Garry Nolan: UFOs and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #262

Garry Nolan 0:00 ... how would you, as a higher intelligence, represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?

Lex Fridman 0:06 Do you think they saw what they say they saw?

Garry Nolan 0:09 It didn't just start showing up in 1947.

Lex Fridman 0:12 How hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans?

Garry Nolan 0:15 What do we believe in? We believe in technology. So you show yourself as a form of technology. Right? But the common thread is you're not alone and there's something else here with you and there's something that's, as you said, watching you.

Lex Fridman 0:32 You are a professor at Stanford studying the biology of the human organism at the level of individual cells. So let me ask first the big, ridiculous philosophical

Lex Fridman 0:43 question. What is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect of human biology at the level of the cell to you?

Garry Nolan 0:50 The micromachines and the nanomachines that proteins make and become, that to me is the most interesting. The fact that you have this basically dynamic computer within every cell that's constantly processing its environment and at the heart of it is DNA, which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process. People think of the DNA as a linear code. It's codes within codes within codes and it is the... Actually the epigenetic state that's doing this amazing processing. I mean if you ever wanted to believe in God, just look inside the cell.

Lex Fridman 1:28 So DNA is both information and computer?

Garry Nolan 1:30 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:32 How did that computer come about? A big... Continuing on the philosophical question, the... Is this both scientific and philosophical? How did life originate on Earth do you think? How did this at every level? So the very first step and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA, that is multicellular organism, and then maybe the fascinating, uh, complex computer that is the human mind.

Garry Nolan 1:58 Well, I think you have to take just one more step back to the complex computer that is the universe, right? All of the- the so-called particles or the waves that people think the universe is made of and, uh, appears, to me at least, to be a computational process and embedded in that is biology, right? So all the atoms of a protein, et cetera, sit in that computational matrix. From my point of view, it's computing something, it's computing towards something. It was created, in some ways, if you wanna believe in God, and I don't know that I do, but if you wanna believe in something, uh, the universe was created or at least enabled to allow for life to form.

Lex Fridman 2:40 Right.

Garry Nolan 2:40 And so the DNA, uh, if you ask where does DNA come from and you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins and, uh, the selfish gene hypotheses. The way I look at DNA though is it is not a moment in time, it assumes the context of the body and the environment in which it's going to live in. So if you- if you wanna ask a question of where and how does information get stored, DNA, although it's only three billion base pairs long, contains more information than I think the entire computational memory resources of our current technology. Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg all the way through to the day you die and it embodies all the different cell types and organs in your body. Uh, and so it's a computational, uh, reservoir of information and expectation that you will become. So actually I would sort of turn it around a different way and say, if you wanted to create the best memory storage system possible, you could reverse engineer what a human is and create a DNA memory system that is not just the linear version but is also everything that it could become.

Lex Fridman 4:03 When we're talking about DNA, we're talking about Earth and the environment creating DNA, so this... You're- you're talking about trying to come up with a optimal computer for this particular environment.

Garry Nolan 4:12 Right.

Lex Fridman 4:13 Um, so y- if you reverse engineer that computer, uh, what do you mean by considering all the possible things it could become?

Garry Nolan 4:23 So who you are today, right? So three billion bits of information does not explain Lex Fridman.

Lex Fridman 4:29 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 4:29 Doesn't explain me, right? But e- the DNA embodies the expectation of the environment in which you will live-

Lex Fridman 4:38 Yes.

Garry Nolan 4:39 ... and grow and become. So all the information that is you, right? Is actually not only embedded in the DNA but it's embedded in the context of the world in which you grow into and develop, right? But so all that information though is es- is packed in the expectation of what the DNA expects to see.

Lex Fridman 5:01 Interesting. So like some of the information, is that accurate to say stored outside the body?

Garry Nolan 5:08 Exactly, yeah. The information is stored outside because there's a context of expectation. Isn't that interesting?

Lex Fridman 5:14 Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, to linger on this point, if we were to run Earth over again a million times, how many different versions of this type of computer would we get?

Garry Nolan 5:28 I think it would be different each time. I mean if you assume there's no such thing as fate, right? And it's not all pre-programmed, you know, and that there is some sort of let's say variation or randomness at the beginning, uh, you would get as many different versions of life as you could imagine. And I don't think it would all be unless there's something built into the, you know, into the substrate of the universe. It wouldn't always be left-handed proteins, right?

Lex Fridman 5:55 (laughs) But I wonder what the flap of a butterfly wing what, uh, effects it has because-... it's possible that it, this system is really good at finding the efficient answer and maybe the efficient answer is, uh, the, is, there's only a small finite set of them for this particular environment.

Garry Nolan 6:14 Exactly, exactly. That's the, kind of in a way, the anthropomorphic universe of the multiverse expectations, right, that, you know, there's probably a zillion other kinds of universes out there if you believe in multiverse theory. Uh, we only live in the ones where the rules are such that life like ours can exist.

Lex Fridman 6:35 So

Lex Fridman 6:36 using that logic, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there? There's- there's- there's, like, trillions of environments-

Garry Nolan 6:45 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 6:45 ... AKA planets, uh, or maybe you can think even bigger than planets. How many life-like organisms do you think are, uh, out there thriving and maybe how many do you think are long gone but were once here?

Garry Nolan 7:01 I think, well, enumerable. Uh, I think in terms of-

Lex Fridman 7:05 So greater than zero.

Garry Nolan 7:06 ... much greater than zero. I mean, I would just be surprised. What a waste, right, of all that space just for us if we're never gonna get there. Um, that would be my first, uh, way to think about it. But second, I mean, uh, I remember when I was about seven or eight years old, and I would love if any of your listeners could find this National Geographic. Uh, I remember opening, uh, the page of the National Geographic, I was about, again, seven to ten years old, and it was sort of a current picture of the universe. It was around probably 1968, 1969. And I just remember looking at it and thinking, "What kinds of empires have risen and fallen across that space-"

Lex Fridman 7:54 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 7:55 "... uh, that we'll never know about? And wouldn't... isn't that sad that we know nothing about something so grand?" Uh, and so I've always been a reader of science fiction because I like the creative ideas of what people come up with, and I especially like science fiction writers that base it in good science, but base it also in evolution. That if you evolve a civilization from something life-like, right, some sort of biology, its assumptions about the universe will come from, uh, the environment in which it grew up. So for instance, Larry Niven is a great writer, uh, and he imagines different kinds of civilizations. In some cases, what happens if, uh, evolu- what happens if intelligence evolved from a herd animal, right? Would you lead from behind?

Lex Fridman 8:53 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 8:53 Right? Would you be, uh, you know, in his case, one of them were the, the so-called puppeteers and to them, the moral imperative is cowardice. You put other people forward to run the risk for you, right? And so he writes entire books around that premise. There's another guy, uh, Brin, David Brin is his name, and he writes the, uh, so-called, um, Uplift Universe books. And in those, he takes different, uh, intelligences, each from a different evolutionary background, and then he posits a civilization based around where and what they came from.

Lex Fridman 9:35 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 9:36 And so, uh, to me, I mean, that's- that's just fun, but I mean, back to your original question is how many are there? I think as- as- as many stars as we can see. Now, how many are currently there? I don't know. I mean, that's the whole- that's the whole question of, you know, how long can a l- a civilization last before it runs out of steam? In you, for instance, does it just get bored or does it transcend to something else or does it say, "I've seen enough and I'm done?"

Lex Fridman 10:06 What does running out of steam look like? It could be destroy itself or get bored.

Garry Nolan 10:10 You know, we said... Or we've- we've done everything we can and they just decide to stop. I don't know. I just don't know.

Lex Fridman 10:17 It's the Elon Musk worry that we stop reproducing or we slow down the reproduction rate to where, uh, the population can go to zero.

Garry Nolan 10:25 Can go to zero and- and we can't... and we collapse. I mean, so the only way to get around that is, uh, perhaps create enough machines with AI to take care of us.

Lex Fridman 10:37 (laughs) What could possibly go wrong?

Garry Nolan 10:40 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 10:41 You've talked to people that, uh, told stories of UFO encounters.

Garry Nolan 10:46 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 10:47 What is the most fascinating to you about the stories of these UFO encounters that, uh, that you've heard that people have told you?

Garry Nolan 10:54 The similarity of them. Uh, the uniformity of the- of the stories. Now, I- I just wanna say up front, a lot of people think that when I speculate, I believe something.

Lex Fridman 11:09 Right.

Garry Nolan 11:10 That's not true, right? Speculation is just creativity. Speculation is the beginning of hypothesis. None of what I hear in terms of the anecdotes do I necessarily believe are they true, but I still find 'em fascinating to listen to because at some level, they're still raw data and you have to listen. And once you start to hear the same story again and again, then you have to say, "Well, there might be something to it." I mean, maybe it's some kind of a Jungian, uh, background in the human mind and human consciousness that creates these stories again and again and it's coming out of the DNA, it's coming out of that pre-programmed something. And Jung talked quite a bit about this kind of thing, uh, the collective unconscious. But actually one of the most interesting ones I find is this constant, uh, message...... that you're not taking care of your world. And this came long before climate change, it came long before, uh, many kinds of, you know, let's say, current day memes, uh, around, uh, you know, taking care of our planet, uh, pollution, et cetera. And so, you know, for instance, perhaps the best example of this, the one that I find the most fascinating, is a story out of Zimbabwe. Uh, 50 or 60 children one afternoon in, uh, Zimbabwe. It's a- it was a, a well-educated group of white and Black children, uh, who at lunchtime, in the playground, saw a craft. Uh, and they saw little men. And they all ran into the teachers and they told the same story and they drew the same pictures. And the message several of them got was, "You are not taking care of your planet." And it got v- you know, there's actually a movie coming out, uh, on this, uh, episode and 30 years later now, the people who were there, the children who've now grown up, say, "It- it happened to us." Now, did it happen? Was it some sort of hallucination or was it a- an imposed hallucination by something? Was it material? I- I don't know. But these kids were seven to 10 years old, you see them on video. Seven to 10 year olds can't lie like that. And so, uh, you know, whether it's real or not, I don't know, but I find that fascinating data, and again, it's th- it's these unconnected stories of individuals with the same s- with the same story, that is worthy of further inquiry.

Lex Fridman 13:57 Yeah, so here we are as humans with limited cognitive capacities trying to make sense of the world, trying to understand what is real and not. We have this DNA that somehow, in complex ways, is interacting with the environment, and then we get these, um, uh, novel ideas-

Garry Nolan 14:16 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 14:16 ... that come from the populace, and then they make us wonder about what it all, uh, means, and so how to interpret it. I- if you think from an alien perspective, how would you communicate with other life-like organisms? You perhaps have to find in-points on this interaction between the- the DNA and its manifestations in terms of the- the- th- the human mind and the- how it interacts with the environment. So get some kind of, "All right, what is this DNA? What is this environment? I have to get in somehow." (laughs)

Garry Nolan 14:55 Right.

Lex Fridman 14:55 To like interact with it, to get- to perturb the system to where these little ants, human-like ants get like excited and figure-

Garry Nolan 15:04 And see something.

Lex Fridman 15:05 ... stuff out. Yeah, yeah.

Garry Nolan 15:06 Right.

Lex Fridman 15:06 And then- and then somehow steer them, uh, first of all for investigative purposes to understand like, oftentimes to understand a system you have to perturb it.

Garry Nolan 15:15 Exactly, yeah.

Lex Fridman 15:16 Like poke at it.

Garry Nolan 15:17 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 15:17 Get- do they get excited or not? And then the- the- the other way is you want to, if you worry about them, you can steer in one direction or another.

Garry Nolan 15:28 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 15:28 And this kind of idea th- that we're not taking c- care of our world, um, that's interesting. I mean, that's comforting, that's hopeful because that means the greater intelligence, which is what I would hope, would want to take care of us.

Garry Nolan 15:42 Like we want to take care of the gorillas in the national parks in Africa.

Lex Fridman 15:47 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 15:47 Right?

Lex Fridman 15:47 But we don't want to take care of cockroaches, so there's a line we draw.

Garry Nolan 15:51 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 15:51 So you ha- have to hope that... (laughs)

Garry Nolan 15:53 W- right now we're a bunch of angry monkeys and, you know, maybe whatever these intelligences are, are also keeping an eye on us. You know, that you don't want a bunch of, you know, you don't want the- the angry monkey troop stomping around the local galactic arm.

Lex Fridman 16:08 Do you think these folks are telling the truth? Do you think they saw what they say they saw?

Garry Nolan 16:15 I think they saw what they said they saw, but I also think they saw what they were shown. I mean, if you go back to the whole notion of, okay, how long has this been around? It didn't just start showing up in 1947. Right? There are stories going back, uh, you know, into the 1800s of people who saw things in their farming, in their farm fields in the US. It's in- it's in- it's in local newspapers from the 1800s, it's fascinating. But if you can go even further back, you know, so to your point of how are- how would you as a higher intelligence represent yourself to a lesser intelligence? Well, let's go back to pre-civilization. Maybe you show yourself as the spirits in the forest and you give messages through that. Once you get a little bit more civiliza- civilized then you show yourself as the gods and then you're God. Well, we don't believe in God anymore necessarily, not everybody does. So what do we believe in? We believe in technology, so you show yourself as a form of technology. Right?

Lex Fridman 17:22 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 17:22 But the common thread is you're not alone and there's something else here with you and there's something that's, as you said, watching you and at least watching over your shoulder. Uh, but I- I- I think that like any good parent, you don't tell your student everything. You make them learn and learning requires mistakes because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.

Lex Fridman 17:51 You've, uh, looked at the brains of, um, or information coming from the brain of some of the people that have had UFO encounters. What- what's common about the brain of people who encounter UFOs?

Garry Nolan 18:04 So, the study started with a group of, let's say a cohort of individuals that were brought to me and their MRIs, uh, to ask about the damage that had been seen in these individuals. It turns out that the majority of those patients ended up being, as far as we can tell, Havana Syndrome. And so, for me at least, you know, that part of the story ends in terms of the injury, it's likely almost all Havana Syndrome. That's somebody else's problem now, that's not my problem. Um, but when we were looking at the brains of these individuals, we noticed something right in the center of the basal ganglia, uh, in many of these individuals, that at first we thought was damage. It was basically, uh, an enriched patch of MRI dense, uh, neurons that we thought was damage and it... But then it was showing up in everybody and then we looked and we said, "Oh, it's actually not." The other readings on these MRIs show that actually that's living tissue. Um, that's actually the head of the caudate and putamen. Um, and at the time... And I remember even asking a good friend of mine, uh, at Stanford who is a, um, psychiatrist, "What does the basal ganglia do?" He said, "Oh, the basal ganglia is just about, uh, movement and nerve and motor control." And I said, "Well, that's odd," because, uh, you know, these other papers that we were reading at the time started to suggest that it was involved with, uh, higher intelligence and is actually downstream of the executive function, uh, and involved with intuition and planning. And if you think about it, if you're gonna have motor control which is centralized in one place, motor control requires knowledge of the environment. You know, you- you don't want to move something and- and hit the table. Or if you're walking across the room, you want to be aware and cognizant of what you might bump into. So obviously all of that planning is... Requires access to all the senses. It requires access to your desires, memory, knowledge of where and what you want and desire to walk near or by. Like I use the example of if you're at a party you want to avoid that person, you like that person, the waiter's about to drop something. All without thinking you maneuver. So that actually, all that planning is done in the basal ganglia, um, and it's actually now called the brain within the brain. It's a, it's a goal processing system subservient to executive function. So what we think we found there was not something which allows people to talk to UFOs. I mean, I think the UFO community, uh, took it a step too far. What I think we found was a form of higher functioning and processing. So what we then looked at, and this was the most fascinating part of it, we- we looked then at individuals in the families of those, uh, let's say the index case individuals, and we found that it was actually in families.

Lex Fridman 21:16 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 21:17 And more so, this is the most fascinating part, we've probably looked now at about 200 just random cases that you can download off of databases online. You don't see this higher connectivity. You only find it in what Kitt Green would have called or has called higher functioning individuals, people who are, uh... I mean, he- he called them savants. I- I don't have the means to... Uh, we haven't done the testing. But as it turns out, my family has it. Right? We- we found it in- in me, my brother, my sister, my mother. We found it as well in other individuals, husband and wife pairs. So statistically, if you had a group of 20 individuals and you found two husband and wife pairs both of whom had it, and yet it's only found in about we think 1 in 200, 1 in 300 individuals, the fact that two individuals came together... Two sets of individuals came together both whom had it implied either a restricted breeding group-

Lex Fridman 22:22 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 22:23 ... or attraction. The reason why it seems to be in, let's say, so-called experiencers or people who claim... If- if intuition is the ability to see something that other people don't, and I don't mean that in a paranormal sense, but being able to see something just in front of you that other people might just dismiss, well maybe that's a function of a higher kind of intelligence to say, "Well, I- I'm not looking at an artifact. I'm not looking at something that I should just ignore. I'm seeing something and I recognize it for not what it is, but that it is something different than is normally found in my environment."

Lex Fridman 23:08 Yeah. You know, I have a- a little bit of that. I- I seem to, uh, see the magic in a lot of moments. Like I have a deep, um... It's obviously... Not obviously, but it seems to be chemical in nature that I just am excited about life. I- I love life. I love like stupid things. It feels like I'm high a lot on-

Garry Nolan 23:30 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 23:30 ... like mushrooms or something like that where you'd really appreciate that. So I'm- you're able... I'm able to detect something about the environment that, uh, maybe others don't. I don't know, but like I seem to be over the top grateful to be alive on a lot of... For a lot of stupid reasons. And that's in there somewhere. I mean it's kind of interesting because, um, it really is true that our brains, the way we're brought up, but also the genetics enables us to see certain slices of the world. And, um, some people are probably more receptive to...... anomalous information. They see the, they see the magic, the possibility in the novel thing.

Garry Nolan 24:18 Right.

Lex Fridman 24:18 A- as opposed to kind of, uh, finding the pattern of the common, of the regular. Some people are more, "Wait a minute, this is kinda weird." I mean, a lot of those people probably become scientists too. Like, "Huh."

Garry Nolan 24:31 Hmm.

Lex Fridman 24:32 Like, there's this pattern happening over and over and over, and then something weird just happened, and then you get excited by that weirdness and start to pull the string and discover what is at the core of that weirdness.

Garry Nolan 24:46 Right.

Lex Fridman 24:46 And perhaps i- i- is that... You know, maybe by way of question, how does the human perception system deal with anomalous information, do you think?

Garry Nolan 24:57 Well, it first tries to classify it and get it out of the way. If it's not food, if it's not sex, right? If it's not (laughs) uh, in the way of my desires, or if it is in the way of my desires, then you focus on it. And so the, I think, the question is how much spare processing power, how much CPU cycles do we spend on things that are not those core desires?

Lex Fridman 25:28 What, uh, is the most kind of, um, memorable, powerful UFO encounter report you ever heard? Just so you pers- on a personal level, like something that was really powerful.

Garry Nolan 25:42 Well, I mentioned the Zimbabwe one. That's particularly interesting. And one that actually most people don't know about, but family driving down the highway, two little girls in the back, open glass-topped car, and the little girls see a craft right over their car. This is in the middle of the day on a busy highway. The mother sees it. Nobody can... They look around, nobody else seems to see it, so the girls take out their camera, take a picture of it. And then they get home, uh, they look at the picture. There's no craft, but there's a little object about 30 feet above their car or so, probably about three feet across, kind of star shaped. It's not the craft, but it's something else. There's obviously, there was something there. And so what were they seeing? Were they seeing a projection? Were they seeing... And why were only they seeing it?

Lex Fridman 26:48 And the photograph was capturing something very different than they were seeing.

Garry Nolan 26:53 Correct.

Lex Fridman 26:53 There's still an object. What, can you give a little bit of context? Is this from modern day?

Garry Nolan 26:59 It's modern day. Oh yeah, they had a camera. I mean, okay, they had a cell phone camera.

Lex Fridman 27:02 And this was like a, a-

Garry Nolan 27:03 About four or five years ago.

Lex Fridman 27:04 ... report provided... By the way, where is like a central place to provide a report? Is this, is this become-

Garry Nolan 27:09 Oh, there's MUFON, but this isn't public. I've seen the picture.

Lex Fridman 27:12 Oh, this is something you've directly interacted with?

Garry Nolan 27:14 Yeah. Yeah. I've seen the picture.

Lex Fridman 27:16 So those moments like that, they captivate your, uh, your mind.

Garry Nolan 27:22 Well, it's so, it's so different and it doesn't fall into the standard story at all, but it also, but it, in another way, it's kind of a, it's a clear enunciation of this notion that when people see events, they don't all see the same thing. Now, we've heard this about like traffic accidents. Different people will see the color of the car differently or the chain of events differently, and just tells you that memory isn't anywhere near what we think it is. But the issue around these so-called UFO reports is that the same people will see a very different thing, almost as if whatever it is is projecting a, is projecting something into the mind rather than it being real, right? Rather than it being a real manifestation, you know, material in front of you, it's actually almost some sort of an altered virtual reality that is imposed on you. I mean, you know, I think the company Meta and all the virtual reality companies would love to have something like that-

Lex Fridman 28:25 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 28:26 ... right? Where you don't have to actually wear something on your face-

Lex Fridman 28:29 Yes.

Garry Nolan 28:29 ... to experience a virtual reality. What happens if you could just project it?

Lex Fridman 28:33 Well, that's the fundamental question from an alien perspective. When you look at a, or as we humans look at ants, how does its perception system operate? So not only how does this thing's mind operate, how does the human mind operate, but how does it, their perception system operate so that we can like stimulate the perception system-

Garry Nolan 28:54 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 28:54 ... properly to get them to think certain things. And so, uh, you know, (laughs) that's a really important question. But humans think that, um, you know, the only way to communicate is in like 3D or 4D space time, there's physical objects, or maybe you write things in a certain kind of language, but there could be just a, so much more, um, richness in how you can communicate. And so from an alien perspective where somebody has much greater technological capabilities, you have to figure out, "How do I use the skills I have to stimulate-"

Garry Nolan 29:32 Right.

Lex Fridman 29:33 "... uh, the human, the limited humans?"

Garry Nolan 29:35 Right. Well, I mean, let's take the ants exam- again as an example. Let's say that you wanted to make ants practical. You wanted to use them for something, right? You wanted to use them as a form of biological robot. Now, DARPA and other, uh, people have been trying to use insects for, you know, and to turn them into biological robots. But if you wanted to, you, you would have to interact with their sense of smell, right? Their pheromone system that they use to interact with each other. So you would either create those molecules to talk to them, to make them do. I'm not saying talk to them as if they're intelligent, but talk to them to manipulate them in ways that you want. Or if you were...... advanced enough, you would use some sort of electromagnetic or other means to stimulate their neurons in ways that would accomplish the same goal as the pheromones but by doing it in a sort of telefactoring way. So let's say you wanted to telefactor with humans. You would interact with them, and this is, again, this is a technology which you could imagine possible. You could telefactor information into the sensory system of a human, right? But then each human is a little bit different so either you know enough about them to tailor it to that individual or you just basically take advantage of whatever the sensory net is that that individual has. So if you happen to be good at sound or you happen to be a very visually inclined individual, then maybe the sensory information that you get that's most effective in terms of transmitting information would come through that portal.

Lex Fridman 31:17 I think the aliens would need to figure out that humans value physical consistency, so we've discovered physics. So we want (laughs) our perception to make sense. Maybe they don't, they haven't, you know... That's not an obvious fact of perception that you have to figure out what kind of things are humans used to observing in this-

Garry Nolan 31:39 Right.

Lex Fridman 31:39 ... particular environment of Earth, and how do we stimulate the perception system in a way that's, uh, not anomalous or not too-

Garry Nolan 31:49 Right.

Lex Fridman 31:49 ... doesn't cross the threshold of just like, "Well, that's way too weird."

Garry Nolan 31:53 Right.

Lex Fridman 31:53 So they have to... (laughs) I mean, that's not obvious that that should be important, you know. Maybe you wanna err on the side of, uh, anomaly, like lean into the weirdness, so communication is complicated. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 32:06 Yeah. Well, that's why I always, I always find this issue of people talking about the so-called grays as interesting because it, it, it is related to what you're saying. They're different enough but they're not so different as to be scary, right? They're not venom dripping fangs, right? They're different enough but they, they all... It's also like they're, they're what you could imagine us becoming in some distant future. So is that a purposeful representation? I don't know. I mean, I don't believe in the grays, for instance, but I believe that people think that they see it. So if, if we're talking about a communication strategy that says, you know, "We're, we're like you but not the same as you," this might be a manifestation that you, that you represent in terms of a communication strategy.

Lex Fridman 33:00 What do you make of David Fravor's sighting of the Tic Tac UFO and other pilots who have, uh, seen these objects that seem to defy the laws of physics?

Garry Nolan 33:12 Well, I think you have to take them at their word. Um-

Lex Fridman 33:17 Are they fascinating to you, these reports?

Garry Nolan 33:18 Oh, absolutely. No, I know, I know a lot of these people, right? So I, I know Lue Elizondo, Chris Mellon, the whole crowd. I've been... I, I saw the videos about three weeks or so before they went public. I was, um, at a bar with Lue-

Lex Fridman 33:36 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 33:36 ... overlooking the Pentagon, um, in Crystal City and they showed them to me and my hair stood on end.

Lex Fridman 33:42 Wow.

Garry Nolan 33:42 And he said, he said, "This is..." He said, "This is coming out soon." And I, I know one of the guys on the inside who was the naval intelligence who had interviewed all of these pilots, again, before this came out and it was hair-raising to hear this, uh, but also exciting-

Lex Fridman 34:01 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 34:01 ... that, you know, here's not just people's testimony. These are credible individuals. And if you've seen the 60 Minute episode with, uh, some of the pilots, uh, you know, they have no monetary gain. If anything, they've got negative gain, uh, from coming out. But then you also have all of the simultaneous, uh, ship analysis from the USS Princeton and the radar analysis, et cetera. So, um, you know, at the end of the day, it's just data. It's not a conclusion. Um, I'm, I'd be perfectly happy, honestly perfectly happy if somebody sh- showed that it was all a hoax and I could go back to my day job-

Lex Fridman 34:42 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 34:43 ... right?

Lex Fridman 34:44 That could be a hoax but other things might not be. I mean-

Garry Nolan 34:47 Right.

Lex Fridman 34:47 This is the point. I, I mean, what... This is why it's nice to remove some of the stigma about this topic because it's all just data and-

Garry Nolan 34:55 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 34:56 ... uh, and anomalous events are such that there's going to be... They're going to be rare in terms of how much data they represent. But we have to consider the full range of data to discover the things that actually represent something that's, um... If we pull at it, we'll discover-

Garry Nolan 35:14 Right.

Lex Fridman 35:14 ... something that's extraterrestrial or something deep about the phenomena on Earth that we don't yet understand.

Garry Nolan 35:22 Right. Well, if it only stimulates people, for instance, to think, "Okay, well what happens if we could move like that with momentumless movement?" And, and it stimulates young individuals to go into the sciences to ask those questions, that to me is fascinating. I mean, after I've been openly talking about this in the last year especially, I've had a number of, uh, students from top schools who aren't my students come to me and say, "If I can help, let me. How can I help? I never had thought about this before but you opened... You and others, not just you, and others have opened my mind to thinking about this matter."

Lex Fridman 36:06 Yeah, that's why it's actually funny that, uh, uh, Elon Musk doesn't think too much about this, uh, these kinds of propulsion systems that could defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them. To me-... it's a powerful way to think what- what is possible.

Garry Nolan 36:23 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 36:23 It's, uh, it's inspiring even if some of the-

Garry Nolan 36:26 Yes.

Lex Fridman 36:26 ... data doesn't represent, uh, uh, extraterrestrial vehicles. I think the- the observation itself, it's like, uh, something you mentioned, which is, uh, you know, hypothesizing, imagining these things, considering the possibility of these things, I think opens up your mind in a way that, um, ultimately can create the technology.

Garry Nolan 36:49 Right.

Lex Fridman 36:49 First, you have to believe the technology is possible before you can create it.

Garry Nolan 36:53 Right. In my own lab, you know, we always look for, as- as I've said before, what is inevitable. And, you know, saying, "Inevitably, this is the kind of data we need, but if we need that kind of data, the instrument we want isn't... doesn't exist."

Lex Fridman 37:10 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 37:10 Okay, so I imagine the perfect instrument, I can't make it, and you back into something which is practical and then you, in a sense, reverse engineer the future-

Lex Fridman 37:22 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 37:22 ... of what it is that you wanna make. And I've started and sold, like, at least half a dozen or more companies using that basic premise. And so it was always something that didn't exist today, but we imagined what we wanted. And at the time, many people said it couldn't be done. I mean, for instance, all the gene therapy that's done today with retroviruses came from a group meeting in David Baltimore's lab. I was a postdoc with him, and one of the other postdocs wasn't able to d- u- make retroviruses in a way that he wanted to, and I realized I had a cell line that would allow us to make retroviruses in two days rather than two months. And so he and I then worked together to make that system, and now all gene therapy with retroviruses is done using this basic approach-

Lex Fridman 38:13 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 38:13 ... around the whole world because something couldn't be done and we wanted to do it better and we imagined the future. And so that's, I think, what the whole UFO phenomenon is doing for people is like, "Well, let's imagine a future where these kinds of technologies are, but also let's imagine a future where we don't blow ourselves up," right? So if these things are there, they managed to not blow themselves up. So it means that at least one other civilization got past the inflection point.

Lex Fridman 38:47 So if some of the encounters are actually representing alien civilizations visiting us, why do you think they're doing so? The... You suggested that perhaps it's to s- study and understand their own past, right?

Garry Nolan 39:02 Right.

Lex Fridman 39:03 What- what- what are some of the motivations do you think, and again, from- from our perspective, us as humans, what motivations would we have when we approach other civilizations we might discover in the future?

Garry Nolan 39:15 Well, I think one motivation might be to steer us away from the precipice, right? Or on the assumption that, you know, even if we make it past the precipice, at least, uh, we're not a bunch of psychopaths, you know, running around. So maybe there's a little bit of motivation there to make sure that your... the neighbor that's growing up next to you is not, you know, unruly. Um, you know, but, I mean, m- maybe it's sort of a moral imperative like what we have with, you know, creating, uh, national parks where animals can continue to live out their lives in a natural way.

Lex Fridman 39:57 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 39:58 Um, I don't know. I mean, that would be... Uh, I mean, w- the problem is we're imagining from a anthropomorphic viewpoint what an alien might think. And as I've said before, alien means alien, right? I mean, not Hollywood aliens, but a whole different way of thinking and a whole different level of experience, and let's say wisdom hopefully, uh, that we could only hope to understand. Now, but if we ever get out there, if we ever make it past our current problems, uh, and even if we don't have faster-than-light travel and even if we're only using ram scoops or light sails to get where we wanna go, uh, and it takes us 10,000 years to s- get somewhere or to spread out, um, we might encounter such things. And are we just gonna stomp all over it like we did in colonial South America or Africa or all the rest? On our current path, likely. You know, and- and so what are we gonna learn?

Lex Fridman 41:06 Well, we- we're getting better and better at understanding what is life.

Garry Nolan 41:10 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 41:11 And I think we're getting better and better being careful not to step on it when we- when we see it. And I- I... This is one of the nice things about talking about UFOs is it expands the Overton window. It expands our understanding of what possibly could be life.

Garry Nolan 41:27 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 41:28 It gets us to think, it gets the scientific community to think when we go to Mars, we'll g- w- when we go to these different moons that p- possibly have life, you know, we're not looking at, uh, legged organisms. We're looking at some kind of complexity-

Garry Nolan 41:44 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 41:45 ... that, uh, arises in resistance to the natural world.

Garry Nolan 41:51 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 41:51 And, um, there's a lot of interesting def- def-

Garry Nolan 41:54 I like that, resistance to the natural world.

Lex Fridman 41:56 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 41:57 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 41:57 So s- somehow there's a rebellious process, complex system going on here. And I- I don't know, you know, the- the many ways it could take form. And there- there's a sense, you know, for aliens that as the technology develops, they take form more and more in- in... as information-

Garry Nolan 42:16 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 42:17 ... as something that can influence the space of- of ideas, of the-... processing of data itself. So I just, uh, this idea of embodiment that we humans so admire, physically visible, perceivable embodiment may be a very, uh, inefficient thing.

Garry Nolan 42:38 Right.

Lex Fridman 42:39 Right? (laughs)

Garry Nolan 42:39 If you think just about, you know, your area, AI, you know, we are- we are trying to make smaller and smaller and smaller, uh, circuitry that is, uh, basically closer and closer to the physics of how th- the universe operates, right? Right down at the level of, I mean, quantum computers are basically right down about quantum information storage. So fast-forward 10,000, 100,000 years, maybe somebody found a way to embody AI directly into the physics of the universe, right? And it doesn't require physical manifestation. It just- it just sits in space-time. It's just a- a locally ordered space. W- we are just locally ordered space-time.

Lex Fridman 43:27 Mm-hmm. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 43:27 Right? You know, I mean, people, uh, uh, but maybe they just- they found a way to embody it there.

Lex Fridman 43:33 They probably have to get really good at not, you know, trampling on the ants.

Garry Nolan 43:38 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 43:38 Because the- the better your technology gets, the easier it is to accidentally, like, oops-

Garry Nolan 43:43 Right.

Lex Fridman 43:44 ... (laughs) just destroy these simpleton biological systems.

Garry Nolan 43:48 We constantly think about whatever these things might be. We think that they are some sort of a unified force. Well, maybe they're not unified. Maybe they are as disparate as you and I are. And maybe what keeps them from stomping all over the ants is each other, right? That they are in a self-tension to prevent one or more of them from running amok.

Lex Fridman 44:18 Oh, uh, yeah. I mean, that's kind of the anarchy of nations that we have on Earth.

Garry Nolan 44:21 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 44:21 So there's- there's always, (laughs) we're- there's always going to be this, um-

Garry Nolan 44:27 There's a hierarchy.

Lex Fridman 44:28 ... this hierarchy that's formed of greater and greater intelligences.

Garry Nolan 44:31 Right, right.

Lex Fridman 44:31 And they're all probably also wondering, "Wait, what's bigger than me?"

Garry Nolan 44:35 E- exactly. That's what I always wonder is that maybe that they're- what keeps them in line is something that is beyond them.

Lex Fridman 44:43 Like, what created the universe? I mean, that in- that- that's probably a question that bothers them too. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 44:48 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 44:49 Um, what about the communication task itself? How hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans? So d- is- is that something you, um, think about, about this barrier of communication between biological systems and something else? How difficult is it to find a common language?

Garry Nolan 45:08 Well, I think if you're smart enough or technologically enabled enough, it's relatively straightforward. Um, now, whether your concepts can ever be dumbed down to us, that might be hard.

Lex Fridman 45:29 (laughs) Yeah.

Garry Nolan 45:30 I- I mean-

Lex Fridman 45:31 Again, talking to the ants.

Garry Nolan 45:32 Talking to the ants. I mean, they don't-

Lex Fridman 45:33 On Instagram. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 45:35 So...

Lex Fridman 45:38 (laughs) You wanna look good in this picture. Let me explain to you how do you look-

Garry Nolan 45:40 Let me explain to you why.

Lex Fridman 45:41 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 45:42 Yeah. So that's the essential problem of, you know, perhaps they realize who it is that they're talking to and they say, "We are... Rather than muddy the picture, we're only gonna give them limited information."

Lex Fridman 46:01 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 46:01 Right? And yeah, maybe we could sit down, like you and I, and have a conversation. But then they would make assumptions- the humans would then make assumptions about us that aren't true 'cause we're not humans, right? So let's stay at arm's length. Let's just let them know that we're here, right? And here's the limited amount of- of communication. Again, this- this notion that if you give somebody everything, they'll get lazy. And, you know, if- if they've been around as long as they have, they've seen every kind of thing that can go wrong.

Lex Fridman 46:36 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 46:37 And so it's- it's they know, as much as they might want to step in, that would be a wrong thing.

Lex Fridman 46:45 Yeah, you have to also understand the- the- the amount of wisdom they carry.

Garry Nolan 46:50 Yeah. You know, and so it's- it's very easy as well for religions to- I don't wanna- I don't wanna get into a whole religious conversation, but it- you could- very easy for reli- you could see how religions could call them angels or devils or what have you. Because, again, if you're trying to fit it into a framework of cultural understanding, um, the first thing you reach for is God. And so it- it- when you- when you look at what these things are, and again, it- with the angels and the devils, uh, in a similar sort of way, their communication is limited. They just kind of give little what's the o- the Oracle of Delphi. They kind of give these Delphic pronouncements and then it's up to you to figure out what it is that they really mean.

Lex Fridman 47:41 Steven Greer, uh, claimed that a skeleton discovered in Atacama region of Chile might be an alien. You reached out to him and, uh, took on the task of proving or disproving that with the rigor of science. The result is a paper titled Whole genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia. Can you tell this full story?

Garry Nolan 48:08 The story was, as you put it right there, correct. Reached out, got a sample of the body, did the DNA sequencing, then worked with a team of, uh, two other Stanford scientists and, uh, Roche Sequencing group.... Roche Diagnostics, and probably a total team of about 11 or so people. Um, and as is, as is standard in these kinds of things, the professors actually don't do the work. (laughs) The students do the work and figured out the answer, uh, and then we helped them put together the story. Uh, and the story was simply that, uh, it was human, a hundred percent. I went into it thinking it was originally a monkey of some sort. Um, I got kind of excited a few months into the process thinking, "Well, what happens if it is an alien?" Right?

Lex Fridman 49:06 Yeah. Can you, uh, describe some of the characteristics of the skeleton that make it unique and interesting?

Garry Nolan 49:10 Primarily, it had dysmorphias of the, of the brain. Um, and so the first thing I did actually when I got pictures of it, I took it to a local expert at Stanford, uh, and, uh, he was, um, on the paper. And, uh, he- he was the world expert in pediatric bone dysmorphias. Th- he literally wrote the book-

Lex Fridman 49:32 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 49:33 ... and, on this. 'Cause that's what you do, you go to an expert when it's outside of your field of, of interest. And he said, "Well, I haven't seen this particular collection of mutations before, uh, or this, uh, this physiology before, but here's what I think it might be." Um, and he said, "But based on the size of the, of the thing and the bone density, it would appear to be like six or seven years old." Now again, that's the, that's the thing where I, I think the lay public doesn't understand or takes a speculation like that and turns it into a fact. No one ever said that it was that age. We only said that the bones made it look like it was that age.

Lex Fridman 50:21 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 50:21 But then we went back and looked for, uh, genetic explanations of why things might look the way they did. And if you, again, read the paper, it's very carefully caveated to say that these mutations might result in this. But what we did find was, an- an unexpectedly large number of mutations associated with bone growth-

Lex Fridman 50:46 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 50:46 ... in this individual. And it was just a bad roll of the dice, right? You roll the dice enough times with enough people born every year, and some of them will roll the wrong dice all at once. So, the sad part about it was individuals in the UFO community who wanted to think that there was some sort of conspiracy around it, right? That somebody had somehow convinced all of my students, uh, to lie.

Lex Fridman 51:20 Dang.

Garry Nolan 51:20 I mean, come on. You know, I would lose my, I would lose my job, first of all, uh, and they would all be, uh, you know, in trouble forever.

Lex Fridman 51:31 Yeah. But also it's just projecting malevolence onto people that doesn't, I don't think exists in normal populous and especially doesn't exist in the scientific community.

Garry Nolan 51:41 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 51:42 The kind of people that go into science, I mean, this is what bothers me with the current distrust of science, is they're, they, they might be naive.

Garry Nolan 51:50 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 51:50 They might, they might not, especially in modern science, look at the big picture, philosophical, ethical questions, all that kind of stuff. But ultimately they're, uh, people with integrity and just a deep curiosity for the discovery of cool-

Garry Nolan 52:06 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 52:06 ... little things. And there's no, um, uh, there's no malevolence, uh, broadly speaking in the scientific community. And so, I mean, there's a bigger story here which is, you know, there's a hunger in the populous to discover something anomalous, something new. And, um, you know, science has to be both open to the anomalous but also to reject the anomalous when the data doesn't support it.

Garry Nolan 52:37 Right.

Lex Fridman 52:37 What, what do you make of that, you know, walking that line for you? Because you're dealing with UFO encounters, you're dealing with, with the anomalous.

Garry Nolan 52:45 Well people have said, uh, let's go back to the Atacama case that I was debunking it.

Lex Fridman 52:51 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 52:52 Well, debunking is a loaded term. It sort of assumes that you were going in purposefully to prove something as wrong. I wasn't. I was just going in to collect the data. And, um, you know, I, I showed that this one was human. There was another skull that somebody had at one point, it was called the Starchild, they called it the Starchild skull. I said, you know, I looked at it, I looked at the DNA sequencing that they had done, I said, "This is human." End of story. Um, the people who owned the thing at the time disagreed with me and then eventually another group came in and proved that I was right. And it's not about debunking, it's about getting the more spectacular and hyped cases off the table. I mean, the reason I got interested in it is because somebody was hyping it.

Lex Fridman 53:40 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 53:41 And not because I wanted to disprove it, but because I just wanted to know.

Lex Fridman 53:44 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 53:44 And let's get it off the table, 'cause it's usually the most extravagant things that are most likely to be wrong. Somewhere i- in the rubble will be something interesting. And so that's what you do, you get the, you get the, the, the dross off the table and then somewhere in the data will be something worth, uh, real inquiry.

Lex Fridman 54:09 And that's, if you inquire deeply enough, will be extravagant as well.

Garry Nolan 54:13 Yes. Exactly.

Lex Fridman 54:15 And that's what actually excites scientists as to, I mean, you want with the rigor of science to actually reveal the extravagant.

Garry Nolan 54:24 And so look at CRISPR as probably the most perfect example of that. These weird...... sequences in bacterial genomes all arrayed one after the other with these strange sequences around them. But when you looked at the sequences, they looked like viruses. And so how did they get there? And lo and behold, after, you know, a lot of effort and work, well, a couple of Nobel Prizes went out the door, but these strange things ended up having extraordinarily extravagant possibilities.

Lex Fridman 54:57 You've also looked at UFO materials. You are in possession of UFO materials yourself.

Garry Nolan 55:03 Claimed UFO materials.

Lex Fridman 55:05 C- claimed?

Garry Nolan 55:07 Alleged.

Lex Fridman 55:07 Alleged UFO materials, that's right. So (laughs) what's another term? Weird materials that don't seem to, uh, uh, how do you say-

Garry Nolan 55:15 That have a story.

Lex Fridman 55:16 They have a (laughs) ... They have a story that doesn't seem to be of natural origins, but it, it's not... You know, there's a process to proving that and that process may, uh, take decades if not centuries because you have to keep pulling (laughs) at the, at the string and discover where they could possibly come from. But anyway, you, you are in possession of some materials of this kind. Can you, um, describe some of them and maybe also talk to the process of how you investigate them, how you analyze them?

Garry Nolan 55:50 Right. So let's say that there's two classes of materials that I've been given by people, and they're not given by, like, the government or anything, just given, people who've collected them and there's a, a reasonable chain of evidence associated with them that you believe is not just a pebble somebody picked up off a road. Um, there are almost always things that people have claimed have either been dropped off as, like, some sort of a leftover material, molten metals, or, um, they are from a- an object that was released from this or that kind of ex- ex- exploded. They're almost always metals. I have some, couple of things that might be biological that are interesting that I haven't really spent a lot of time on yet. When you l- look at a metal, you basically go, "Okay, well, what are the elements in it?"

Lex Fridman 56:41 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 56:42 And, "What's it made of?" And so there's pretty standard approaches to doing that. Most of them involve a technology called mass spectrometry, uh, and there's probably about five or six different kinds of mass spectrometry that you could bring to bear on answering it. And they either tell you, depending upon the limit of the resolution of the instrument, they either tell you the elements that are there or they tell you the isotopes that are there. And you're interested not just in knowing whether something is there or not. You are interested in knowing whether there are, you know, the, the amounts of it, the, the... and in the case of elements, how many different isotopes are there? And, and that's kind of where in some of these cases it gets interesting, right? Because on, in at least one of the materials as we first studied it, the isotope ratios of, in this case it was magnesium, were way off normal. And I, I just don't know why. It do- doesn't, it doesn't prove anything. It just pr- all it proves is that it was probably accomplished by some kind of an industrial process. Whether it's the result of a process or whether... and, and this is sort of the leftover, or whether it was made that way for a particular purpose, I don't know. All I know is that it, it was engineered. That's it, right? But then it's... Th- the question is, as you sort of, you go one step deeper, why would you engineer it?

Lex Fridman 58:20 Right. W- why eng- and what does e- engineered means? There's all kinds of... It could be a byproduct. It could be, um, the main result of an engineering process. It might be a small part of the engineering process that is the main part.

Garry Nolan 58:39 Mm-hmm. Well, so the ratios of isotopes for any given element are basically the result of stellar processes. Uh, a supernova blew up sometime several tens, you know, several billion years ago, uh, that became a cloud. Those atoms coalesced gravitationally to form another sun, uh, and a, a ring that became a rocky planet, uh, and the ratios of the isotopes were determined at the time of that explosion. And so everything in the local solar system is more or less of that ratio depending upon certain gravitational diff- but, but by, uh, fragments of a percent-

Lex Fridman 59:26 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 59:27 ... not whole tens of percent difference. So what do humans use isotopes for? Mostly to blow stuff up. I mean, the, the vast majority of the isotopes that have been made in, in the per pound or ton are things like certain ratios of plutonium and uranium to blow stuff up. W- we don't make or engineer isotopes, which it's, it's today is relatively easy to do, but it's still expensive, for any other reason apart from, let's say, uh, as, uh, anti-cancer. Um, we use stable isotopes in money these days as a counterfeiting tool. You basically embed certain ratios of isotopes in to make it harder for counterfeiters to accomplish. Um, and so, but other than that, we don't do anything with that. So why would you make grams of such material in this one case and drop it around on a beach in Brazil?

Lex Fridman 1:00:25 So which case are we talking about here? Describe that Brazil case.

Garry Nolan 1:00:27 This is the, this is the Ubatuba case.

Lex Fridman 1:00:30 Can you describe this case a little bit further-

Garry Nolan 1:00:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:00:32 ... like what material we're, we're talking about? Just the full story of the case?

Garry Nolan 1:00:36 So, um-

Lex Fridman 1:00:36 It's an interesting one.

Garry Nolan 1:00:37 It's an interesting one. So, a, a fisherman saw an object that, uh, released something or it, it, it exploded. And it was this r- r- rela- I'm, you know, I've got b- some big chunks of it, uh, relatively pure magnesium with obviously something else in it 'cause magnesium burns. So, it, it had something in it that would a- other metals, simple alloy, that would prevent it from, from, uh, basically burning up. Um, and so the question is... And so, so then we had, we had two pieces that came from, um, two different chains of custody both claimed to be from the same object. At least, uh, physically when you look at the two things they look the same, right? So, we took small fragments of each of them. We put them in an instrument called a secondary ion mass spec, uh, which is an extremely sensitive instrument and it can see down to .0001 mass units, uh, which is important for, let's say, more ar- arcane reasons, but, um, it's a sensitive instrument. And so one of the chains of custody, t- we had two pieces from the same chain of custody and then two pieces from the other chain of custody. O- o- one of them had completely normal, uh, magnesium isotope ratios, magnesium 24, 25, 26, and the other was off. Well, not just like slightly off, way off, and they were both off to the same extent. So, uh, I mean, it was sort of like you had an internal control of what was normal and then you had this other one which was, which was wrong. And so you're left with, uh, a s- kind of an open question: was this a hoax? W- were these two chains of custody one of them a hoax, that somebody purposefully introduced those things? 'Cause you could do it. It would cost a lot. I mean, at the time that this was found, I guess the 1970s or so, um, might've been earlier, I forget, uh, the amount that I had would have cost several tens of thousands of dollars to make. Um, and again, it's not something you would just throw around. And, and why would you do it in the hope that some guy 30 years from then would, would pick it up and study it?

Lex Fridman 1:03:02 Yeah, it's a very subtle, subtle troll.

Garry Nolan 1:03:05 It's, yeah, it's a long-term plan.

Lex Fridman 1:03:06 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:03:07 Um, so, so I, I just don't know... I just don't know what to make of it, except it's interesting. But it's... But... So a, a different kind of question that you're asking is, what constitutes evidence? Right? So, is, is this sufficient evidence? Absolutely not. But somebody's put it forward. I have the time. It's my time. I'll study it, and I... My objective is to sort of take those that I think are credible enough and do a reasonable analysis, put it out there, and maybe somebody else will come up with an idea as to what it is. Now, what would be better is some sort of true technology, right? Something that is obviously... But we don't have it, you know? And people like, uh, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostak have come out rightfully and have said, you know, "When you show up with, you know, uh, something really obviously technology that we don't understand, you know, then we'll pay attention," right?

Lex Fridman 1:04:16 Not just material.

Garry Nolan 1:04:17 Not just material. A piece of metal is, is interesting, uh, but... A- and several of the things that I've looked at and things that people... other things that people have come to me with, we found to be completely banal or were actually pieces of aircraft that were invented back in the 1940s.

Lex Fridman 1:04:38 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:04:38 And so, take them off the table.

Lex Fridman 1:04:40 See, but I... (laughs) I think, um... Again, I think showing up with technology that we humans would find completely novel is actually a really difficult task for aliens, because it obviously can't be so novel that we don't recognize it-

Garry Nolan 1:04:58 For what it is, yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:04:59 ... for what it is. And so... And I would say most of the technology aliens likely have would be something we don't recognize. (laughs) So they... It's actually a hard problem how to convince ants-

Garry Nolan 1:05:10 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:05:11 Like, you first have to understand what ants are tweeting about-

Garry Nolan 1:05:16 (laughs) Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:05:16 ... like, what, what they care about, in order to, like, inject into their culture. Because, uh, you know, that's why I think it would be... the technology that you could present is in the space of ideas, is in the... It's, it's try to influence individual humans and... with the encounters-

Garry Nolan 1:05:35 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:05:35 ... and try to... W- with this kind of thing that, that you mentioned about, uh, us not taking... messages about us not taking care of the world. It's difficult to c- I mean, I... to... for them to understand that you have to come up with trinkets that impress us, I mean, maybe the very technology, the fascination with the development of technology and the development of technology, the actual act of innovation itself is the thing that they're communicating.

Garry Nolan 1:06:05 Right. Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:06:06 I mean, this is kind of what, you know, Jacques Vallee thinks about, is the role of... (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:06:11 The control system, he calls it.

Lex Fridman 1:06:13 The control system. Well, let me, uh, ask about Jacques, uh... Who is he? Um,

Lex Fridman 1:06:19 you know him. Who is Jacques Vallee? What have you learned from him? About life, about... (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:06:27 Oh, God.

Lex Fridman 1:06:27 About... (laughs) About UFOs, about technology, about our role in the universe.

Garry Nolan 1:06:33 Well, I met Jacques actually soon after the whole Atacama thing happened. Um, I was visited by those people associated with the government and the, whatever around the, um, the Havana s-, what ended up l- mostly being Havana syndrome patients, but also Jacques at the same time. And, y- they were actually working behind the scenes with each other. Said, "Oh, here's this Stanford professor who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things. Um, maybe we should go talk to him." And he, he reached out through a colleague and he and I had lunch, actually, um, at the Rosewood Inn, um, up on, uh, near Sand Hill. So Jacques is one of the first openly active scientists, uh, and he's really a scientist, in this area, g- g- going back to the 1960s. Um, and, uh, you know, he's put forward a number of ideas, speculations about what it might be that people are inter- interacting with. And he... The first thing that I learned from him is this notion of what he called Kabuki theater, that many of the things that people have seen are... I remember reading his books and thinking, "He uses this word absurd a lot." Um, he said, "The- the things that people claim they see are absurd." Right? "A- a- a- a ship doesn't land in a farmer's field and then come up and knock on the door and say, 'Can I have a glass of water?'" And these are stories literally out of newspapers from the 1930s.

Lex Fridman 1:08:07 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:08:07 It's- it's absurd.

Lex Fridman 1:08:09 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:08:09 You know, and the other thing that people say, "Ships don't crash. If you're so technologically advanced, you don't crash. It's absurd-"

Lex Fridman 1:08:17 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:08:17 "... that they crash." So, um, he says, "This is put on as a show. It's meant to... It's an influence campaign."

Lex Fridman 1:08:28 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:08:28 Right? It's- it's not meant to influence individuals. It's meant to influence a culture as a whole. Maybe they don't look at us as individuals. Maybe they look at us as an organism that lives on a planet, right?

Lex Fridman 1:08:43 And perhaps rightly so.

Garry Nolan 1:08:45 And so that's how you interact with them. That's how you influence them. So that was one of the first things that kind of took me back and realized, "Wow, there's actually a... Maybe there's a puppet master behind the scenes that's, you know, doing this influencing and that all this stuff about aliens is just, is not true per se. They're just a representation of something"-

Lex Fridman 1:09:07 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:09:08 "... that is meant to influence." So that was probably the most interesting thing. I mean, the- the man is brilliant. Uh, he's also in- en- can be... And I'm sorry, Jacques. He can also be incredibly annoying to have a conversation with-

Lex Fridman 1:09:20 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:09:20 ... because he will pick apart your arguments or anything that you think you know and show you why you don't know what you think you know. And, and he uses the... He used the example that, for me, that is, is, is all you need is one counter-example to any conclusion and you're wrong. And so I learned from him. I mean, I'm supposed to be a good scientist, but I learned from him, "Don't talk about conclusions, just talk about the data. Because data's not wrong. I mean, convince yourself that the data's not wrong or not an artifact, but be careful about your conclusions because whatever is going on, it's- it's much more complicated than we- than we imagine."

Lex Fridman 1:10:03 Wow. That's powerful being able to s- always step back, because we get... We humans get excited.

Garry Nolan 1:10:07 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:10:07 We start to, uh, jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.

Garry Nolan 1:10:11 Well-

Lex Fridman 1:10:11 Powerful being able to s- always step back, because we get... We humans get excited.

Garry Nolan 1:10:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:10:15 We start to, uh, jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.

Garry Nolan 1:10:19 Well, in some of my Twitter feeds, when I dare to go on Twitter, are full of, "Well, when are you gonna give us the answer?" Well, y- you

Garry Nolan 1:10:27 know, science is not immediate. You're gonna have to be patient. And even some of my science colleagues have said, "Well, where's the data?" My answer to them has been, "Where's been your work to try to produce any?"

Lex Fridman 1:10:39 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:10:39 You know, I'm, I'm not here to give you everything on a silver platter.

Lex Fridman 1:10:43 We talked offline how much I love data and machine-

Garry Nolan 1:10:46 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:10:46 ... learning and so on. And, uh, it's been really disheartening to see the, the US government not invest as much as they possibly could into this whole process. So let's jump to the most recent thing, which is, what do you make of the report titled Preliminary Assessment-

Garry Nolan 1:11:04 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:11:05 ... Unidentified Aerial Phenomena that was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021? So this is... Was like, uh, "Okay, we're gonna step back and we're going to-"

Garry Nolan 1:11:17 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:11:17 "... like, what? Where do we stand and where do we hope the future is?" What do you make of that report? Is it hopeful? Is it, um...

Garry Nolan 1:11:24 I see it as very hopeful. Very hopeful. I think the adults are finally stepping up and- and being in charge, right? I mean-

Lex Fridman 1:11:32 In the good sense of adult.

Garry Nolan 1:11:33 What's that?

Lex Fridman 1:11:34 In the good sense of adult.

Garry Nolan 1:11:34 In the good sense of adult.

Lex Fridman 1:11:36 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:11:36 Um, you know-

Lex Fridman 1:11:37 Because childlike curiosity is pretty powerful thing.

Garry Nolan 1:11:40 That's true. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:11:41 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:11:41 I- I... It's... But it's also, I think, the people who were worried that the populous at large might run screaming into the streets and riot-

Lex Fridman 1:11:50 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:11:50 ... uh, you know, have... You know, they basically... The empiric evidence is they're wrong. You know, this, these videos and all these things have been out for now, what, five years? Most people don't even know about it. Right? So as- as- as hyped as it's been and all over the newspapers that it's been and et cetera, you know, even Tucker Carlson has talked about it many times on his news program. Um, Joe Rogan has. A lot of people don't know about it.

Lex Fridman 1:12:16 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:12:16 So I think people, if it's not affecting their day-to-day life, they're going on with their day-to-day life. So, but that said, I think it was an important sea change in the internal discussions going on in the government because, and, and the reason being...... that I, I think this is actually partly true with the, the maturation of human social technology. It was becoming so obvious that this stuff was showing up again and again and again around our ships, they just couldn't keep it quiet anymore, right? And so it's like we need to do something about it. And Lue Elizondo and Chris and others, to their great credit, found the right angle to talk about this. Says, "Well, okay, let's say it's not out there. Maybe it's the Russians, the Chinese or somebody else. We should know about this 'cause we damn sure know it's not us." So that, to me, is an important thing to, to finally be a little bit more open about the matter. But, like I often say, I'm not looking for people to give me permission to do anything. I'm just gonna do the analysis myself with what I have. Avi Loeb has taken the same approach. He said, "I'm not gonna wait for the government to give me telescopic information about technologies or, or things that might be even in our own solar system. I'm just gonna collect it myself." And, and that's the right way to do it, right? Don't wait for somebody else to give it to you.

Lex Fridman 1:13:48 It's also possible to inspire a large number of people to do a wider spread data collection.

Garry Nolan 1:13:55 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:13:55 I mean, you yourself can't do a large enough data collection that would... If you're talking about anomalous events-

Garry Nolan 1:14:02 Right, right.

Lex Fridman 1:14:04 ... you, you should be collecting high-resolution data about everything that's happening on Earth in terms of like, uh, in, in terms of the kind of things that would indicate to you a strong signal-

Garry Nolan 1:14:18 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:14:18 ... that something weird happened here.

Garry Nolan 1:14:20 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:14:20 And this is why, you know, governments can be good at funding large-scale efforts.

Garry Nolan 1:14:26 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:14:26 I mean, you know, NASA and so on, working with SpaceX, uh, with Blue Origin, uh, to, you know, fund, uh, capitalistic sort of fun companies, fun company efforts to do huge moonshot projects-

Garry Nolan 1:14:42 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:14:43 ... and in the same way, do huge moonshot data collection efforts in terms of UFOs. I mean, we're not... It needs to be like 10X, like one or two orders of magnitude more funding-

Garry Nolan 1:14:53 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:14:53 ... to do this kind of thing. And I, I understand on the flip side of that, if you make it about what are the Russians, what are the Chinese doing, you know, make it a question of geopolitics, it gets touchy because now you, you're kinda taking it away from the realm of science and-

Garry Nolan 1:15:11 Making it military.

Lex Fridman 1:15:12 ... making it military. Some of the greatest... This is what makes me, as an engineer, makes me truly sad, that some of the greatest engineering work ever done is by Lockheed Martin-

Garry Nolan 1:15:23 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:15:23 ... and we will never know about it.

Garry Nolan 1:15:25 Yeah. I agree. I agree. I, I wish we were, it was different, but, um, it's the world we live in. Um, you know, but related to that UAP Task Force announcement that you just said, you know, the bill was passed in the Department of Defense that now formally establishes an office-

Lex Fridman 1:15:44 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:15:44 ... to collate that information and also to be transparent about it. Money is now set aside, right?

Lex Fridman 1:15:52 What, well, what do you think of, just in case people don't know, the DoD established a new department to study, uh, UFOs called Airborne... Naming, come on. But yes.

Garry Nolan 1:16:03 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:16:03 Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. Eh, do you know how to pronounce that quickly?

Garry Nolan 1:16:09 No, I do not. No, and that's a stupid-

Lex Fridman 1:16:11 A-O-I-M-S-G.

Garry Nolan 1:16:12 It's stupid and needs to be renamed, but-

Lex Fridman 1:16:14 MSG. A-O-I-M-S-G. AO. All right. It's directed by the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. What do you make of this office? Do you, are you hopeful about this office?

Garry Nolan 1:16:26 I, I think there's still a tug of war going on behind the scenes as to who's gonna control this. Uh, but I do know, though, that money has been set aside that will be used to, uh, make things more public, right? To start to get, uh, others involved. And, um, you know, there's... I'm involved with an effort to get other a- academics involved.

Lex Fridman 1:16:51 So you think there might be some of that money could be directed towards funding maybe like groups like yours to do some research here?

Garry Nolan 1:16:58 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:16:59 So they would be open to that, you think?

Garry Nolan 1:17:01 I hope so. I mean, it, nothing is set in stone yet, so, you know, I, I... and I'm not hiding anything 'cause I just don't know anything, right? But I do, um, I do think that there will be, uh, public efforts. Now, there go- there, there are being set up other private efforts to bring monies involved and to use that to leverage, uh, and get access to some of the internal resources as well. So, um, what you're seeing is, uh, kind of an ecosystem building up, uh, in a positive sense, uh, of people who are willing to do the research. So, you know, before, it, it would be you couldn't even go to a scientist and ask them to help. Now, if there's money, as I said before, scientists are essentially capitalists. We go where the money is, you know? We don't... I mean, the work that I've done, I did out of my own pocket, uh, and probably about 50, 60, $70,000 of money went into the paper we published-

Lex Fridman 1:18:02 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:18:02 ... out of my own pocket. Um, and, you know, but the amount of money that needs to go in is in the, in at least a few millions to do a proper analysis of these materials. Th- the work I know that the Galileo Project is involved with, uh, it's probably in the, in the, you know, five to ten million range to get stuff done. But that's actually a relatively modest amount of money to accomplish something that has been in the zeitgeist for decades.

Lex Fridman 1:18:34 I, I should also push back a little bit on something you probably will agree with. You said scientists are essentially capitalists.What I've noticed is there's certainly an influence of money. But oftentimes, when you're talking about basic research and basic science, the money, um, is a little bit, a little bit amb-ambiguous to what direction you're doing the research in. And the scientists get really good at telling a narrative of like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're fulfilling the purpose of this funding, but we're actually..." They end up doing really what they're curious about.

Garry Nolan 1:19:08 Yes.

Lex Fridman 1:19:08 And of course, you cannot deviate, like, if you're getting funded to study penguins in Antarctica, you can't start building rockets. But probably you can, because you'll convince some kind... You'll concoct a narrative saying, "Rockets are really important for studying penguins in the Antarctic."

Garry Nolan 1:19:23 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:19:24 I, I, I think that's actually... This is one thing I think people don't generally understand about the scientific mind, is I don't know how capitalistic it is. Because if it was, they would start an effing company. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:19:39 No, no, no, no. I mean, when I meant capitalist, I didn't mean in the, uh, they'll, they'll, they'll start companies per se. I mean, we can only do the research where there's money.

Lex Fridman 1:19:50 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:19:50 And so from, from, you know, maybe it's a bad use of the term capitalist. So... But the... We will only do the research where there's money. I mean, why do most people work, uh, many biologists, uh, work in cancer research? Because there's a lot of money there. It's an important problem. But I might not have ever gotten involved in it if there wasn't money. I might have gone and... I was gonna be a botanist when I, when I was a kid. That's what I wanted to do. Um, so having money available will bring people to bear. Now, an- another mistake that's often actually made, I think, by the lay public about science is that people think that we're paid to do things. Just as you said, I get a research grant, and luckily from the NIH, they're, they give you a fair amount of latitude. Uh, I will go my own way and I'll find something... I might have proposed something, but I'll end up somewhere entirely different by the end of the project. And that's how good science is done. You follow the, you follow the data, you follow the, the results. Um, and so that's what I'm hoping can be done here. I think the worst kind of thing that could be done with this subject area is to put it inside another company where they have a set plan of what it is they're gonna do, and the scientists either tell... Do what the executives tell them to do or not. Uh, that isn't how anything will really get discovered. Put it... Get it out into the public, get open minds thinking about it, and then publishing on it and doing the right kind of work. That's how real progress will be made with this.

Lex Fridman 1:21:33 Let's again put, put our sort of philosophical hats on. Do you think the US government or some other government is in possession of something of extraterrestrial origin that is far more impressive than anything we've seen in the public?

Garry Nolan 1:21:54 If I... I've not seen anything personally, but if I believe the people who I don't think can lie, yes. This is-

Lex Fridman 1:22:03 How does that make you feel in terms of the way government works, the way our human civilization works, that there might be things like that and we're not... They're not public? Is, is, is there a hopeful message for transparency that's possible? Like, if you were, if you were, uh, in power, and I'm not saying president because maybe the president is not the, the source of power here, would you release this information in some way or form?

Garry Nolan 1:22:30 Yes, if I were. I, I think it would... I think it's... Uh, I think it's something that can bring humanity together, right? I think that knowledge of this kind of thing, to know that we are, you know, we are more alike than we are different in comparison to whatever this is, is, uh, is a positive thing for us. Um, and to know... You know, I don't necessarily care that the government has been hiding it, and I think, you know, people who've been talking about w- we should give government officials or whatever amnesty, I think that's probably the right, the right answer. We don't... This isn't a time to look back and say, "You did something wrong." You did whatever you did because that was the data you had available to you at the time and those... You had good reasons for doing it. Now, if your reasons were selfish, if your reasons were you wanted to do it because you wanted to monetize it yourself, uh, to the, to your benefit but against that of others, then I think maybe there's something else that could be said. But, you know, uh, an opportunity to get all this information out, if I were in charge, I would, I would try to do it. Now, I might be shown something though that says, "Hmm, there's a reason why you don't wanna let anybody know this." You know, may- maybe you don't want everybody have, having access to unlimited, uh, energy because maybe you might turn it into a bomb.

Lex Fridman 1:23:57 Or something that gives you hints that something like unlimited energy is possible, but you haven't figured it out yet. And if you make it public, maybe some of the other governments you have tensions with-

Garry Nolan 1:24:09 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:24:10 ... will figure it out first.

Garry Nolan 1:24:11 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:24:11 I mean, I...

Garry Nolan 1:24:13 It's kind of an arms race going on, I think.

Lex Fridman 1:24:15 In all forms, and it's, it makes me truly sad because, uh, it's obvious that, um, for example, the origins of the COVID virus, it's obvious to me that the Chinese government, whatever the origins are, is interested in not releasing information about it because it can only be bad for the Chinese government.

Garry Nolan 1:24:39 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:24:40 And every government thinks like this, like what... Uh, e- every... Actually, this has been a disappointment to me.... talking to PR folks at companies. Like, they're always nervous. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:24:53 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:24:54 They're always, like, conservative-

Garry Nolan 1:24:56 Right, right.

Lex Fridman 1:24:56 ... in the sense like, "Well, if we release more stuff, it can only be bad." And then an Elon Musk character comes along who tweets ridiculous memes and doesn't give a fuck. And I've been encouraging CEOs, I've been encouraging people to be transparent and... Of course, government is, national security is really, like, another level. It's human lives at stake. But let's start at the lighter case of just releasing some of the awesome insides of the te- how, how the sausage is made, the technology.

Garry Nolan 1:25:32 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:25:32 And being transparent about it, because it, it excites people, it, uh, like you said, it, it connects people, it, it inspires them. It's, uh, good for the brand. It's good for everybody.

Garry Nolan 1:25:45 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:25:45 I, I, I honestly think this kind of idea that people will steal the information and will use it against you is, um, is an idea that's not true and is the idea of the 20th century.

Garry Nolan 1:25:56 Right.

Lex Fridman 1:25:56 Like you said, some of the benefits of the social media, uh, our, our social world, is that transparency is beneficial. And I hope governments will learn that lesson. Of course, they're the-

Garry Nolan 1:26:07 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:26:07 ... usually the last to learn such lessons.

Garry Nolan 1:26:09 Right, right.

Lex Fridman 1:26:11 What do you make of Bob Lazar's story in terms of possession of aircraft? Do you believe him?

Garry Nolan 1:26:15 I don't believe in the Bob Lazar story, to be quite honest. I mean, I, uh, Jeremy Corbell has done a great job interviewing him and, uh, has done some, you know, beautiful, uh, documentaries. Um, I, I just don't... I, I... I don't know how to interpret it. And, um, you know, and again, there's some of the people who fraternize with... think it's all rubbish. Uh, yeah, but he, maybe he's right, but I don't know. I mean, the pr- the problem is... And, um... This is a little bit different about how I approach the whole area than a lot of others. I'm less interested in going over old paperwork and all these old histories of who said what, you know, the, the whole he-said-she-said of the history of, of UFOs.

Lex Fridman 1:27:09 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:27:10 I'm a scientist. I worked on the brain area because it's something I can collect data on. I can go back to the same individual, collect their MRI again, and redo it. I can hand that MRI to somebody else, they can analyze it. I can get materials, I can analyze them. I can get some of these skeletons, I won't touch any skeletons ever again, but I can analyze it and somebody else can reproduce the data.

Lex Fridman 1:27:34 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:27:35 I mean, that's what I'm good at. And so, you know, I'm... I, I, I'm not going to go into the whole... I'm not a historian.

Lex Fridman 1:27:43 Yeah, that's true, but there's a human side to it. (sighs) I want... Sometimes I think with these... Because, again, anomalous rare events, some of the data is inextricably connected to humans.

Garry Nolan 1:27:57 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:27:57 The observations.

Garry Nolan 1:27:58 Yeah. Right.

Lex Fridman 1:27:59 Um, I mean, I hope in the future, you know, that, that, that sensory data will not be polluted by human subjectivity. But, you know, that's still, that's still powerful data, even direct observations-

Garry Nolan 1:28:13 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:28:13 ... like if you talk about pilots. And so it's an interesting question to me whether Bob Lazar is telling the truth, whether he believes he's telling the truth too.

Garry Nolan 1:28:21 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:28:21 And what... Also, what impact his story and stories like his have on the willingness of governments to be transparent-

Garry Nolan 1:28:30 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:28:31 ... and so on. So m- m- m- you know, y- you have to credit his story for captivating the imagination of people and then getting the conversation going.

Garry Nolan 1:28:41 He's maintained his story for all these years with little to no change that I'm aware of, so... Um, but there's so many other people who are, let's say, experts in that story, um-

Lex Fridman 1:28:52 Their gut, you know, you accumulate a s- (gasps) a set of sort of, um, circumstantial evidence where your gut will say that somebody is, uh, not telling the truth.

Garry Nolan 1:29:04 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:29:05 You mentioned, uh, Avi Loeb. I forgot to ask you about Oumuamua.

Garry Nolan 1:29:10 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:29:11 You know, because you've analyzed specimens from here on Earth-

Garry Nolan 1:29:15 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:29:16 ... what do you make of that one? And what do you make broadly of our efforts to look f- look at rocks essentially or look at objects-

Garry Nolan 1:29:23 Mm-hmm.

Lex Fridman 1:29:24 ... flying around in our solar System? Is that a valuable pursuit? Or maybe s- most of the stories are, can be... Most of the fascinating things could be discovered here on Earth or on other nearby planets?

Garry Nolan 1:29:37 Just going to Oumuamua, uh, you know, I think Avi's insight is an interesting speculation, right? Like I was saying before, people can sometimes look at something and not see it for what it is. Many would just look at that and say, "Oh, it's an asteroid." And dismiss it. There was something odd about the data that Avi picked up on and said, "Well, here's an alternative explanation that doesn't fit, that actually better fits the models than it just being a rock." You know? And to his credit, he just has ignored the critics because he believes the data is real and is using that then as a battering ram to go after other things. So I think that's, I think that's great, you know?

Lex Fridman 1:30:25 Yeah, I... Uh, what, what is his main conclu- Does he say it could be of, uh, alien extraterrestrial origin? Is that his, his, uh-

Garry Nolan 1:30:32 Well, that's one of the things. I mean, he, uh, you know, he's explained how it could be a light sail.

Lex Fridman 1:30:36 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:30:36 Um, and a light sail is certainly within near human capabilities to make such a thing. I think Yuri Milner is, he's a Russian billionaire. He's involved, I think, in a project to make light sails with laser-... you know, to, to, uh, launch them with laser power, essentially, uh, towards Alpha Centauri.

Lex Fridman 1:31:02 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:31:02 Right? So it's something that humans could make. I think Avi's proposal is perfectly within the realm of possibility. I mean, sadly, the thing is, you know, now nearly out of our solar system.

Lex Fridman 1:31:16 Yeah. So, I mean, to me that's inspiring to do greater levels of data collection-

Garry Nolan 1:31:21 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:31:21 ... in our solar system, but also here on Earth. And it just seems like we should be constantly collecting, collecting data because the tools of software that we're developing get better and better at dealing with huge amounts of data. It's changing the nature of science. I mean, collect all of the data. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:31:36 Right. Collect the data. I mean, I, I, um, the Galileo Project asked me over the weekend to join, and I did.

Lex Fridman 1:31:42 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:31:43 So, um, you know, I'm not a specialist in any of the stuff that they're doing, uh, but, you know, in looking at the list of people who are on there, there are really no biologists on there. So at, at some point, if my expertise is required for something.

Lex Fridman 1:31:59 What's the goal and the vision of the Galileo Project?

Garry Nolan 1:32:01 Better talk to Avi, but my understanding and just actually looking at the, uh, at the, sort of the bylaws this morning, literally just got them-

Lex Fridman 1:32:10 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:32:10 ... um, is, uh, number one, collect the data on UAP and number two, collect data on, uh, local, potentially local technological artifacts.

Lex Fridman 1:32:22 I need to look into this. This is fascinating. And Avi is heading the Galileo Project?

Garry Nolan 1:32:26 Yeah. Have you spoken to him?

Lex Fridman 1:32:28 On this podcast, yes.

Garry Nolan 1:32:29 Okay.

Lex Fridman 1:32:29 That was bef- I believe it was before he was head-

Garry Nolan 1:32:32 Oh.

Lex Fridman 1:32:32 Is this a new creation?