Garry Nolan on crash materials and contractors

Garry Nolan on crash materials and contractors

Person	Garry P. J. Nolan (born 1961), Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine
Field	Immunology and pathology; inventor and biotech founder
Entry into UAP work	About 2013, after a visit from a man who said he was ex-CIA and an aerospace executive
Materials analysed	About a dozen alleged UAP samples, including Ubatuba (1957) and Council Bluffs (1977)
Key paper	Nolan, Vallée, Jiang and Lemke, Progress in Aerospace Sciences, January 2022
Contractor claim	A reported 2022 statement about crash material passed to Lockheed and other companies could not be confirmed in the sources
Date	3 August 2022
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Congress & law (topic)
People	Garry Nolan, Christopher "Kit" Green
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 207
Year	2022 in UFO history
Timeline	2022 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	9

Garry Nolan, a professor of pathology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is one of the most prominent academic scientists working on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).^[1][9] His UAP work has two strands. One is medical: studying people said to have been harmed near anomalous craft, a project brought to him by a man who said he was ex-CIA and an aerospace company executive. The other is the laboratory analysis of materials said to come from UFOs.^[2][9] He has also been reported as saying in 2022 that he had heard claims that material from crashed craft was passed to Lockheed and other aerospace companies. That statement could not be found in any of the sources listed here.^[1][2]

Nolan

Nolan was born in the United Kingdom in 1961. His family emigrated to the United States in 1963, and he grew up in Windsor, Connecticut.^[1] His career in outline:^[1][2][9]

• Training. He took a biology degree at Cornell (1979–83) and a PhD in genetics at Stanford in 1989 under Leonard Herzenberg. He then did postdoctoral work with the Nobel laureate David Baltimore at MIT, where he co-developed a widely used system for delivering DNA to cells with retroviruses.
• Stanford. He joined the medical school in 1993 and became a full professor in 2009. His research covers autoimmunity, cancer and leukaemia, and systems immunology.
• Output. EXO credited him with about 300 research articles, 40 U.S. patents and eight biotech companies. His companies include Rigel (1996), Nodality, BINA Technology (sold to Roche in 2014 for $107 million), Apprise, Scale Bio and Akoya Biosciences.
• Tools. He helped develop CyTOF, a technique for deep analysis of blood cells. "I'm not the world's best immunologist," he told Stanford magazine, "But my tools are used by the world's best immunologists."

His interest in UFOs was personal before it was professional. He recalls seeing an apparent craft above the woods on his childhood newspaper round, and waking as a small child to alien figures in his bedroom.^[9]

The Atacama skeleton

In 2012 Nolan offered to analyse the "Atacama skeleton", a tiny mummified body from Chile that ufologists, among them Steven Greer, had suggested might be alien.^[1][2] DNA testing showed it was a human girl, perhaps stillborn, with rare mutations in skeletal genes that explained its appearance. The result was published in Genome Research.^[2][3][9] "The UFO community didn't like me saying that," Nolan said.^[2] He has also said he took part in the 2013 documentary Sirius partly in the hope that it would bring him to the attention of "people who might really know what's going on".^[9]

The aerospace connection

After the documentary, two men arrived unannounced at his lab:^[2][9]

• Who they were. Nolan declines to name them. One claimed to be ex-CIA, and the other was an executive with an aerospace company. In other accounts he has described them as people associated with the CIA and "some aeronautics corporations", and as people "representing the government and an aerospace corporation".^[1]
• What they brought. They had MRI scans of pilots, ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been harmed, some after reported close approaches to UAP and "the fields generated by them".
• What they wanted. They wanted blood analysis, because "everybody says that you've got the best blood analysis instrumentation on the planet".

Nolan has not said which government departments, other than aeronautics, were involved. "No, I'm not" able to say, he told EXO.^[2] His later contacts included Jay Stratton, the first director of the government's UAP Task Force, who retired in 2022. Stratton referred pilots worried about exposure to UFO propulsion systems to Nolan when they were reluctant to see a military doctor.^[9]

The medical study

Nolan described the work to EXO in December 2021:^[2][3]

• The patients. There were about 100, almost all defence or government personnel or aerospace workers. Their cases had been collected by Kit Green, a former CIA scientist, from odd medical cases that reached what Nolan called the "weird desk".
• The symptoms. Some had heard buzzing in their heads and fallen ill. A subset said they had seen UAP or been close to things that made them sick. The MRIs showed scarring resembling the white matter disease of multiple sclerosis.
• Deaths. About a quarter of the roughly 100 died from their injuries.
• Havana syndrome. Most had symptoms "basically identical" to what is now called Havana syndrome. Nolan believes the group included the first Havana syndrome patients. Once the issue became a national security matter, he said, he was locked out of the files.
• A state actor. In one case, at Skinwalker Ranch, the depth of the damage allowed an estimate of the energy of an electromagnetic wave aimed at the person. Nolan said, "We don't think that has anything to do with UAPs", attributing it to "some sort of a state actor".
• The brain finding. What first looked like damage between the caudate and putamen proved to be unusually dense neural connections, five to fifteen times normal. Earlier MRIs of some individuals showed it predated their incidents, so Nolan concluded it was something they were born with.
• Blood. His CyTOF analysis was inconclusive, because the blood was drawn years after the incidents. He told the government he needed samples while cases were still acute.

The caudate–putamen finding led to collaboration with Harvard scientists on the region's role in intuition.^[9] The medical study of the patients themselves has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.^[2][9] A YouTube clip of Nolan discussing "UFO-related physical effects on humans" is among the sources. Its full content could not be checked.^[8]

Materials analysis

Through Jacques Vallée, Kit Green, Eric Davis and Colm Kelleher, a circle Nolan calls "The Invisible College", he was asked to analyse alleged UAP materials with mass-spectrometry instruments he had developed.^[2] His account of the results:^[2]

• Mixed metals. Of about a dozen materials, almost none were uniform. Each was an "inhomogeneous", incompletely mixed hodgepodge of a similar set of elements.
• Ubatuba. One fragment from the 1957 Ubatuba, Brazil, case showed magnesium isotope ratios about 30 per cent off normal on a nanoSIMS instrument. Another piece from the same case, analysed at the same time, was normal. Humans have no good reason to alter the isotope ratios of a stable metal like magnesium, he argued, so such a material "has likely been engineered".
• Two anomalies. Of the 10 or 12 samples, "two seem to be not playing by our rules", meaning that they have altered isotope ratios.
• A hypothesis. Many samples are molten metal said to have been shed by objects that seemed unstable. Nolan speculated that it might be spent material from a propulsion mechanism. He called this "pure speculation".
• Cost and tools. Each analysis cost $10,000 to $20,000. He said he was talking with the government about building a new instrument able to resolve atomic structure.

The Council Bluffs paper

In January 2022 Nolan, Vallée, S. Jiang and L. G. Lemke published a review of analytical techniques in Progress in Aerospace Sciences. They applied it to material from Council Bluffs, Iowa, where a glowing red mass fell on 17 December 1977.^[4][6][9] The publisher's page could not be read, so the paper's content here comes from secondary accounts.^[4]

• The incident. Witnesses said 35 to 55 pounds of molten metal lay burning on a levee. It was still warm two hours later. Investigators ruled out meteorites, satellites and aircraft and found no plausible sign of a hoax.^[6][9]
• The result. The material was mostly iron, closer to carbon steel than cast iron, with no significant isotopic deviation from terrestrial values. It was strongly inhomogeneous: aluminium varied up to twofold between subsamples, iron up to tenfold and magnesium up to twentyfold.^[6]
• Satellite ruled out. The analysis showed no connection with the Soviet Cosmos 954 satellite, which crashed in Canada five weeks later.^[6]
• Interpretation. The authors suggested the iron could be discarded fuel from an advanced aerial vehicle but drew no conclusion. Stanford magazine called it, to Nolan's knowledge, the only mainstream peer-reviewed paper to examine alleged UFO artifacts seriously.^[9]

A thread on the sceptic forum Metabunk examined the paper by setting its quotations beside their sources. Critics there argued that it offered no protocols for the "aerospace forensics" it proposed.^[5] The passages quoted in the thread show several things:^[5]

• Earlier tests. Earlier analyses had found ordinary iron with little nickel.
• The samples. The original samples were no longer available, so the paper measured a sample "claimed to be derived from" them.
• Its references. The paper cited the government's AAWSAP reference documents on spintronics, and drew its speculation about a nuclear or liquid-metal power source partly from private correspondence.
• The hoax idea. A thermite hoax hypothesis had been weighed and set aside, because the metal was molten when witnesses arrived and no thermite source was found locally.

Contractors

Nolan's account of his entry into the subject involves an aerospace company from the start.^[1][9] A more specific claim, that in 2022 he said he had heard material from crashed craft had gone to Lockheed and other aerospace companies, has been attributed to him. It does not appear in his Wikipedia biography, the EXO interview, the Science Times summary or the Stanford magazine profile, so its exact wording and occasion could not be confirmed.^[1][2][3][9] In May 2023, at a SALT conference session titled "The Pentagon, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Crashed UFOs", Nolan said that some governments had retrieved artifacts from extraterrestrial craft.^[1]

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory synopsis, "Analysis of a Metallic Specimen", is also among the sources. Its tables refer to bismuth, magnesium, zinc and lead, but the copy's text is mostly unreadable, so its findings could not be summarised here.^[7]

Later activity

• 2022. In August he was the sole guest for a full hour of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. He said he was "more than willing to take the pelting" for the venue.^[1][9]
• 2023. At the May SALT conference he put the probability that extraterrestrials have visited Earth at "100 percent", speculating that the visitors may be "emissaries" or drones. The journalist Leslie Kean said he knew the whistleblower David Grusch "very well and vouches for him".^[1]
• The Sol Foundation. On 15 August 2023 he co-founded the Sol Foundation, a UAP research and policy group, with the anthropologist Peter Skafish, and serves as its executive director. Its first symposium, at Stanford, included Charles McCullough, Christopher Mellon, Karl Nell and a surprise appearance by Grusch.^[1]
• 2025–26. He appeared in the film The Age of Disclosure (2025). In June 2026 he was named to a new UAP Science Advisory Council created at the White House's request, alongside Timothy Gallaudet, Avi Loeb and Michael Shermer.^[1]

Assessment

Nolan separates belief from proof. As an individual he is convinced alien intelligence has visited Earth. As a scientist he says, "I don't have something that I could put on the kitchen table that will float with anti-gravity."^[9] His published materials work found terrestrial isotope ratios at Council Bluffs.^[6][9] His Ubatuba magnesium result and the medical study have been described in interviews, not in peer-reviewed papers.^[2] The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has said it found "no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics".^[9]

People and topics

• Garry Nolan — Stanford immunologist who studies UAP-related injuries and claimed materials.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Lockheed Martin — The aerospace company whose Skunk Works built the U-2, SR-71 and F-117.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Christopher "Kit" Green — CIA physician and analyst who became a long-time contact of Jacques Vallée and studied UAP-related injuries.
• Sol Foundation — A UAP research and policy group co-founded by Garry Nolan in 2023.

On the Timeline

• Ultraterrestrial hypothesis paper (31 July 2022) — Puthoff releases a paper on the 'ultraterrestrial' hypothesis.
• Calvine UFO photograph (12 August 2022) — Researcher David Clarke publishes the 1990 'Calvine' UFO photo from MoD files.

See every 2022 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Garry Nolan”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.