Dr. Garry Nolan: I’ve always been an avid reader of science fiction, so it was natural at some point that when YouTube videos about UFOs began to make the rounds I might watch a few. I noticed that this guy at the time, Steven Greer, had claimed that a little skeleton might be an alien. I remember thinking, 'Oh, I can prove or disprove that.' And so I reached out to him. I eventually showed that it wasn't an alien, it was human. We explain a fair amount about why it looked the way it did. It had a number of mutations in skeletal genes that could potentially explain the biology. The UFO community didn't like me saying that. But you know, the truth is in the science. So, I had no problem just stating the facts. We published a paper and it ended up going worldwide. It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper. What's more appealing or clickbait than ‘Stanford professor sequences alien baby’?
The Atacama Skeleton. Photo: Bhattacharya S et al. 2018 / Genome Research
I thought it was a practical joke at the beginning. But no, nobody was pulling a practical joke. And just as an aside, the school is completely supportive, and always has been of the work that I've been doing. When the Atacama thing hit the fan, they stepped in and helped me deal with the public relations issues around it.
No, I'm not.Can you describe the more anomalous effects on the brains you observed with the MRIs?
If you've ever looked at an MRI of somebody with multiple sclerosis, there's something called white matter disease. It's scarring. It's a big white blob, or multiple white blobs, scattered throughout the MRI. It's essentially dead tissue where the immune system has attacked the brain. That's probably the closest thing that you could come to if you wanted to look at a snapshot from one of these individuals. You can pretty quickly see that there's something wrong.
Left - Normal brain; Right - Injury and resulting white matter disease. Photo: Anonymous.
It was around 100 patients. They were almost all defense or governmental personnel or people working in the aerospace industry; people doing government-level work. Here's how it works: Let's say that a Department of Defense personnel gets damaged or hurt. Odd cases go up the chain of command, at least within the medical branch. If nobody knows what to do with it, it goes over to what's called the weird desk, where things get thrown in a bucket. Then somebody eventually says, ‘Oh, there's enough interesting things in this bucket worth following up on that all look reasonably similar.’ Science works by comparing things that are similar and dissimilar to other things. Enough people were having very similar kinds of bad things happen to them, that it came to the attention of a guy by the name of Dr. Kit Green. He was in charge of studying some of these individuals. You have a smorgasbord of patients, some of whom had heard weird noises buzzing in their head, got sick, etc. A reasonable subset of them had claimed to have seen UAPs and some claimed to be close to things that got them sick. Let me show you the MRIs of the brains of some of these people.
Hypermorphism in Head of Caudate<-->Putamen. Photo: Garry Nolan.
Correlation between genetics caudate<-->putamen density.
Of the 100 or so patients that we looked at, about a quarter of them died from their injuries. The majority of these patients had symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. We think amongst this bucket list of cases, we had the first Havana syndrome patients. Once this turned into a national security problem with the Havana syndrome I was locked out of all of the access to the files because it's now a serious potential international incident if they ever figured out who's been doing it.That still left individuals who had seen UAPs. They didn't have Havana syndrome. They had a smorgasbord of other symptoms.How does the impact of electromagnetic frequencies factor into your hypotheses about what exactly transpired here?
With one of the patients, it happened on the Skinwalker Ranch. Given how deep into their brain the damage went, we can actually estimate the amount of energy required in the electromagnetic wave someone aimed at them. We don't think that has anything to do with UAPs. We think that that's some sort of a state actor and again related to Havana syndrome somehow.
Brain damage from Skinwalker Ranch
We did a deep psychological evaluation of all of these people, just to make sure that they were stable and we were not dealing with obviously delusional individuals. My role in the initial project was analysis on blood, using a device called CyTOF which was something that I had been involved in the development of. The problem was that we couldn't really conclude very much because many of the cases happened years before I ended up getting the blood. With an acute injury to be seen in some telltale signature, we need to collect the within four or five days or a couple of weeks, but blood from an individual a couple of years out will not be useful. What I told the people in the government is I need access to their blood while the case is still acute. Is there anything man-made that might have this impact on the brain?
The only thing I can imagine is you're standing next to an electric transformer that's emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body.
Depth of ionizing radiation
Yes, it's kind of the natural way that science is done. First, you catalog, then you organize and then you say: well, this is similar to that and this other thing is similar to that but why is this other thing different? And then, if you have enough data, you start to look for causes. I do that every day with our cancer work. We always try to come up with hypotheses on why something is. Hypotheses are innumerable—they are proof of nothing. So, I am careful NOT to come to a premature conclusion because you only need one disproof to undermine a hypothesis. That's what I'm trying to stay away from. I have my private thoughts about what I think is going on, and some of them I'm very, very sure about. I'm open to being wrong. Except most of the time, I know I'm probably right.
You've probably heard of Jacques Vallée, Kit Green, Eric Davis and Colm Kelleher. All roads lead to them when it comes to UAP. I basically became friends with that whole group; they call it The Invisible College. When they found out some of the instruments that I had developed, using mass spectrometry, they asked if I could analyze UAP material, and tell them something about it. That led to the development of a roadmap of how to analyze these things.
The Invisible College. From left: Douglass Price-Williams, David Saunders, Leo Sprinkle, Dick Henry, Jacques Vallée, J. Allen Hynek, Claude Poher, and Fred Beckman. Photo: Ted Phillips
Material samples from Ubatuba. Chart: Garry Nolan
Material samples from Ubatuba. Chart: Garry Nolan
So of the 10 or 12 that I've looked at, two seem to be not playing by our rules. That doesn't mean that they're levitating, on my desk or anything, it just means that they have altered isotope ratios.Have you ever used a super quantum interference device?
We will likely be using SQUIDs in a new device that can determine the atomic structure of anything, at a sub-angstrom resolution. There's no device in the world that can do that today, especially of an amorphous object. We can do crystals, we can do little bits of biology with what's called cryo-EM. But this device supersedes all of them. So I'm talking with the government about building that. Are the devices and methods that you have available to you in terms of being able to analyze this material sufficient? In a perfect world, what would you want to see?
Depending on how deep you want to go, each analysis costs anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000. That tells you what the atoms are, what the isotope ratios are, crystalline quality—a lot of things that are sort of standard materials analysis. The point of doing this though is to figure out what it was used for. To do that, eventually, you do need to get down to the atomic level. Let's say we didn't have transistors today and one of these objects dropped a big chunk of germanium doped with other elements, or, you know, these little transistors. We would not have a clue as to the function, and we would ask 'why would anyone put arrays of germanium with these strange impurities in them… what is this thing?' Anybody who's engineering materials these days for doing any kind of advanced electronics and photonics understands that where the atoms are in the structure matters. There's a thing that's often used in biology called the structure-function relationship. Structure defines the function. Sometimes, if you can just see the structure, you can understand the function. I can look at a heart and watch a little bit of how it moves and understand its function. I can look at the tubes in your veins and say, that function is to carry blood. As we're looking at the structure of cells, when we see the structure of a protein, we can get a sense of how it's operating. So that's really what it's about. The next frontier of materials study is atomic. If you want to understand something very advanced, you better have something like this in your back pocket.Additional reporting by Jason Koebler.
Thobey Campion is the former Publisher of Motherboard and the Founder of EXO Dynamics, a blockchain-powered media organization. You can subscribe to his Substack here.