Garry Nolan, a prominent Stanford professor and inventor in DNA gene therapy, is also researching something out of this world: UFOs.
Nolan first set foot in the field when he was given the DNA sequence of a six-inch, human-like mummy that was discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert in 2003. People started calling it an ‘alien mummy.’ In 2012, he started analyzing its DNA and studied it in his spare time. He brought in a larger team of scientists to look at it as well.
“We basically said, OK, this is human, and here are the mutations that we think might relate to what it looks like. And that was really all we did,” said Nolan. “We published it, and I actually didn’t expect it to be that big of a deal. It went worldwide. I mean, every newspaper. I mean, you think about it in retrospect, what’s a better click bait than ‘Stanford professor sequences alien baby,’ right?”
He became one of the few scientists out there who was willing to talk about unexplained phenomena and apply science to it.
Because of that, the government has asked him to help investigate military and diplomatic personnel who were being harmed in unknown ways, some of whom admitted to hearing buzzing in their ears and claimed to have seen UFOs.
“They started bringing out X-rays and MRIs of the internal scarring that had gone on with some of these individuals. And so I said, OK, well, that’s clear. That’s not imagined, that’s not a hallucination,” he said. “And so I then got involved with three or four years looking at these individuals, and it turned out ... the majority of those patients that we had were actually the first of the recognized, or what I would think of as recognized, Havana Syndrome.”
“I don’t need to agree that they saw a UFO. I need to just understand that they saw something that they interpreted as a UFO. That doesn’t matter to me. It’s what happened to them and medically is what’s important. And if you have it happening in different people around the country, then you’re entering a realm where it’s reproducible, or at least you’re getting people coming in with reproducible experiences. So it’s kind of starting to become science,” explained Nolan.
Later, he became friends with a well-known venture capitalist and UFO researcher, Jacques Vallée. Together they looked at the molten metal remains after an alleged UFO sighting in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in December 1977. They tried to replicate the substance and see if there was anything new they could learn. After conducting a spatial analysis with one of his instruments called the multiplex, they found that the molten remains were an uneven mixture of metals.
“Now I have three other metals from Australia, from nearby, as it turns out, and other places around the world where the same pattern of events occurs,” said Nolan. “Something is seen. It drops off this metal. The metals are different each time. One of them is like aluminum. Another one is almost pure silicon, and pure to the level that you would need a Silicon Valley foundry to make. But it was dropped in the middle of a beach in Ubatuba, [Brazil] pounds and pounds and pounds of it.”
According to Nolan, since there are many questions surrounding such data, he wants to analyze it and put the information out there for others.
“The government has already said UFOs are real in some ways. ... At least, the data is real,” said Nolan.
Witnesses testified about the threat to national security posed by potential incursions into U.S. airspace, while accusing the Pentagon of shrouding many UAP documents in secrecy.
“Don’t wait for Daddy Government to do something. Disclosure can come from the public. Waiting for the government to make up its mind is like waiting for them to, you know, refund your tax check. Don’t sit around waiting for it. Go out and do it yourself,” said Nolan.
