By the end of the classic B-movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Klaatu, the offworld emmissary sent by a federation of planets to our world, delivers a chilling ultimatum before a group of scientists and heads of State: either the people of Earth mature beyond their violent tribal behavior before we attempt to venture forth into outer space, or the more advanced civilizations would be forced to annihilate us, lest we become a bigger risk to the stability of the Universe.
But how to achieve such an utopic goal? Klaatu then proceeds to explain how he and his people learned to live in harmony with one another: they willingly submitted themselves to the authority of robotic enforcers such as Gort (the giant aluminum golem escorting him) programmed to detect and eliminate any sign of aggression with cold, dispassionate efficiency. “Our system is not perfect,” Klaatu concedes—”but it works.”
Klaatu’s tone sounds almost angry during this climatic moment, but the audience can easily excuse him for it—after all, he literally died (and was momentarily resurrected) for no reason other than delivering his message to the immature Earthmen: grow up or face extermination.
Every time I watch an interview with Dr. Garry Nolan, Stanford professor, scientist and entrepreneur, I notice more and more of a similar anger and bitterness. It’s not like Nolan has been physically harmed by his enemies—though I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s ever received the occasional death threat on the Internet, where he keeps an active presence—but like Klaatu he’s been constantly attacked by both peers and laymen for delivering a message many don’t want to hear: The UFO phenomenon is a mystery that merits serious scientific scrutiny.
The role of science is to be wrong today, and righter tomorrow.
Garry Nolan
Nolan’s scientific achievements and reputation speak for themselves. He’s been registering patents and founding companies since he was just a grad student; he hangs around with Nobel laureates, and he’s been nominated to the esteemed prize himself; hence he does not suffers fools gladly—his go-to response when skeptics (whom he calls ‘pseudo-skeptics’) say things like ‘show me the evidence for UFOs’ is a pithy ‘I’m not your daddy… go find it yourself.’ It would appear one of the biggest motivators to devote so much time and energy into a subject his colleagues consider a waste of time, is just so he can prove them wrong.
Hence the bitterness…
Last week Nolan was recently invited to The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, following on the footsteps of other illustrious UFO researchers who’ve been previous guests on the show—like his friend and mentor Jacques Vallée—and other not-so-illustrious personalities in the field—like Dr. Steven Greer; the one initially responsible for turning Nolan into a UFO celebrity back in 2010, when he first showed interest in conducting proper scientific testing on Ata (the name given to a strange and diminutive mummy found in the burning sands of the Atacama desert in Chile, that Greer bombastically promoted as the remains of a non-human entity). Nolan and Greer’s partnership had an ill end, once Nolan published his final conclusions: Ata showed signs of peculiar genetic mutations, but she was just an aborted human child—evidence of human cruelty, not alien visitation.
During the almost-three-hour interview with Joe, Garry didn’t even bother to mention Greer’s name once.
Other names who were also omitted in the long conversation with Joe were those of Diana Walsh Pasulka (who has also been in Rogan’s podcast) and Jaime Maussan. In 2019, Pasulka published American Cosmic, in which she detailed her visit to an undisclosed location in New Mexico in the company of Nolan (who was at the time referred to under the pseudonym ‘James’) and ‘Tyler D.’, an aerospatial engineer and biomedical entrepreneur (now identified as Tim Taylor) who took them in search of traces of a purported UFO crash. As detailed in Vallée’s journal Forbidden Science vol. 6, the study of those material samples gave reason to suspect there were not exotic in nature, and might have been deliberately planted.
As for Maussan, the shady Mexican ringleader apparently invited Nolan to analyze the ‘tri-dactyl’ Peruvian mummies he’s been avidly promoting for the last couple of years. Garry refused, not because he is necessarily skeptic of the authenticity of the mummies—he told Rogan he remains cautiously open-minded about the bigger ones (the tiny ones he knows they were never alive, but wonders if they were part of some ritual to ‘honor the gods’) given the tests already conducted—but because he refused to have a TV crew following his every move to make a spectacle out of the whole thing. Unlike others, Garry doesn’t seem interested at all in jumping into the UFO showbiz.
So what is Nolan interested in, then? By what he said to Joe, the answer is changing the current paradigm of total secrecy maintained around the supposed retrieval of crashed UFO materials, erected in the service of national security, to one of ‘public private partnership’ where the government grants limited access to these materials to a selected group of cleared scientists and companies—quite likely only American-based— in the spirit of (for-profit) collaboration that is so characteristic of the Silicon Valley where he lives and works. This is the basis behind the Sol Foundation that he co-founded in 2023 alongside Peter Skafish and UFO whistleblower David Grusch, who is incidentally no longer a part of it—Garry casually mentioned to Rogan that Sol’s next conference will be held in Italy, of all places, and one wonders if this was suggested by Grusch’s adherence to the highly controversial story of a crashed disk retrieved during the time of Mussolini, in 1933.
Both Skafish and Nolan gave separate presentations earlier this year, at the Archives of the Impossible 2025 Conference organized by Professor Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University. A sociocultural anthropologist, Skafish’s approach to the phenomenon couldn’t be more different than that of Nolan’s: Garry focuses on the purely physical aspects of the UFO mystery, in the form of material traces retrieved from cases like Ubatuba in 1957, Socorro in 1964, and Council Bluff in 1977 (Nolan wrote a paper detailing his findings in that case, and disproving the theory that it was caused by industrial slag molted by thermite). As he explained to Joe, he’s planning to build bigger and better imaging technologies to analyze these type of materials at the atomic level; where it may be possible to prove, once and for all, that their exotic nature is the result of a highly-advanced technology beyond our means.
There are also the very physical health hazards allegedly caused by close proximity to the UFO phenomenon—Nolan was approached by the CIA in 2013 (quite possibly through Christopher ‘Kit’ Green, a long-time member of the Invisible College) to analyze the first cases of Havana syndrome, which had similar characteristics to ten other cases caused by UFO exposure (the victims showed white matter lesions in their brains).
Skafish, on the other hand, is more interested in the ‘experiencial’ aspect of the phenomenon, and what can be learned from the testimony of those who had been allegedly in contact with non-human entities. “At the end of the day,” Nolan told Joe, “I am a physicalist. I don’t like all the anecdotes. A thousand anecdotes make a good story, good campfire(…) I think there’s statistical value in people seeing the same thing again and again and there’s a truth to it.”
“…But as you know, and I can believe anything I want to around that. And many of the statements that I’m purported to have said are around my beliefs as opposed to when I put on my scientist hat and I try to convince another scientist. I can only provide this data and this evidence and I don’t have yet these materials.”
What is significant about Nolan’s words—and here is another thing he omitted to mention to Joe— is that he himself has had personal experiences which closely resemble the ‘night intrusions’ reported by countless of witnesses all over the world. Diana Pasulka has mentioned it in her books as part of the impetus for why he decided to look into the matter of UFOs, alongside Jacques Vallée.
It may speak of his higher standards as a hard scientist, that Nolan is willing to disregard his own subjective encounters with an Other that seems to be intimately connected with a bigger aspect of the UFO mystery, because he cannot put those memories into a microscope (yet?); but part of me wonders if he has really paid any serious consideration into what Vallée says in his books. In the interview with Joe, he even mentions something Vallée said to him about how to the UFO, “Reality is negotiable,” so why speculate about it with Joe in ‘manageable’ Sci-Fi concepts like generational spaceships, AI probes (nowadays a favorite trope among ‘serious’ people taking a look at the UFO problem) and zero-point energy? Why not entertain the possibility, like my friend and colleague Joshua Cutchin does, that the UFO may be just 20% physical and 80% meta or paraphysical; and that those physical intrusions are transient, momentary, and quite likely co-created by the minds it irregularly interacts with?
If that is the case, then pointing all our guns into that incipient tip of the iceberg may prove fruitless, when we are leaving that vast—and perhaps unimaginable—portion beneath the waters of 3D space-time untouched. And if that larger ‘uber-reality’ does exist… why not call it spiritual, for lack of a better word?
I don’t know if the Sol Foundation will be successful where NIDS and many others crashed and failed. As I’ve written in previous articles for this website, there is something that just rubs me the wrong way about their TED-like, startup-prone approach, seeking ways to lure VC money into the hyped promises of purported alien technology; the same way psychedelic advocates tried to legitimize these chemical compounds by promising great profits to pharmaceutical companies, eager to replace patent new products for a society hungry for more anti-depressants and ‘mind optimizers’.
But perhaps the biggest tell-tale sign that Nolan’s ideas about the future seem disturbingly aligned with those of the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ , was how he mentioned to Joe his admiration about the Chinese politburo—”America is ruled by lawyers. China is ruled by engineers”. Throughout the long interview, Nolan and Rogan (perhaps the meathead more enamored by the promise of the Singularity) fantasized about the emergence of ‘benevolent AI overlords’ that would be able to run the government instead of corrupt human politicians. “Perhaps AI has to come into power before we can get access to any of this,” Joe said, with Garry’s full agreement.
NOLAN VERADA NIKTO, indeed…
The timing for these high-profile appearances at the JRE show are hardly coincidental. They are carefully planned (by whom?) in order to maximize their impact. There is another Congressional hearing about UFOs scheduled this very weekend (September 6th) which will attempt to gain support for the so-called UAP Disclosure Act; another legislative attempt to move the needle a little closer in the direction of Disclosure, which would put organizations like the Sol Foundation in a vantage position, if the dreams and fantasies of UFO advocates ever come true, and the hoarders of alien artifacts are forced to part ways with their coveted treasures.
I wonder… if Dr. Nolan is ever asked to be a witness in one of these events, would he be able to admit before all those US government officials the utter contempt he seemingly has for all of them? That he wished the United States adopted the ‘efficiency’ of the Chinese republic that allows them to build wonders like the Three Gorge Dam and superfast trains and such neck-breaking speeds? By golly, what’s not to like about that! (Unless you happen to be an Uyghur minority or a student foolishly protesting for freedom of expression in Tiananmen, that is).
Don’t get me wrong. Despite it all I still happen to admire Dr. Garry Nolan. Hell, I wish he succeeds in building bigger and more powerful instruments that will allow us to pry deeper into these strange UFO relics we’ve managed to gather—maybe one day he’ll analyze a few apports on a whim, why not.
He’s a brilliant and driven man who knows he hasn’t a lot of time left, and that some day he may not be able to catch a cancerous tumor in time. I just worry that the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos of Silicon Valley doesn’t end up breaking things we should keep intact—like democracy and human rights.
