Garry Nolan is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research is in microbiology, immunology, bio-computation, and analysis of UFO artifacts, materials, and reports of UFO encounters. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:43 - Biology
6:36 - Alien civilizations
10:40 - UFO encounters
47:40 - Atacama skeleton
54:57 - UFO materials
1:06:19 - Jacques Vallee
1:10:27 - UFO data
1:21:33 - Alien hardware in US possession
1:26:10 - Bob Lazar
1:29:05 - Avi Loeb and Oumuamua
1:33:07 - Advice for young people
1:39:55 - Meaning of life

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How would you as a higher intelligence represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?

Do you think they saw what they say they saw?

How hard do you think it is for aliens to communicate with humans?

So you show yourself as a form of technology, right?

But the common thread is you're not alone, and there's something else here with you, and there's something that's, as you said, watching you.

You are a professor at Stanford studying the biology of the human organism at the level of individual cells.

So let me ask first the big ridiculous philosophical question, what is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect of human biology at the level of the cell to you?

The micromachines and the nanomachines that proteins make and become, that to me is the most interesting.

The fact that you have this basically dynamic computer within every cell that's constantly processing its environment.

And at the heart of it is DNA, which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process.

People think of the DNA as a linear code.

It's codes within codes within codes, and it is actually the epigenetic state that's doing this amazing processing.

I mean, if you ever wanted to believe in God, just look inside the cell.

A big, continuing on the philosophical question, this is both scientific and philosophical, how did life originate on Earth, do you think?

How did this, at every level, so the very first step and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA, that is multicellular organism, and then maybe the fascinating complex computer that is the human mind?

Well, I think you have to take just 1 more step back to the complex computer that is the universe, right?

All of the so-called particles or the waves that people think the universe is made of and appears to me at least to be a computational process and embedded in that is biology, right?

From my point of view, it's computing something.

It was created, in some ways, if you want to believe in God, and I don't know that I do, but if you want to believe in God, and I don't know that I do, but if you want to believe in something, the universe was created or at least enabled to allow for life to form.

And so, the DNA, if you ask where does DNA come from, and you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene hypotheses.

The way I look at DNA though is it is not a moment in time.

It assumes the context of the body and the environment in which it's going to live.

And so if you wanna ask a question of where and how does information get stored, DNA, although it's only 3 billion base pairs long, contains more information than I think the entire computational memory resources of our current technology.

Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg all the way through to the day you die.

And it embodies all the different cell types and organs in your body.

And so it's a computational reservoir of information and expectation that you will become.

So actually I would sort of turn it around a different way and say if you wanted to create the best memory storage system possible, you could reverse engineer what a human is and create a DNA memory system that is not just the linear version, but is also everything that it could become.

When we're talking about DNA, we're talking about Earth and the environment creating DNA.

So this, you're talking about trying to come up with an optimal computer for this particular environment.

So if you reverse engineer that computer, what do you mean by considering all the possible things it could become?

So 3000000000 bits of information does not explain Lex Friedman.

But the DNA embodies the expectation of the environment in which you will live and grow and become.

So all the information that is you, right, is actually not only embedded in the DNA, but it's embedded in the context of the world in which you grow into and develop, right?

So all that information though is packed in the expectation of what the DNA expects to see.

So like some of the information, is that accurate to say is stored outside the body?

The information is stored outside because there's a context of expectation.

I mean, to linger on this point, if we were to run Earth over again a million times, how many different versions of this type of computer would we get?

I mean, if you assume there's no such thing as fate, right, and it's not all pre-programmed, and that there is some sort of, let's say, variation or randomness at the beginning, you would get as many different versions of life as you could imagine.

And I don't think it would all be unless there's something built into the, you know, into the substrate of the universe.

It wouldn't always be left-handed proteins, right?

But I wonder what the flap of a butterfly wing, what effects it has, because it's possible that the system is really good at finding the efficient answer and maybe the efficient answer is there's only a small finite set of them for this particular environment.

That's the kind of in a way the anthropomorphic universe of the multiverse expectations, right?

That there's probably a zillion other kinds of universes out there if you believe in multiverse theory.

We only live in the ones where the rules are such that life like ours can exist.

So using that logic, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there?

There's like trillions of environments, AKA planets, or maybe you can think even bigger than planets.

How many lifelike organisms do you think are out there thriving?

And maybe how many do you think are long gone, but were once here?

I mean, I would just be surprised, what a waste, right, of all that space just for us if we're never going to get there.

That would be my first way to think about it.

But second, I mean, I remember when I was about 7 or 8 years old, and I would love if any of your listeners could find this National geographic.

I remember opening the page of the National Geographic, I was about, again, 7 to 10 years old.

And it was sort of a current picture of the universe.

I just remember looking at it and thinking, what kinds of empires have risen and fallen across that space that we'll never know about?

And isn't that sad that we know nothing about something so grand.

And so I've always been a reader of science fiction because I like the creative ideas of what people come up with.

And I especially like science fiction writers that base it in good science, but base it also in evolution.

That if you evolve a civilization from something lifelike, right, some sort of biology, its assumptions about the universe will come from the environment in which it grew up.

So, for instance, Larry Niven is a great writer, and he imagines different kinds of civilizations.

In some cases, what happens if intelligence evolved from a herd animal?

In his case, 1 of them were the so-called puppeteers.

And to them, the moral imperative is cowardice.

You put other people forward to run the risk for you, right?

And so he writes entire books around that premise.

There's another guy, David Brin is his name, and he writes the so-called uplift universe books.

And in those, he takes different intelligences, each from a different evolutionary background.

And then he posits a civilization based around where and what they came from.

But I mean, back to your original question is how many are there?

I mean that's the whole, that's the whole question of you know how long can a civilization last before it runs out of steam?

And you, For instance, does it just get bored or does it transcend to something else or does it say I've seen enough and I'm done?

What does running out of steam look like?

You know, or we've done everything we can and they just decide to stop.

It's that Elon Musk worry that we stop reproducing or we slow down the reproduction rate to where the population can go to 0.

I mean, so the only way to get around that is perhaps create enough machines with AI to take care of us.

You've talked to people that told stories of UFO encounters.

What is the most fascinating to you about the stories of these UFO encounters that you've heard that people have told you?

The similarity of them, the uniformity of the stories.

Now, I just wanna say up front, a lot of people think that when I speculate, I believe something.

Speculation is the beginning of hypothesis.

None of what I hear in terms of the anecdotes do I necessarily believe are they true.

But I still find them fascinating to listen to because at some level, they're still raw data and you have to listen.

And once you start to hear the same story again and again, then you have to say, well, there might be something to it.

I mean, maybe it's some kind of a Jungian background in the human mind and human consciousness that creates these stories again and again, and it's coming out of the DNA, it's coming out of that pre-programmed something.

And Jung talked quite a bit about this kind of thing, the collective unconscious.

But actually 1 of the most interesting ones I find is this constant message that you're not taking care of your world.

And this came long before climate change, it came long before many kinds of, let's say current day memes around, you know, taking care of our planet, pollution, etc.

And so, you know, for instance, perhaps the best example of this, the 1 that I find the most fascinating, is a story out of Zimbabwe.

50 or 60 children 1 afternoon in Zimbabwe.

It was a well-educated group of white and black children who at lunchtime in the playground saw a craft and they saw little men.

And they all ran into the teachers and they told the same story and they drew the same pictures.

And the message several of them got was, you are not taking care of your planet.

And it got, you know, there's actually a movie coming out on this episode, and 30 years later now, the people who were there, the children who've now grown up, say, it happened to us.

Or was it an imposed hallucination by something?

And so, whether it's real or not, I don't know, but I find that fascinating data, and again, it's these unconnected stories of individuals with the same story, that is worthy of further inquiry.

Yeah, so here we are, humans with limited cognitive capacities trying to make sense of the world, trying to understand what is real and not.

We have this DNA that somehow in complex ways is interacting with the environment, and then we get these novel ideas that come from the populace, And then they make us wonder about what it all means.

If you think from an alien perspective, how would you communicate with other lifelike organisms?

You perhaps have to find endpoints on this interaction between the DNA and its manifestations in terms of the human mind and how it interacts with the environment.

So it gets some kind of, all right, what is this DNA?

I have to get in somehow to interact with it, to perturb the system to where these little ants, human-like ants get excited and figure stuff out.

First of all, for investigative purposes, understand, like, oftentimes to understand a system, you have to perturb

And then the other way is you want to, if you worry about them, you can steer in 1 direction or another.

And this kind of idea that we're not taking care of our world.

That's hopeful because that means the greater intelligence, which is what I would hope, we want to take care of us.

Like we want to take care of the gorillas in the national parks in Africa.

Yeah, but we don't wanna take care of cockroaches.

Right now we're a bunch of angry monkeys and maybe whatever these intelligences are are also keeping an eye on us.

That you don't want a bunch of, you know, you don't want the angry monkey troop stomping around the local galactic arm.

Do you think these folks are telling the truth?

I think they saw what they said they saw, but I also think they saw what they were shown.

I mean, if you go back to the whole notion of, okay, how long has this been around?

It didn't just start showing up in 1947, right?

There are stories going back into the 1800s of people who saw things in their farm fields in the US.

It's in local newspapers from the 1800s, it's fascinating.

But if you can go even further back, you know, so to your point of how would you as a higher intelligence represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?

Maybe you show yourself as the spirits in the forest and you give messages through that.

Once you get a little bit more civilized, then you show yourself as the gods.

Well, we don't believe in God anymore necessarily, not everybody does.

But the common thread is you're not alone and there's something else here with you.

And there's something that's, as you said, watching you and at least watching over your shoulder.

But I think that like any good parent, you don't tell your student everything.

And learning requires mistakes, because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.

You've looked at the brains of, or information coming from the brain of some of the people that have had UFO encounters.

What's common about the brain of people who encounter UFOs?

So the study started with a group of, let's say a cohort of individuals that were brought to me and their MRIs to ask about the damage that had been seen in these individuals.

It turns out that the majority of those patients ended up being, as far as we can tell, Havana syndrome.

And so, for me at least, that part of the story ends in terms of the injury.

That's somebody else's problem now, that's not my problem.

But when we were looking at the brains of these individuals, we noticed something right in the center of the basal ganglia in many of these individuals that at first we thought was damage.

It was basically an enriched patch of MRI dense neurons that we thought was damage, but then it was showing up in everybody.

And then we looked and we said, oh, it's actually not.

The other readings on these MRIs show that actually that's living tissue.

That's actually the head of the caudate and the pitamen.

And at the time, and I remember even asking a good friend of mine at Stanford who is a psychiatrist, what does the basal ganglia do?

He said, oh, the basal ganglia is just about movement and nerve and motor control.

I said, well, that's odd because, you know, these other papers that we were reading at the time started to suggest that it was involved with higher intelligence and is actually downstream of the executive function and involved with intuition and planning.

And if you think about it, if you're going to have motor control, which is centralized in 1 place, motor control requires knowledge of the environment.

You don't want to move something and hit the table.

Or if you're walking across a room, you want to be aware and cognizant of what you might bump into.

So obviously all of that planning requires access to all the senses.

It requires access to your desires, memory, knowledge of where and what you want and desire to walk nearby.

Like I used the example of you're at a party, you want to avoid that person, you like that person, the waiter's about to drop something.

So that actually, all that planning is done in the basal ganglia and it's actually now called the brain within the brain.

It's a goal processing system subservient to executive function.

So what we think we found there was not something which allows people to talk to UFOs.

I mean, I think the UFO community took it a step too far.

What I think we found was a form of higher functioning and processing.

So what we then looked at, and this was the most fascinating part of it, we looked then at individuals in the families of those, let's say the index case individuals, And we found that it was actually in families.

And more so, this is the most fascinating part, we've probably looked now at about 200 just random cases that you can download off of databases online.

You only find it in what Kit Green would have called or has called higher functioning individuals.

But it turns out my family has it, right?

We found it in me, my brother, my sister, my mother.

We found it as well in other individuals, husband and wife pairs.

So statistically, if you had a group of 20 individuals and you found 2 husband-wife pairs, both of whom had it, and yet it's only found at about, we think, 1 in 200, 1 in 300 individuals.

The fact that 2 individuals came together, 2 sets of individuals came together, both of whom had it, implied either a restricted breeding group or attraction.

The reason why it seems to be in, let's say, so-called experiencers or people who claim...

If intuition is the ability to see something that other people don't, and I don't mean that in a paranormal sense, but being able to see something just in front of you that other people might just dismiss, Well, maybe that's a function of a higher kind of intelligence to say, well, I'm not looking at an artifact, I'm not looking at something that I should just ignore.

I'm seeing something and I recognize it for, not what it is, but that it is something different than is normally found in my environment.

Yeah, you know, I have a little bit of that.

I seem to see the magic in a lot of moments.

Like I have a deep, it's obviously, not obviously, but it seems to be chemical in nature that I just am excited about life.

It feels like I'm high a lot, unlike mushrooms or something like that, where you'd really appreciate that.

So I'm able to detect something about the environment that maybe others don't, I don't know, but like I seem to be over the top grateful to be alive for a lot of stupid reasons.

I mean, it's kind of interesting because it really is true that our brains, the way we're brought up, but also the genetics enables us to see certain slices of the world.

And some people are probably more receptive to anomalous information.

They see the magic, the possibility in the novel thing.

As opposed to kind of finding the pattern of the common, of the regular.

Some people are more, wait a minute, this is kind of weird.

I mean, a lot of those people probably become scientists too.

Like, there's this pattern happening over and over and over, and then something weird just happened.

And then you get excited by that weirdness and start to pull the string and discover what is at the core of that weirdness.

Perhaps, is that, you know, maybe by way of question, how does the human perception system deal with anomalous information,

Well, it first tries to classify it and get it out of the way.

If it's not food, if it's not sex, right?

If it's not in the way of my desires, or if it isn't the way of my desires, then you focus on it.

And so the, I think the question is how much spare processing power, how much CPU cycles do we spend on things that are not those core desires?

What is the most kind of memorable, powerful UFO encounter report you've ever heard, just to you on a personal level, like something that was really powerful.

Well, I mentioned the Zimbabwe 1, that's particularly interesting, And 1 that actually most people don't know about, but family driving down the highway, 2 little girls in the back, open glass topped car, and the little girls see a craft right over their car.

This is in the middle of the day on a busy highway.

Nobody can, they look around, nobody else seems to see it.

So the girls take out their camera, take a picture of it.

There's no craft, but there's a little object about 30 feet above their car or so, probably about 3 feet across, kind of star-shaped.

It's not the craft, but it's something else.

There's obviously, there was something there.

Were they seeing, and why were only they seeing it?

And the photograph was capturing something very different than what we're seeing, but there's still an object.

What, can you give a little bit of context?

It's modern day, Oh yeah, they had a camera.

By the way, where's like a central place to provide a report?

Oh, there's a move on, but this isn't public.

Oh, this is something you've directly interacted with.

moments like that, they captivate your mind.

It's so different, it doesn't fall into the standard story at all.

But in another way, it's a clear enunciation of this notion that when people see events, they don't all see the same thing.

Now, we've heard this about like traffic accidents, different people will see the color of the car differently or the chain of events differently.

And This tells you that memory isn't anywhere near what we think it is.

But the issue around these so-called UFO reports is that the same people will see a very different thing, almost as if whatever it is is projecting a, is projecting something into the mind rather than it being real, right?

Rather than it being a real manifestation, you know, material in front of you, it's actually almost some sort of an altered virtual reality that is imposed on you.

I mean, you know, I think the company Meta and all the virtual reality companies would love to have something like that, right?

Where you don't have to actually wear something on your face to experience a virtual reality.

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Garry Nolan: UFOs and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #262