Don't Talk Conclusions. Talk Data.

Lex Fridman opens with the ridiculous question: how would a higher intelligence represent itself to a lesser one? Garry Nolan is a Stanford professor who studies human biology at the level of individual cells, and he does not start with spacecraft. The most beautiful thing in the cell, he says, is the micromachines and nanomachines that proteins become. Every cell is a dynamic computer constantly processing its environment. At the heart of it is DNA, which people treat as a linear string. It is codes within codes within codes. The epigenetic state is what actually does the amazing processing. "If you ever wanted to believe in God, just look inside the cell."

Asked how that computer came about, he takes one more step back: the universe itself looks to him like a computational process. Particles and waves sit in a matrix; the atoms of a protein sit in it too. He does not know that he believes in God, but if you want to believe in something, the universe was at least enabled to allow life. DNA, in his reading, is not a moment in time. It assumes the body it will build and the environment that body will inhabit. Three billion base pairs, he argues, contain more information than the memory resources of current technology, because who you are includes the egg you were, the day you will die, and every cell type and organ in between.

He would reverse the engineering question. If you wanted the best memory system possible, reverse-engineer a human. You would not get a linear code. You would get everything the system could become. Three billion bits do not explain Lex Fridman; they embody an expectation of the world he will grow into. Fridman asks whether that means some of the information is stored outside the body. Exactly, Nolan says. There is a context of expectation. A cell has no eyes, and it still knows there should be light.

If you reran Earth's history a million times, how many versions of this computer would you get? Different each time, Nolan says, if you assume there is no fate and some randomness at the start. You would get as many kinds of life as you can imagine, unless something is built into the substrate of the universe—left-handed proteins, for instance, might not be inevitable. Fridman wonders about the other limit: maybe the system is very good at finding efficient answers, and this environment only has a small finite set of them. Nolan agrees that is the anthropic, multiverse-flavored thought: a zillion other universes, and we live in the ones whose rules allow life like ours.

How many alien civilizations, then? Innumerable. The rate is much greater than zero. All that space just for us would be a waste, especially if we never get there. He remembers being seven or eight, opening a National Geographic around 1968 or 1969, staring at a then-current picture of the universe, and thinking of empires that had risen and fallen across that space that we would never know about. The sadness of that is why he reads science fiction, especially writers who ground invention in good science and in evolution. A civilization's assumptions, he says, will come from the biology it grew up in.

Larry Niven's Puppeteers are the example he likes: intelligence evolved from a herd animal, leading from behind, with cowardice as a moral imperative—you put other people forward to take the risk. David Brin's Uplift books do the same move with different evolutionary starting points and let whole civilizations grow out of them. How many such civilizations are *currently* out there is a different question: how long before a society runs out of steam, gets bored, transcends, or decides it has seen enough. Elon Musk's worry that we stop reproducing and collapse is one version. The only workaround Nolan jokes about is enough machines with AI to take care of us. What could possibly go wrong.

What fascinates him about UFO encounter stories is the similarity, the uniformity. He puts a disclaimer on the table that he will keep putting there: speculation is not belief. Speculation is creativity, the beginning of a hypothesis. He does not necessarily believe the anecdotes. He still listens, because at some level they are raw data, and once you hear the same story again and again you have to say there might be something to it. Maybe it is Jungian, a collective unconscious leaking out of that pre-programmed DNA. One motif still startles him: the constant message that you are not taking care of your world, arriving long before climate change and the current pollution memes.

The case he finds most compelling is Zimbabwe, mid-1990s: 50 or 60 children, a well-educated mix of Black and white, at lunchtime on a playground. They saw a craft and little men. They ran to the teachers, told the same story, drew the same pictures. Several of them received the message that you are not taking care of your planet. Thirty years later the children, now adults, say in a documentary that it happened to them. Did it? Hallucination, imposed hallucination, or material? He does not know. They were seven to ten years old. Seven-to-ten-year-olds, he says, cannot lie like that. Unconnected individuals with the same story is data worth further inquiry, whether it is true or not.

Fridman turns the lens around: from an alien perspective, how would you communicate? You would have to get into the coupling of DNA, mind, and environment—perturb the ants, see what lights up, and if you worry about them, steer. Nolan agrees. To understand a system you poke it. The "take care of your world" motif is, in that frame, almost comforting: a greater intelligence that might want to look after us the way we look after gorillas in African national parks. We do not look after cockroaches. There is a line we draw. Right now we are a bunch of angry monkeys, and you would not want that troop stomping around the local galactic arm.

Did those people see what they say they saw? He thinks they saw what they said they saw, and also what they were shown. This did not start in 1947. American farm-field newspapers in the 1800s already had the stories. Push further back and the display changes with the culture. Pre-civilization, you show yourself as spirits in the forest. A little more civilized, you show yourself as the gods. Today not everybody believes in God. What do we believe in? Technology. So you show yourself as technology. The common thread does not change: you are not alone, something else is here, something is watching. Like a good parent, you do not tell the student everything. Learning requires mistakes. Tell them everything and they get lazy.

The brain work started with a cohort brought to Nolan with their MRIs, to ask about apparent injury. Most of those patients, as far as he can tell, ended up as Havana syndrome. That part of the story is someone else's problem. While looking, though, he noticed something in the center of the basal ganglia: an enriched, MRI-dense patch they first read as damage. It showed up in everybody. Other readings said it was living tissue—the head of the caudate and the putamen. A psychiatrist friend at Stanford told him the basal ganglia was just motor control. That sat oddly with papers they were reading, which put it downstream of executive function, in intuition and planning.

Motor control, he argues, already requires a model of the environment. You do not want to hit the table. Walking across a room, you need to know what you might bump into. At a party you avoid one person, approach another, notice the waiter about to drop a tray—all without thinking. That planning lives in the basal ganglia, now nicknamed the brain within the brain, a goal-processing system under executive function. What they found, he insists, is not a organ for talking to UFOs. The UFO community took that step too far. They found a form of higher functioning and processing.

The family follow-up is the part he still finds most interesting. The feature ran in the families of the index cases. About 200 random scans downloaded from public databases did not show the higher connectivity. Kit Green had called such people higher-functioning, even savants; Nolan has not done that testing. His own family has it: himself, his brother, his sister, his mother. They have also seen husband-and-wife pairs. If the trait is in one in 200 or 300 people, two such pairs in a small group implies either a restricted breeding group or attraction. If intuition is the ability to see something in front of you that other people dismiss—not paranormal, just unclassified—maybe that is a higher kind of intelligence: I recognize that this is different from my usual environment, even if I do not yet know what it is.

Fridman admits a milder version: he sees magic in ordinary moments, a chemical-feeling gratitude that can resemble being slightly high. Nolan's reply is that brains, by genetics and upbringing, are tuned to slices of the world. Some people are more receptive to anomalous information. A lot of those people become scientists: they watch a pattern repeat, something weird happens, and they get excited enough to pull the string. The perceptual system first tries to classify an anomaly and get it out of the way unless it is food, sex, or in the path of a desire. The live question is how many spare CPU cycles we spend on anything else.

Asked for the most powerful report he has heard besides Zimbabwe, Nolan describes a case most people do not know. A family on a busy highway in daylight, two little girls in the back of a glass-topped car. The girls see a craft right over them. The mother sees it. Nobody else on the road seems to. The girls take a phone picture. At home there is no craft. About 30 feet above the car there is a small object, maybe three feet across, somewhat star-shaped—not the craft, something else. He has seen the picture. It is modern, maybe five years old, not a public MUFON file. What were they seeing? A projection? Why only them? The photograph captured something different from the eyes, and still captured something.

It does not fall into the standard story, which is why it captivates him. It is also a clean statement of a broader fact: people seeing the same event do not all see the same thing. Traffic-accident witnesses disagree on car color and sequence; memory is not what we think. UFO reports push that further, almost as if something is projected into the mind rather than sitting in the air. An imposed virtual reality. Meta and every VR company, he notes, would love a version you do not have to wear on your face.

If you wanted to use ants as biological robots—DARPA has tried insects—you would have to enter their pheromone channel, either by synthesizing the molecules or, if you were advanced enough, by stimulating neurons the way the pheromones do, remotely. The human analog is telefactored sensory information. Each person is a little different, so you tailor it or you ride whichever portal they already use: sound for the auditory, pictures for the visual. Fridman adds a constraint aliens would have to discover: humans value physical consistency because we found physics. Maybe you stay under the "too weird" threshold. Maybe you lean into anomaly. That is why the grays interest Nolan as a design. He does not believe in them. He believes people think they see them. They are different enough not to be us, not so different as to have venom-dripping fangs, and they look a bit like a distant-future human. As a communication strategy—we are like you, not the same—it holds, whether or not it is on purpose.

On the Tic Tac and the Navy pilots, Nolan says take them at their word. He knows many of the people: Lou Elizondo, Chris Mellon, the whole crowd. He saw the videos about three weeks before they went public, in a Crystal City bar with Elizondo overlooking the Pentagon, and his hair stood on end. Elizondo said it was coming out soon. A naval-intelligence contact had re-interviewed the pilots; that was hair-raising too, and also exciting, because these are not anonymous forum posts. The *60 Minutes* pilots had nothing to gain and something to lose. There is also simultaneous ship analysis from the USS Princeton and the radar. At the end of the day it is data, not a conclusion. He would be perfectly happy if someone showed it was all a hoax. He could go back to his day job. That case could be a hoax and other things not. Destigmatizing the topic is how you look at the full range, including the rare events.

Even if none of it is an extraterrestrial vehicle, the observation itself can send people into science. What if momentumless movement is possible? In the last year, students from top schools who are not his students have come to ask how they can help. Fridman notes that Musk does not dwell on propulsion that would break known physics. Nolan's lab habit is to ask what is inevitable, imagine the perfect instrument that does not exist, and reverse-engineer backward into something you can actually build. He has started and sold at least half a dozen companies on that premise. All of today's retroviral gene therapy, he says, traces to a group meeting in David Baltimore's lab: another postdoc could not make viruses the way he wanted; Nolan had a cell line that cut the process from two months to two days. They built the system. The world still uses it. First you have to believe the technology is possible.

If some encounters are visits, why come? One motive might be to steer us from the precipice, or at least to keep the neighbor from growing up a psychopath. Another is a national-park moral: let the animals live. The problem is the anthropomorphism. Alien means alien—not Hollywood, a different way of thinking. If we ever go, even on ten-thousand-year ram scoops or light sails, the live question is whether we stomp the way colonial powers stomped. Talking about UFOs, he says, widens the Overton window for what counts as life when we go to Mars or the moons: not necessarily legs, just complexity in resistance to the natural world.

Fridman floats a further speculation: as technology develops, civilizations become more like information, things that influence the space of ideas. Embodiment, the physical body we admire, may be inefficient. AI circuitry is already chasing the physics of the universe; quantum computers sit on quantum information storage. Fast-forward ten or a hundred thousand years and someone may have embedded intelligence in space-time itself, locally ordered, no body required. They would have to get very good at not trampling ants. Better technology makes accidents easier. And they may not be a unified force. What keeps them from running amok might be each other—the anarchy of nations, scaled. Every layer of intelligence still wonders what is bigger than me. Communication, if you are capable enough, is relatively straightforward. Dumbed-down concepts are the hard part. Stay at arm's length, let them know you are here, give limited information. Religions will reach for angels and the Oracle of Delphi. Limited pronouncements, then it is up to you to figure out what they meant.

Steven Greer claimed a skeleton from Chile's Atacama region might be an alien. Nolan reached out and took on proving or disproving it. The paper is *Whole Genome Sequencing of the Atacama Skeleton Shows Novel Mutations Linked with Dysplasia*. A team of about eleven, including two other Stanford scientists and Roche Diagnostics, did the work the usual way: students at the bench, professors helping assemble the story. It was human, 100 percent. He went in thinking it might be some kind of monkey. A few months in he even got a little excited: what if it is an alien?

The striking features were brain dysmorphias. He took the pictures to a Stanford colleague who is a world expert in pediatric bone dysmorphias and who literally wrote the book. The expert had not seen this particular collection of mutations, but by size and bone density it looked like six or seven years old. Nolan stops on that sentence. The lay public turns a speculation into a fact. Nobody said it was that age; they said the bones *looked* like that age. The paper is carefully caveated: these mutations *might* result in this morphology. What they found was an unexpectedly large number of mutations associated with bone growth. A bad roll of the dice. Enough births per year and someone rolls every wrong number at once.

The sad part was the corner of the UFO community that wanted a conspiracy: that someone had talked his students into lying. He would lose his job; they would be in trouble forever. It is also, he and Fridman agree, a projection of malevolence onto people who mostly do not have it. Scientists can be naive about the big picture. They are not, broadly, malevolent. They are curious about cool little things. People called the Atacama work debunking. Debunking is a loaded word; it assumes you went in to prove something false. He went in to collect data. This one was human. A "Star Child" skull he looked at from existing sequencing: human, end of story. The owners disagreed; another group later proved he was right. The point is to get the most spectacular, hyped cases off the table. The most extravagant claims are the ones most likely to be wrong. Somewhere in the rubble there will be something interesting. CRISPR is the comparison: weird repeating sequences in bacterial genomes that looked like viruses, a lot of work, a couple of Nobel Prizes, and then extravagant possibility. You want the rigor of science to reveal the extravagant thing, not to protect it from inspection.

Nolan also holds claimed UFO materials. Not from the government—collectors, with a reasonable chain of evidence, not a pebble off a road. They are almost always metals, said to be leftover molten drops or fragments from something that exploded. He has a couple of possibly biological samples he has not spent much time on. The workhorse is mass spectrometry, five or six flavors, for elements and for isotopes, and for how much of each. In at least one material the magnesium isotope ratios were way off normal. That does not prove an origin. It proves, he says, that it was probably accomplished by an industrial process: leftover, or made that way on purpose. He does not know. He knows it was engineered.

Isotope ratios for a given element are set by stellar processes. A supernova billions of years ago, a cloud, a new sun, a rocky ring. Everything in the local solar system sits near that ratio, differing by fragments of a percent, not tens of percent. What do humans use isotopes for? Mostly to blow things up: plutonium and uranium by the pound. Engineering other ratios is relatively easy now and still expensive. There are anti-cancer uses. Stable isotopes get embedded in money as an anti-counterfeiting trick. Other than that, nobody bothers. So why make grams of such material and drop it on a beach in Brazil?

The case is Ubatuba. A fisherman saw an object release something, or explode. Nolan has sizable chunks of relatively pure magnesium, alloyed with something else because pure magnesium burns. Two pieces arrived through two chains of custody, both claimed from the same object, looking the same. Secondary-ion mass spec, down to 0.0001 mass units: one chain had completely normal magnesium-24, 25, and 26. The other was way off, and both fragments from that chain were off to the same extent. An internal control sitting next to a wrong answer. A hoax is possible and would have been costly—tens of thousands of dollars at 1970s prices for the amount he has—and a very patient prank if the point was that some stranger would study it 30 years later. He does not know what to make of it except that it is interesting. It is not sufficient evidence. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostak are right that obvious unknown technology would be better than a piece of metal. Some of what has come to him turned out banal, including 1940s aircraft parts. The catch, for an alien, is the ant problem: technology too novel is not recognized as technology; technology too familiar is not evidence.

He met Jacques Vallée soon after Atacama, through people tied to the government work that became mostly Havana-syndrome patients. They had lunch near Sand Hill. Vallée has been an openly active scientist in this area since the 1960s. The first idea Nolan took from him is Kabuki theater: much of what people see is put on. Vallée's books keep using the word *absurd*. A ship does not land in a farmer's field and knock on the door for a glass of water—those stories are in 1930s newspapers. Craft that advanced do not crash. Absurdity is a clue that you are looking at a show, an influence campaign aimed at a culture, not at a person. Maybe they do not see us as individuals. Maybe they see an organism that lives on a planet. That was the first time Nolan felt there might be a puppet master, and that the alien narrative itself might be a representation rather than the fact. Vallée, he adds, is brilliant and can be incredibly annoying: he will pick apart anything you think you know. His method is that one counterexample kills a conclusion. Nolan's takeaway: do not talk conclusions. Talk data. Convince yourself the data is not an artifact. Be careful after that, because whatever is going on is more complicated than we imagine.

The June 2021 ODNI *Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena* he reads as hopeful. The adults are finally stepping up, in the good sense of adult. People who feared the public would run screaming into the streets have been empirically wrong. The videos have been out for five years. Most people still do not know. Tucker Carlson has talked about it; Joe Rogan has talked about it; if it does not affect the day, people go on with the day. Inside government it was still a sea change. Social technology had made the objects around U.S. ships too obvious to keep quiet. Elizondo, Mellon, and others found the workable angle: even if it is not "that," it might be Russia or China, and it is damn sure not us. Avi Loeb's version of the same ethic is the one Nolan likes: do not wait for the government to hand you the telescope time. Collect it yourself.

The Pentagon then stood up an office whose name Nolan cannot pronounce and wants changed: the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, AOIMSG. He thinks a tug of war over control is still going on behind the scenes. Money has been set aside to make things more public and to get others involved. He is part of an effort to bring in more academics. Nothing is set in stone. Before, you could barely ask a scientist for help. Now, if there is money, scientists go where the money is—he uses *capitalist* and then walks it back. His own paper cost $50,000 to $70,000 out of pocket. Proper materials analysis wants a few million; the Galileo Project is in the five-to-ten-million range, modest for a decades-old question in the zeitgeist. Fridman notes that basic researchers are good at fulfilling a grant's story while following their curiosity. Nolan agrees, and says he wanted to be a botanist as a kid; a lot of biologists do cancer because that is where the funds are. The worst outcome for this subject would be locking it inside a company with a fixed plan and scientists taking orders from executives. Put it in public. Let open minds publish.

Does some government hold extraterrestrial hardware more impressive than anything public? He has not seen it. If he believes people he does not think can lie, yes. Would he release it if he were in power? Yes. Knowledge like that can bring humanity together: we are more alike than different next to whatever this is. He is not interested in a retrospective prosecution. Give amnesty to people who decided on the data they had. Selfish monetization is a different case. Sitting in the chair, someone might show him a reason not to—hints of unlimited energy that a rival state could turn into a bomb first. That is an arms race. He is blunt about COVID origins in the same breath: whatever the truth, the Chinese government has an interest in not releasing it, and every government thinks that way. Corporate PR is a milder version of the same nerves. Then an Elon Musk character tweets ridiculous memes. The fear that stolen information will be used against you is, he says, a 20th-century idea. Transparency is a social-world advantage. Governments will be last to learn it.

Bob Lazar he does not believe, though he credits Jeremy Corbell's interviews and documentaries. Some of the people he fraternizes with think it is rubbish. He is less interested in old paperwork and who-said-what than in things he can re-measure: another MRI on the same person, materials another lab can run. He will not touch skeletons again. Fridman notes that Lazar has not changed his story, and that such stories move the transparency conversation. Nolan grants the human side: rare events are tied to observers; he hopes future sensor data will be less polluted by subjectivity, and pilot observations are still strong data. On 'Oumuamua, he likes Loeb's move: most people saw an asteroid; Loeb saw an oddity in the data and an alternative—possibly a light sail—that fit the models better, then used the data as a battering ram and ignored the critics. Light sails are near-term human technology; Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Starshot is trying to laser-launch them toward Alpha Centauri. Sadly the object is nearly out of the solar system. Over the weekend of the recording, the Galileo Project asked Nolan to join and he did, not as a specialist, but because looking at the list there were really no biologists. Collect the data on UAP. Collect data on possible local technological artifacts.

Advice for young people who want to do something new: if you believe an idea is valuable, do not let others shame you out of it. Shame is a societal control device to get you to do what they want. Sometimes it correctly stops an unethical act. It also draws a fence around your environment. A very well-known scientist told Nolan this subject would hurt his career. If anything, it enhanced it. Why is it wrong to ask the question? The person trying to stop the questions is the one acting like a cultist. Fridman's gloss is that a lot of scientific progress is done on ideas a senior colleague said would wreck you. That warning can itself be a signal. Nolan agrees.

His lab has been 20 to 30 people since 1992. He tells students it is not the data that falls in line that is interesting. It is the spot off the graph. That is usually where discovery is. He has lost count of the times he stopped someone mid-talk: wait, go back a few slides, what was that? Those moments made careers. Pressure at Stanford he answers by pointing at outcomes. You were the ones who told me not to start companies; now you come for advice on how to start one. Wanting to take a possible explanation off the table is not the scientific method. He reverse-shames them with reason. It can be lonely, the way neural-net people were lonely in the 1990s. Because of this subject he has met some of the most fascinating people he would never have met on the conventional track. Give a talk at Harvard or MIT, and at dinner the topic comes up, and someone else at the table admits they are interested or that they have seen something, and the tone changes. Or they come over afterward: I do not talk about this openly, but. The number of scientists who know there is something else going on, he says, is much larger than the scientific community would like to think.

Meaning of life, given all this? He reaches for an island. You have lived on it your whole life, looked across the ocean, never imagined another island with anybody on it. Then a ship with sails shows up. You do not understand it. Your world just got a lot bigger. He thinks we are in that moment: the galactic view opening, not only to the possibility of somebody else but to something else, as yet not understood. The fact that it is not understood is what excites him. He can fill it with his dreams. The discovery will make us more humble and more interesting at once—smaller and larger. Fridman can look at the stars and know he will never see it all and still be glad it is there. He closes with Stanislaw Lem in *Solaris*: how do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we cannot even understand one another.