Garry P. Nolan - three interviews

U. S.  Professor Garry P. Nolan has had an interest in the topic of UAPs ever since he:

"...was approached by some people representing the government and an aerospace corporation to help them understand the medical harm that had come to some individuals, related to supposed interactions with an anomalous craft. I had no expectation of this, but they came primarily because they were interested in the kinds of blood analysis that my lab can do."

I thought it would be useful to bring together some details from three interviews given by Garry Nolan, in an attempt to understand his work on UAPs; his views, and his methodology.  

2016

The first interview, conducted in 2016, appeared in Annie Jacobsen's 2017 book, "Phenomena" (Back Bay Books, New York.) After her interview with  Christopher (Kit) Canfield Green, she went on to write:

"To advance his hypothesis, based on the demographics and high-functioning of his patients, Dr. Green teamed up with the Nolan Lab at Stamford University, run by Garry Nolan, one of the world's leading research scientists specializing in genetics, immunology and bioinformatics. Nolan trained under the Nobel Prize-winning biologist David Baltimore, has published over 200 research papers, and holds twenty biotechnology patents. Age fifty-five, he has been honored as one of the top twenty inventors at Stanford University. His research is funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute and others. In 2012, Nolan was awarded the Teal Innovator Award from the Defense department, a $3.3 million grant for advanced cancer studies. The Nolan Lab is perhaps best known for pioneering advances in large-scale mapping of cellular features and human cells at an unprecedented level of detail. "We are building on technologies that are just coming into existence," Nolan told me in 2016. Dr. Kit Green and his colleagues sought out Garry Nolan for help.

"I have met and worked with many of Kit's patients," Nolan confirms, "and I have looked deeply at the relevant medical data. These people were injured. I have seen the physiological consequences of the harm they've endured. He agrees with Kit Green that in many cases it looks as if it is an electromagnetic field of some sort." It has led to inflammation and other biomarkers in their bodies that can be seen on MRIs, tisue, blood. We are now working on both the genetics and epigenetic components," Nolan says. "I am relatively certain we are the only individuals in the field doing this." Using mapping technology the Nolan Lab is renowned for, technicians are mapping Green's patients' DNA and their immune systems. They are looking for patterns among the patients, using biological data to create an integrated theory.

Source:http://web.stanford.edu/group/nolan/ 

"All kinds of trauma can be picked up by the immune system," Nolan says. "Every event that happens to you is recorded by your immune system," which in turn creates a biological data-base of the self. "Every surgery or bee sting," he says, every incident of HIN1 flu, head cold, allergy or chicken pox "is all sensed and recorded by the immune system." With the technology that is emerging from the Nolan lab, doctors will likely soon be able to take a snapshot of a person's blood and read the historical record of a person's physiological life. Access to this kind of high technology non-subjective biological data would have been impossible to imagine in any other age.

But what, I ask Garry Nolan, does this have to do with anomalous mental phenomena research? With ESP and PK? With Uri Geller and hallucinations experienced by scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory? "We are also mapping [DNA and immune systems] people and their families who claims to be remote viewers  or have anomalous perception," Nolan confirms. For example, Joe McMoneagle is part of their research program; he provided them with a sample of his DNA, and the team is considering how to access the DNA of his sister, who was also allegedly a remote viewer, says Nolan. "Whether real, perceived or illusion, there appears to be a genetic determinant." And while Dr Green maintains that his patients' injuries may have come from high energy devices or their components, both Green and Nolan think there is more to it than that. "Some people [seem to] repeatedly attract the phenomena or the experiences," Nolan says. "They act like an antenna or are like lighthouses in the dark."

For some it might be a blessing, Nolan speculates. They are comfortable with these experiences and make it work in their lives (think Uri Geller, Joe McMoneagle, Angela Dellafiora, and Paul Smith). For others its a curse (for example, Green's injured patients and the Livermore nuclear scientists who quit their jobs). Nolan makes clear that his ideas are only hypotheses, but he explains that the raw data from which his hypotheses have been drawn are clear. "It's important to remember that DNA doe not invent stories," he says. Gene mapping and advanced single-cell analysis techniques reveal biological truths. "Imagine if you could understand how all this connects to mentation [ie mental activity], "Nolan says. Nolan says of claimed UAP encounters and ESP or PK abilities, "You could make a drug to block [the genetic aspect] for those who don't want it - or even enhance it for others.""

2019

Nolan was interviewed by U. S. author and researcher, M. J. Banias on 29 April 2019. Their conversation mainly involved the areas of Dr. Nolan's work with Dr. Kit Green and their cohort of patients who had apparently sustained injuries arising from their encounters with the phenomenon; and the work Dr. Nolan was undertaking with Jacques Vallee on materials analysis.

Regarding their materials analysis work, I directed the following question to Dr. Nolan, through Banias: "Is there a peer reviewed paper anywhere in the near future that the community can expect?"

Dr. Nolan gave an extended response, to the question, which I listened to on YouTube. Later, in communicating directly with Dr. Nolan, he offered to clarify some of the points he had mentioned in the Banias interview. So, the following is a combination of his conversational response to Banias, and some additional material from my own direct communication.

"Yes...some initial studies showed unusual isotopic ratios and Jacques has talked about them publicly so I'm comfortable talking about that. So what we are doing right now, is I'm doing this work personally. The recent work that Jacques showed, I did the experiments myself, but not the historical stuff Peter Sturrock for instance, here at Stanford did collaborating with Jacques in the past. Others had done some isotopic analysis work as well, and we have confirmed some of those efforts.

My point is at this stage, as much as some of the (non-mainstream) journals that have published this stuff are credible, they are unfortunately not the journals that anybody in the mainstream is paying attention to. The journals people are paying attention to are like, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics, and Aeronautical journals. So, we've convinced a couple of those major journals that if we put together a credible paper that looks like there are credible conclusions, then they will send the paper out for peer review. That doesn't mean they will publish the work, but they will send it out for peer review, to make sure and double check our results. I expect we will probably get push back like I got push back with the Atacama results at the beginning. But the feedback made it a better paper. So, that's what we will do. So yes, we plan open publication.

So, right now what we are doing are confirmations of our initial results. We are taking it round to those who are specialists in mass spectrometry and metallurgy, to ask "Ok, where could I have made a mistake? What could be the contaminating artifacts in the information here that are leading to me to make the wrong conclusion  - and hopefully prevent me from potentially making a fool of myself?

That's why you go to the experts - which we have done in some of these cases. Sometimes you tell them what it is, and the provenance. Sometimes, you say, hey I've got this stuff, I'm trying to find out what it is. Does this make sense - is this possible? Given we know what this is made of, ( i.e. the elements and the isotopes) could I get apparently altered ratios by some strange surface chemistry that leads me to misinterpret the results? So, let's talk about some of the isotopes. I think there's magnesium in a couple of the samples of Jacques that have strange ratios. So, are the unexpected magnesium ratios because Mg26 is more likely to bond  to something in the material or less able to be ionized, and therefore make it look like it has got a different isotope ratio than it actually has?  And maybe that's the case because that magnesium 26 is in the context of something  else in the sample. Total speculation, but I've learned to be careful. So, apparent isotope ration difference might have nothing to do with aliens, or other worldly anything, and it is only to do with the physical structure of the material that makes what we think we're seeing to be somewhat off natural, when it is in fact truly "normal."

Here the message is to other people that I know , who are out there, who are doing this kind of analytical work on these materials; be very careful. A couple of things that we thought were off, have very conventional explanations, and you have to go to the expert, or you will make a fool of yourself. And you will discredit anything that you're trying to do. And the people who are listening, who know what I am doing with these materials- who know I know who they are, and that I have told this to them privately, but now I'm telling them publicly.

That's why I am interested in the material work that Jacques brought to the table. It's because, of, all the many things things that can be done, the materials are "reproducible." We can cut those samples into many pieces as Jacques would tolerate. Send it to people in laboratories - to confirm it. We've done that in some cases. So, we're getting these validations and we're checking with the necessary experts. Then, we'll write up a simple paper that will make no claim to anything, other than the fact that here's the composition of the stuff and here's the story of how it was found. End of story.

The hanging question there, should the materials be truly anomalous, is how did they get made? People (humans) don't play with isotopic ratios easily. Ask yourself what do people do with isotopic ratios now (with current technology)? What do we modify isotopes for, or what have we been doing with isotopes for the last 60 years? Blow stuff up...uranium and plutonium...imaging or killing ...cancer cells...nothing very subtle.

Chemistry and physics have not caught up with why you might use titanium 46 versus titanium 47 (plus one neutron)...what is different about the magnesium ratios in the sample that I know Hal has, and I have a sample that was given to me by Leslie. So, why would somebody alter those ratios? The cost to change isotopic ratios is considerable, especially given the provenance: that is, some of these materials date back decades, when the ability to make those changes was so costly that why would you make a big chunk of it and throw it out in the desert?...why would you bother?...I can tell you right now there is simply no industrial/material reason to alter the ratios.

(Talking of the use of the word "alloys by TTSA.) "So, I wrote an internal memo to TTSA at the time I was involved with them and said these aren't alloys. These materials, do not think of them as alloys. We need to change the conversation. You need to call them metamaterials - so I'd like to lay claim to the use of that term (this was a memo in response to the Scientific American article about the Tic Tacs saying that humans basically know all there is to know about alloys.) These are more complex, and if anything, you need to call them ultramaterials because metamaterials are pretty well understood....basically that's a repeated atomic architecture that performs a single purpose.

So, I took some of the material from Jacques to some people at Stanford, and I said - this is interesting, and you tell them a little bit about it. They will sometimes reply, if you can interest them that " Well I have this or that instrument, and I'll get back to you, and tell you something about this, that, the other of it..." They can inform us whether you've seen this in any aeronautical industry materials before. And if they come back and tell me, yes this is something from Pratt and Whitley circa 1955, I'm like, thank you, now I can go do something else..."

2021

In an interview published on 14 June 2021, by author Jon Brooks:

"So how did you get involved working on UFOs?

Garry Nolan: I was approached by some people representing the government and an aerospace corporation to help them understand the medical harm that had come to some individuals, related to supposed interactions with an anomalous craft. I had no expectation of this, but they came primarily because they were interested in the kinds of blood analysis that my lab can do.

What were your findings on that?

It turned out there couldn't be any findings because some of the events had happened so long ago that the signal would be lost in the noise of time, and it just wasn't worth going into.

You're now looking into some alleged artifacts that came from UFOs, including a case from Jacques Vallee, perhaps the mast famous UFO researcher. How's that going?

You can think of it almost like investigating forensics. Somebody claims something happened or didn't happen. And so you use whatever psychological or scientific means to investigate and document the case. And in the case of some of these materials, they're almost all metals that are claimed to have either been dropped by these UAPs, or somehow left behind. In the case of Trinity, two boys got into what they claimed is a craft and took  a piece of it. And they've kept it since 1945. I come to it with no preconceptions. I come to it with, well, here's how you do the analysis. Am I the best person to do the analysis? No. Absent an actual metallurgist stepping in, I'm willing to do the groundwork, to get preliminary results that might interest a sufficiently expert metallurgist to go the next step.

What can you say about the results of your analysis? 

If people are expecting a spectacular smoking gun, this is not it. But the objective is to take even some of the most blasé cases and just create a pipeline of how this should be done, to demonstrate to people that you don't need to come up with a spectacular answer. I mean, we don't disprove anything with this case. It's just not a case of this being an obvious piece of technology.

The things that interest me the most are the case where there are claimed changes in the isotope ratios of given elements. The point I've always made is we don't know why you would do that in the first place, because it's expensive. And so if somebody is engineering isotope ratios for a prctical purpose, I'd like to understand why, because that would be evidence of an understanding of material science that we don't currently possess.

And so if you put together this idea of material science understanding that we don't possess with some of the claimed observations of craft that do things , that we don't know how to do, it's like catnip to somebody who likes to solve problems.

If you come to a conclusion that is not supported by the facts or anecdotal, and start pushing an agenda, you're only going to discredit yourself, because one of the things I've learned in looking at this area is that it's way too complex to come to some Hollywood conclusion about aliens. As many people have said, the majority of the so-called sightings are likely to be mistakes. And so let's get the mistakes off the table.

I've dealt with fake cases before. People brought me things that were clearly faked trying to make money. So it's a fraught field.

Howe have your colleagues reacted to your work in this area?

A little bit the usual giggles, and some have said, "Garry, you're going to ruin your reputation." And my response is: I'm not making a conclusion. I'm just saying that there is data here that is anomalous and that somebody needs to explain. I'm willing to take the time to explain it. What scientist takes something off the table? If the explanation is sitting there right in front of you and you decide to throw it away before you even come to a conclusion, you can't really claim to be a scientist - you're a cultist.

I think the crux of the whole issue here is: Why are we afraid of talking about it? It's interesting that suddenly in the last year this has come to national attention. We train these pilots for tens of millions of dollars, and we entrust them with multimillion pieces of equipment. Now people are coming to me who kind of giggled in the past, and they're saying, "Garry, it looks like you might have been right. I'm really interested in this, Can you tell me more? It's a little bit more open now, and that's a good thing. And if it is disproven, ultimately, I'm perfectly fine with that.

Are you aware of any other scientists who are working on UFO issues?

Dozens. And there are probably others who just don't want to step forward. I'm the only one perhaps foolish enough to be a bit more public about it. Part of the problem is that there is no funding, so people are doing it on a nickel and a dime, paying for it themselves in their spare time. And I think that when people say, well there's no real results, it's because nobody's funded the question properly to get the results. As many people know, science is on some level capitalist in nature in that it will follow the money. If there's money in research grants and things to be done, people will start investigating. 

It sounds like you think there is really something to this phenomenon

I think there is genuinely something interesting there. How to explain it, I don't know. As Jacques once said, the problem with coming to conclusions is if you can come up with one counter conclusion or one counter observation, your whole set of conclusions can fall apart. So maintain your distance until you have all of the data. All I'm saying is there is data that is interesting.

Is it fair to say that your open-mindedness about this issue is a minority position among the scientific community?

I think it's a minority position. But in my science, I always consider everything. I'm very much, "Keep it on the table." So it might be a low probability, a 0.1% chance. If I throw it away and consider it impossible, then I might be limiting myself. That's how I have succeeded, at least in my field. Not everybody works that way, and I don't think everybody needs to. We need the skeptics. They are, in a sense, peer review. As long as they are not pathologically skeptical. There has to come a point at which we agree there's a proof point We can still be proven wrong later."