Garry Nolan is a Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University,1 where he holds a chaired position and runs his own laboratory investigating human genetics with postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.2 He has published more than three hundred papers3 and developed around forty patents,4 and has started more than half a dozen companies based on technologies from his laboratory.3 He has also applied techniques from his laboratory to the analysis of purported exotic materials, publishing the first peer-reviewed paper to examine such materials.5
Nolan has said that human civilisation was transformed by something as small as a grain of silicon or germanium, the element underlying the integrated circuits that underpin modern computation and artificial intelligence.6 He has argued that studying even small samples of purported anomalous material could lead to benefits for humanity that are currently inconceivable.7 In his words: “What might be represented here could be hundreds of technology revolutions ahead of us. It could be more transformative for humanity than what the microprocessor accomplished. Imagine what we could do with even a grain of knowledge about how they operate."8
Colleagues have nominated Nolan for the Nobel Prize.9 Through Nolan, Luis Elizondo met the entrepreneur Sean Parker and the entertainer Lady Gaga, both of whom fund cancer research.10
William Livingston flew to California with a team that included Colm Kelleher and Jacques Vallée to meet Nolan.11 Livingston’s team brought MRI images of the brains of self-described UAP experiencers - all servicemen and intelligence officials - to Nolan’s office at Stanford.12 According to Elizondo, Nolan concurred with Livingston that the experiencers had suffered brain scarring known as white-matter disease.13 According to Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, all 105 patients in the study were high-functioning individuals with high IQs,14 and all had an overdeveloped caudate-putamen, a brain region some researchers associate with intuition.15
Livingston identified a second subset of patients for Nolan: military employees recruited into a programme originally run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).16 Many of these patients had been associated with an elite military Remote Viewing (RV) programme, and some of the United States Army’s psychic spies were found to share the same hyperdeveloped caudate-putamen seen in the UAP experiencers.17 Nolan worked with Livingston to develop a programme studying the questions raised by the circumstances of Livingston’s patients,18 but never briefed the Pentagon-based Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) team directly, working instead for Livingston.19 Nolan also set up a project for graduate students to compare caudate-putamen scans across a control group, a group diagnosed with autism, and a group with schizophrenia,20 which found that the autistic and schizophrenic groups both showed slight pathological differences in their caudate-putamens compared with the average person.21 According to Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs, Nolan theorised that if psychic ability exists, it would have to be connected in some way to the caudate-putamen,22 and considered the region to be the “hardware” that allows the brain to perform intuitive or psychic functions, with DNA as its blueprint.23
Nolan kept a battery of instruments in his laboratory that he thought would help Vallée better understand a metal sample recovered from the 1977 Council Bluffs, Iowa UAP incident.24 According to Elizondo, Nolan and Vallée analysed the elemental and isotopic composition of the molten metal aggregate recovered from that incident.25 Nolan, a friend and colleague of Elizondo, was included on Tom DeLonge’s advisory board.26 He is a professor at Stanford University’s medical school, and the Nolan/Vallée Iowa Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) materials paper marked the first time he had published in an aerospace journal.27