was
involved with what was called the cloning and
characterization of the what are called transcription
factors that turned the virus on and off. And I actually
cloned it in David Baltimore's lab at MIT when I was a
postdoc there. David won the Nobel Prize actually for reverse transcriptase,
very famous man obviously.
So, but when I came to Stanford and using the technologies
that we developed, we did everything from Ebola research
to Zika to whatever the current manifestation of whatever the
plague was that people were worried about.
And we even actually saw the first COVID lungs from unfortunately deceased patients.
And that's what really, that actually scared the bejesus out of me when I realized that we're dealing with something extremely serious with COVID, at least in some people. But most of my research these days is in cancer research and looking at how the immune
system interfaces with the tumor and trying to learn about the signals that the usually tumor
manifests to turn off the immune system or to disrupt the function of the immune system. And so that required the development of new instruments to see things at a level
previously people were incapable of, but then also to develop the algorithms to
understand the complexity because you've got thousands of cells in a complex
dance with the cancer and trying to figure out what that means took a lot of
algorithmic effort.
So, we're a computational lab as well as a wet lab as we call it.
Do you have an engineering background?
No, but I've always been a tinkerer.
And so, you know, I mean, I think what makes a good scientist is knowing what you don't know and knowing
who to bring in to help you create what it is that you want and being able to explain
it to them in a way that gets them interested.
And that talent, frankly, translates very well in the entrepreneurial side of things.
When you're talking to venture capitalists, you can convince them that the biology is interesting,
that it's doable, that here's the kind of people I need.
And I always use this term inevitable,
that it's inevitable.
This is something that's coming.
So it really is up to the early bird that gets the worm.
If you can see that it's something that will happen
and has to happen and you
have a solution for it, it might not be currently the best solution, but it's a solution, get
to it first and own the market.
And your degrees, what are you, in what areas were your degrees awarded?
All genetics, but one way to think about genetics is genetics is actually programming. I'm actually pretty good as a programmer as well, but genetics itself is software.
And so if you think about genetics as software, it was very easy, again, for me to be both a programmer
and a geneticist at the same time. So I've always been good at math.
I've been good at the – I'm more, I would say, good at the intuition
of how biology works. And intuition plays a larger part, frankly, in science than people would like to admit.
Yeah, you know, one of the things that's always struck me as peculiar about scientific research papers
is that the introductions are always a lie.
It's so interesting because I thought about this for a long time.
It really struck me when I was first in graduate school because when you write a scientific research paper,
you present the situation as if all the background reading that you did
produced an incremental transformation in your thinking such that you generated a hypothesis.
And that's almost never the case.
Usually what happens is that people have an intuition that's derived from some pattern recognition,
and then they backfill it and make it look
like it's algorithmic.
And then the other thing that's so bloody peculiar about that is that there's almost
no discussion in graduate school training, maybe this was different where you went, on
hypothesis generation itself.
It's as if scientists swallow the idea that you're creating your hypotheses in this algorithmic
manner as a consequence of grinding through the research. I know I had a student at Harvard,
Shelley Carson, who worked on creativity, and she would make very large leaps with regard to
her hypothesis, and then it would take her a few months to backfill
so that she could bring people along to explain the justification.
But that certainly wasn't the method by which it was derived.
You strike me as a peculiarly creative person for a scientist, by the way.
That might seem a perverse characterization,
but we also studied predictors of scientific prowess,
and openness, which is the trait marker for creativity,
was actually slightly negatively correlated with scientific productivity,
at least at the graduate school and then early career level.
But you've got a very wide range of abilities and then you've got this on both an
entrepreneurial and a managerial twist. Is that a
fair characterization? Because that's also a rare
combination.
I think what, I mean, it's hard to talk about
yourself as if you don't sound like a, not to
sound like a narcissist. But I think if you can marry creativity with
practicality, that's the magic mix at least for me, is I'm very good at rapidly iterating all the
possible reasons why something can be the case and then rank ordering them very quickly, coming up with at least two
cutoffs.
One is, yeah, this is possible, but it's very unlikely that magic dwarves run the universe,
right, everything below that level.
But then above that level, there's one more cutoff.
One is possible, but impractical or perhaps not easy to prove, and then above that is the provable.
And so if you can rapidly rank order and then come up with where something sits,
then you can immediately turn and tell a student, yeah, you should do this.
Or, yeah, you probably shouldn't do that because here's the reasons why there are so many other things
that it could be that you can't prove or disprove, so let's not go down that road because it's a rabbit
hole.
So I think marrying creativity with practicality and being able to see, and frankly, what I
call reverse engineer of the future.
It's like you can see what it is and then you know I need to do this first and then
I need to do that.
And once I've done each of these steps, those are milestones that give you confidence to
take the next step.
And then because if I think like that, then that actually helps with talking to venture
capitalists because they can then follow the path that you've just laid out for them.
And when did you start your first company?
Soon after getting to Stanford, actually.
It was around 1994.
But I had already learned a lot from my mentors, Len and Lee Herzenberg.
So I was lucky having come to Stanford to end up in their lab
because Len andLee, who were
frankly hippies, you know, they had the two of the three
biggest patents at Stanford. One was for something called the
flow cytometer, which brought in hundreds of millions of
dollars, and perhaps even more important were the
monoclonal antibodies, the what are called humanized antibodies.
So, by making monoclonals that could be injected into
humans without raising an allergic reaction or a
strong immune response, almost all of the injected
antibodies today are based on those original
technologies. And Len was just a natural
entrepreneur. He never started any companies, but he technologies. And Len was just a natural, a natural
entrepreneur. He never started any companies, but he knew
how to license them. So he would always bring me into his
office when he was negotiating with the pharma companies,
and he would give me the contracts to read, because I
was one of his favorite students. So he's like, okay, I'm
not going to waste my time by giving this guy something something because he'll actually understand it and pick it up. And he introduced
me to the best patent attorneys of the day. And so I learned from them what it was all about. So it
was, you know, much of what I would love to say is mine is just a rewrite of what I learned from Len and Lee.
Right, so you were very favored in your mentoring.
Yes, I got lucky.
Yeah, well that's a good deal.
I rotated in Stan Cohen's lab, and Stan of course had the Cohen-Boyer patents.
So Boyer, her Boyer started Genentech.
Stan Cohen had the other of the three biggest, and they
were all in the Department of Genetics.
And those were the patents for genetic engineering.
So, it was sort of an environment that led you to
think about practical applications.
Now, when I started my company as an assistant
professor, I got a heck of a lot of pushback
from senior scientists saying, Gary, it's too early.
You're going to, you shouldn't dirty your hands with
this yet or now, frankly. They didn't even want me
getting involved at all. And it was funny because a
lot of them, you know, 10 or so years later were back in my
office asking for my advice on how they could start a company.
Right, right.
Well, it's a rarer pathway to be scientifically productive and to make your talents manifested
in multiple directions and to be your talents manifested in multiple directions
and to be an entrepreneur.
I mean, that's the research that I referred to
looking at predictors of scientific productivity
showed that the best predictor apart from IQ, obviously,
which is always the best predictor
of virtually anything complex by a lot
was conscientiousness, right? Just sheer diligence
and that there's a certain kind of narrow focus that goes along with conscientiousness too. And so
it is reasonable advice if you're talking to someone whose primary talents are diligence
and industriousness for them to focus intently on one area so that they can establish themselves. But that obviously wasn't the
appropriate pathway for you. And so, but that, and it's
also complicated and difficult to start a company as
well as a research lab and to teach and all of that.
So, as generic advice, it probably wasn't too bad, but
it didn't seem to hold in your case.
How many patents do you have?
I think somewhere between 50 and 60 at this point.
And research articles?
Over 350.
Right.
Okay.
Well, so for everybody watching and listening, I mean, obviously that's a tremendous number of patents because actually one patent is a lot of patents and so 60 is a tremendous number
and on the research side you can do a rule of thumb calculation and not
everybody agrees with this but three research papers properly packaged make a
pretty nice PhD thesis so 300 is is roughly equivalent to 100 PhDs,
and that's a lot of PhDs.
And I think that's a reasonable way of looking at it,
not least because most PhDs end up with either zero
or one publications.
So the three publication rule of thumb isn't a bad one.
What do you think of that characterization?
Yeah, I think it's good. I think the better way to do it is how
often are you cited. So you can publish and never be cited. So
at this point I think I'm at about 89,000 something
citations. So that puts you in the top whatever percent. And a
lot of those, frankly, were the retroviruses, because people use the retroviruses.
And then a lot of it is, are the technologies that I've developed, because for the immune system measuring
technologies, whether it's something called CITOF that I co-developed with this guy at the University of Toronto,
his name was Scott Tanner, he invented the machine, but I showed how it could be used for
immunology or the codex or the MIBBY or phosphoflow
or now the split pool synthesis technology for
single cell analysis were all things that sort of
just like came to me. It's amazing that some people
think that science is this methodical step by step, whereas more
often than not, it's you pose the question in a way
that sort of sets your subconscious to work, but then
you lay out in front of you all of the necessary raw
material and you say, somewhere in this morass is the answer. And then at a lecture out of nowhere
it suddenly just appears, you know, in your head fully
formed. It's almost as if your subconscious was busy
working and it finally said, oh, I'm done, here it is.
Yeah, well, your thoughts and revelations, let's say,
as well as your perceptions, are extremely
influenced by your goal.
And so if you set the right question,
you establish the quest.
And your thoughts are orienting mechanisms.
They're going to be working on the pathway to that goal.
And they do deliver the goods,
just like when you're walking down the street
and you orient towards a goal, you can see the way to walk.
I mean, it's analogous to that.
And we're not shocked that our perceptions
are delivered to us.
No, it's not like we effortfully construct them.
They make themselves manifest in our consciousness.
And if thought is an abstracted equivalent of perception,
which is at least one of the things it is,
it's not that surprising that once you set your mind
to the task that your, what would you say, that the spirit of revelation visits
you in the appropriate manner.
That's especially true if it's a genuine question, you know, if you're really interested
in it.
So, how, could you describe your typical day?
How many hours a day do you work and how do you set up your day? Like, how many hours a day do you work and how do you set up your day?
I probably work 14, 15 hours a day. I get up, I feed the dogs because they're very
demanding. I sit down, I start on email, and then I look at my task list. And
usually these days it's a lot of editing
and luckily large language models have come along
and helped with that.
In fact, it's actually almost fun to write grants now.
That's a, you know, that should shock you.
Wow, that's something to say, that's for sure.
Because I figured out how to use large language models
to write grants.
And so now, and what's interesting is that you really only need to give it like five
or six sentences of the basic idea, the way I've constructed this large language model
version, and the rest of it gets automatically produced, which is actually kind of sad, because
what it means is the majority of it is wrote.
The majority of what we write is similar to
what you were saying about papers. The majority of
that is rote and it's just there for the convenience
of the reviewer. But the central idea is only a few
sentences.
Right. Right. Now, do you have your own large
language model? And how do you stop them from lying
to you and producing false, like, hallucinations
and citing papers that don't exist?
Yeah, we use pretty sophisticated versions.
We don't have our own LLM, but we have our own chain of thought layer that sits on top
of these for the work that we do with the large language models. We have, we use OpenAI or Anthropic
or Gemini, you name it, and then we have a layer
sitting on top.
Oh, yeah. And is that layer trained on your work?
Yes.
Or on relevant work?
Relevant work.
I see. I have one of those as well that I trained on
my books and some other material. Right. Yeah. And it's a very weird thing to use. I have one of those as well that I trained on my books and some other material.
Right.
Yeah. And it's a very weird thing to use. I don't know if you have the same experience,
but in this system we trained thinks like I think, but it can also think up things that
I haven't thought up, which is, I guess what's happening as far as I'm concerned is that in the statistical encoding of my
linguistic knowledge is all sorts of latent information, right?
I mean, there's relationships in my patterns of thought that I haven't explored, obviously,
and they're probably near infinite in scope.
I mean, I would say that's the case for everyone,
but because there's just so much information that's encoded.
And so does your system refer to the material
that you've trained it on first
and then to the large language model
that's general after that, or?
It's, I mean, it's in the context window.
It starts with it, but I think the value is
because it has lowered barriers, which is really what
you're talking about. The barriers are lowered to finding analogous or metaphors of what
it is that you've said in other ways of thinking. I mean, much of my work, the inventions that
we've made, we're taking the metaphor approach of finding somebody else's technology that
works in something else,
completely unrelated to biology, and showing how it could be applied to biology.
Right? And so, you know, ideas, very often the best ideas are saying, or the best teachers,
are people are saying, this is something like this. Think of it like this.
And then giving a metaphor or an anecdote that explains the idea.
And so the large language models are just metaphors on steroids.
Depending on how you set the heat, it can find things for you and solutions for you
that you probably could have thought of, but it did the legwork.
So for me, for instance, on the atomic imaging idea, you know, I said,
okay, well, here's what I'm doing. Help me write the patent on it. And it helped me start the patent
that I gave to the patent attorneys who wondered what lawyer I'd used to write this because it was
already pretty good. But I said, find me five other ideas that might also do the same thing.
And surprisingly, it came up with ideas.
Now, they were impractical, but it came up with ideas that were like, oh, that's pretty cool.
I wish I knew about this area of physics.
So, you know, actually there was a study just done out of Stanford just last fall that showed that large language models can be as creative as humans, if not more creative as scored
by humans, just less practical.
I wonder what the bound is on practic- like do you suppose, I've talked to some computer
engineers including my brother-in-law, who's quite a
genius, and one of the things that he is prognosticating, and not only him, is that we have these,
obviously, we have large language models that are assessing the statistical relationship
between words at multiple levels of resolution and can do this remarkable thinking for lack of a better word,
because it sure looks a lot like thinking to me.
But, you know, human beings,
we seem to be able to do that with images as well, right?
And also with movement, like embodied movement.
And my guess is the practicality constraint
is probably something like the referencing of the semantic system
to the domain of image and movement, right?
Will this, because just because it's coded hypothetically in the linguistic corpus doesn't mean that it's
in keeping with the way the world makes itself manifest.
And humans have three different memory systems at least, right?
We've got semantic
and episodic and procedural. My suspicions are that when we're looking for practicality,
that we assess the joint contributions of all of those different ways of representing
information. The large language models can't quite do that yet, but they will soon. I mean,
it's got to be the case, right, because someone like Elon Musk,
for example, he has this immense corpus of real-world data, and it's got to just be a
matter of time before that's integrated with the large language models. Right. Well, actually,
you know, there's a part of your brain that does a lot about what you're talking about,
and it's called the basal ganglia and the caudate potamen, which is actually where intuition happens.
So, there's a game, a Japanese game of chess, which is sort of a limited form of what we think of as chess.
And so, they were doing basically reads of people's brains while they made these moves,
and especially when they made like what would be considered a genius move.
The area of the brain that lights up is
the head of the caudate and the patament.
The basal ganglia is actually what part of
the brain tells you where your body is in 3D space,
what your memories are, etc.
It's all subconscious subservient to your executive function.
So when you make a decision to do something, that gets sent to the basal ganglia, which determines whether or not you can actually do it and whether you want to do it.
Like if you're walking across a room, how do I walk? All those subconscious decisions are all done in the basal ganglia, but as it turns out, as humans have evolved,
that has then been sort of taken over to be used as our decision-making system, our intuition system
works through the basal ganglia. So all those ideas that you just talked about, where it actually finally comes to is this practical or not, the basal ganglia is part of that
process, of central place for that process.
So is that an embodiment constraint essentially?
Sorry, what do you mean by that?
Well, some things you can act out and some things you can't.
But it also appears to be used in the abstract sense now.
Like, is this the right move to make in a chess game?
Which is kind of, you know, abstract reasoning.
And we actually did a study on it.
I mean, believe it or not, we came to this area of the brain because of some
of my UAP stuff. And we did a study with a group at Harvard and found in fact that the
size of this area of the brain correlated directly with intelligence. And so...
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Which part exactly? Was that the caudate?
That was the caudate. Yeah. But we were... How high was the correlation? Which part exactly? Was that the caudate? That was the caudate.
Yeah.
But we were more...
How high was the correlation? Do you remember?
What was the magnitude of the correlation?
I can't remember. But we have three papers.
Okay.
Three papers on it that we published. So it's interesting stuff.
Oh. When were they published?
In the last three or four years.
Oh yeah. Okay. So I haven't come across those.
I'm very interested in the neurological determinants of intelligence.
But there was a guy in literally, I think, the year 2000 from Harvard who, through his
own sort of best guesses or whatever, who had proposed before anybody actually found
it that, I think his name was Hoffman,
he's now at UCLA, he's a professor of neurology there, had proposed that the Caudate and the
Basal Ganglia were going to be involved in intuition. I didn't read his whole paper on it,
but he was already a postulate when he was like a postdoc.
I wonder what the, what do you think the connection is?
I mean, when you think of intuition, you tend to think, at least I tend to think of pattern
recognition, let's say.
What do you suppose the connection is between pattern recognition and the caudate and its
relationship to motoric movement? It's making a decision with sparse data.
It's the instantaneous decision to leap when there's movement,
like the leopard is about to jump out of the tree at you,
and it's the movement.
But, you know, in the military. Right, so that's having to,
well, I'm imagining someone on a playing field,
in a hockey game or a soccer field,
obviously they're tracking many moving objects simultaneously
and abstracting out something like a meaningful pattern,
which direction is this going?
And then they're modulating their reactions
in consequence of reading the field.
And the great athletes, the great team athletes
are particularly good at that.
Wayne Gretzky was particularly good at that in hockey.
And so, okay, so the pattern recognition
would be something like,
you can imagine that being also crucial in a hunt, right?
Because you're gonna wanna know
where the animal's
gonna go and with your pack, you have to orchestrate
your movements and you have to do that together.
There's something almost musical about that,
like lions can do that and pack animals.
And so, oh yeah, I see.
And that would be focused on a goal,
the hunting arrangement, and that would require
extremely fast reflexes.
So it's, the intuition in that regard is a very complex form of reflex in a sense.
Yes, exactly.
So it's, humans seem to have evolved a way to use a pre-existing system in the basal
ganglia that was really just there for motor movement and making subconscious decisions.
And they've layered over it and they put an abstraction layer on top of that
so that we can now use it for mathematical principles and other ideas.
It is what provides that aha moment. And I've learned actually to see when the aha moment comes is almost like a form of color.
It's like when the next time you get an aha moment,
if you can try to capture that when it happens
and realize that it was a different kind of input
than what a methodological moment is, where you basically
have added it up and you've gotten the number by just simple
addition as opposed to that aha moment. And I've learned to
recognize and pay attention to the aha moment, not that it's
always true, but that it came from an intuition. Because, you
know, it's, it very often you can get it and then just dismiss it
because it was just an intuition as opposed to something that you figured out.
So, listening to those aha moments and I'm telling you, I see it as a color.
When it happens, I recognize it as a different kind of thought.
It's not like it's being given to me magically or anything like that. I know a lot of people would like to think that that's what it is.
Well, I don't know. There's something kind of magical about it. It, like, thought has this
revelatory quality, as you pointed out. You can set your sights on something and then the pathway
there, the mechanism that delivers you there is delivered to you. You know, so there is a magic about it.
You know, I'm going to, people are going to laugh at me for this because I always
do it, but I'm going to do it anyways.
That I've been studying Old Testament literature a lot for a long time.
And I'm interested, I'm bringing this up because of something you said about the Basal Ganglia too,
developing an abstraction layer. You know, part of that abstraction layer is no doubt our ability to tell stories,
because stories are verbal representations of action patterns.
And so, the burning bush episode in Exodus, that's an intuition episode.
Now, Moses takes his intuition seriously enough
to deviate from his normative path,
and then he delves deeply into the source of the intuition,
and that's what transforms him into a leader, right?
He gets to the bottom of something,
down a rabbit hole to the bottom of something.
And so it is a narrative representation
not only of intuition, but of the willingness
to attend to it and to delve into it deeply, right?
Okay, so we should switch topics here. I wanted to go over your background
with you to establish for everybody listening who you are. And it's pretty obvious that you have a
multitude of abilities and a stellar track record that's continuing. And so that sets the foundation for our next discussion. You started
to become interested, and I would like to know the story, in unidentified aerial phenomena. And
that's definitely a lateral move from your other interests. And so I'm very curious about all of that. I guess what I'd like to start with
is why the interest and why take the risk to pursue it as well, because you have a lot
to lose, let's say on the reputational front. And it's clear you're a very creative person,
so I'm sure your interests go everywhere. But tell us how it is that you became interested in this
and why you decided to pursue it with some degree of seriousness.
So I mean, there's a couple of origin stories to it.
But I think the easiest to start with is with the Atacama
mummy, right, the small mummy that people had been promoting
as being an alien, right, the small mummy that people had been promoting as being an alien.
Right, the mummy that was found in Atacama, Chile.
And
Right, that was a couple of years ago, not too long ago.
Oh, actually it was, no, it was 12.
It was
Oh, was it 12 years ago?
Yeah, yeah, actually already.
Oh my god.
Yeah, it was a long, long time ago.
I mean, that was, and so I had seen it on YouTube.
I reached out to the people who were, let's say, marketing it.
And I said, hey, I can figure this out for you.
I can tell you what it is.
And so we arranged to get a small piece of the body, a rib.
I wanted the rib because I wanted the bone marrow from
within the rib because I felt that that would be the place
best protected from bacterial contamination.
And long and the short of it was that we showed that it was a human baby, probably, well,
it was probably preterm birth, but that we found a number of mutations in the genome
that could explain what it looked like
and why it looked the way it did.
And so, you know, when a movie came out regarding that,
circa 2012 or so, it was like sending up a, you know,
a flare to two sides of the world.
One, the people who didn't like that I was debunking the alien. So, I became an instant symbol of dislike well the intelligence community that here's a guy willing to look
at things and just call them as he sees it. And so that
led as it turned out to somebody representing the CIA
and an aerospace company showing up at my office at
Stanford literally unannounced, showed me their
credentials and said we need your
help looking at patients who've had harm done to them.
And I was like, well, what kind of harm?
And then they laid out the data, literally like MRIs and x-rays of internal scarring
of...
Are these people who reported abductions?
No, no, no. Oh, no. Oh, sorry. Okay. internal scarring of... Are these people who reported abductions?
No, no, no.
Oh, no.
Oh, sorry.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I'm off on a wrong tangent.
These are intelligence agents, diplomatic corps, military personnel, et cetera, all
who had said that they were hearing buzzing in their ears or, you know, and then a small
subset of them said that they'd been in proximity
to things that you would call a UFO.
So I thought it was a joke at the beginning, especially when they mentioned the UFO stuff,
because I had no intention at the time of going back and doing more alien research after
the Atacama mummy escapade. And so they had come to me. I mean, why
come to me? Well, one, I was willing to talk to people about this stuff. But two, they
wanted to do blood analysis of the individuals who had been harmed as part of a complete
medical workup. And so they'd asked around and they said, well, who does the best blood analysis?
Oh, you need to go talk to this guy, Nolan at Stanford.
He has this thing called CyTOF that can do the deepest analysis of blood that, you know,
currently today and still.
So basically over the course of two or three years on working with this group and on these patients.
It turned out that these were actually the first of the Havana syndrome patients.
I'm sure you've heard of Havana syndrome.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Review that for everyone.
So, Havana syndrome was something that basically came out around 2015, 2016, and it was called Havana because it was the diplomatic core individuals in
our government who were getting headaches, they were having to be sent home.
And it turned out that it's probably a kind of microwave technology being used by some
of our adversaries.
It's 100% real.
Some people in the CIA try to debunk it,
but now there's a whole, like, set of paperwork out,
put out by the Department of Health and Human Services
on anomalous, what's now called anomalous health incidents,
where Havana syndrome and all of the sets of
associated symptoms are all listed,
and there's a path now for people who think that they have it to go
follow it up, you know, appropriately with the
Veterans Administration or what have you.
But, you know, in the three years...
So, let me get this straight.
So, you had someone from the CIA show up to your
office, and he had a list of people who
had medical problems and some of those medical problems were a
consequence of people coming into contact with what? Technology
that is mysterious? Is that the right way of thinking about it?
Yeah, well, I mean they didn't know what the source of it is, but now we know that it was basically,
I mean, it's an energy weapon, just a microwave weapon.
Just imagine you could focus the beam of your microwave
in a very narrow path towards a person's head.
You'll bake the brain cells in their head.
So, I mean, there's nothing magical about it.
We have them.
Everybody knows that these things exist.
At the time, when we were working on it,
we were calling it interference syndrome.
You call something a syndrome when you don't know
the exact cause, but it can have a variety of manifestations.
And so what we had done was we had matched the symptoms
to what are called the international diagnostic codes
so that we had the ability to say,
oh, it's this and it's this and it's this, and if you have 10 of 15 of these, you have
interference syndrome.
So at the same time, somebody was figuring out what Havana syndrome was, and it turned
out that our set of symptomologies matched perfectly with the Havana syndrome ones for
most of our patients.
We were able to hand all of that over to the U.S. government, and I've worked with
Senate staff and others, you know, on that. And that's something I can't talk much about.
But what remained, and this is what's good about how science is done, once you've
characterized something and you find it uninteresting, not that it's uninteresting that these patients are being harmed, but I could hand it off to
somebody else who would then take care of it as a national security concern, what was left on the
table were the oddities. And those were now the people who had gotten close to UAP, they claimed,
at least some of them. And they had, as it turned out, slightly different symptomologies.
Some of those were more likely to have arrhythmias or scarring on the skin as opposed to internally
or manifestations on the back of their neck of some kind of irradiative damage of some kind.
Now there...
And there was a pattern to this.
Yes, there was, yes.
And the pattern was always anecdotal, unfortunately, in that they had a story that you at face...
Right, but I mean the symptom pattern was stable.
And how many people, how many individuals approximately, like what kind of sample pool
were you assessing?
Now you're down to about five or six people.
Because of the original-
Okay, so it's a small number of people.
Of the original 100 that we started with, 90 or so,
it turned out, were what we could think of
as Havana syndrome.
The remaining were what were interesting.
And, you know, but sort of back to, let's say, my career. My career has always been, I've always been good at
seeing the data point off the curve and realizing that it's
not noise, or at least asking the question, how did that
data point get there? And not just, you not just going with what's
sitting on the line, but understanding why the data
point off the curve is important.
And then being able to quickly, again, back to that,
iterate the possibilities, say, ah, well, if we know
that it's not a problem with the
instrumentation, then it's an indication that we don't
understand something.
And so that was where I was already starting to get
introduced because of this UAP stuff, because of that we
had these groups of individuals who said that they'd
gotten harmed by UAP, and we diligent them to make sure that they didn't have
some sort of psychological problem. They had full
psychological workups and we knew that these were
people that we're, you know, we're trusting the
nation's security with. You know, it's kind of like,
okay, well, it's an anecdote, it's a story and now
I've heard 50 stories like this by that
point.
Right.
And it's like, well...
No, they say the plural of anecdote isn't data, but the plural of anecdote is definitely
hypothesis.
Yes.
Right.
And so once you start to get that, I was like, okay, well, there seems to be something here.
And you raised a point
that you ruin your career.
I literally was told by a senior official at the
National Cancer Institute by around circa 2014, 2015,
because I was just talking about this, just saying,
isn't this an interesting idea?
You're going to ruin your career, Gary.
And I was just like, but the data's on the table, it isn't ridiculous to ask the question.
But the fact that they were trying to push it off the table incensed me.
It was just like, that's not how a scientist thinks.
And I said to him, I said, you sound more like a priest than a scientist.
Maybe you should give your PhD back.
Oh, and...
Well, there aren't that many scientists, you know.
There are a lot of people who act out the role of scientists, but that's not the same
thing.
Yeah.
Right?
Scientists are very peculiar people when they're real.
So...
So, and that's been sort of my approach to it.
It's like, how dare you tell me I can't ask the question?
Because there's more than enough evidence that there's something worth studying.
And people mix up evidence with proof.
You know, data sits in isolation and has no meaning whatsoever.
It only has meaning in the context of a hypothesis.
And so does the hypothesis and the data match
to mean that it is perhaps evidence.
Evidence, just as in court, is not proof of anything.
That requires a jury to decide whether or not
the evidence is sufficient to manifest guilt or not.
The same thing in a paper.
There's very few papers that you will ever read
that ever say there is, at least in biology,
this is a conclusion.
There's all kinds of weasel words that we as biologists use
to give ourselves diplomatic egress, just in case.
So, but when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson say there's no evidence, well, that's just a lack of
understanding of what the difference between data and
evidence is. There's reams of evidence, there's libraries
full of evidence, there's books I could throw, I could drown
people in with evidence, but that's not a conclusion.
That's not what we think of as scientists as proof.
Now I have, I'm of personally two minds.
As far as I'm concerned, there's definitely something going on that appears to be not
human.
That's just my personal.
Okay.
But that's different than science, right?
Yeah, right, right, right.
Go for it.
Okay, so tell me, well, tell me a typical story,
like the typical story pattern that characterized the testimony of these leftover individuals
whose symptoms were troublesome but somewhat anomalous.
Like, what were they reporting?
And then you took it seriously because there had been
psychological workups done on them, and there were a number
of people reporting the same thing.
So you know that something's up.
So tell me a story and then tell me what you started thinking
about with regards to a potential cause.
Well, one was a guy by the name of John Burroughs
in the Randall Shull Forest case where he literally got
close to one that came down near our nuclear storage
facilities there. It's a very famous case. And he came
to me as part of this group of 10 remainders,
and I was introduced to him to do the blood analysis and do the collection of the blood.
And then later, as it turned out, and here's an interesting thing, later he developed a heart problem,
and he couldn't get the Veterans Administration to open up his file so that he could get, he
could prove that or that it might have actually been originally caused at Randall-Shum in England
because his medical file was deemed top secret. So we literally had to go to, and this is on the record, we literally had to go to Senator
McCain in whose state this guy lived in Arizona and get him to write a letter to the Veterans
Administration forcing them to open his file so that he could get insurance payment for
his heart condition.
It's all on the record.
So why does an individual who had a problem that he claims had
been caused through some interaction way back when, why do you have to make his file top secret?
What's in it? There was nothing in it, frankly. It was just somebody had decided it needed to
be top secret because things related to UFOs just need to be, you know,
nobody talks about them, rush them under the table. But we literally, and it's again,
it's public record. And so what did he experience? He saw something. He came close to something,
something that was about five feet across on the ground. And I don't know. I mean,
I wasn't there. I'm just relaying the story.
Right, right, right. And what's the typical pattern of encounter?
Is there a pattern of the phenomena?
No, no, there's not enough of a... This is the problem, is that you can't repeat harm.
When harm happens, it's sort of incidental.
And so you just have to deal with, and I think it's less about the harm.
So, I mean, I think we should move away from a discussion of the harm and just talk more
about what it is that people are seeing.
And I'm talking about credible people, right?
What's the credible data that we can collect?
Okay, so it's a broader conversation
on unidentified aerial phenomena.
So sure, and I want to talk about your Saul foundation
as well, and also the fact that you've analyzed materials
with unusual properties.
So if we can tangle all that together, that would be good.
Yeah. So the reason why we started the Sol Foundation,
and it was me, Peter Scafish, and David Grush.
David Grush was the gentleman who testified in front of
Congress about what he claims were the reverse
engineering programs. And the principal reason for
starting the Sol Foundation was to enable, say, a picket fence
within which people of reasonable intelligence or
academics who don't always have reasonable
intelligence, but could have a conversation and not
be laughed out of the room. To be able to say, here's
a hypothesis, and here's the data I have, do you think my hypothesis matches or do you have another idea?
But the spectrum of things about which we wanted to be able to talk about were everything from religion all the way through to material science on my side. We have Peter Scafis, who's an anthropologist and a, what is the other one?
Well, let's call him an anthropologist.
And so he's interested in people's stories, right?
What are so-called experiencers?
What's the pattern of the experiencers?
And what kind of, let's say, trauma might they undergo?
Not only because of the experience itself,
but the trauma of not being able to talk to your friends
and or family about what it is that you think that you saw,
because of the stigmas associated with talking about this
and not wanting to be, you know, considered crazy.
And then, so he's collecting and writing papers on that. We have a focus on religion.
We had somebody from the Catholic hierarchy write a paper on that for us. To, on the more,
you know, extreme science side, the hard science side, the materials analysis that I do. And part of it, again, was to say,
okay, let's have this conversation. We had our first
foundation meeting, I mean, big convention at
Stanford where we had about 200 or 300 people there
who had come from all over the world. Hmm. What year was that?
That was three years ago now. We had one each year.
Okay.
Each year. And the funny story there was about two weeks before we were to have the meeting,
I started getting these pings from administrators around Stanford that there might be a problem.
And I was like, oh, God, you can't do this to me.
Everybody's invited, the plane tickets are paid for, et cetera.
What's going on?
And I managed to trace down who it was at Stanford that was sort of causing the trouble.
It turns out it was the branding office at Stanford.
And that they had a problem with that
Stanford's name wasn't first. That we had put Soul
Foundation first and not Stanford. And they wanted it
Stanford, you know, and the Nolan Laboratory, not the Soul
Foundation. So Stanford was more than willing to, you know, to
be upfront about it. They were, you know, open about it. In
fact, the Alumni Association had me give at the last homecoming a big talk to
probably about 200 people about it because of the interest
level. So, there's been no problem on that front. But then
I then got interested in the materials because, again, through the connections
that I had made, I came to know a gentleman by the name of Jacques Vallee. Jacques Vallee
is probably one of the most famous, let's call them ufologists ever, in terms of like
his scientific prowess. He was involved in the early days of the internet. He was an astronomer. He's a venture capitalist in the Bay Area. And he's heretical in the
sense that he didn't believe that whatever this was was necessarily
extraterrestrial. But it was some other kind of manifestation of either the human psyche or something more
beyond, something almost paranormal in its capabilities.
So it was interesting to listen to this, but I was more
interested in, you know, okay, well, what can I teach
another scientist? How can I convince another scientist?
So it turns out Jacques had a number of materials, metals and or objects that had been associated
with landings of alleged UAP or UFOs.
And so I said, okay, well, give me some of them. I need only tiny amounts,
and we can do pretty traditional analysis on it.
So one of the things that I got a hold of,
we showed recently to being that was from a beach in Ubatuba,
Brazil that a fisherman had seen this object drop from this UFO and it shattered
and he picked up some pieces of it and it made its way through what I would consider
to be a reasonable chain of custody.
We measured it and it was 99.999% silicon.
Okay, that's not hard to make today,
but it's not something in the late 1950s or early 1960s,
you drop giant pieces of all over a beach
in Ubatuba, Mexico.
So it's, whatever that was, it was clearly an object of
industrial purpose, right? There's no 99.999% silicon
anywhere on planet Earth. It's all contaminated. And I
actually have an atomic map of one of these pieces that we
developed, that we did with atomic probe tomography.
What was fascinating was that one of the two chains of custody that I obtained
also had magnesium ratios that were not what you would expect from Earth.
They were different than the standard magnesium ratio. So magnesium
has three isotopes, 24, 25, and 26. 24 is like, let's just say, rounded up to 80% and
the other two are 9 and 11%. Whereas one of the two chains of custody, the magnesium ratios
were just higgledy-piggledy all over the map.
They didn't look anything like what you expect to find from a piece of silicon on Earth.
Anywhere you look on Earth, you're going to find silicon,
sorry, the magnesium at the 80, 11, and 9 ratio.
Whereas this one of these pieces was wrong.
That doesn't prove that it's a UFO.
It just proves that it's of some kind of manufacturing purpose.
So that's one.
We're actually writing the paper up on that one.
I published a peer-reviewed paper on another thing,
another object from what's called Council Bluffs, Iowa,
where again there were multiple witnesses, in this case even the police,
had seen an object and it seemed to drop something.
And when the people arrived, they thought actually it was a plane crash.
When they arrived, they found about 30 pounds of molten metal in the middle of a frozen field.
And I have the original Polaroids.
And so I just did an analysis of it.
And the long and the short of the analysis was there was nothing wrong with the isotope ratios, but it was a mixture of metals that nobody
would normally put together. It was not fully mixed,
it was only partially mixed. So it's kind of like if
you were to take chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry
ice cream and partially melt them and just kind of
turn your spoon a couple of times around. Depending
on where you looked, you'd find different ratios of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.
As opposed to if you were to put it in a blender, everywhere you look it would look the same.
So what I found in the metals was that it was incompletely mixed.
Okay, so who would drop 30 pounds of incompletely mixed iron, titanium, and aluminum in the
middle of a field for no good reason from something that looks like a UFO?
So all the conventional explanations that it was thermite, it's not thermite because
there's no aluminum hydroxide, I've checked, to carry that much molten metal requires at that
temperature a cauldron that would be like half a ton to the middle of a field.
You're not going to put it in a plane.
So what is it?
Unexplained.
But the reason for doing it, and actually there's somebody who it looks like is going to give me sort of free money to analyze more of these things,
is not to prove that they're from UAP, but it's to do the
right kind of analysis on the materials so that I can get
it out there and publish it with no conclusions, just
here's the data and here's the story, and here's the
analysis as complete as we can do at this time.
Because maybe somebody else will look at it three years from now
or some other enterprising student will go,
ah, that's how you would, if you released this,
this would be the engine control for, I don't know,
anti-gravity or something. So it's, you know, it's part of that thing of like you come up
with an intuitive idea because you've spread all of the data
in front of you. Well, if you don't have the data, you can't
come up with the solution. But if I can get the data out to
as many people, maybe somebody else will come up with the
hypothesis that unifies the story.
So it's part of like the, I mean, I think of it as the open source data approach or the open science
where you get the data out for everybody because somebody paid for it. So maybe you shouldn't keep
it in your, you know, in your desktop drawer or these days in a folder on your computer.
Get the data out there so that other people can use it. Does that make sense?
Okay, so, so far it makes sense. I've got more questions. So, you started by assessing the medical problems
of a small subset of people whose symptoms didn't fit the pattern,
but whose self-reported stories had their own characteristic,
and that their symptoms had their own identifiable characteristics.
Now, I'm not sure how you got from that to the sole foundation.
Now, my understanding is that because you had worked on that
hypothetical alien corpse and debunked that,
and then you got involved with the CAIE project,
that more of these stories were coming your way?
Yes.
Is that, and-
Yes.
Okay, and so what other kinds of stories,
and tell us about the foundation itself and who's involved.
And then I'm also extremely curious about your conclusions. I mean, I'm sitting here thinking,
you're obviously studying anomalous phenomena. Why would you make the, or have you even derived the inference that apart from the isotopes, why would you
derive the conclusion that extraterrestrial origin is the most likely?
No, I never said that.
Culprit?
No.
Okay, fine, fine, fair enough, fair enough.
You didn't.
And so that's exactly why I'm posing the question.
I'm not trying to corner you on that.
I want to know.
Like, you're studying anomalous phenomena.
You know of Charles Fort, by the way?
Very well, yeah.
Yeah.
Yes, okay, okay, okay.
Did you ever watch Magnolia?
No.
The movie?
No.
Oh, Magnolia is a great movie, by the way, and it's about Charles.
It has a sub-theme of Charles Fort.
So if you're interested in Charles Fort, Magnolia is very much worth watching.
It's a great movie, also beautifully put together musically.
And of course, Charles Fort studied anomalous phenomena his whole life, and Magnolia happens
to be about that.
But okay, so you're studying anomalies.
Lay out the realm of hypotheses, because there's military experimentation.
I mean, there's all sorts of obvious competing hypotheses.
So tell me what you've gone through, more about your foundation and what you've concluded.
So the principal reason for starting the Soul Foundation was that I was, because of, let's say, my public persona about this,
more and more scientists were coming to me and saying, hey, I want to help.
How can I do it?
And then a common friend of Peter Scafisch and I, along with David Grush,
who I had met through all of these events.
And David, again, was the guy who sat in front of Congress and testified about the alleged
reverse engineering programs of which he was aware.
And I met with Dave and spoken with him, you know, very deeply and watched every element
of his body language as I possibly could to see, you know, look for evidence
of being, of misconstruing him in some way.
And as far as I could tell, he's telling, at least as far as he's concerned, the truth
about what he knows.
And I said, okay, well, we need a more formalized way to approach this.
And so what do you do as a scientist in a new area? You start a society, more or less.
Or you start a foundation that becomes the lead foundation for other groups to come together.
And the SOUL Foundation pretty much has established itself as a nonpartisan umbrella group through which the many individuals who are interested in UAP and talking about
it in a professional manner can come together.
And our next actually event is going to be historic.
It's going to be in Italy.
And we've got people from the European Parliament.
We've got a number of former, let's say, U.S. officials
who will be there to talk about these matters.
And again, I don't expect a revelation.
I expect just from this people to come and know that
there's a place where they won't be laughed at, but they can share
and maybe give ideas.
And one of the sets of ideas of what's going on right now is there's a big movement for
what's called the UAP Disclosure Act that, for your listeners, for the last two years,
Senator Rounds and Senator Schumer, supported by multiple representatives on both sides of the aisle,
have put forward a part of the bill that goes into the Defense Department bill, 60 pages of
which talks about the reverse engineering programs and extraterrestrial or not necessarily, not even extraterrestrial, non-human intelligence.
And that for, you know, the next five to ten years, there will be an oversight group which
will collect and gather all of this information for potential benefit of humanity.
Now, you just asked me about ruining my career. Would Senator Schumer, the head of the Democratic Party,
and Senator Rounds, an important figure on the Republican side,
come out and make any of these kinds of statements or allow for
their offices to be the vehicles through which such a bill would manifest itself,
if they felt that they were going to be derided on the
floor of the Senate.
Probably not.
And so Marco Rubio has come out openly and talked about this.
He's now our Secretary of State.
There's 20 minutes of part of a film that he's in where he's openly
talking about the fact that there are these objects moving
in ways that we don't know. I was speaking with your producer
prior to your getting to the set. The Soule Foundation, one
of our purposes, we put together press kits of like 15
different snippets from former heads of the CIA, the DIA, NSA, President Obama, etc.
all saying there's something that we don't understand and is moving in ways in our atmosphere that we
can't explain and it appears to be technology. Now, they'd like you to think that it's something out of Lockheed, perhaps, but these things
were being seen before Lockheed existed.
They were seen in World War II.
They were seen subsequent to World War II, long before we had any capabilities.
So what is it?
I don't care if it's human or not. I just want to have reproducible findings and yet somehow,
for some reason, the government won't release the information that it has. I mean, just
recently, there was a Freedom of Information Act release of the so-called Mosul Orb, M and a solid silver ball.
That ARROW, which is the anomaly resolution office of the Department of Defense, came
up and said, yeah, we see lots of these things.
The former assistant director of ARROW, which is the office programmed and set up by the DOD to collect the kind of
information around these anomalies, openly stated just
three weeks ago on a podcast that, yeah, we have seen
videos of these black triangles that move in ways
that we don't understand.
Okay, if it's our technology and we can move in ways
like that, why are planes still crashing at Reagan Airport?
Right, why are we letting airplanes use fuel
when we have some other kind of technology that can move the way that these things can
and is being kept a secret. Is that just for defense?
So you talked about black triangles and silver orbs. Can you go into a little bit more deep?
Like what, I'd like to know the central phenomena.
Where do you think most of the signal resides with regard to these anomalous sightings?
What's the pattern?
The pattern, the best pattern are what it is that the military sees.
And those are the ones that where I have a focus and where actually I'm involved with
another group that's funded privately called Skywatcher. And what we're doing is we've
been setting up sensor systems in what we call cleared areas
where we know that there's no overflight. And we do sometimes
work in concert with the FAA and others to make sure where
we're setting up for repeatable measurements and sensor
systems to see things. And we're seeing stuff that doesn't make sense.
And so we're not coming to conclusions, but we're
collecting the data.
And because I'm a scientist, I'm like their principal
advisor to this group, and we're setting up and doing
the kinds of measurements that I think are necessary,
because I'm not going to wait for the government.
You know, I'm not going to wait for daddy government
to tell me what's right.
I'm just going to, I'm a scientist, I'm going to go out
and do it myself.
And so that's what we've done, and we've raised
significant funds.
I mean, and you can go look up Skywatcher on the internet
and what it is that we're doing.
And part of what we're doing is it's two purposes.
One, it's two purposes.
One, it's basically aerial surveillance, partially just for drones because we've seen what drones
can do in wars.
And you know about the drone incidents in New Jersey, right?
And all of the hubbub that that caused, we were actually there.
We were actually measuring things.
What was that?
What was that? What was that?
Some of them were simply drones. Some of them though were moving in ways that would be hard
to explain by drones. But all the stuff that we observed close to shore was clearly human
activity. But so we're setting up Skywatcher as sort of a dual purpose.
One is to work with the government to hopefully,
or defense contractors, or anybody who wants to pay
for our services, to collect aerial data basically
as rapidly as possible.
Because often you can't deploy the
necessary equipment on site quickly enough to collect the
data when there's an anomaly that shows up. I mean, our
principal goal is protection of the United States. But if in
so doing, we happen to collect other information about some,
let's say, anomalous objects, we will have the tracking data
necessary to say, hey, well, this is, we don't understand
this. And it's important to know because if it isn't a human
adversary who have capabilities that we don't appreciate, even
if somewhere in Area 51 they have something that does that,
it's good for, I think, our
military, the more public aspect of our military, to know that these objects do exist and report
them when you see it, because it might be the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranians.
You want to know this because if you ignore it, you could be ignoring the data point off the line that is important to know
about.
Always back to that.
Don't ignore the anomalies because anomalies, just about
every single Nobel Prize that was ever awarded in physics and
chemistry or biology is because somebody paid attention to the anomaly.
Right, right, right. Yes. So, tell me about the patterns of anomalous activity that characterize,
that define something as an unidentified aerial phenomena, And then tell me what you've concluded as a consequence
of your investigations and where you, yeah, let's do that.
So there are, let's say, five characteristics of something
that you would think of as an anomaly.
One is instantaneous acceleration and deceleration.
There's very few things that we know of that can go from 0
to 5,000 miles an hour and then stop on a dime
without squishing everybody on the inside,
sending them through the windshield.
So when you see these things go from, in the case of the,
I think it was the Nimitz or the Eisenhower,
goes from sea level to space in less than a second,
and they have the radar trackings of those things.
And now imagine the size of the object, let's say it weighs a ton.
To instantaneously accelerate and decelerate at that level,
it takes more than the, would take the energy of more than the nuclear output of the United States for a year.
Okay, so where did you get that energy, first of all? So, instantaneous acceleration and deceleration.
So, seeing things that do zigzags across the sky means that somebody or something has control if it's going fast
enough and it's not doing an arc.
It means something has control of momentum and inertia.
They can negate momentum and inertia.
So that's an observation seen hundreds if not thousands of times by pilots all over
the world. So what does that mean about our understanding of physics, first of all?
So that's one thing. The other is no apparent flight services and no apparent exhaust.
So no energy output. So you're moving and doing these things and yet if you look at them with FLIR,
which is a kind of infrared,
you don't see any hot spots.
If you were to look at a jet, all you would see is the plume from the jet.
So no flight surfaces meaning, you know, basically Bernoulli's principle is not at play here,
right, which is basically how the wings work and then lift. So, Bernoulli's
principle is not at play. So, you're moving without a flight
surface and without an apparent mode of inertia. You're not
putting something out so that you can move forward. And then
the other one is what you would think of as what's
called transmedium travel, meaning something that can go
from the water to the air and then back again or to the air
and to space.
We have nothing that can do something like that.
Recently, there have now been drones made and talked about openly and
actually these are US drones just shown on a military video recently where they
can go drones can be underwater travel and then come out of the water and go do
the attack but that's only been developed in the last you know a few
years not something from 50 60 years ago. So those are the kinds of things that people see.
And again, it's, you know, you ask me what I think of as real.
Those anecdotes are, to me, stories, and why I get interested in the medical or the material side is
it's something I can repeat.
I can't repeat these pilot observations,
but I can repeat experiments on materials
or experiments on, not experiments on human,
but reading the humans who've been harmed.
Now, the thing about Skywatcher is that we,
Skywatcher is, is that we, at least in a limited sense, have a signal that can be released that sometimes it seems to attract these objects.
And so that's where the repeatability attempt is coming in.
Explain that a bit more. So there's a, because it's a company and I'm not the official spokesperson for it,
and this is public information that's out there, is that there's a signal that an individual
as part of Skywasher had determined when he was working with the military, not as, it
wasn't his purpose to develop it, so he didn't take
anything out.
It was sort of a, he noticed something, and then he refined the technique, and now he
knows that he has, let's say, an electromagnetic sequence that he can release that somehow
seems to have these things, objects, show up.
And I was there when it happened. We go out on these week-long events in the middle of nowhere,
and stuff shows up. And some of it's been on... some of it's, you know, you can go find it on Twitter.
But the stuff that's on Twitter isn't good enough in my opinion.
I'm more interested in the data that we're more recently collecting with better cameras
and better sensor systems.
Because the idea is just to do the science.
So I think what we'll do on the daily wire side, because we have to wrap this up in relatively short order,
I want to close here by asking you what you've concluded provisionally as an explanation for this,
like what hypotheses you're nursing.
And then on the daily wire side for everybody watching and listening, I'd like to ask you more about
stories about what you've seen, for example, when you've been on these Skywatch
expeditions and what the Skywatch
program is reporting and and then also to delve a bit more into the political you talked about the
Schumer and I don't remember the other Senator.
Senator Rounds.
Rounds, this bipartisan proposal to declassify and make public.
Some of the information.
Narratives of sightings from pilots in particular.
Okay.
So we'll delve into that more on the daily wire side for everybody watching and
listening so you can join us there for an additional half an hour.
To close up here, I think it would be useful
for you to let us know if you would
what the hell you think is going on.
And what this has done to you too,
I mean, this has got to kind of come out of left field, so to speak, in a severe way. And so I imagine it's put a bit of a bump into your life,
I mean, maybe one that's mostly interesting, but still, you know, it's, to call it strange is to
barely scrape the surface. So what, what are, what are you, what do you make of this?
That there's something non-human here. And it's been here for a long time, is my provisional conclusion.
And, you know, the question is not, that people should ask, is not, is there something here?
You have to ask the question first, can there something be here?
And the short answer is, of course there can be.
The universe is 14 billion years old.
You could have gotten from one side of the galaxy to the other in our galaxy in Elon
Musk's Tesla if it were traveling at 10,000 miles an hour.
But what got on in the first place doesn't mean the same thing as what gets off on the
other side.
So, yes, the short answer is something can be here.
What it is, I'm not 100% sure, and I feel very uncomfortable with the sightings of biological beings,
if only because they just look a little too much like us, and I just
can't see from a genetics point of view why the human form is
so, or even two legs and two arms is necessarily biologically
the most successful shape. So I think there's something here.
I think the data, the evidence of the hypothesis, there's more than enough evidence to say that
it's worth investigating.
So I would ask my colleagues to just hold their sarcasm for a while.
Because how do you deny thousands of reports like this?
And I don't want to sound conspiratorial,
but I mean, I did get a phone call
from somebody representing the White House,
because I was talking about something that they felt
was a little too on the edge.
They said, you need to just shut up, Gary.
I mean, I'm just telling you,
I mean, I've briefed Canadian Parliament. I went to your parliament in Toronto and I
briefed all three parties on it. The only ones who didn't want to hear anything with the separatists. So interestingly, but no, I spent two days there on that. And
we've briefed the European Parliament as well on it. And they're aware of what their own,
some of their own military are talking about. So that I conclude that there's definitely something here. But I think the more interesting conclusion is if they are, if something is here, it's
likely been here longer than humans have even been civilized.
So it really opens the question.
And actually it's something that I think Charles Fort actually said is, you know, Earth is probably somebody
else's property.
Well, that's a hell of a place to end.
So I think we will end there.
For everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue our investigation on the
narrative side and the political side behind the paywall at Daily Wire.
And so if you want to join us there for an additional half an hour, that would be good.
Thank you very much, Dr. Nolan.
That was interesting, to say the least.
It's very difficult to know what to make of it, obviously.
You have an incredibly credible background
and a very wide ranging mind.
And it's very fascinating to see your reaction to
this set of circumstances that have come your way and thank you for sharing out what you've learned
with us and to everybody watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention.
We'll continue on the Daily wire side. Join us there.