Garry Nolan

Nolan grew up in Windsor, Connecticut, and recalls seeing an apparent spacecraft on his childhood newspaper route. He earned a Stanford PhD in 1989.⁠[1]

He trained with Leonard Herzenberg for his PhD and with David Baltimore as a postdoc, helping first clone NF-κB p65/RelA and develop rapid retroviral production systems.⁠[2]

On May 6, 2011, Science published a paper led by Nolan in which his team used mass cytometry developed by Scott Tanner’s group at the University of Toronto to measure 34 substances in human bone marrow cells at once, classifying more than a dozen immune cell types and comparing their internal signaling; the lead authors were his team members Sean Bendall and Erin Simonds.⁠[3]

For applying CyTOF to the immune system he received the Nature Publishing Group’s “Outstanding Research Achievement” award for 2011.⁠[4]

In 2012 he became the first recipient of the US Department of Defense’s Teal Innovator Award, a $3.3 million grant for ovarian cancer research.⁠[2]

In 2013 he appeared in a UFO documentary by the group Sirius Disclosure, saying preliminary research indicated the mother of a tiny Atacama Desert skeleton was indigenous to Chile. Critics later argued this suggested he sought notoriety rather than scholarship.⁠[5]

Nolan founded Rigel, the diagnostics developer Nodality, BINA (later sold to Roche Diagnostics) and Apprise (later sold to Roche Sequencing Solutions), and co-founded Ionpath and Akoya. DVS Sciences, whose scientific advisory board he chaired, was sold to Fluidigm in 2014 for $207 million on an investment of $14 million.⁠[6]

On March 22, 2018, Nolan, UC San Francisco’s Atul Butte and colleagues published a paper in Genome Research confirming that “Ata,” a skeleton about six inches long found in Chile’s Atacama Desert, was a human female with rare genetic mutations. Nolan had studied it since 2012 and said it should be returned to its country of origin and buried in keeping with local customs.⁠[7]

After publication, Chilean scientists called the research unethical, and Chile’s National Monuments Council investigated whether the skeleton had been illegally exhumed and taken out of the country. Butte said the team had no knowledge of how it was obtained or exported; Nolan said they first suspected a nonhuman primate and that the analysis involved no identifiable information about a living individual.⁠[8]

In July 2018, Sian Halcrow of the University of Otago and colleagues argued in the International Journal of Paleopathology that Ata’s skeletal features are all part of normal fetal development, that there was no rationale for genomic analysis, and that the original study cited no ethical consents or archaeological permits.⁠[9]

On behalf of the co-authors, Nolan said the team’s responses to the criticisms were already public and declined further interviews.⁠[5]

In December 2021, Nolan said in an interview that the government had asked him to examine data from pilots and others who had been near unidentified aerial phenomena, and that some of their brains were badly damaged.⁠[10]

He said he had analyzed about a dozen metal fragments said to come from UAP events, most of them inhomogeneous; of two magnesium samples from the 1957 Ubatuba event in Brazil, one had normal isotope ratios and the other was about 30 percent off. He noted that altering magnesium isotope ratios is possible, though expensive.⁠[11]

In January 2022 he, Jacques Vallée and others published a paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences re-examining molten metal left by a 1977 sighting in Council Bluffs, Iowa: mostly isotopically ordinary but atypically mixed iron. It weighed earthly explanations but noted possible discarded fuel from an advanced vehicle, drawing no conclusion.⁠[1]

On February 6, 2022, he appeared on episode 262 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing alien civilizations, UFO encounters, the Atacama skeleton, UFO materials, Jacques Vallée, alien hardware in US possession, Bob Lazar, and Avi LoebAvi LoebAvi Loeb (Abraham Loeb) is an Israeli-born American astrophysicist and the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University who has long studied black holes and the first stars and formerly chaired Harvard’s astronomy department; since 2017 he has advanced a series of claims that interstellar objects may be products of alien technology, which many peers dispute, and he launched the Galileo Project to search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts.Open the full entry and ‘Oumuamua.⁠[12]

In May 2023, at the SALT iConnections conference in New York, he said he believes extraterrestrial intelligence has not only visited Earth in the past but is here now, putting the probability at “100 percent.” Clips spread widely online, and he also became a target of critics skeptical of UAP.⁠[13]

He also said he had not been shown hard physical evidence of UAP and would not feel ashamed if it all proved to be a psyop; he is also a member of Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project.⁠[13]

The Sol Foundation, a think tank on UAP, officially launched on August 15, 2023, with Nolan as executive director of the board and anthropologist Peter Skafish as director of research. On November 17–18 it held its first symposium in Palo Alto, hosted by the Nolan Laboratory and the Stanford School of Medicine; Nolan said the aim was to “legitimize and professionalize” the field.⁠[14]

On November 22–23, 2024, the Sol Foundation held its second symposium at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco; Nolan and co-founder Peter Skafish opened the event, and Nolan held a conversation with retired Colonel Karl Nell on a framework for UAP research.⁠[15]

Nolan Lab: Official website: https://web.stanford.edu/group/nolan/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

X: Public account: https://x.com/GarryPNolan (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

Stanford University: Official website: https://www.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]