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Dr. Gary Nolan
There was this corpse, which you might say that could be an alien.
Mayim Bialik
What did it look like?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Big eyes, slightly triangular head. I took it to the world's expert in pediatric bone disorders. He said, I don't recognize the syndromes that might have generated this. There were whole sets of the DNA that didn't seem to fit anywhere.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
Gary Nolan is one of the top 25 inventors at Stanford University. He's also a leading researcher on unidentified aerial phenomena and mysterious injuries from potential alien exposure.
Dr. Gary Nolan
A representative of the CIA came to my office unannounced and said some of our diplomatic corps intelligence officers were getting sick. They showed me MRIs and X rays. Areas of their brains had just been fried.
Mayim Bialik
What could do that?
Dr. Gary Nolan
An energy weapon. I actually went out and interviewed the medical team. Several of these individuals that claimed to have interactions with uap.
Mayim Bialik
Could it be not of this Earth?
Dr. Gary Nolan
I can only imagine its electromagnetic ability at a distance. Or it's a form of physics of the universe where they can do things that we don't yet appreciate. What was surprising to me was the pushback from the CIA. Oh, that's impossible. We don't have anything like that. How do you reach into a helicopter and turn off its navigation and prevent it from attempting to launch a missile and deactivate the button?
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
Specifically, do you think we are at.
Mayim Bialik
Risk from adversarial forces within this solar.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
System or from outside the solar system?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Well, first of all.
Podcast Host/Guest (possibly Jonathan Cohen)
Hey, Sal.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Hank.
Podcast Host/Guest (possibly Jonathan Cohen)
What's going on? We haven't worked a case in years. I just bought my car at Carvana, and it was so easy.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Too easy.
Podcast Host/Guest (possibly Jonathan Cohen)
Think something's up? You tell me. They got thousands of options, found a great car at a great price, and it got delivered the next day. It sounds like Carvana just makes it easy to buy your car, Hank. Yeah, you're right. Case closed.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
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Mayim Bialik
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Mayim Bialik
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Mayim Bialik
Four years now, and it's been a.
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Our kids all have them.
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Jonathan Cohen
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
Mayim Bialik
And welcome to our breakdown. You might be able to tell what this episode's gonna be about based on the T shirt that I'm wearing and the T shirt that Jonathan is wearing.
Jonathan Cohen
Single or taken? If you're only listening, it's a man being beamed up into a spaceship with the word taken with a check mark beside it.
Mayim Bialik
And everyone thinks that I got that shirt for Jonathan, but the funny thing is he bought it for himself.
Jonathan Cohen
Sometimes you got to take yourself and.
Mayim Bialik
I am wearing my favorite Sedona cats being beamed up into a flying saucer.
Jonathan Cohen
Why are we wearing these T shirts today?
Mayim Bialik
We're wearing these T shirts today because we're going to speak to possibly the most highly decorated, highly educated, highly sophisticated scientist and professor who also is open to and generous with how he thinks about the possibility of life on other planets. Being here, threatening us, looking for things from us. Dr. Gary Nolan is a professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine and he's one of the foremost authorities on immunology, cancer, leukemia, autoimmunity, inflammation, as well as computational and systems level approaches to immunology and cellular NETWORKS. He holds 50 US patents, he's published almost 400 research papers. He's been recognized as one of the top 25 inventors at Stanford University. But what is most fascinating about him is that he founded the Soul foundation, which is an organization dedicated to unidentified aerial phenomenon. It convenes experts from academia, from government, and from really every discipline to conduct rigorous multidisciplinary Studies on UAPS and the broader implications. Dr. Nolan is the guy that people go to when they have material that they think might be of an alien origin. Dr. Nolan is the one who literally analyzes metal that is brought to him as this is from a flying saucer. His laboratory has the sophistication to be able to analyze, date and fully quantify what material is what. And he's part of the documentary that was released, Age of Disclosure, as he talks about the role that the government plays and doesn't play in how we determine what kinds of injuries can be classified as unusual and what his lab has done to address many of the injuries and damage that people's brains have exhibited when they have been placed in situations where they might be exposed to some of these phenomenon.
Jonathan Cohen
He explores humans that have been injured and have injuries from UAPs. And he studies the potential of why they may have experienced damage. He talks about energy weapons in a way that is absolutely fascinating and posits whether or not adversarial countries could have made these weapons that people have been injured by or were they created elsewhere in a way that we don't really understand yet. We also discussed the possibility that non human intelligence has monitored United States and Russia military capability. He talks about what it could be that was able to turn off the weapons system of a US helicopter.
Mayim Bialik
The notion that we may be being watched is a fascinating one and one that Dr. Nolan does not take lightly.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
And he's going to teach us the.
Mayim Bialik
Difference between belief and hope and data when it comes to understanding unexplained phenomenon. We're also going to talk a bit about some of the biotechnology that Dr. Nolan has developed, patented and uses to give credence to the fact that we can analyze samples with some degree of certainty to try and figure out their origins. So we'll talk to him about some of the technology that he's developed and that his lab has been using for decades and to try and understand specimens from all over the world. We're also going to get personal with Dr. Nolan. Something that he does not talk about a lot is his own personal experience as a child that led to his interest and his belief that there is more out there and there must be a way to find it. We're happy to. Welcome to the breakdown, Professor Gary Nolan. Break it down.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here.
Mayim Bialik
There's so many things we'd like to speak to you about which I think all fall under kind of a beautiful umbrella of the work that you do. Before we even get started with any specifics, talk about what you see your mission as in your work, in your life, and in your career.
Dr. Gary Nolan
You only see this in retrospect. But in looking at the many things that I've done over the years, I've always been interested in potential and filling the gaps of what you would think of as missing potential. I hate to see potential lost, but I also like to look for what I often call is the inevitable. What is it about the data, for instance, in the laboratory that we're collecting today that is, let's just call it prosaic. Everybody's doing it. It's not really moving the field forward in any necessarily meaningful way. So what is it about the new kinds of data that we need to collect? And therefore, if you can define what that is, what then are the instrumentations that you need to develop or methods to get you there? Even if it's going to take you two to three or even in one case, five years, until we get to the instrument that then can be used.
Mayim Bialik
By everybody, you do some of the most intricate and elegant and sophisticated work on cells that is out there. If someone knows nothing about the kind of work you do, can you explain a little bit about the kind of lab that you run, the kind of testing you do, and what you're able to tell with the equipment that you use?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Let's just say I began life as a geneticist, which is true. That was my original training. But as anybody in the field knows today, all of the fields of things like virology, immunology, genetics, and signaling biology all kind of merge one into the other. You can't talk about one without really touching upon aspects of the other. The genes underlie the architecture of the signaling biology in the cell, which is where a lot of the magic happens and where drugs often need to be aimed. Those signaling biologies then determine the interactions between cells that, for instance, in the case of the immune system, decides very often the fate of your life because it is the center of inflammation, anti cancer, anti pathogen effects, et cetera. So I began actually at Stanford, wanting to go to a guy by the name of Stanley Cohen's laboratory who had the original, what are called Cohen Boyer patents, which founded the entire biotechnology industry. And he was, let's say, mostly a microbiologist working on bacteria and fungus. But during what is called rotations, in your first year, I happened to rotate through the Herzenberg Laboratory, who had this kind of machine still being used today, called a flow cytometer. That was a merging of the physics of light using lasers, fluorescence, rapid single cell analysis, thousands of cells per second. The collection of that kind of data and then the algorithms required to understand what that data was, was and of course the computers behind the scenes, I mean the computers that we used then circa 1983, could fit on your wristwatch. The training that I did with Len and Lee, Len and Lee Herzenberg, who co ran their, their lab, really set the stage for what it was that I wanted to do because it had everything that I wanted all in one place. Complexity beyond belief, understanding at a deep level, constant technology development and basically, you know, I think the best way to say it is that the, the Herzenbergs ran their lab almost like a commune. They had a very open architecture to the kinds of people that they would take into the laboratory. It didn't matter who or what or where you came from, as long as you, as long as you were smart. But they also had, let's say, an ethic of taking people who would otherwise think themselves insufficient and teaching them how to be good scientists and ask questions in the right way. And so I tried as best as I could to bring that kind of modus operandi along with me into my development in the lab.
Jonathan Cohen
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Mayim Bialik
In reading over the kind of grants that you've been given by the fda, you know, bio agent protection and cross species immune system reference. Like what, what is sort of the, the motivation and the application behind some of these incredible grants that you've been able to do research under.
Dr. Gary Nolan
So the reason why we got those grants, including the Department of Defense grant that I got to study ovarian cancer, was because it was around the time of what is called systems level biology where we not only understood that there was a complexity of interactions not only within the cell but also between cells, the techniques that were available at the time could only look at just little slices, whereas what was necessary, this was sort of what I call the inevitable was the development of techniques that would give you a gestalt because with the gestalt of as many components in the immune system as could be reasonably measured, it would allow you to build mathematical models of the interactions and whether such interactions or the presence or absence of certain cell types or cell states was indicative of disease outcome or where you might intervene to make the immune system better, you know, or turn off cancers anti immune system effects. So it was, it was with that beginnings where my laboratory developed a way to look inside of cells at what are called phosphor signaling states that we were able to look at surface molecules that would define the kind of immune system cell it was. But then the intracellular states that would define the outcome. And so the let's say the FDA grant which was for the cross species immune reference for better or worse. And I don't like it but I sort of felt it as a, it's, you know, it's necessary animal models are used and but animals are non humans and we all know that. And so you know you can cure, we've cured every form of cancer that a mouse can have, but very few of those drugs actually translate properly to humans because there are just differences in how the immune systems operate. This was actually using primates, rhesus monkeys, which are closer, at least to us. They're not perfect, but nobody had the ability to look at the gestalt of all of their immune system cells versus ours. And the idea was, can we make a one to one or try to make a one to one comparison of what those different cell types are so that when we use, let's say, a new drug on rhesus monkeys, we can understand the bridging effect between the two. And it was a successful grant, but its focus actually was on Ebola. Ebola was and still is a significant threat to world health. And luckily, you know, there are, let's call them, containment strategies and there is a vaccine against it that is not going to be widely distributed. But they do something called ring vaccination. Once something is found, then they ring the community with vaccinations to prevent its spread. So I had a graduate student who had been an MIT undergraduate who had actually worked in the Ebola facility at Fort Detrick and so had been fully trained in that and work in the moon suits. You've seen kind of the movies, serious stuff. And so I visited actually Fort Detrick in the run up to all of this. And there were guards on every corner, you weren't allowed around unattended, et cetera. The Plexiglas that you could actually look into. The laboratory was literally about that thick. And so there was, it was a military run facility where the scientists were scurrying about, you know, and, and you know, purposefully, because the idea was, you know, we, we were basically giving these monkeys Ebola and then following the course of the immune system's reaction to it. And then that was the run up to testing for drugs and all of the rest. And then we actually had to develop a technology that allowed us to safely get the blood out of that laboratory, ensure that we were fully killing the virus, the filovirus that Ebola is, so that we could then run it in what would be called a BSL1 facility, Biosafety Level 1, which is a standard laboratory. I mean, your kitchen counter is BSL1, although I wouldn't go near your kitchen sink because that's probably BSL2 if you don't clean it regularly. There was a lot of work around that. That was the bio threat, which led to later work on Zika and other emerging threat viruses or bacteria. So what I often call burned as a pipeline of how to do it. We worked with a group at MIT who were doing, let's say the RNA we were doing, the protein. We published eventually a paper in Cell on all of this.
Mayim Bialik
And also I should mention, in addition to all of these things, you also helped develop or develop the instrument platforms that could be used to process samples. Correct. Without having to transport them overseas. Which the reason I'm bringing it up is because I think that, you know, when people hear the kind of work you do, like, that's amazing. And people understand immune system, but I don't think people understand the intricacy of what it means to have the instrumentation, the ability to experiment, the ability also to facilitate actual testing in ways that are reliable and consistent. So I just wanted to mention that because that's also something that we often don't think about. That's part of the work that you do.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Well, one of the things that we developed, it was actually developed by a graduate student, and then he took it out and commercialized it. Something called Smart Tube. And it was a way to take blood directly, put it into the tube, break a couple of vials, shake it, and then the blood would. We would not only lyse the red blood cells, which are not unimportant, but we want to get to the white blood cells that are part of it, but then also sterilize the blood in a way that would inactivate any viruses that might be in there. But that is now a standard throughout the world for how to collect blood, save it so you can put it in the refrigerator or freezer for later analysis, even decades later.
Mayim Bialik
Can you talk a little bit about Codex? The development of deep tissue profiling methods that these have contributed to the human cell atlas, also to the cancer cell atlases. I know it's hard to ask you to toot your own horn, but I'm going to ask you to do so. This is an incredibly significant achievement. Can you talk a little bit about for people, again, who don't know what you know, tissue profiling is what is the impact of this achievement?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Codex grew out of an earlier developed development that actually we won. Nature's like research something of the year in 2012, I think it was. And so that was Cytoff. And Cytoff was actually the original instrument was developed by a guy at the University of Toronto, Scott Tanner, who was a specialist in mass spectrometry. He understood that it would have value in single cell analysis. And so he came to me because he knew that I was kind of a guy who would take ideas and figure out a way to commercialize them. And so it was probably one of the most successful collaborations of my career, we turned it into the premier immune monitoring instrument of the. Of the day. And so because I come from the Herzenberg lab, where when I left that laboratory, three or four parameters per cell was the. Was the height of capability, which just basically lets you say that's a T cell, that's a B cell, and maybe that's a macrophage. Whereas what Cytoff enabled us suddenly to do is to do 40, 50 parameters at a time using a form of mass spectrometry where the labels were not fluorescence, but were actually metal tags attached to antibodies. So we had to develop a whole chemistry. We didn't develop a chemistry, a chemist at the University of Toronto did, so that we could attach these individual unique isotopes of metals. And what that did was it suddenly let us get to that gestalt. Suddenly we can look at enough of the immune system cells at a time to give a state diagram of what the immune system might be doing. And we published that paper in Science, and that was sort of the beginnings of what, at least for me, was the big data explosion, where suddenly we could collect so much. But what it meant that we had to do was then develop algorithms to deal with the complexity. And we had to develop things such as what's called a D dimensionalization approach to. Called tsne, which is a kind of a clustering approach, which we borrowed from other fields and then adapted to what we were doing. And then something called pseudotime. We were the first to develop the pseudotime to show that you could actually see trajectories of how immune system cells might be changing and maturing, which we then later applied to cancer and certain kinds of aml, acute myelogenous leukemia. So, okay, that was great. And it rocketed around the world. Everybody wanted a Cytoff, and we actually ended up selling that company for, I think, 207 million. I didn't make any. I wish I made something close to that. The VCs and the investment bankers always manage to walk away with the majority of it.
Mayim Bialik
This is a helpful, you know, kind of framework for us to understand not only your skill set, but also the. The depth of kind of creativity that you have in your field. And, you know, something else happened in 2012 that, that you were involved with. In 2012, you discussed that you had been given a piece of a body of some sort. And I'm sure that for anyone listening, it would make sense that if you want someone to analyze, what is this? What's it made of? Where did it come from? You would go to Dr. Nolan. Can you talk about what happened in 2012?
Dr. Gary Nolan
I had discovered, let's say, the concept of UFOs on the Internet. Like many people, I just sort of went down the, the rabbit hole. I hadn't had any prior particular interest in it, although I did have experiences as a, as a boy, as I've often talked about, but I never followed up on that. And I just found it interesting that there was this corpse, which reasonably by how it looked, you might say, oh, wow, that could be an alien.
Mayim Bialik
What did it look like? Like, are we talking like the big eyes, the triangle head?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Big eyes, slightly triangular head, but it was tiny. It was like 8 inches or so across. My first response was to go over to the head of the neonatal care unit, who was a friend at Stanford, and I said, hey, have you ever seen babies that look like this or that would have this? And he said, well, we see lots of unfortunate births that are due to genetic issues, but we happen to have on staff this guy who is the world's expert in bone disorder, pediatric bone disorders. So here, why don't I set up a meeting with him? So I took it to this guy and I had him look at it, and he said, oh, this is interesting. You know, I, I don't recognize the syndromes that might have generated this, but, you know, there are certain genetic disorders that could give you this part or that part or this change. And so, but, you know, I had agreed with the person who, you know, I, I reached out to them. They didn't reach out to me, say, hey, I can help you figure out what this is. When you're in science, and as you probably know, when you start crossing disciplines, don't assume you know everything. Go find the expert to make sure you're, you're right. So he said, okay, well, the, the picture is not enough. Here's the kind of X rays that I need at these, this angle, this angle, the other angle. And I said, look, if, if you want me to do an analysis of the DNA, I need a very small piece of bone which might have bone marrow in it, because that would be. And bone. It would be great to go and do that because that, that would be the most likely place to be protected from contamination by bacteria, at least until you know it. You know, in its, at that time, desiccated state, how old was. Was suggested to be very old, like hundreds of years. But, but later I found out probably only 20 or 30 years old. I started the analysis of it because of the, let's say the age, it was only about 30 or so years old. We thought there was a lot of degradation of the DNA and so it required what was called over reading to be able to do something with it. I first got excited because there were a whole, say, sets of the DNA that didn't seem to fit anywhere and made sense. And so, you know, I was discussing with the, the group that had provided me it and saying, you know, this might actually, I don't know what this means. So. But again, as a scientist, what you don't do is assume you know everything about the genetics or about even genetics, even though that's my PhD. So I went then to the experts and as it turned out, well, not only do we have the kinds of experts available, but I had started another company with another professor at Stanford at the time, the chairman of statistics, along with a co student that we had who was in computer chip design from the engineering department. And we developed algorithms that we had encoded onto something called field programmable gate arrays. And what FPGAs are, are basically think of them as a blank slate of circuitry that you could program to be just about anything. And FPGAs are still used today, so they're, they're rapidly, you know, it could be a, it could be a, it could play a game, it could do analysis, you could code it to do statistics, et cetera, but you're hard coding it. So we started this company with about a $10 million investment and we eventually then sold that company to Roche Diagnostics for a considerable sum. And actually my student, she made quite a bit of money because she was the CEO and she was quite good that had, by the time we had collected enough of the DNA and I had then recruited a whole team of about 14 people from around Stanford, enough data to give to then, what was then the Roche diagnostics bioinformatics team that had been, you know, basically seeded by what we had done for them to help us assemble what's called the contig, the full contig of the, of the DNA and then to search it for anomalies that might be related to bone disorders. Because at that time we'd already figured out, okay, this is human. The unknown regions were actually because of DNA degradation and there were ways to fix, fix that. So it was, it was human. We then determined that it was, the statistics said it was, it was a girl, probably a preterm birth. And at that point I actually started to get a little queasy because now I Realized that I was working with a body of somebody who died. And, you know, and yet there were people out there who still wanted it to be an alien. And so we wrote up a study and we actually got the world's again at Stanford, luckily, the world's expert in South American human genetics. And what he showed was that the allele frequencies, the differences that make one racial group or ethnic group different from another showed that in fact, this came from the Chilean area of South America. So it was clearly, it had heritage from that area. We published the paper, went through peer review, and we had all the experts on it that were necessary. The graduate students did most of the original writing. The professors then edited, gave it enough of a, of the right kind of flavor. And then we published it after peer review and you know, literally the next day, all over the world, Stanford professor sequences, alien baby, you know, which was completely not what we had done, but of course that's clickbait.
Mayim Bialik
You actually had specifically taken something that people thought were alien, proved that it wasn't. And the headline was, you sequenced an alien baby.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Some of the reporters who called me who wanted to talk said, well, you've debunked this. I said, I didn't debunk anything. I didn't debunk. I, I'm not a debunker. I'm, I'm a scientist who are by as you just earlier prior to this said, you're a skeptic. We're all skeptics. You know, I don't enter something trying to prove that it is something because that's, that's not the scientists mindset. The scientist mindset has come in with a completely open mind about it. I would have loved for it to be an alien, but it wasn't. I would also question why would an alien have even DNA and regulatory sequences like we do?
Mayim Bialik
How would you like an alien to have DNA sequences?
Dr. Gary Nolan
You know, I think the most likely, you know, answer to even, you know, presence of life on Earth is a form of panspermia, where, you know, some, let's say, primitive organism could make it from one solar system to the next. I mean, every piece of metal on your desk came from the heart of an exploded star. So for people to say, oh, you can't get from here to there. Well, everything that you are today came from the heart of an exploded star and everything we use, you know, so that became a gas and then recoalesced into a solar system that created planets that then made metals. But I would not expect the regulatory sequences or the signaling biology that they create to have evolved exactly in parallel mind.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
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Jonathan Cohen
Support the show Mind Bialix Breakdown is supported by Incogni.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
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Jonathan Cohen
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Mayim Bialik
When people talk about, you know, their notion of aliens being these like walking, talking beings that basically is like a human body with an alien head. That feels wrong to you just from the get go?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Yeah, it feels wrong because I mean, it, it could be that the bipedal, you know, for, you know, you know, arms or legs, form is a universal constant. But I just don't, I mean, we only have one example of that.
Mayim Bialik
Well, we only have one carbon based example of that. And there's no reason to assume that if there is other life or if there's been some seeding that it would need to even be carbon based.
Dr. Gary Nolan
I mean, we look at, I mean, probably the most different animal that is as smart as seems to be quite intelligent as the octopus. There are any of a number of bird species that have, you know, pretty high level problem solving capabilities. They just, for whatever reason, didn't have the ability to form societies, which is, I think the society Formation is what differentiates us from others and the ability to pass wisdom from one generation to the next.
Mayim Bialik
Which birds, just so we can give a shout out to the smart birds.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Well, parrots, a number of parrots. Crows as example. I mean, those are the two that just come off the top of my head. Ravens. I love watching these. There's this parrots where they give them colored balls, and the parrot has to put the colored ball into the right colored box. You know, I mean, things like that that are, you know, that show a level of understanding of form and logic.
Mayim Bialik
You, with your capabilities can analyze, let's say, a body that might be alien, and you can look at that on all these levels. You also have the ability to look at many other elements and many other things. Sometimes we're presented with something that we can't explain. It seems impossible. And for many people, they go to one explanation. But as a scientist, we still have to hold open many explanations. But I'd like you to talk a little bit about how you got brought into the kind of community where you became a person who has access to materials and experiences that other people are needing you to help explain.
Dr. Gary Nolan
The original analysis of the Atacama specimen, which is owned by somebody in Barcelona, which I think, frankly, should be returned to Chile for proper burial. I've said this many times. Once I realized what it was, this guy who was a representative of the CIA and an aerospace company, two of them came to my office unannounced and said, hey, we have these. We have these people that we've collected into what we call the weird bucket. Civilian, diplomatic, or military events had occurred. Damage which had sort of filtered up the chain in the medical arena, and then said, well, we don't know what this is. And they went over to somebody who was collating in intelligence, you know, group these things and said, okay, we have enough of these things. And they're starting to look similar to each other. And so let's figure out what's going on. Because some of our diplomatic corps or intelligence officers were basically getting sick and coming down with pretty severe problems. And so, you know, literally they walked in my door, threw a bunch of MRIs or showed me MRIs and X rays of the damage, which was incontrovertible. It was quite clear that if anybody had that kind of damage inside their body or inside their brain, white matter disease, they were in, you know, in trouble. And they were at least correlated to these significant health effects.
Mayim Bialik
What's that like when the CIA walks into your office unannounced?
Dr. Gary Nolan
You think it's a joke?
Mayim Bialik
Wow.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Right? I mean, I literally looked around. You know, my office is, you know, on the third floor, and there's a, like a, there's a bridge between two buildings, just. And I thought, okay, there's a candid camera here somewhere. What's going on? This is a joke. Because not only had they mentioned this, but then they also mentioned that some of these, a very small subset of these individuals had claimed to have interactions with UFOs. And I just, I, my, my brain exploded. I thought that I was already done with this issue.
Mayim Bialik
They're presenting you with a problem. We have scans, we have MRIs, we have, you know, biomedical imaging of people's brains that have damage that we cannot explain. We're kind of collecting them in this random bucket. And ops, a few of them are saying that they have also had interactions with UFOs.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
Got it.
Dr. Gary Nolan
So fast forward, let's say four years. So we started collecting. We, we had the original data of their medical. A person on the team who was a neurophysiologist and with psychiatric training went around to every single one of them and did a, a neurophysiologic and psychiatrics exam. Because especially for the ones that had claimed to see, you know, something weird, you want to make sure that there's not some psychological issue associated with this or if there's trauma, you know, mental trauma associated with whatever it is that they thought that they, they saw or heard. You want to make sure that they get the right kind of treatment. So what happened then? And this wasn't me, this was the medical staff, they started aligning the symptomology with what's called the ICD codes. These are the international code for diagnostics. So you go into a doctor and they say you have salmonella, whatever, and that has an associated ICD code. And then that has an associated way to. You can go to the insurance company and get payback for it, but it also allows you to then designate, well, how many people in the world have this ICD code associated with them? And so a syndrome is where you have a collection of, let's say, symptomologies that none of which alone are sufficient to call it a disease. Like Ebola is not a syndrome. Ebola is a disease. But syndromes are like Gulf War Syndrome, Havana Syndrome. It's a collection of symptomologies that you could have 10 of the 15 of them, and that's sufficient to classify you as such. We had already designated this, what we were seeing as a, we were calling it Interference syndrome, because these people were being interfered with around 2016 or so. I can't remember the exact year Havana Syndrome became in the news, where it was clear that in Havana, some of our diplomatic corps were getting sick. People thought it was some sort of energy weapon of some kind or sound wave weapon. What was surprising to me was the pushback from the community that not just the ua, I mean, not even the uap, just the CIA and all of the rest and the. And the general minute, oh, that's impossible. We don't have anything like that. Meanwhile, I was already talking to people in the DoD who said, of course we have stuff like this. We've been developing this stuff for the last 20 years. You know, we've been developing it, and we think that this is an adversary nation or a rogue party hired by an adversary nation to do this to us. What happened was that when we lined up the ICD codes, they aligned. So that was great. So we were able to actually take, let's say, 90 of the hundred people that we have and just hand them over to the Havana Syndrome groups that were already working within the government and say, okay, well, these guys are yours. And this is kind of how science is done. Once you've categorized something, you know, you can continue to study it, but you hand it off to the experts that are doing it. But. But what is left on the table is the data off the curve. And some of them had claimed interactions with. With uap. Now, you know, we followed up with a couple of those because they were so disparate. But I actually went out and interviewed with the medical team, several of these individuals, just to read their body language, to hear the story of what it was, and the body language and the stories aligned with the damage. I couldn't be there to establish veracity. I just could listen to what it was that was being said. And so these people believed that this had happened to them. And that's enough, at least for a psychiatrist to say, hey, there's a traumatic issue. They probably need, at the very least, therapy to deal with whatever the trauma might or might not have been. But what was interesting was that along the way, as we were looking at the brains of these individuals, we were looking for commonalities of is there a common area in the brain that's being damaged? And what we noticed was that there was an area of the brain that looked. It looked like damage. At the beginning, it was at the head of the caudate and putamen. And it turned out to be just a neural density and you know, there's ways of you can, eventually you could kind of switch the mode of how the MRI data that you might have could say, okay, well this is actually living tissue, this is not scar tissue. And we're like, well, that's interesting because the medical textbooks don't show this level of neural density. So we then said, okay, well what's common about the people that had this density and do we see it in a normal population? So we sort of did metrics of what the density was and how dense the neural structure was. And then we went to open Access databases of MRIs in the world and found that, yeah, it's there, but only at about 1 in 100 or 1 or 200 people. And yet, and yet in our group of even the hundred, a sizable proportion of them had it. And so what was at least postulated was it wasn't that they were targeted because they had it, was that they had it because it is a feature of high functioning mental capability. It's a feature of intelligence. Because the area of the brain in the cardioputamin sits at the basal ganglia, which is one of the most actually ancient structures in the, in the brain that is the center of all sensory network input and is actually even at that time was called the brain within the brain. It's a subconscious processing system that your executive function of who you think you are uses to say, I want to do this. And then it goes and subconscious things look at your emotions, capabilities, your surroundings, etc. And make the split second determination of how you navigate a room at a party to avoid this person or to avoid the waiter who's about to maybe drop something. These are diplomatic core and intelligence officers. They have to use intuition, they have to use their, their skill set, et cetera. And what kind of turned us on to this was finding a paper in the literature, functional MRIs that were done on chess masters in a form of Japanese chess, and asking which areas of the brain light up when people make the unexpected intuitive move. This area of the brain lit up as one of several. But this area of the brain lit up. And then when you once you then say, okay, well, intuition, and then you use that as a search term in the Google, suddenly you find dozens of papers already being published. In fact, somebody already, as far back as 2000, said that the cardiac containment is the center of where intuition occurs.
Mayim Bialik
What is a possible conclusion that one can draw when you're looking at this group, right, as what's going on here? This is a highly intelligent, intuitive group that either a has access to information that other people don't, or they're susceptible to information that other people are not.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Susceptible to, or they better realize their environment and can put together disparate notions in ways that somebody would call intuition. It's not magic, it's not psychic power. It's just a processing system that is better at taking multiple different inputs, processing the information, and then coming to what should be a successful conclusion. And you can imagine an evolution. This is necessary. You're walking down the path in the jungle and there's a sudden movement and split second determination is required to avoid the jaw of the Jaguar.
Jonathan Cohen
Dr. Nolan, what types of injuries were you seeing when they came to you that you were starting to investigate?
Dr. Gary Nolan
So the majority of the ones that were so obvious were what are called white matter disease in the brain because a lot of people were reporting confusion and long term it wasn't acute, it was chronic. They didn't have it before and then suddenly they had it. So people have often mistaken the things that I've said to say that this caused the cardiac curtamen. No, that appears. And we had some MRIs from people 10, 20 years earlier and they had it then. So the additional damage in their brain. If you look at MRIs of people with multiple sclerosis, and I have somebody in my family who has it, you'll see these sort of random pockets of, of just white matter. It's called white matter disease in general, but dead scar tissue. And so it looked like that like areas of their brains had just been fried.
Mayim Bialik
What could do that?
Dr. Gary Nolan
An energy weapon.
Mayim Bialik
What's an energy weapon? Because we talk here a lot about energy, like high vibrations. What is an energy weapon? What would that look like?
Dr. Gary Nolan
You have one in your kitchen. Your microwave oven is an energy weapon.
Mayim Bialik
I don't own a microwave.
Jonathan Cohen
Not anymore she doesn't. I took it away.
Mayim Bialik
Okay, so. So we're talking about a concentration of energy that beamed right in a way that it could do damage. Like a laser of energy.
Dr. Gary Nolan
I wouldn't call it a laser. Laser, you know, would, would burn. This is something where, you know, even as far back as the, as in the Soviet Union, people were claiming to get sick. And even then people were thinking that the Soviets of the time were bombarding us with sound waves that would cause, you know, damage, but sub. At a level of hearing where we didn't hear it, but it would be enough to annoy you, you know, at the very least, or cause damage. But when you're. We're not talking about sound here. We're talking about something that would be penetrative in a manner that would reach into the brain. I mean, gamma radiation would be an example that could reach through or X rays, you know, I know, but, but at the time where, because many of these people actually had been collected, the damage had happened to them a decade ago. And so, you know, there were no portable, you know, phasers like on Star Trek. You know, there, there was nothing like that. The energy requirements and the instrumentation would require at the very least, a small van. It became a controversy because there was an NIH study that had been done that said this was all bunk. And then the NIH study had to be withdrawn because it turned out that some people in the government, our government had ceded the, the patient population with. They had paid people to go into the patient population and they had basically destroyed the statistics. Now because of, I think, you know, I, I wouldn't say my efforts, but at least we contributed to there now being literally a military website for anomalous health incidents. And so just like we did with UAP where we turned it from U. Unidentified Flying Objects into unidentified anomalous phenomenon. So being scientific and trying to capture a framework with verbiage that doesn't bias the conclusion, you know, especially, I mean, as many people have said, well, if, if it goes into space, it's not flying, you know, because flying requires air, at least by, you know, and if it goes underwater, it's submerged. So people came up with USOs. But then there were so many different things that were trying to be packaged so unidentified Anomalous phenomena. But the same thing for Havana Syndrome. It's now classified under Anomalous Health Incidents as one category of things that could happen. Because what they were trying to do was capture things like Gulf War Syndrome or any of a number of other things that, I mean, there's literally a website that tells veterans and or diplomatic corps, people working in the government, here's how you can get your medical issues paid attention to. Here's the process. I mean, it's now like a division of the Veterans Health.
Mayim Bialik
And it's very possible that some of these things are caused by adversarial nations or governments.
Dr. Gary Nolan
And literally in the news in the last two days, there have been claims that the US Government has captured and or obtained one of these instruments from an adversary nation. I mean, the information is very, let's say, sparse at this moment in time, but it's all over the news the last couple of days.
Jonathan Cohen
I want to ask something from that I heard from the age of disclosure, which is extraterrestrials activated and deactivated US And Russian nuclear weapons. Russias were. Were pointed at us.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Right. And turned on. Yeah.
Jonathan Cohen
And, you know, it suggests that there is some sort of interest in our survival. Can you talk a little bit about that quote from the documentary and give it some context?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Here's how I'm going to deflect a little bit on that. I'm not interested in the intent or what the purpose is. I would be interested in the how it was done.
Jonathan Cohen
I'm very interested in the how it was done and the fact that it was done. How do we know?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Right. How do you, with claimed events with pilots, reach into a helicopter and turn off its navigation and prevent it from doing something? How do you reach into a pilot that's attempting to launch a missile and deactivate the button, specifically in a way that the pilot's, like, frantically turning the thing on and nothing happens? How do you do what was claimed to be done in the missile cases? Whatever it is that you're doing, you have an ability to. I mean, I can only imagine it's some. I mean, if you imagine it's electromagnetic, then that's a control of. Of electromagnetic ability at a distance that doesn't, you know, that. That can reach through essentially a Faraday cage, or it's a form of understanding of the physics of the universe where they can reach down underneath and do things that we don't yet appreciate. And so that's what interests me.
Jonathan Cohen
How do we know that that happened? From accounts of the pilots?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Only accounts. Only accounts. And that. And that is, of course, the problem.
Mayim Bialik
Well, age of. Age of disclosure is. I mean, I said to Jonathan, because we had Lou Elizondo on, and obviously I read his book, and, you know, we had a great conversation with him. I said, it's all of the people that I read about now I'm seeing them in person. And it is.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
It's.
Mayim Bialik
It's a bit of a different flavor because as a viewer, I'm trying to analyze veracity based on some subjective, you know, notion that I have of, like, I don't trust his eyes. Right. Like, it's not how it works.
Dr. Gary Nolan
The standard of evidence for a scientist in. In, let's say, my cohort is something I can hand to them and they can reproduce themselves. It's not a story, but interestingly, I will trust them telling me something about their biology. And I don't need to go back into their laboratory and stand over the shoulder of their postdoc to prove it because I can contextualize what they're telling me in the context of everything I already know about the area and say that sounds like it could be true. I can now build models based on that. So I'm unfortunately, or fortunately as a scientist still working with that kind of a framework where I'm listening to all these stories and this story aligns with that, and this thing aligns with this. And if there's such evidence, it's being kept right. So that sounds conspiratorial, but enough people have come forward and saying that there is such a thing. But what that means is that the level of control over the information and the level of threat against such individuals is extreme. So I guess I'm just almost not interested in that. I mean, and this gets back to materials. I want to see a material put together at a level of complexity, not just pure silicon with different isotope ratios. I want to see something put together that looks like technology, even if I don't. Even if it no longer functions. You know, atomic arrangements that we don't know how to make right now, or at least we don't publicly know how to make.
Jonathan Cohen
Well, I'm wondering, how do you reconcile the number of military professionals who seem highly credible who are talking about the fact that they have seen biological material, that every government in the world has retrieved aircraft and they're studying it? You know, obviously many scientists like yourself haven't seen those, but there are these claims. How do you reconcile those?
Dr. Gary Nolan
All I can do is reach back to the events that I know and the people that. And to say to my friends as scientists, when you say there's no evidence, there's bucket loads, there's truckloads of evidence. But evidence is not proof. It's. The evidence is contextualized data. Evidence is data where you put a hypothesis on top of that data that says the underlying data could be explained by this hypothesis and is evidence. So in a legal framework, lawyers, the prosecution takes evidence, takes data, calls it evidence of so crime. It's up to the jury to look at it and say, is the preponderance of evidence contextualized as a hypothesis? The lawyers are like scientists in this way. That is sufficient to convict or exonerate the person based on the data, which is so there's lots of evidence. So don't ever let anybody say there's no evidence. There's lots of evidence. But is. But evidence is not proof nor a conclusion.
Mayim Bialik
Well, and I think also it's such an important concept and one that we've Been talking about, really, for the majority of the last year on this podcast. You know, ever since the telepathy tapes came out. And so many people were like, telepathy exists. I always knew it. I'm telepathic. You know, my nonverbal child is telepathic. You know, once that came out, what we saw was that there absolutely were two buckets of people. There were people for whom that belief and that story was sufficient evidence. And then there were people for whom that was an interesting and fascinating way for us to start examining this aspect of human consciousness and communication. But that alone is not evidence. Right.
Dr. Gary Nolan
And then there was another group that said, everybody, you're all crazy.
Mayim Bialik
When does the conversation about this leap into, could it be not of this.
Jonathan Cohen
Earth and could it have existed back then when there weren't portable devices and it needed to be in a van in order to be used?
Dr. Gary Nolan
You know, I've spoken to intelligence officers who says that, you know, we trace some of these vans back to through shell companies that are eventually owned by Russia, you know, or other. A couple of incidents like that. I mean, again, those are claims. I mean, I'm not. I'm not on the inside at that level, but when I talk to the people. But. But I, you know, I've. I've worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee on it. I've written a white paper on it for them. I wrote a white paper to one of the committees on Covid and Wuhan saying they asked me what kind of facility would be required to engineer such a thing. And so I gave a breakdown of the kinds of laboratory setups, et cetera, that would be required. I wasn't asked to analyze the data. I was just asked to say, if you wanted to do it, how big of a facility do you need to accomplish it, and what kinds of instrumentation? Because what they were going to do within that information was to probably see if they have access to documented receipts where things were, you know, monies were moving around to do it. I have zero opinion, zero opinion on whether it was or was not engineered. But certainly, you know, whether it was engineered or whether it happened in that marketplace, it. It tells you the danger of putting animals of diverse origins that can have a common viral vector together, because it's the mixing and matching of pieces of genomes from different organisms that allows for something to come together that could create what became Covid. Whether it was done intentionally or whether it was done accidentally. It tells you. Mixing and matching pieces of DNA from pathogenic viruses is not something I would ever recommend you do.
Mayim Bialik
And this is my, my anecdotal report on why I thought it had to be created in a lab. When I had Covid, it felt like a different virus every day. That's how I described it. And I instantly thought of everything I knew from genetics. It felt like something was literally clicking on and it would do its course and something else would click on and it would. It literally felt like a different virus. And I said this was long before.
Podcast Narrator/Announcer
There was even controversy.
Mayim Bialik
I said, this feels like no organic virus I've ever had. And it turns out I was right.
Dr. Gary Nolan
But we've had these kinds of things before, right? The influenza plague of, I don't know, some of the 1920s or 1910s was such a virus. And we've set up almost the perfect cesspool for this kind of thing to happen, where we have chickens, birds and ducks next to pigs, where humans working. It all gets thrown into, you know, they all, they're eating each other and, you know, and influenza is a virus with like a multipartite genome that it just makes it easy for it to swap pieces. So if you get co infected with a bird flu and a, and say a regular human flu, something from the bird could. Bird flu could transfer over and make a monster.
Mayim Bialik
Isn't it possible that the sample set that you're looking at is simply people who already have more developed caudite mutamen in the first place?
Dr. Gary Nolan
Oh, yes. Yeah. That was because they were intelligent.
Mayim Bialik
So the idea would be these people are more likely to have had this experience or it's simply the environment that they were in because of their, let's say, intelligence and intuition.
Dr. Gary Nolan
It's an unhappy collision of intelligent people with, you know, in an environment where they are going to be targeted. So, so, but there was a great hypothesis. So what we did was that, okay, well, let's test the hypothesis. Let's go look at hundreds of brains. Let's just see if there's any hint of correlations in large populations that correlate connectivity in the brain with intelligence. And so we developed algorithms, you know, this is back, you know, almost 10 years ago now, started to develop algorithms that would take MRIs, take the voxels, the 3D pixels, and find areas of the brain, draw, you know, draw out where the caudate is, all the different areas of the brain and as well the tracts between areas of the brain. Because information has to move from one place to another through these, through these tracts and say, okay, well, are there any correlations to intelligence, et cetera. And what we Used as part of our sample set were not only so called normals, but two very well metric groups of people with either schizophrenia, autistic spectral disorders, and it's all a disorder as well as they had collected the associated so called normals and said, okay, well they've been psychologically evaluated into intelligence, capability, etc. And lo and behold, on almost every of the, let's say positive metrics of what we think distinguishes humans from animals, the caudet putamen was one of the major, if not the major, the caudate was a major component in a, in a statistically relevant way. And we published three papers in neurophysiology journals and this was done with the MODI laboratory at Harvard who, she's an expert in human autism. And the reason we chose those as, let's say, bookends is because, you know, on, let's say the schizophrenia side there's a, you know, as you move towards frank schizophrenia, let's say, that might be actionable in a psychiatric sense, you actually do start to have a movement towards creativity. Very often schizophrenics see things and connections that aren't there. Along that axis is creativity that scientists use to see connections that other people missed. So let's call it neurodiversity today is the general term. On the other axis is a form of focus and high functioning that you see in many autistics who can't carry on a conversation and have social disorders, let's say on the extreme side. But if you ask them what the square root of some giant number is, they can instantly give it the answer, where does that come from? How do they compute that? So we thought that they would be great bookends to be able to say, well, you know, along that axis which aspects of the brain are changing? And we actually came up with, at least for decent, let's say, proposals of well, here's a signature of what the brain looks like in autism and here's a signature of schizophrenia which, you know, I mean, that was let's call primitive machine learning at the time. Today there are much better things where now you can start to think about diagnostics for. You actually do have this. But here's something interesting that we skipped over with the cardiac attainment. We had within our group individuals who were participating in the study as the scientists, let's say, who we know were high functioning, you know, new smart people. And so we looked at them as what, several of them, as well as their family members. And we found two things. There were more likely to be husband, wife, pairs who had it and their children were more likely to have it.
Mayim Bialik
Nerds marry nerds, and then they make.
Dr. Gary Nolan
Nerds and they make nerds. And so, I mean, to me, that goes all the way back to my heritage and genetics.
Mayim Bialik
I thought you were going to say your heritage as a nerd.
Dr. Gary Nolan
My heritage as a nerd. And, you know, so of course, narcissistically, I had my family tested and, you know, we weren't at the top, but we were on the curve going up. You know, you can, you know, there's plenty of people online on Twitter or Reddit who say I'm an idiot. You know, that's fine, you know, but I just would need to point to my record and say, I might be an idiot and I might speak out of turn in many ways, but I do have some. I do have the occasional accomplishment.
Mayim Bialik
We're going to pause here. We have a lot more to talk about with Dr. Gary Nolan, including his studies on metal fragments and the anomalies that they contain. We'll talk about his foundation in more detail and what he thinks the goal of non human intelligence might be as they potentially make contact with us. We'll also focus on his personal experiences as a child that led him to believe that there is more out there than what we've been taught to believe.
Jonathan Cohen
Join us for all kinds of metaphysical and extraterrestrial conversations over on Substack. Mayim Bialik's breakdown on substack. And you'll get the history of both of our UFO shirts and Mayim's personal experience with extra sensory energies. That's Mayim Bialik's breakdown on Substack.
Mayim Bialik
From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.
Podcast Host/Guest (possibly Jonathan Cohen)
It's Mayim Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two non fiction and now she's gonna break down. It's a breakdown, she's gonna break it down.
Date: January 27, 2026
Host: Mayim Bialik
Guest: Dr. Garry Nolan (Professor, Stanford University, Pathology)
This episode features a riveting conversation between neuroscientist Mayim Bialik and Dr. Garry Nolan, a renowned Stanford professor known for his contributions to immunology, pathology, biotechnology—and most intriguingly, his research into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), unexplained medical injuries (e.g., so-called “Havana Syndrome”), and potential alien contact. The discussion weaves together Dr. Nolan’s scientific innovations, detailed case studies of mysterious brain injuries among US personnel, the rigor behind “alien artifact” analysis, and open-minded yet skeptical consideration of non-human intelligence.
[08:36 – 12:57]
[17:47 – 27:59]
[28:41 – 37:37]
[41:15 – 43:07]
[43:57 – 62:27]
[53:57 – 76:34]
[60:35 – 67:08]
[76:34 – End]
The conversation fluidly mixes scientific rigor, curiosity, humility, and a hint of playful skepticism. Dr. Nolan’s precision and open-mindedness contrast with media sensationalism, while Mayim brings warmth and a relatable perspective, frequently linking technical themes to broader questions of belief, intellect, and human potential.
[End of Part 1. Continuation teased: Metal fragment studies, foundations, and personal UAP experiences to follow in the next episode.]