Even casual followers of UFO news usually think of Area 51 in Nevada and Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio when you say, “Places to find wreckage from crashed UFOs.” When someone brings up Sanford University in California, where a well-known microbiologist is using “Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging” to look at the atoms of samples from alleged UFO crashes in Colombia and Argentina, you know they are a real insider. Hey, what? Stanford?

“We have come up with a way to use secondary ion mass spectrometry to take pictures of antibodies that are marked with elemental metal reporters that are isotopically pure.”

Dr. Gary Nolan studies “hematopoiesis, cancer and leukemia, autoimmunity, and inflammation” at Stanford’s Nolan Lab, which is named after him because he is a “well-known microbiologist.” He does this by using high-tech tools to look at single cells. In his free time, he uses the same tools to study pieces of what people say are UFOs. In a recent interview with KQED, he said that it wasn’t his idea; he got one of those strange calls from the government.

“I was asked by people from the government and an aerospace company to help them figure out why some people got sick after interacting with what they thought was an unidentified flying object. I didn’t expect this, but they came because they were mostly interested in the kinds of blood analysis that my lab can do.

After that, Nolan moved on to look at parts of the real strange ships. Besides the most recent ones from Colombia and Argentina, he has also looked at pieces from the supposed UFO crash in New Mexico in 1945, which happened at the same place as the Project Trinity nuclear tests. From that, what did he learn?

“This is not the smoking gun that people were hoping for. But the goal is to take even the most boring cases and make a flowchart of how this should be done to show people that they don’t have to come up with something amazing. I mean, this case doesn’t prove anything wrong. It’s just not obvious that this is a good piece of tech.”

Nolan says that he wants to know why some people say that the metals show signs of being made by changing the isotope ratios of given elements, which is an expensive process. If there is a practical benefit, he wants to know about it because it would help our own material science. His work can be seen as both finding something new and getting rid of things that can be explained. Nolan was shocked when he put pieces from the UFOs in Colombia and Argentina into the imaging device and saw that the ratio of isotopes didn’t make sense. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be something we know, but it also doesn’t mean that they can’t be alien metal. He doesn’t guess, but he does talk about what other scientists think of his work in the UFO field and his defense.

“A little bit of the usual laughter, and some people have said, “Garry, you’re going to ruin your reputation.” And I say, “I’m not coming to a conclusion.” I’m just saying that there is strange data here that needs to be explained. I’m willing to spend time explaining it. What kind of scientist takes something off the table? If the explanation is right in front of you and you throw it away before you even come to a conclusion, you can’t really call yourself a scientist. You’re a cultist.”

All ufologists should follow that line of thought. Nolan says he doesn’t understand why scientists who are doing similar studies don’t want to talk about this kind of research. He knows of dozens of them and is sure there are many more. He says we need people who think about everything, like himself, and we also need skeptics. “Keep it on the table,” he tells them both.

We should hope that he shows us more of what’s on his mind.