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This is KZSU Stanford.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions
coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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The poet Georg Trackle wrote something strange
as a soul on earth,
a verse that was ponderously glossed by Martin Heidegger,
yet in truth, it's the earth itself
that is stranger than strange.
This third stone from the sun,
as Jimmy called it,
contains a staggering diversity of realities,
as well as extraterrestrial inheritcies.
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The extraterrestrial permeates our oars,
our atmosphere,
our bodies,
our solarizing plants.
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Our oceans are filled with surreal apparitions
of a cosmic imagination.
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The only thing I share in common with a leafy sea dragon
or dumbbow octopus,
oboni eared,
assfish is the terrestrial matrix
that incubated us all.
That incubated even this strange thing called the soul.
The question will be addressing today is whether there is
any indubitable evidence here on earth
that earth is not the only matrix of life.
In other words,
has our planet ever been visited by life forms
that come from elsewhere?
Stay tuned friends, a show on unidentified anomalous phenomena
coming up.
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I'm joining the studio today by special guest,
Gary Nolan,
who is the RACFORD and Cadlotta Harris Professor
of Immunology here at Stanford
in the Department of Pathology.
Gary Nolan, as authored numerous medical research papers,
has founded biotechnology companies
to a which are on NASDAQ.
And he has been particularly actively in ufology,
the study of unidentified flying objects,
or what now goes by the term unidentified,
anomalous phenomena, or UAPs.
Nolan is one of the scientists investigating UAPs
who has been particularly forthcoming in public
about the alleged existence of alien craft and machines
here on earth.
And it's this possible presence of anomalous,
non-terrestrial objects that he's here to discuss with us today.
Gary Nolan, welcome to the program.
I'm delighted that you could join us today on entitled opinions.
- Well, thank you very much for the invitation.
I'm looking forward to discussing this with you and your audience.
- So am I.
I'm gonna start by asking you some questions
that you've answered any number of times
in other venues and interviews,
which I've been following myself.
But since most of the people who listened to this show,
entitled opinions haven't heard you speak on this topic,
could you tell us to start off how a highly distinguished
professor of immunology got involved
in the investigation of UAPs?
- Well, it is almost something out of a movie.
So I was sitting in my office at Stanford
doing my day job, which is immunology cancer research.
And there was a lock at the door of my office.
And unannounced, there were two men who shut up at the door
who claimed that they represented CIA and an aerospace corporation.
And they wanted me to talk to them
about some data that they had around some military pilots,
military individuals, intelligence community individuals
who had been harmed by exposure to some kind of objects.
So that was fine.
That was a nice introduction.
And then they came in and we got to talking.
And then as I began asking them questions about,
well, what's the nature of the objects
that they felt that they had been exposed to?
And that was when the term UFO came up.
And your audience should know that I was as skeptical
as anybody else when somebody would mention something like that.
And I thought honestly it was about candid camera.
I thought this was a candid camera moment.
- So they came to you because you have an expertise
in immunology and you had invented
from what I gathered some machines for detection of pathogens
and blood and so forth.
And so you were one of the leading experts
in the field that could maybe provide some insights.
- So where did it go from there?
- So why they came to me was because we had co-developed
to this instrument called Cytoph, which was a blood analysis device.
And so they were doing complete medical workups
of these individuals.
And so blood analysis would give them some view
as to the inflammatory processes that might have occurred.
And I mean then they actually started showing me the data.
And this is one of the things that I continually press on people.
It's not about the conclusion.
It's about the data.
If I can convince you that the data is real,
which they convinced me that the data was real,
then we're allowed together to speculate about what it might mean.
I mean that's science, that's just plain old science.
And so because at the time they showed me data,
MRIs of individuals that, you know,
hard to hoax such a thing.
And no reason to believe that they were really hoaxing that.
It intrigued me.
I mean who couldn't be intrigued with a medical problem like that?
And so from there it went to me helping them with some of this
and actually worked with them for probably four or five years on it.
And it turned out that a large number of the cases
that we had studied were in fact Havana syndrome cases.
So we actually had seen some of the first of the Havana syndrome cases.
And so why would they have brought Havana syndrome cases to me?
Because what had happened was in the military and in the intelligence community,
these strange occurrences kind of go up the tree, the medical tree,
and then nobody knows what to do with them.
And they go over and they get put in a bucket, largely called the weird bucket.
We don't know what to do with it.
And when enough of these cases have occurred where there appears to be a pattern,
that's when they say, okay, well now we have a pattern that we can reach out
into the various scientific communities to help us understand what the pattern means.
And so we had by that time already determined a large number of the,
let's say the diagnostic codes for what had happened to many of these individuals that we had.
And they matched the diagnostic codes of what was coming out of Havana,
which was actually a good thing because then we were able to take the 80 or so individuals,
85 or so individuals that had that off the table.
That became somebody else's problem.
It became actually a national security concern and there's a huge operation of people studying that.
But the 20 or so that remained had a concentration of individuals when you looked at the case reports,
they had said that they had seen unidentified flying objects that he'd gotten too close to.
So the science helped you categorize and clean the data, filter the data,
for something which was to me then even more intriguing.
So that was what got me involved.
Could I ask were these mostly military personnel,
these mostly military and or intelligence community individuals?
But also diplomatic corps.
So the whole range.
Right.
So did you interact directly with the individuals?
Or only with the data?
Oh, you did.
Oh, no, no.
I wanted to hear from some of the people.
And what did they tell you about their exposure?
Well, they said that they'd seen the things that were on paper.
And I can't talk about the individual cases because some of these people are semi-public.
And when I talk about any of them specifically, they think I'm talking about the other and they feel they don't want their families reminding them of these things.
And can you share with us what their descriptions of what they saw?
They would, I mean, one gentleman said he saw something directly on the ground in front of him.
And he was in a military base which had nuclear materials on site.
And that his day job was to help protect those nuclear materials.
Which is interesting because a large number of the cases that are actually out there are regarding these objects that seem to be seen.
With a higher frequency around military establishments that actually have nuclear materials.
So for instance, the USS Nimitz and the Eisenhower events that occurred at sea, those are both nuclear aircraft carriers.
So they seem to be, they seem to find whatever these things are they seem to take a concerted interest in anything of ours that has nuclear capability.
So let's just assume hypothetically that they're alien in the extraterrestrial sense.
And their interests in our nuclear capabilities would indicate perhaps that they are trying to measure what degree of technological advancement we're at.
Would it be because they find something interesting about our nuclear technologies or what?
Well, so let's take a step back and perhaps we can cover this later portion of the discussion of whether it's ET or something else.
But imagine yourself as an anthropologist studying a village of Aborigines or primitives in the middle of the forest.
And suddenly they've developed the ability to do something that might actually hurt you.
And so one way of thinking about it is that they're kind of suggesting they're monitoring us that we've now reached a level of scientific ability where we might actually do something that hurts them.
And we're also poised, frankly, to move out into the solar system and then also to move out into probably the local galactic arm here at some point in our near future.
And so if you are, let's say, a civilization or a species that's been around for a long time and to have even gotten here over any kind of credible timeframe,
you've probably been around for millions of years.
You think in those terms and so you think in the inevitability of human species, finding its way out into the local reaches.
And you might interact with them in some way, that would be negative, or it might be a reason for them to say, "Okay, well, it's time to take care of these people and point them in a different direction in the best way possible."
Did I understand you correctly just hypothetically again saying that if this presence is indeed alien in the traditional sense of alien, that it's been on Earth for a long time, much longer than we would expect?
Why would it just show up because we found a reason to see them?
And it's showing up because now we have the means to detect or to confirm.
Well, I see it as almost like an intelligence test, right, that if you can actually see something and recognize it for what it is, and realize that it's, as I would say, data off the curve.
And then recognize that data off the curve is not noise, but something that actually needs to be explained, which is what a good scientist should do.
Then, you know, I think we've come of age in a manner that has allowed us to say, "Well, maybe it's not just the gods, maybe it's not just an angel flying over, but it's actually something that has been a lot of the gods."
And something that has an origin, maybe at some point in time, similar waters.
Right.
I want to get back to the material data that you think it's very important to put out in the public sphere, but I can't resist referring to something that you said in another interview where the question being posed about whose planet this really is, if there has been this presence for such a long time before we even became harmonized ourselves as a species, you know?
Well, I mean, I actually wasn't a question. It was my postulate that I don't think it's gotten enough attention.
Whose planet is this? Right.
Right. I mean, if something else has been here for a long time for us to arrogantly show up on the scene and say, "Okay, well, now because we are on the surface of the planet, we own it."
I mean, it's no different than a barking dog thinking that, you know, the house that it is in is its territory, as opposed to somebody else actually owns the house.
Well, let me, again, in the realm of speculation, refer to Star Trek and the next generation series where they have a prime directive, which is not to interfere in any of the civilizations or life forms that they encounter elsewhere.
He would seem to me that this hiding, this tendency of whoever they are to conceal themselves or at least not coming and making themselves public very often, they are showing their craft in discrete ways.
Put it this way. Their presence on Earth is extremely discreet.
It's discreet, but it also is, again, I think it's again, I go back to the intelligence test narrative.
It's, "Can you see it for what it is?" Right? I mean, clearly they're not fully hiding. I mean, at some level, they don't seem to care whatever these things are. We see them.
But you've talked also about projected realities that people who see a flying saucer above the car, as you mentioned in France where the family is driving with their hood open, and the other cars don't see anything, but there's one mother with three children that see something above them, then that could be a way of projecting something that doesn't actually conform.
That would be an extraordinary technology on the one hand, but it would also seem to suggest that they're in no hurry to make themselves fully known.
Let's think of it a different way. So going back to your Star Trek idea, where actually they take it to the extreme. I mean, they're even whole movies in the Star Trek universe where even showing yourself is a problem.
So, clearly they didn't watch these guys that were dealing with didn't watch Star Trek. Right. Right. They show up and they do what they seem to want. Maybe it's a process of acculturation that by showing yourself slowly and allowing yourself to be talked about, eventually, humanity comes to terms with it.
And again, it's something like this, for instance, happened back in the, I don't know, the 1500s or whatever, when the Spanish first showed up off the shores of South America.
And, you know, there are written narratives from that time from the civilizations in South America at that time that didn't see them for what they were.
Didn't see the Galians coming across the ocean and the sails and realize what it meant. Right. That suddenly their world had become both larger and smaller at the same time. Right. Well, the technology seems to be quite extraordinary and far in advance of anything that as far as I can gather, we're able to explain with our own laws of physics. Is that correct? Can you describe a little bit about how impressive or unusual the technology that you've had some glimpses into?
So just this last couple of weeks, we had a conference at Stanford here sponsored by my laboratory but helped by the Sol Foundation, which is a charity charitable foundation that I set up.
We had speakers, physicists and scientists and philosophers and religious leaders all there to talk about this in very scientific terms. And one of the speakers is this gentleman, a physicist from the University of Albany by the name of Kevin Nuth.
And he went off the data that had been collected from one of the so-called the TIC-TAC incident, which had happened around 2004 or so. Where objects were not only seen, but were tracked by multiple radars simultaneously with our most advanced radar systems and seen to move from the basically 50 feet over the Earth to 14 miles above the Earth, instantaneously.
Now, if you calculate the amount of energy to accomplish that, to instantaneously accelerate and decelerate, let's say call it a one-ton object, the amount of energy to do that is more than the nuclear output of the United States for a whole year.
So, I mean, you're talking about multiple, multiple terawatts of energy to accomplish that, and yet they seem to do it effortlessly.
Now, does that mean that they're breaking the laws of physics? I mean, my friend at Harvard, Avi Loaf, professor of astronomy and former head of the department there, who is well known in his study of dark matter physics.
He would say that it just means not that they have new physics, it just means that the physics is as yet unexplained.
I mean, 150 years ago, or whenever it was that Lord Kelvin was eminent physicist of his day, he said physics is over. It's all about the rounding of numbers from this point on.
Well, I mean, how wrong was he? Yeah, totally. So, can I ask, Gary, is it beyond a reasonable doubt that what you described the tic-tic-tic-tic-vids? Oh, yes.
It's beyond a reasonable doubt that it happened.
Well, of course, beyond a reasonable doubt that we, here on Earth, have the presence of what we have to assume, it's an intelligence that doesn't have a terrestrial origin.
Well, I mean, let's put it a different way. Do we have a terrestrial origin? No, everything that we are came from elsewhere.
Yeah, that's what I was saying in my mind.
The Hans Burmia hypothesis basically says that life could have easily originated elsewhere, and it just basically hitched a ride on a rock and took a long sleep.
It's true, but all of these creatures that we know of on Earth's evolved, can't have any more sense.
And there were lots of kinds of have an attrestial origin that come from a single source, or what have you?
And, well, anyway, what I'm saying is, did they originate on this planet, or did they arrive from elsewhere?
Who's to say, I mean, this is speculation, but who's to say that the dinosaurs didn't find a way to become intelligent enough to, and they decided to move underground, right?
You have to leave open, you have to leave open the possibilities until the data takes it off the table.
Then the intrigue for me would be, why, if with that degree of evolved intelligence, would they allow our rather primitive species by comparison to be trushing the planet that they might be belong to them even more than to us?
I mean, if you actually talked to people who claim to have interacted with these things, one of the consistent messages, and you should look up this in Bobway incident of the aerial school,
the aerial school, AR, IEL, and there's a recent movie about it, a documentary.
One of the consistent messages is you're trashing the planet. You're hurting yourselves.
It's not going to hurt us, but you're hurting yourself.
Yeah. Well, again, the skeptics out there will want to know, well, why would you go to Zimbabwe and make communicate such an important message for the
grassroots to grassroots, why not to the governments of the, maybe they don't think about structure and power in the same way you do?
Can we talk about how much the defense department, the CIA, and maybe even NASA knows how much material are they actually in possession of, and how much does our Congress and government?
Know about these phenomena. So for anybody who's interested, you should go and look up in this on YouTube, the filmed testimony of David Grish and David Grish was an intelligence officer who worked for many years, was read into probably something like 2000 SAP Special Access Programs, which is an untold number of basically, you're read in at the top most levels.
He served in Afghanistan, been in the Air Force for 20, 30 years now, recently retired.
And he had been tasked by a government office, which was congressionally mandated, called the UAP Task Force, to collect data about what was known from multiple agencies within the government about this subject matter.
You know, who has what? And he didn't want to do it. He didn't enter it wanting to do it. He was asked to do it because of his, and because his clearances allowed him to gain access to all of this stuff, he could go and knock on the right doors.
Well, as he began knocking on the doors, two things happened. One, the doors were slammed in his face. First. Second, well, three things happened. Second, people from behind the doors, snuck out the window and came and told him what was really going on behind the doors.
And then third, the people who basically were running the show started retribution against him, basically accusing him of things that he didn't do and trying to get him in trouble and his clearances were revoked.
And then this is where it starts to get really interesting, because then, a gentleman by the name of Chuck McCullough, the third, who was the first inspector general of the intelligence communities appointed by Obama.
Who basically was the guy you go to to basically make sure that everything is done right, a lawyer, came to David's rescue and prosecuted the case recently. And won the case against the intelligence community and got David's clearances reinstated.
And basically, and now there's actually another investigation, not against David, but against those individuals who went after him.
So that then gave David the permission to use the whistleblower's law that it wasn't that if you know things that you're not supposed to say, just because you know them, you don't get to go to the New York Times and talk about them.
But if you go then to a congressional committee and say, here are what I think are some laws that are being broken, or where I think there's fraud.
That's where David used that to go and talk to Congress and then it was openly discussed where he talked about the existence of multiple programs for reverse engineering.
Now, it's alleged, have I been there? No. Do I, though, believe David? Who I know quite well? Yes. And why do I believe David?
Because not only him, but the other individuals that I know who are associated with these programs, I use the same, let's call credibility index that I use with another scientist.
It's called a chain of custody of trust that I don't need to know what another scientist's laboratory is doing and how exactly they did it.
I don't need to go stand over their postdoctoral or graduate students' shoulder.
I can listen to what they say corroborate it with how I know science is done and say, okay, well, I can believe that.
Do it, certain degree of trust, I assign it a probability index.
Similarly with these other people is that unless there's an extraordinarily well-managed hoax program putting out disinformation constantly, all the stories are showing true.
Now, you say, okay, well, that's fine, Gary. What does that mean? Well, all you need to do is look what's happened in the last two weeks alone.
So, our Senator Schumer last summer put in a legislation. It's a Senator Schumer, the head of the majority in the Senate.
Put in legislation called the UAP Amendment, which was set up to do multiple things, but one of which, which I think was the most important, was to establish a public board of scientists, philosophers, religious leaders, economists, to collect data from all over the U.S. intelligence agencies.
And what should stay private and secret? And what should go into the National Archives?
NARA. And, okay, fine, he put it in. In the last week, and this is for the National Defense Appropriation Act, which is a $965 billion defense budget.
Right, so I've read the whole thing. I mean, the amount of money is staggering, first of all, but 60 pages written by a gentleman mostly by the name of the
by Carl Nell, who also talked at our conference here at Stanford to explain what it was all about. And suddenly, in the last two weeks, a whole bunch of Republican Congress people came forward and have tried to block it.
And we find out that behind the scenes, airspace companies, and lobbyists are the ones doing it. So, if there's nothing to hide, if there's nothing worth hiding, if there's nothing there, why are people putting extraordinary pressure?
On our representatives. Yesterday alone, Senator Schumer got into the well of the Senate and said the Republicans are trying to stop this, not all Republicans, two Republicans in particular, who are they?
Ahead of the intelligence agency, ahead of the intelligence committee, and the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. And then you go look at who gives them money, one of them specifically, Lockheed Boeing.
They are their biggest donors. And that's interesting because I gather that this material, much of it has been consigned to these contractors for analysis, is that correct?
Yeah, because they don't want to divulge because they have a profit motive to keep it to themselves. Is that correct?
There's both a profit motive as well as a potential fraud motive. So, the money that is appropriated to be used to study these things, no matter what it is that a contractor does. If you don't use the money appropriately, or if you misappropriate the money, or if you misappropriate the findings from what it was that you were supposed to be doing.
Then you are at risk of legal liability, and the individuals are. So now you're up against a situation where companies have hot potatoes. And there's a fair amount of discussion on behind the scenes about some of the companies that are trying to unload their hot potatoes.
Namely, Kraft, Objects, Objects.
Have you seen any of these objects?
I personally have not. I wish I could say, but had the UAP task force been instantiated, and had I been having some association with that, then there might have been an opportunity.
But, well, today, I learned this morning that the bill was gutted in the conference, and all the meat and the teeth and the claws of the amendment have been removed.
But, I still see that as a win, right? Because several things have happened now. Now, this is actually the third bill passed that will be passed by Congress and the Senate, and signed into law by Biden, the third in three years, having to do with UAPs.
I said this actually in a conference this summer in Manhattan in front of financial analysts, where I was asked, what's the best evidence? The best evidence is what your government is doing about it, and the pretzels that everybody seems to be twisting themselves into to do the dance of the seven veils, so actually not talk about what's going on.
Well, I was reading an article in The Atlantic by Garrett Graff. I don't know if you, he's coming out with a book on UFOs. The article in The Atlantic was a kind of proceed of his thesis, and he says it's more likely in his opinion that rather than it being a cover up of what they know, it's a cover up of their ignorance.
And that's the real reason that they don't want to reveal just how little they know if anything at all about these objects, and therefore they're not defending our airspace, they're not looking after our interests, so they would expose their deficiency in doing their job.
Exactly. I mean, the conceit of government and the military is that they've got everything under control, and that you're safe, and just leave it in their hands and give us more money.
And so if none of those things are true, then why should you be giving them any more money?
So that's the, I think that is certainly the case. I mean, in fact, again, because of the people that I speak to, the frank answer is we don't know what this stuff is.
In fact, for much of that, we don't even know how the technology operates. It's like if you were to hand a cell phone to, in the end of the fall, what would they do with it? Even if you told them what it could do, could they possibly understand the integrated circuitry within it to reproduce it?
Do you think that's a reason, even maybe the main reason why there's such discretion about them revealing their full presence here is that we're just not in a position to comprehend where they're coming from and what technology is all about?
Well, I think, you know, we think in terms of technology, but what happens if it's a little bit more than technology? What happens if it's literally the interaction of a mind with time and space? And that their operational capability is because they have the ability to do so?
Right? To interact with their technology by thinking at it? Doesn't mean it's magic. It just means that the technology is capable of interacting with them in some way. And so maybe we just don't have the right rain structure to accomplish that at this point.
You know, think about it like this, if you had a race of intelligent ants at the bottom of your garden, how do you even talk to them about TikTok? I mean, how do you talk about the concepts of it? And how would you interact with them? Let's say you wanted to talk to them about it.
You would have to probably recreate something that looked like an ant, but not so much like it was an ant. And then you'd have to downgrade the concepts into some format that they could understand. So, I mean, you've got a lost in translation problem here. We could barely talk to somebody in the ninth century anymore about what it is. Now imagine something which is a million years ahead of us. In fact, probably what we're interacting with is not actually who's in control.
We're probably talking to their version of whatever an AI is. Yeah. No, for sure. And of course, in this realm of speculation, you can also wonder whether they would, from what I gather, they would have been interested in our planet long before our human intelligence arose on this planet. So it's not because of us that they got curious. There's something here that warrants either of their presence or research.
I mean, just because they're here doesn't mean that they really care. I mean, again, think of it this way. So I was asked to write a paper for SETI. And the paper, they were said, well, what's wrong with the Drake equation?
The Drake equation is basically the mathematics of how would you calculate the number of intelligent civilizations that might be present. And the Drake equation started by the number of stars that could have planets and at the time frame in which it might evolve.
And so I started with the premise of, well, maybe it's not a search for intelligence, maybe it's a search for consciousness. And so if you suddenly, if you evolve yourself to a point where you no longer even have to deal with physicality and you can embed your consciousness into space time. And you are just space time. I mean, don't think this is just mumbo jumbo, I'm talking. You are just organized space time. And that happens to in the right format create the you.
But maybe they figured out a way to disembody it. And maybe the better place to go live is orbiting a black hole. Right. And so what we're seeing is just the leftovers of their ancient technology.
Got it.
As running on autopilot.
Well, if one day, and I'm assuming it's going to happen that the public is going to be fully informed about what we know what the materials are and increasingly persuasive evidence of this presence.
Would you agree with me that it would represent a momentous cultural revolution in our modern history, if not in our history for millennia.
We've had a few such revolutions. We've had the Copernican revolution which should have completely unsettled our species of it didn't do that in a way. Maybe because it didn't actually change our everyday experience of the world.
And it still seems to us that we're the center and that everything's revolving around the earth. So we kind of metabolize that revolution and then something like evolution itself, the theory of Darwinian evolution.
But I think this would have even more for our reaching consequences for the way we conceive of our place in the universe now.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, 100% I agree with that. But first you have to realize that cultures have dealt with the concept of something larger than us for centuries. I mean, religions place the gods and the civilization of the gods well above us and well beyond our understanding.
But as well, when you're talking about a civilization that might be millions of years ahead of us, I see hope in that.
Because I mean, how many movies and TV shows are about the apocalypse. We all feel that we're on the edge of an apocalypse.
And maybe the fact that these sorts of things might exist, it means that actually there's a way around the apocalypse.
That's for sure that it reminds us that there are futures that we can't even imagine. Yeah, perhaps I'm more of pessimist with that regard.
I mean, I when I think of how far away is the nearest other solar system to us and how primitive our space travel capabilities are. I'm not sure we're ever going to get off the planet to go and explore.
You seem to be more optimistic about that.
Well, I'm not optimistic about personally ever getting there, but I'm optimistic about our progeny, or at least our, let's say, intellectual progeny.
You know, there's a concept developed by someone back in the 50s by the name of von Newman and the thing called a von Newman probe.
And basically he said, okay, even by conventional means and conventional propulsion that we understand.
You could send a probe to another solar system that could use the local resources to self replicate and make more copies of itself and send them out.
And basically within about half a billion years, the universe is 14 billion years old.
You could populate the entire galaxy with your machines.
And so maybe those machines carried the seed or the knowledge.
I mean, we can synthesize DNA from nothing. We can make cells most likely so they could maybe have been making copies of themselves.
So they don't need to personally go there. They send their intellectual progeny in their stead.
I get tremors of anxiety when I even can contemplate that scenario because I find that, I mean, if I were an alien intelligence a million years ahead of us, I would investigate the Earth.
And I would just leave it alone. We're an insane asylum. Our species is pathologically self-destructive and unreasonable.
But let me stop you there. Maybe that's the point of evolution. Is that maybe we need to go through a, say a demise locally until we eventually evolve to the point where we realize that we shouldn't be killing each other off all the time.
I mean, humans are humans and we have succeeded because we killed off all of our cousins.
Well, exactly. And so maybe we need to find the genes for greater empathy and maybe that's what evolution will eventually accomplish.
Well, I hope it would accomplish it before any prospect of going out and seeding the rest of the galaxy because this is my own entitled opinion, unentitled opinion if you want.
We are not worthy of seeding the rest of the galaxy in our present condition of basically what kind of depravity in human nature that you wouldn't want to export abroad.
If it's going to lead to the kind of cataclysm and nightmares that our human history is made up of.
So if what you're suggesting is that this kind of death and rebirth in a better, the better angels rather than the dark devils in our nature, yes, I can.
But maybe you get the opportunity in designing the progeny to do so. Maybe you can design out the aggression.
Well, there again, designing out and taking control, I see that I'm high to Gary enough to be suspicious of the will to power, which expresses itself as engineering and creating a progeny in whatever image we want.
And I think it's also a kind of heuristic. Maybe there are other forces that have selected who we are for reasons beyond our own ability to comprehend.
And do we want to go on thinking genealogically when we extend our imagination into space? Is this drive, this blind, what Shopenhauer would call this completely blind will to replicate?
Don't we have to interrogate it when it reaches a certain level of cosmic magnitude? I think we should. Is there any reason, good reason for us to want to replicate ourselves just for the fact we're because we can't.
Because we have an anxiety about death, we have an anxiety about finality, an anxiety about mortality, and the idea that things will extend into an indefinite future, we find edifying.
Well, I mean, you got to think of it this way in what 500 million to a billion years, the sun expands to the point where the earth gets melted. Yes. So we have to move.
So better sooner than later. I mean, I'm part of a scientific advisory board of a company that's building, or at least one of its goals is to build the first human, von Newman probes to send ourselves out.
We already did it, I mean, years ago, with decades ago, with one of the probes that has Carl Sagan's, his sayings or voice and the pictures of humans, won't reach anywhere interesting for another few million years, but the memory of us goes on. Certainly, if anybody else has a SETI program on another planet, if you light yours away, a few hundred light years away, they'll hear us.
So they're starting to hear us now. So can I ask to come back more to earth and to the present, do you have security clearance yourself to visit some of these?
I have enough permissions to, if given permission. Yeah.
You know, just because you, I mean, this is not talking about me in particular, but just because you have a security clearance doesn't mean you get to do anything. Right.
Right. And are you optimistic that in our lifetimes, yes, there's going to be a big revelation on this front.
I mean, if you don't see what just happened this summer as a revelation, then you're really not paying attention. I mean, to have so much activity around prevention of release of information that supposedly doesn't exist, that's not smoke. That's a conflagration for alarm fire.
Well, I hope Congress can get involved in this in a more active way. Well, they are. They are, they are, in fact. And yeah, and actually what's nice about it is that it's bipartisan.
Right. I mean, the Schumer amendment was not put forward just by the Democrats. Schumer amendment was put forward by gate, by rounds and Senator Rubio and several others are senators. In fact, 12 of them signed on to it as co-sponsors. Just think of it this way. You know, without taking political sides, would you think that the Democrats in a contentious election year would put themselves in a position of being made fools of?
In front of Fox News and all of the others, where the vote for the next presidency is in contention and doubt. I doubt it. Right. So basically, you can imagine that this was done with the implicit understanding of the White House.
So why would they do it? So again, this is, this is what I want people to step away from. We've even during this conversation, we spent so much time about the conclusion rather than the data.
No, I don't want to apologize for that. I want to at least clear that for this show and the kind of listeners that tune into entitled opinions, I wanted to spend a good proportion speculating about what the consequences of certain potential conclusions would mean for our cultural history and our self understanding.
But as a scientist, what I'm asking for people to do is say, yes, we can do the speculation that we're doing. But it would help if they were willing to throw either they believe me or disbelieve me to spend some time looking at the data and look at the individuals who are bringing the data forward and looking at the totality of the data, the extraordinary totality of it to say it's well beyond a doubt that there's something worth looking at. Right.
And what drives me, in fact, more so even than that I feel that there's a conclusion here, it's that people would dare to tell me I shouldn't be asking the question.
Oh, yeah. That's very unscientific. It flies right in the face of the scientific.
Well, and people who've accused me of that, I've accused them back of being a priest. I said, look, you've violated your oath.
Yeah.
You should give back your PhD and you should go join the priesthood. Right. And that usually gets them quite angry.
Well, you know, on, in title opinions I've often stressed the difference also affinity, but also a difference between knowledge and self knowledge.
To know ourselves, we know ourselves differently according to different methods, different procedures, more revelations rather than explanations.
So, the knowledge of the objective world and of objects is of a different order than knowledge of our own subjectivity.
But it seems to me that this UAP phenomenon is one that calls not just for knowledge, but to interrogate whatever data we have, also from the question of what it means to our understanding of ourselves and who we are.
So, there's subjects of this ongoing history that we're part of a very long history. That's why I want to thank you again for coming on to speak about this, you know, in a very open way.
And with, with the kind of courage that I don't see often, except for those people who don't have anything to lose by winning one theory after another.
But you know, you as a very responsible scientist and with the scientists ethos that I think we need exactly more Gary Nolan's in this discussion.
Thank you.
All right, thank you. We've been speaking with Professor Gary Nolan from the Department of Pathology here at Stanford. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
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