New Realities recorded on February 22, 2025
Summary
In this interview, Alan Steinfeld and Zenka Caro speak with Stanford immunologist Dr. Garry Nolan about his work with the Sol Foundation and the scientific investigation of UAPs and experiencers. Nolan discusses the concept of psionics, the potential physics behind non-local consciousness interactions, and the possibility of stimulating specific brain regions like the caudate putamen to enhance these abilities. He emphasizes the need for rigorous scientific methodology and institutional review when exploring these fringe concepts. The conversation also touches on the potential for alien life, the evolution of human consciousness, the integration of AI with the human brain, and the societal implications of disclosing advanced technologies and non-human intelligences. Nolan advocates for an open-minded yet structured scientific approach to investigating the unknown.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. I’m Alan Steinfeld, and tonight along with Zenka Caro from Lightnet, we have the opportunity to interview Garry Nolan, one of the leading voices in the disclosure movement. He is a scientist for Stanford University and works very closely with inside government forces, looking at the brains of experiencers and qualifying the phenomena within a scientific framework. His Sol Foundation is a very important leading organization that very much promotes the all aspects of disclosure. Stay tuned for this very exciting, informative interview with one of the great insiders of our time, Garry Nolan, immunologist from Stanford.
Zenka Caro
Hi everybody. My name is Zenka Caro. I’m from Lightnet. I’m here with Garry Nolan and Alan Steinfeld of New Realities. And we are going to be interviewing Garry for this episode of the Unlimited show. Now, Garry doesn’t need an introduction. He is one of those people, he’s written 300 scientific papers on immunology in Stanford, among things. Now, he is focused on the Sol Foundation now and his growing curiosity in UAPs and beyond. Alan, Garry, welcome today. It’s great to have you.
Alan Steinfeld
Garry probably is one of the most important voices in the coming disclosure or the ongoing disclosure. The Sol Foundation plays a very important part in that. He’s one of the co-founders of that. And as an immunologist at Stanford University, he’s used to facts. He likes to confirm what happens or what the aspects of this phenomena is really all about. And I appreciate all the work you’ve done the last few years to bring out the truth, Garry. Recently, we’ve heard the term psionics and that is a huge game changer for those looking into this phenomena and those trying to understand the aspect of human consciousness. Whatever the military is trying to define psionics and the importance of that activity.
Garry Nolan
Sure. Well, I think the way that you start talking about psionics is by going back to the so-called experiencers and the stories and anecdotes from people literally over decades and frankly if you look at it the right way centuries of how people claim some kind of mental interaction with entities, whatever you want to call them. Now I’m not validating that those interactions are real. I am taking the John Mack approach of saying these people have a story and they have an experience they had, which is why they’re called experiencers, and they’ve framed it as an interaction with an entity. Now the notion of where psionics has showed up frankly has been around since the whole CE5 trials or experiments that were done where there were claimed manners by which there could be a calling of some kind of object and it would show up for certain people not necessarily at a whim but with a sufficiently high likelihood that the percipients and the participants in the activity would say, hey, I have this ability to do so. So the claim is and again I’m not validating that it’s real, the claim is that the military or the government has known about this for decades and it’s one of the manners by which interaction occurs and that one can basically say, hey it’s time to show up, we want to see you, we want to talk to you, we want you to show us that you’re real. Now I was there when such an event was run and something showed up at the time of the guy who was doing it, his claimed call. Now it was just a few frames in a video of something moving apparently very fast across the scene and then coming back, but you know and so it’s a correlation it’s not a causation necessarily, but I found that interesting. Now I think the next, because this does I think concern a lot of let’s call it lay people or scientists is it sounds like pseudoscience. But my challenge to those scientists is not to explain it away as pseudoscience but to say, okay let’s say that it did happen, if it did happen how could it happen? And how do we use the physics of today to perhaps explain and understand how that operates. Now interestingly in the last few days I was at my mentors here on Stanford campus, she’s 90 years old, she and her husband were my co-mentors, and there was at the dinner somebody who I’d known since then since graduate school who was the computer programmer for the lab but was also really a brilliant physicist, and we were talking about quantum entanglement and his theories about how things operate. And without going into all the gory details of his approach to understanding entanglement, there’s many ways that you can structure a standard model of physics or a model of physics where points in this 3D space are actually closer to each other or interacting with each other in ways that allow apparent information transfer across space and time that doesn’t require some intermediate transmission of electromagnetic waves. Our brains sit in a quantum foam of spacetime. We are just organized spacetime. So we interact with each other via quantum fields. So to say that there might be other ways that quantum objects can interact with other things in a way doesn’t surprise me. I mean at the Sol meeting I challenged the audience to say, okay given everything that is more or less claimed and we can think of as possibly real, what kind of technology and background physics would you need to postulate to explain or allow for this to happen? Because that’s where creativity and frankly discovery happens. So I don’t have a problem thinking or that there’s a way for a technology to know that they’re being thought about in some manner. I don’t know how it would be done, but I don’t have a problem saying, okay well, maybe. And once you say maybe, the next question is how? And that is the engine of creativity in science to me. So I hope that answers a little bit better.
Zenka Caro
Thank you, Garry. Yeah, you know, speaking of creativity and science and applying our scientific minds like you have been doing and advocating for the nation and the world when we look at these mysteries, right? So now we’re moving into a new presidency, they’ve stated they’re going to be disclosing everything, reviewing budgets and disclosing everything from JFK to MLK to the orbs and everything in between. How does this impact Sol Foundation? How does this impact your dreams and hopes for next year? Tell us about the foundation and how you are excited about applying the scientific community and the governmental funding to our future.
Garry Nolan
Well the Sol Foundation grew out of frustration in a way that I saw first on Twitter if you will, I don’t know five seven years ago and I said look if you guys don’t get professional about this, no scientist is ever going to take you seriously, and if you don’t frame your postulates as hypotheses and if you don’t stop calling them conclusions, then people aren’t going to ridicule you, or people aren’t going to continue to ridicule you. So it made me realize that there needed to be a formalization of it first of all which I campaigned about over several years about how to talk the science. But then there needed to be an organization which could bring scientists together and create a perimeter within which the science could be reasonably discussed even if it’s just an Explorers Club for fun of let’s just all sit around and have a beer. But what I found happened having set that up and done so with the right balance of individuals, so Peter Skafish, David Grusch, myself, that brought in the kind of high-level expertise and formalities. I mean Peter more in the philosophy and anthropology area than I was because that’s at least half if not more of the problem. And David as the person with the sort of who kick-started along with Lue and Jay who was a more hidden figure until recently. The discussion again in a formal way that Dave and Jay and Lue said, we have the data or the data exists, and so I’m there to say okay well let’s structure the data in a way that other scientists can talk about it, and here’s what you need to do, you need to write papers, you need to do the boring part of getting peer-review because then it’s referencable and then it becomes a foundation for more studies and something that you can point back to and say hey look this has already been done and proven, you don’t have to redo it, and that’s how science operates. And then of course Peter’s there to take on the more social aspects of what it means for humanity in a bigger way. And so I’m beyond thrilled frankly as to where we are with it. I never expected it to succeed as much as it has, but I think that the success is not because of us. It’s because of the burning need of what was required and what everybody knew was required, and once they saw that it was there, they’re like, ah that’s it, let’s follow them. And what came of it was even better, it in a way helped instantiate many other groups. And so now there’s a cottage industry of groups, each of which has their own niche and their goals. There’s a scientific coalition of UAP research, which brings together groups of scientists to organize around it. There’s John Priestland’s group on hidden, which is about the psychological aspects. There’s the John Mack Institute for experiencers. There’s Ryan Graves for the flight issues with both military and commercial pilots. And then there’s UAPDF, the UAP Disclosure Fund, which at least the initial discussions were around helping whistleblowers legally, but became more a policy institute for working directly with the government. And the whole idea is to create an ecosystem that both commercial entities as well as the government and society can turn to and say that at least there’s some experts or some people with professional background that are able to address it. And one of my big interests and part of my goal at Sol is not just to be an academic. One of the things that I did at Stanford back in the day and I got a fair amount of flack from as an assistant professor was saying hey look, ideas can become companies, and the government doesn’t need to fund everything. The government funds the discovery of diseases in an unbiased way, and then you have the venture community or investment community there to pick up the slack and take it and turn it into commercialization. And so I have been for the last five or six years beating that drum that if any of this is real, the commercial opportunities are extraordinary. I mean the technology represents not just a leap of understanding, it represents hundreds of technology revolutions. Any one of which could frankly change the face of the planet hopefully in a good way. But just look what a grain of silicon did. A grain of impure silicon or impure germanium is the heart of everything we do today in electronics. So there are certainly understandings of the universe that need to be appreciated if somebody else has already appreciated them and even if they’re not willing to give us the ideas directly, if we can learn from just observing what they do, we say okay well now that we know that’s possible, how can we do what we now know is possible. So that’s really what Sol is meant to be, it’s meant to be the same A to Z, play with ideas and turn them into value that I’ve participated in and driven for my whole career. And frankly I didn’t come up with that model, I learned it from my mentors Leonard Herzenberg and then watching David Baltimore, my other mentor then at MIT for my postdoc, and then the people around them who were so successful, and saying okay well how are they successful, ah I see what they did, or I see aspects I think I understand, and let me try to replicate it and bring my flavor to it. And that’s what Sol really is.
Alan Steinfeld
Thanks Garry for that. I want to just go back to some of these organizations like Skywatchers. I want to know how much is your involvement with that and Sol, and I’m gonna throw out a few more questions. Have you been able to qualify some of these skywatchers through your brain analysis and is there also a way to enhance that caudate putamen aspect of the brain and increase the efforts of that. So that’s a bunch of questions, answer what you want.
Garry Nolan
So, Skywatcher is an organization that I’ve been with since its beginning. I don’t speak for them, and they’ve been speaking for themselves quite a bit lately, and I’ll let the officials of that talk about the goals of Skywatcher. But when I participated in the first event, I was really just there as a neutral observer, first to make sure that nobody jumped to conclusions on things, but also just to provide a scientific framing for how the questions are asked. And it’s not that the people who are there are in any way naive or stupid. It’s just that the majority of them had military backgrounds and were involved in so-called retrievals of prosaic material and others, but they in the course of their careers had met and or seen things that were sufficiently anomalous that they had those kinds of aha moments that said, okay well since nobody’s going to be doing this from a governmental but public-facing posture, well there’s no reason we can’t do it. There’s enough information out there already that we don’t have to bring things that we know about how to do on the inside to the outside, because we can basically point to public approaches and use what’s already free on the internet to approach this and including things like as you first asked at the top of the hour psionics. So the question you ask about can you enhance, I mean that is part of a discussion in the group and I won’t talk for other people who could talk it better than me, but it was from the very beginning in my mind once you localize a function in the caudate putamen that might be involved in the processing of information, if not the actual let’s say the antenna. I don’t think the caudate putamen is the antenna. I think it’s a processing function and that the information is somehow impinged across the brain and then it’s coordinated in the caudate putamen. And that’s actually what the caudate putamen does with senses. It takes all your senses, incorporates them into a structure downstream of executive function that says this is what I need to do and then unconscious functions that say react to that flash of light or react to that leopard about to leap out of the bushes at me in a subconscious way, processes it and says here are the movements and things that you need to do relative to your emotional and memory state. That’s for real, that’s what the caudate putamen is involved with in what we call intuition. But as I was thinking about it it became kind of obvious to me that if you needed to place a coordination of the information that might come as an additional sense or a sense that was coming from a direction or dimensions that we don’t understand, it was still going to have to go through the same routing system. There’s no need to evolve a whole new system if you’ve already got one in place onto which you can overlay the same kind of information. So that obviously, you just need to be paying attention to even lay literature that there are ways that you can stimulate the brain from the outside whether that’s via drugs that change the nature of how the nerve pulses operate, things as drastic as DMT and LSD and the whole tryptamine family and beyond to electromagnetic transcranial stimulation that’s been around for a couple of decades now, and now ultrasonic stimulation of the brain in ways that don’t fry the brain, but yet turn on or off various regions and it’s now known that you can do that. So it’s an obvious next step to say, okay, well, if this part of the brain is involved in, let’s say, claimed remote viewing or claimed psionic interaction with entities from beyond, why don’t we try stimulating it and see if it gets any better or worse? But here’s the problem. People might do that in their garage, and god knows what that does to people, right? You don’t want to be messing around with your brain. You don’t want to be the guinea pig. So again stepping back and doing this in a formally scientific way, first of all looking at the ethics of what you’re doing, getting institutional review board approvals which is standard way that clinical trials are ever done on humans where you basically say to a board of ethics and whatever the relevant sciences say how do you do this or this is our proposal, do you see any holes in it, do you see where we might get in trouble doing this. Like for instance you don’t do it on children, and even with parental consent because consent really means you understand. Consent doesn’t mean that somebody lets you do it. So you really have to understand what it is that you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And then you put it together in a way that the time and money and effort spent doing it is not wasted so that you try to fill all the potential loopholes ahead of time and the mistakes you could have made so that you don’t waste anybody’s time in the process of carrying it out. So yeah, and again I now know of many groups trying this, and it’s not just the people that I’m most immediately talking to and that’s exciting. Again, because I think SOL and other people who have been moving this has created a permission structure that it’s okay to ask fringe questions. I want to reclaim the word fringe and turn it into something positive. Not something that gets thrown at you by the New York Post as some sort of declaration of near insanity.
Zenka Caro
Yes definitely. You know, I was pausing is because there’s a Stanford alumni magazine interview with you where it says Garry Nolan is the man you call when there’s no earthly explanation. And as you say there’s all this repressed curiosity that’s coming out. And it’s great that you’re lending your scientific research mind to these questions and to these researchers that have questions. One of which is Sean doing the super experiencer, you can find out about this research by the way at exostudies.org/superexperiencer. And Sean is going to be studying the brain of experiencers that have multiple experiences. As we look to our biology and what we teach people when we bend spoons and everything else, is consciousness as well. Because once you understand how consciousness works, it’s hard to undo it. When I talked to Sean, I asked him, do you think people are born with these abilities of remote viewing, bending spoons, all these things, or is it something that they have after an ET contact? Were they given that? Were they born with it? What are your feelings on our human capabilities and our future of having more capabilities as we become aware that we can do these extraordinary things?
Garry Nolan
Right. I mean I think it’s like playing the piano. Some people are just natural at certain things. And I can play the piano or I can sing, but you better cover your ears when I do either of those because it’s harsh. But when it comes to math or biology intuition, that’s my strength. So I think you can teach people to do something or to at least organize whatever capability or level that they have in ways that we didn’t understand. I can be taught to play the piano but I wasn’t a Mozart at age four. And so I think as well just like with this people who are born with it. And many of these people later in life say that either I found I needed to suppress it or I needed to ignore it or I found a way to manage it. So that’s the first part. The second part of your question was about does the interaction cause it. I think all the interactions might do unless somebody’s reaching into your brain and restructuring how your brain operates, is revealed to you a way to accomplish it, it was always there you just never realized you could do it. It’s sort of like the muscle memory needed to be activated, and so once you realize that you can do it, it becomes easier to do it next time. So I think that for many people when they have an interaction there’s two ways to think about it. One way they have an interaction and that strengthens a mental connection approach that allows them to continue to do it. So just like with meditation, when I first began learning how to meditate I couldn’t do it, but now I can very quickly go into a state where I can clear my mind in five ten seconds. I’m not a meditator, I can’t do it for more than like 10 minutes, but I can clear my mind because I’ve learned how to do it. So I think that’s part of what is going on with some people. But I think for the people though who for instance there’s many stories of individuals who have had some sort of medical event, and they wake up after this event, where now they have this new ability. And I think one way to explain that is a process of neurogenesis, that two parts of the brain might not have previously been connected but after oxygen insufficiency in the brain caused nerve damage the brain does have now we understand the ability to regenerate partially, and that might sort of create a network around the damage that connects two areas of the brain in ways that they weren’t before. Now it doesn’t happen in everybody just because you got a head trauma, but in the few people that were lucky enough if you will to have the damage in the right place this connection occurs maybe. I always am disappointed in scientists who say oh well that just can’t be. It’s like well why don’t you just play with the idea and see where it goes? You don’t have to dismiss it dismissively.
Alan Steinfeld
Budd Hopkins used to say, most scientists like to explain the uninvestigated instead of investigate the unexplained. And so I wanna ask you, you’ve been very outward about your own personal experiences, as a paper boy when you were I guess ten, and then this experience in England hypothetically perhaps. How much has that informed you and your passion for this subject, and maybe a little shift in your own physiology?
Garry Nolan
Oh I think without those I wouldn’t be here today. Without having had those experiences, because as I’ve often said there’s the anecdote of your experience. An anecdote doesn’t mean it’s just a story, you experienced something and you know what happened. So you don’t need anybody to tell you that or you don’t need to believe anybody who says that you’re crazy. So I experienced those things, whether anybody else likes it or not. And so for me it’s not a belief, it was an experience for me. And so the little guys in my bedroom are perhaps in some ways less believable because it might have been a dream except that it seemed to be a recurring dream over a few weeks. And 20 years later seeing a picture of what it was that I saw in my bedroom on the front cover of Whitley Strieber’s book Communion was an ontologic shock for me where I just dropped the book literally standing in the used bookstore just here on California Avenue. And so but for me to translate that to other scientists or for me to prove to other people that it was beyond just an anecdote requires everything that I’m doing. So the first thing for me was the paperboy event where all my senses were totally clear that was an object a physical structure, an engineered device floating above me making weird sort of vibration in spacetime or as other people I’ve been speaking to some sort of geometric structure of space that explains the quantum nature in a different way. And so if you had access to the behind the scenes puppet strings that are matter in some way if you could reach behind this structure and then just change the relationship of those things you could program it from behind. It’s kind of like you’ve got a puzzle piece in front of you and behind the scenes is a puppet master moving the pieces around to make something be what it is that they want it to be. Now maybe that’s done by consciousness. And the other event, the one in England that I refer to without really going into a lot of details with other people except in private, was the event that happened where my consciousness was moved physically. The sort of event you have an out of body experience and you might hover over your body or watch doctors working on you or whatever the events might be. This went far beyond that. This was a clear demonstration that consciousness is severable from the body, and it wasn’t a near-death experience, there was no trauma. There wasn’t an event except that it was sort of a calling where some internal voice said go lie down and I did and within 30 seconds I was out of my body interacting with something else completely that was basically transferring information. And when that happens to you, even physicists are freaking out because they’re beginning to understand that the universe doesn’t happen unless consciousness observes it. And that’s a very uncomfortable place for a physicist to be. At least until recently. So I think we’ve reached a stage of science where what is explainable is reasonably well understood, but we’re now at the fringe of what we understand, and the only way to explain the fringe is to come up with new science that goes beyond the simple ways that we understand it today.
Zenka Caro
That’s right, new science. The quantum world is banging at our door. ETs are banging at our door, dimensionality, all of these new and exciting things. So considering we have a new world where we’re not going to have to spend a lot of our time in the disclosure world of trying to say, hey this is important let’s listen is it real is it not. All that effort that we put in over the years, I’m hopeful that things could change now. And in that, leaders like you, what are you, Garry Nolan, interested in? Aside from everybody else, what lights you up? I know you’re interested in crash retrieval at the Sol Foundation conference, Hal was talking about programmable quantum materials. But biology, DNA, ETs, crash retrievals, if you were given a sizable amount of budget with as much research teams as you wanted to direct yourself, what is your heart’s desire to research right now?
Garry Nolan
Two things. One is materials understanding. Because again if you want to reach other scientists and you want to reach the lay public, you want to be able to show that there is money for value or value for money put in. And so, if such technologies exist, I happen to think that they do based on everything that everybody I’ve spoken to and the way that people react in the government around this. I mean, my god they put Chuck Schumer’s UAP disclosure act, to me that’s an admittance that something is going on, and he basically tried to claim eminent domain. Eminent domain over the materials. Why would he do that? Because he felt he needed to do that. Otherwise, he never would have gone down that road. If you’re looking for proof, that’s it right there. The legislation is proof. So to the extent that getting access to that material and understanding how it was done, the most important thing that comes out of it is the first order approximations of the math and physics of how it operates. That level of fundamental physics will tell you the background principles of physics that you’re going to use to do this, whether it’s what Hal Puthoff says or Eric Davis says, or any of these other brilliant people trying to understand it. So it has to be brought out into the open for all to investigate and opine on. And then you can make the decision as to what you do with the technology, but to have it held behind the scenes by defense contractors or within a siloed set of silos within government and intelligence, where we know they haven’t been able to make great progress on understanding the whole picture. Some minor parts perhaps. But to leave it there is a crime against humanity basically. It’s fundamentally a crime to say that we have a technology that could provide unlimited energy, zero point energy or otherwise, and we’re not going to let humanity have access to it. It requires a Manhattan Project level study, and it needs to be done outside of the doors of the government. Whether the best place is academics or the best place is some sort of public-private relationship, but you want to do it in a sufficiently transparent way that people see that there is value and movement out of this. So there’s the materials aspect because that kind of gets into the programmable matter point that you just raised, that I think what he means by programmable matter is at the very least the ability to rearrange the structure of material and the components of that material which are not particles, they’re some sort of weird vibration in spacetime or some sort of geometric structure of space that explains the quantum nature in a different way. And so if you had access to the behind the scenes puppet strings that are matter in some way if you could reach behind this structure and then just change the relationship of those things you could program it from behind. It’s kind of like you’ve got a puzzle piece in front of you and behind the scenes is a puppet master moving the pieces around to make something be what it is that they want it to be. Now maybe that’s done by consciousness. And the other part that you know, like Jacques Vallee said, Jacques who first shocked me when he said, in talking about and explaining as a way to explain all of the observations that we seem to have on the table in front of us. His comment was, to them, reality is negotiable. And what he meant by that was by whim and by thought or consciousness or technology, or consciousness interacting with technology that enables it, they can take a volume of space and make anything happen within it. It’s unimaginable levels of technology or unimaginable ways that it could happen, but it’s the stuff of science fiction, and I mean that in a positive way. That, okay if wow if somebody’s doing that, what do they understand about the universe that we don’t? And so that excites me. So I’m 64. So I’m unlikely to see the end of this story. And I’d be happy if I’m only helped push it along. But to me that’s at least part of it. The second part is consciousness, obviously. To your point of can we reach into the brain and change things? I think before we want to change things, we want to understand things. You don’t want to be poking about in people’s brains until you understand what you’re doing. But if consciousness is what we think it is, getting down to something like the Hameroff-Penrose Orch OR, orchestrated reduction approach, or whether there’s something else that explains what consciousness is and how it sits in the fabric of spacetime. Whether you’re a materialist and you think that consciousness is only an illusion of the neurons interacting with each other, there’s still what Federico Faggin calls the qualia, of how do you explain what red means and what the taste of a hamburger is in terms of consciousness, and how do you encode that in neurons. And so understanding the relationship of how matter creates or allows for consciousness. It’s already well understood now that the brain is not just those neurons, the electromagnetic frequencies that we know happen, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, theta waves etc, are actually communicating from one side of my head to the other. There are resonance and if anything minimally they’re sort of the clock, the CPU clock that keeps the brain moving in a regularized manner. But we now understand that at that grander level, one side of the brain is talking to the other and keeping it in concert. But we also understand that cancer cells have their own little electromagnetic fields that are different than normal cells and that you can actually perhaps even detect that as a diagnostic approach, and people are already thinking about using electromagnetic fields to specifically go after cancer cells in tissue. Now, having just had a cancer removed literally right there next to my eye, that would have been a far better thing than the giant hole that they just poked in me and then they had to reconstruct it. People often say, what’s wrong with Garry’s face? Cause I’ve had my face reconstructed like four times now. Not because I wanted to look prettier, because I had to remove giant cancers that infested my face. Because I’m just prone to them. So I think that that is the two areas. Those are the two areas that I would go after. If I had the money, I get asked literally every other week to get myself involved with some of these mummies down in Nazca. I think there’s maybe something there. There is science that’s being done that still has me scratching my head and going, hmm. But I don’t think it’s being done right because the money is not… I’m not dissing the people who are doing anything. It just needs a sufficiently large research program to oversee it to get it done right. Like I did with the Atacama mummy. That took a lot of time and effort. Some people didn’t like what I had to say about it, but I think I’ve proven over the years that I’m not here to debunk. I’m just here to tell the data as it’s seen. But I’ve had four decades now of working in the sciences and I know how it should be done. And so to the extent that I can pass on that and create a rubric within which others can learn. I have like eight or ten of my former students are now professors at Stanford and Harvard and many other places, that I’ve taught them how to think, how to do science. They were naturally smart people, but I gave them a method. And so I think there’s a method still to be provided to this whole fringe area. Again, I’m going to reclaim that word. This whole fringe area, there’s a method to be applied that others can learn. And it’s not hard. And I was taught it by my mentors. Both the teaching side, I went to Catholic school, so I have a and plus I’m a Catholic, but all my mentors were Ashkenazi Jews. And they had a particular way of thinking about things that I realized was there’s a method there that I can learn. And so hybridizing those things together, I think has value. There’s always value in hybrid. There’s hybrid vigor where you take the best aspects of one thing and another, you bring them together and you create something new.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you for that. I just want to go back to the idea of experiencers and the fact that you saw these little beings and millions of others, or hundreds of thousands have seen similar beings. So the consistency of the scenes doesn’t prove it, but there’s a correlation of evidence. But that’s not the question I want to ask. I want to ask about something you said earlier in your career, I think I heard a conversation with you and Caroline Cory where you hypothesized maybe according to Moore’s law that the DNA is like nine billion years old and the earth is only four and a half billion years old. So life, an emergent property of creation, and does that life then constitute a form of consciousness?
Garry Nolan
Yeah, I mean I think, and interestingly even somebody from SETI just the other day says it’s very likely that aliens exist because as many have said there’s billions and billions and billions of planets even in our local supercluster that have conditions of environment that would allow even life like us to emerge. So the notion of nine billion years versus four billion is that somebody, and it wasn’t me, came up with a Moore’s law of DNA complexity. So the Moore’s law of transistors is that every five years, whatever the number is, the complexity goes up by twofold, and it just is, it’s a line going up. Similarly, somebody thought, okay well the chromosomes and the gene networks are a circuit way more complex than any computer we could ever make, they’re a circuit. And similarly, you could imagine that there has been from the beginning of time since today a complexity. So what they did was they modeled the complexity of what it would look like going all the way back to from where we are today back to the Cambrian. I think it’s the Cambrian explosion, everybody knows what that is when sort of modules of genes came together in ways that created all these weird structures, have you ever seen a picture of the supposed pre-Cambrian or Cambrian sea there’d be all these monstrous looking things. From which only a few things ended up surviving. But the modularization and the ability to put things together like Lego blocks had come to fruition. But before that there must have been others. So when they project that back in time, when they cross the x-axis of when time is. So complexity on the y-axis, x-axis is time. It crosses at about four billion years. And that’s weird. Because the universe is supposedly was created nine billion years earlier than that or at least what we understand the universe to be. So the universe has been around for 15 billion years. There was probably enough matter available for something to evolve probably within about five billion years. So there’s a gap there of about six billion years. So you have to propose two things. Either life occurred elsewhere and just sort of hopped a rock and showed up here as a spore and so it kind of jump-started everywhere because of those initial conditions. Or complexity went through an exponential very quickly at the beginning and then leveled off into a linear line. So those are the two possibilities. It either went like that, from four billion years ago. Or it actually happened much earlier. And so, people say well how reasonable is that? Well how reasonable is it that the metal in this pen actually is a condensate of supernovas that happened 10 billion years ago and turned into a cloud of atoms and then condensed and turned into a solar system sufficient that somebody was able to mine it. I mean the same process that created the metal in this thing is the process that you could imagine allows for some lucky microbe to make it from one place to another. So I have no problem with it. It’s a kind of diaspora. And just look at some of the recent results with deep miners. They’re mining material from miles under the earth and they pull up rocks that have microbes in them that their metabolism is so slow that they divide once every 100,000 years. Okay, well maybe that was the first microbe that hitched a ride. And that makes you go back and think again about well where did life evolve. People always think of life as having evolved on the surface in the intertidal zone and lightning strikes and boom the molecules come together and life begins. Maybe life began deep under the earth. Or deep under a place that would be inhospitable to us today, but if you can imagine that, suddenly the place where life can start expands exponentially. It’s anywhere there’s water and heat and sufficient minerals. So that means life could happen everywhere because there’s lots of rocks that are big enough to have melted water and mineral availability. Now here’s another interesting thing. What is most life made of? Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and a few of the other, and metals. Mostly metals are used in enzymes to help catalyze reactions. That’s interesting because the very first elements that ever got made in the first novae or supernovas were carbon, nitrogen. The heavier atoms, uranium, etc, took stellar evolution of multiple supernovas. So we’re the luckiest downstream owners of those heavy metals like iron, but those weren’t the first of the elements that were around. But life is almost exclusively made of the lighter elements that showed up in the earliest phases of the universe’s expansion. So, once again, it gives you the opportunity to have life beginning way earlier than it was required for metal usage.
Zenka Caro
And it may be an emergent property of creation, and therefore you’re saying it’s probably everywhere.
Garry Nolan
I mean, I had really a sort of a moment when I read that paper just about three weeks ago of these ultra long-lived microorganisms that live deep under the earth. It was like, geez, that means anywhere there was such conditions, which probably exist literally in every solar system that ever was, there’s water and heat. And so therefore the conditions for life are way beyond what we think of as a habitable planet.
Alan Steinfeld
I totally agree.
Zenka Caro
We wanted to talk a little bit about hybrids, alien brains, human hybrids with alien, all that sort of thing and looking at our brain structures, looking at our DNA, this was things that Alan had wanted to ask you. So Alan, if I’m not phrasing it right, go ahead and ask him…
Alan Steinfeld
It’s a safe space.
Garry Nolan
Right.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you’ve looked at brains, human brains. How different, I mean I don’t know if you’ve looked at alien brains, but if their physiology and neurology is different, they would be able to perceive different levels of reality. Is that correct? Or different types?
Garry Nolan
I mean, the scientist down at UC Irvine, Hoffman, I think is his name, is that basically his postulate is you only perceive what is evolutionarily necessary for you to pass on your genes. It’s no need for me to perceive you as an electromagnetic or quantum wave function. I don’t need to see cosmic rays with my eyes because it’s not evolutionarily an advantage for me. So basically he’s saying is that what we perceive as reality is only enough to allow me to recognize a mate, mate, and have children. Right? So that’s the first thing. So the second thing is, and we’ve been watching the TV show Shogun recently on Hulu I think, and about Japanese culture in the 1600s-ish, and how different they were to the Westerner, the British Westerner who shows up, in their thinking style and what they assumed about reality, or they assumed at least about cultural interactions. So you don’t have to go to Japan, you can go to any of the shamans or other cultures that their perception and rules of how the universe is are different. They still have the same senses, but they interpret them differently. Imagine that you were something that lived in a place which was dark, well you’d probably evolve an intelligence, if intelligence evolves, that might use sound. And use sonar, and we have those on Earth, we have bats. We know that sharks and other fish in the ocean use electromagnetics to sense their surroundings. So what happens when you have an intelligence that uses something like that, and how does that change your structure of reality and the math. The basic assumptions you make. I’ve been learning about in math and this is again related to the conversation I had with this old friend of mine, about quaternions and octonions, which are mathematical constructs of unreal numbers but are necessary to explain physics issues to explain reality and transformations in three and four and eight D space. And it’s like wow imagine if you had a brain that instinctively understood that. Would an avian species be more likely, because they think in 3D much more intuitively, to come up with ways of understanding math that might advance them further than us? Would it be possible for a reasonably intelligent group of dinosaurs to not require technology, but find a way to use their consciousness to transcend and become a kind of civilization that’s different than us? I don’t know. But it’s fun to think about. And you can imagine any other place that maybe there are some far distant star a race of ascetic monks that are far better meditators than we ever would be and have learned how to manipulate spacetime mentally. Again there are these clues in human history and culture that such abilities exist. There’s been lots of research that some people believe is sufficient to prove the case whether mainstream science wants to believe it or not. I can look at the data and go hmm if this were a paper about cancer then I would say it’s true, because the numbers don’t lie. Your interpretation might be wrong. So anyway I think one of the best movies about it recently was that movie Arrival. And that basically depicted an alien thought process that saw time as a something that language could use to transcend your vision of reality. So yeah I expect it, it can’t be that everybody thinks like humans. Because that’s like saying humans think like monkeys. Or humans think like the reptiles from which we descended. There’s an evolutionary process back to that, but we don’t think the same. And we hope we evolve and become something different. Humans 10,000 years from now assuming we don’t descend into anarchy or otherwise will be very different than us. We are already different than who we were in the 1500s. So yeah, and that excites me. All the science fiction I’ve ever read, which is basically every science fiction book that ever came across my desk that I’ve read, was because I was interested in the aliens in those books. And the different ways that the authors depicted a thinking process. Some of the best ones that I liked the most were that the thought processes came from their biology and their evolution. That shaped what they were and how they thought, and their perceptions. So yeah I hope it is.
Zenka Caro
Some people say that the grays actually see their soul as a field. So yeah, and if it’s true that they just drink smoothies and stuff, then they’re not thinking about food all the time like humans are. And if they can’t have sex, they’re not thinking about sex either, so the brains are different. Let me ask one last question. Are we at a point in evolution where the availability of the psionic assets and the telepathy tapes and this access and this conversation on consciousness and what you’ve just said about this evolution, could we be at this nexus point where we are actually becoming a new species that will think differently than 20th century humans or whatever you want to call it?
Garry Nolan
What that requires, I mean yes I think the potential’s there. So what that requires though is separation. Species evolve best or most quickly when they’re separated from the other groups. Darwin’s finches is the perfect example of that. Geographic dislocation either ocean or mountain ranges when two groups can no longer intermingle their genes, that allows for one to drive forward or evolve differently than another. It’s basically because your environment has changed. Either because of genetic drift or because of the environment changes you need to adapt. But if your environment doesn’t change, like sharks their environment hasn’t changed in several hundred million years, and they’re apparently the same as they were long ago. They’ve evolved to a point of near perfection. They don’t need to change. But our cultural environment is changing, especially with disclosure. So we may be at that cutting edge of human evolution based on all these external assets that we are now aware of, like the telepathy tapes. Others have pointed this out that because humans adapt their environment to their needs, and because we don’t… please don’t take me wrong I’m not advocating eugenics. Because we don’t cull the herd, we accumulate mutations. I mean I have a mutation that causes cancer, that’s why I get all these skin cancers all the time. I would have been dead when I was 32 except for medicine. I might have been able to pass my genes on, but that would have been the end of things. And so I think civilization and culture slows down evolution, doesn’t stop it, but you’ve still got the weight of the unchanged contributing their genes to the gene pool. So it’s only via separation that you will accomplish this, and so that’s one great reason why getting off this planet and getting to other places so that we can isolate and adapt. So great, if suddenly we had starships and we could get groups of people who were all of one mind about something to go somewhere else, 10,000 years from now they come back, you’d probably be very different. But you know, we’re also adapting technology to ourselves. So very soon, one or more of these ideas that I’m talking about, about changing brain, Neuralink company or other things are going to be used. And frankly, even with AI today, I use AI for everything. If I could incorporate it somehow into my brain, I would be more an appendage to the AI than the AI is an appendage to me. If I could use it for my memory ’cause you are your memory, and the memories that shaped you. But you can’t remember everything that happened 15 years ago, I can barely remember what it is that I did yesterday. But if I could have that at my beck and call, and part of my memory system where the neurons could be interlaced into that structure, who am I then? I now have vastly, even with AI today I have vastly different capabilities. And the stuff that I use it for is just wow. What a relief. I edit papers with it, I write papers with it, I use it for ideation of ideas. And that’s in just 60 years. When I was 16 I remember going to one of the first computer labs in Connecticut, was a field trip from my school, and I typed into the computer, who was George Washington? Return. Error. So I’ve used it, and yesterday’s computers were like abacuses compared to what we’re doing today, and it doesn’t mean that AI is conscious, and I don’t think that AI is going to be conscious. I think it could replicate consciousness. We’re already past the point of can it mimic a human. Yes, is the short answer to that. And look at how fast it’s advancing. Give us another 100 or whatever years, we are going to be merging with our machines. And then you’re going to have a fight. You’re going to have a fight with those people who think it’s horrific and unethical and inappropriate, and that we shouldn’t ever do it, and then there’ll be those who are going to do it. You have people already today who are fighting genetics, and the use of genetics to modify humans. There’s a prohibition of course worldwide against it, but who’s to say it’s not happening, I’m not saying that I know that it’s happening, but who’s to say that it’s not happening somewhere. Or that there won’t be a group that says, I don’t care what you all say I’m gonna do this. We’re gonna create a nation state in the middle of the Pacific, we’re going to put a bunch of barges there. We are now the nation of Utopia, and we think it’s okay to do this. Absent a naval flotilla showing up and sinking them, they could do whatever they wanted.
Zenka Caro
And who’s to say we haven’t already done that and the aliens are our CRISPR experiences coming back to us through time. Who knows, there’s all these different…
Garry Nolan
I mean, people often say that, one of your questions was about genetic intervention with humans. I don’t think you have to. We’ve evolved dogs faster than we have cats because dogs have a particular set of transposable elements that allows their genomes to be more plastic than cats. But we’ve evolved them from wolves into such a range of capabilities all just by choice. We are going to breed this thing with that. So if you were a super species, you don’t need to genetically intervene. You just need to make sure that the right groups survive and the right matings occur. Maybe you can do something. But that level of intervention is, you don’t just splice in a gene. Because there’s so many interconnected relationships in genes that we’re not there yet. Maybe somebody is. But I always use the example of where is the gene for nest building in birds? There’s no gene. It’s an instinct. But the instinct is revealed over development of the bird from the egg to the brain structure that forms because of the epigenetic shapes and changes that occur in the DNA of the bird as the program unfolds through development. The genes change, the chromosomes change over time. You need to understand that if you say I want this to happen you need to be able to trace the this that happens back through all of the cell types that generate that meta-trait. I call them meta-genes. That meta-gene trait, so that you understand you’re accomplishing the goal and not causing a problem. And I think we’re going to be there in far shorter order than I would have believed five years ago because of the large language models in AI. Which tells me that there is a way to do it if you are sufficiently advanced and you would know what to do. That doesn’t mean it’s happened, but it also tells you that people who are looking to find some genetic evidence of hybrids, it’s a lost cause. The changes would be so subtle as to be lost in the noise. Of course if reptilians are real then obviously you’re gonna see something very different. But the ‘they walk amongst us crowd’, doesn’t mean that they’re not there, it just means that detecting them by whatever technologies we have today would be fruitless.
Alan Steinfeld
I just want to thank Garry for the time he has with us. And it seems things are accelerating. The disclosure process, people like Jacob Bargar appearing in front of a SCIF in Congress. Do you see this accelerating, is it building to a nexus point you think?
Garry Nolan
I don’t want to predict, because of what a timeline might be. So, back in 2015 I was involved with a core group of people, scientists, who were working, the usual names that have come up, Jacques, Hal, Eric, Jay, Stratton, people who were behind the scenes doing all of this stuff that was secret then. Suddenly it started coming out. So what I knew in let’s say 2013 2014 didn’t really come out until 2018. So that’s a five year lapse. And then suddenly the secrets that I knew started to tumble over each other more quickly. So in terms of acceleration the time interval between me knowing that secret and then everybody suddenly knowing about it shortened. And so that tells me and literally every day everything is changing. And so, people on Twitter who say oh nothing’s ever changed, shut up! There’s no evidence, there’s lots of evidence, you just haven’t taken the time to look at it. So shut up. If you don’t think that there has been a change in either the narrative or the facts, well go watch paint dry. But the rest of us are busy moving things forward. And if you’re not going to help put your shoulder to the cart to help push it along, and all you want to do is sit in the cart and complain that the cart’s not moving fast enough, then get out of the cart! That’s my attitude. So I’m only happy to deal with the people who are pushing it forward. Because I just don’t have time for the ones, I’m almost dead, relative to the end of my life right I got maybe 10 15, maybe 20 years. I got a little bit of time left but it’s not infinite, right? And I want to get an answer to it. And I’ve devoted my life mostly not to knowing the answer to it but putting a structure in place such that the answer can be derived. The Sol Foundation, the things that Dave Grusch and others are doing, everything that’s going on behind scenes are creating a scaffolding. From which those answers can be extracted. You don’t jump to the answer, you build the answer.
Zenka Caro
Well we want to end on an appreciative note that you have been doing that Garry, and it’s you know we had a bunch of other questions for you but we’re going to wrap up and I think this idea of building permission structures, of creating methods that look at the fringe science, the pseudo, whatever people think pseudo is it’s real, consciousness is the next frontier of understanding reality. But I never thought of myself in my life as an activist. And I’m seen as being an activist. Or that I needed to be the leader of a movement or anything like that. The only thing that drives me is the anger, not anger, but how dare you not allow me to ask the question. And Avi Loeb has the same kind of thing. It’s like, you’re a scientist, you’re not supposed to talk about ideas that way. You’re a priest, you’re not a scientist, stop it. If you want to be a priest or a nun, there’s the convent, head over there. If you want to believe in dogma. And so, if anything has motivated me into this it has been that righteous indignation that questions should be asked. But again, I got that from my mentors, and I got that from ideas that I had as a scientist where somebody said oh that won’t work. I said, well okay, you’re wrong, let me prove it to you. And you know what came out of that? All the retroviral technology that does gene therapy, that was me. I came up with that. Retroviral technology. And I was told by a Nobel prize winner that it wouldn’t work. Not my boss but the Nobel prize winner. When I showed him and another colleague the idea, he said ‘oh wow let’s do it.’ So, it’s I think that’s what I’m trying to inculcate in people is the right to ask the question and the right to do it your own way.
Alan Steinfeld
I think it’s very exciting what you’re part of, what we’re all trying to bring out there that there’s something new for humanity to embrace. And thank you for being a big part of it, Garry.
Garry Nolan
Thank you very much. I appreciate the time. Thank you to the audience.
Alan Steinfeld
See you at the MUFON symposium in Cincinnati, Garry.
Garry Nolan
Yes, when is that?
Alan Steinfeld
That is July 17th to the 19th, 2025.
Zenka Caro
You know, our eyes are only seeing a small percentage, less than one percent, you know, half a percent of what’s out there. But there’s a whole bunch of multi-dimensionality and other intelligence that are a part of reality. So all of these discussions are so fascinating. We have Garry Nolan as one of the premier worldwide investigators that’s advocating for us to really come together, the major institutions, governments, people in general, to come and apply some rigorous science, curiosity, open-mindedness to our future. If you want to check out Garry Nolan, you can find out his incredible organization at the Sol Foundation. You can also find amazing decades worth of interviews from Alan Steinfeld on New Realities YouTube. It’s incredible. You know, I love that you’re interested in consciousness, Garry, because that really, for me, is something that’s even higher than physics. And so when we understand it, we reap the benefits from this. So thank you for bringing that into it because it really messes things up in terms of the simplicity of conversations and things. Also want to invite… hold on one second, Alan. One quick second. I’m going to give Garry a chance to wrap us up and say things as well. I just want to tell you one more thing. We have an Impossible to Possible coaching this year that is taking consciousness into an applied research place in your lives. So when we’re talking about this, we’re talking about ETs, we’re talking about our lives, we’re talking about genetics, we’re talking about applying what we know from science into your life, about what you are doing, what you are up to, what seems impossible, what are you trying to do, are you researching, etc. So that’s really exciting. We’ll see you next time on the Unlimited Show. And in the meantime, stay tuned.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you, Zenka, for setting up, creating this beautiful interview and opportunity to interview Garry Nolan. We’ll have more upcoming interviews. Zenka Caro and I look at her website lightnet.com, look at my YouTube channels at youtube.com/newrealities. Thank you. If you’ve listened to this whole interview to the end, send me an email and I’ll send you a gift of the introduction to my book, Making Contact: Preparing for the New Realities of Extraterrestrial Existence. Send an email to newrealities@earthlink.net with ‘introduction’ in the title and I’ll be happy to send you the introduction.