Garry Nolan, Chris Mellon, Karl Nell, and more at the SOL Foundation Symposium

It’s been a busy few weeks! There were five UFO-related commercials at the Superbowl. The SOL Foundation dropped the videos from their UAP conference. Congress had a minor freakout directly after a UAP briefing by Lue Elizondo. The DODIG found that the DOD’s lack of a coordinated UAP plan leaves the US at risk. And Sean Kirkpatrick’s article drew a lot of pushback, questions about whether he followed the DOPSR process, and raising concerns that he may be a disinformation agent.

Back in November, the SOL Foundation held its first UAP symposium.
The feedback from the community was very positive, but it took awhile to get the videos posted.
Co-founder Peter Skafish: “We want the Sol Foundation to be a kind of nerve center in which serious professionals across academia, across government, within investment and technology communities, within civil society institutions such as religious bodies, to be able to come together and be able to network, to listen to cutting-edge research on this, and to be able to incubate their own projects while they’re in a space with a lot of other like-minded individuals.”
Co-founder David Grusch: “This is why we have the Sol Foundation. We need to basically create a parallel track of research and independent discovery that aren’t necessarily dependent on the U.S. government to provide us all the answers.”

Garry Nolan, Ph.D. on The Material Science of UAP

Garry Nolan is a professor in the department of pathology at Stanford. His talk was mostly about how you approach UFOs from a scientific perspective, specifically evaluating UFO materials.
His talk seemed to be aimed at other scientists. He discussed the work he has done to analyze particular samples that Jaques Vallee has provided him, and how they could turn this into a repeatable framework that other labs and scientists could follow in the future.
“Inevitably we're going to come across something out there that is alien. But how do we engage it and how do we begin? I think we start with the problem. Everything is made of stardust, but the problem is we don't understand the rules of how it all goes together. As a biologist I study the basic gears and principles of what goes on inside of a cell, and then we basically figure out how it works. So I think of potential UAP materials as something that I can approach with the same methodologies that I have with cancer research. It's straightforward.”
“How would you analyze materials from a UAP? You take it apart piece by piece. You try to understand the components, and you try to ask the question ‘why is this component here next to that component’ and ‘what might they be doing with each other.’ It’s about the data, not the conclusion. Verifiable data and methods are what are peer reviewed.”
He talks about a metal sample from a UFO incident in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1977. He briefly discusses the witness and the chain of custody, and then about what they learned from the sample. I didn’t understand the science, but they were able to conclude a few things:
- The metal was clearly the result of an industrial process (not naturally occurring).
- The samples they took showed a slightly different ratio of elements in each, meaning it was incompletely mixed.
- No signs of technology (it was just molten metal).
- No exotic isotope ratios (not conclusively from another star).
He talks about a sample from a UFO explosion in Ubatuba, Brazil in 1957. Again, discusses witnesses and chain of custody, and then what they learned from the samples. In this case, he found that of two samples of magnesium from the site, one matched the natural ratios of isotopes, and another was way off. Which is something we can do today, but was extraordinarily expensive to produce in the 50s. So once again, he concludes the materials show no sign of technology, but are clearly the result of an industrial process.
He talks about a sample from the Lonnie Zamora encounter in Socorro, New Mexico in 1964. He was able to show it was an unusual sample of aluminum and zinc side-by-side, with very little mixing, again, clearly the result of an industrial process.
Then he wraps up by saying he’s setting up a new initiative, the Stardust Repository, which will offer standardized testing with a federation of other scientists with access to labs and tools that would otherwise be incredibly expensive (casually mentions that the above tests ran to $40k!). He mentions this is what Avi Loeb had to do with his materials from the South Pacific, and he wants to standardize it and put out a set of protocols for others so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Christopher Mellon on The Potential Consequences of Disclosure

Chris “UFO Daddy” Mellon is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and one of the oldest supporters of our podcast. I’ve got a lot more quotes from Chris’s talk because he turned it into an article on the Debrief a few days later.
“Imagine you were just elected President of the United States. During one of your first classified briefings, you learn that the US military has recovered advanced extraterrestrial technology. You are told we’ve made only modest headway in understanding how this technology works, where it is from, or why these intelligently controlled machines are here. What would you do in that circumstance?”
- “As President, your top priority is to keep the American people safe from all threats, both foreign and domestic. …Are you going to hold a press conference revealing that aliens are visiting planet Earth, but we don’t know where they’re coming from, why they are here, or whether we can defend ourselves from them?”
- “It is hard for me to imagine any of the politicians I’ve worked for over the years leaping at that opportunity. …What chance would you have as President of moving forward on other vital issues on your agenda, given the tumult that would result? What reason is there to believe the net effect for society would be positive rather than negative?”
- “Strangely, there is little discussion of this critical issue among proponents of disclosure in the UAP community. Perhaps advocates of disclosure simply assume that truth and transparency are always for the better. Although I applaud the sentiment, the issue is not so simple for government officials bearing the weighty responsibility of governing. I therefore thought I would offer some thoughts from the standpoint of a former national security official because national security concerns are inescapably central to this discussion.”
“When I first became publicly involved in the UAP topic… my immediate goal was to alert policymakers to a dangerous intelligence failure, namely, the fact of serious and recurring intrusions into restricted DoD airspace by strange, unidentified aircraft. It was shocking to learn our vaunted multi-billion-dollar intelligence system was paralyzed by ineffable stigma… placing US personnel and the nation at risk. This situation reminded me of both Pearl Harbor, where vital warning information was not forwarded up the chain of command, as well as 9/11, when intelligence agencies failed to share vital information that could have saved the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. Having survived the attack on the Pentagon myself, this was not a purely theoretical consideration.”
“I want to challenge the recurring assertion that the UAP issue is primarily for scientists, not politicians or government officials. …Current intelligence collected by the US indicates that our military is encountering intelligently controlled, solid objects invading restricted military airspace, sometimes even flying in formation, on an almost daily basis. Many of these objects are emitting radiation in the 1-3 and 8-12 gigahertz range. Multiple credible reports indicate that UAP has rendered segments of our nuclear deterrent inoperable; in other cases, they are jamming radars on fighter aircraft. We also have multiple cases of near-mid-air collisions and cases involving serious injuries to military and civilian personnel. Therefore, as much as we need and want scientific investigations, the government cannot be permitted to divest itself of the UAP issue.”
“The first question that arises is, ‘How can we make a fair determination about the potential risks and benefits of disclosure without access to all the facts?’ Suppose the US government recovered extraterrestrial technology decades ago. In that case, there has inevitably been some progress in assessing it and, hopefully, some insights gleaned regarding the nature and intent of its designers. …One of the only things we can say with certainty is that unless ETs prove to be angelic, which is not what our military is reporting, disclosure would undeniably frighten, if not terrify, large segments of the population.”
- “Moreover, what if disclosure precipitated a change in the behavior of an alien civilization, given that they no longer had an incentive to remain elusive and clandestine? What is the risk potential that disclosure might cause some governments to overreact, precipitating fearful and aggressive interactions? If these risks are substantial, does it still make sense to release such disruptive information?”
“Nothing as potentially ontologically shocking as UAP disclosure has probably ever occurred, certainly not in modern times. However, there are still some interesting historical precedents we can examine.”
- “Consider the Sputnik issue that arose in 1957. Sputnik was merely a small satellite emitting tracking signals, not a weapons system. Yet the mere fact America was lagging behind the Soviet Union in space and missile technology immediately became a major political issue.”
- “Other examples are tragic. When we look at the first contact between more technologically advanced civilizations and indigenous peoples, the consequences often proved catastrophic for the less technologically advanced.”
- “In the case of Sputnik, we have an awareness of a potential threat; in the second instance, we have an actual invasion and occupation. So, a key question to ask… is whether disclosure might provoke hostilities. That seems highly unlikely; so, although the Sputnik case is far less shocking and provocative than disclosure would be, it may be a more appropriate model than the tragic cases involving European contact with pre-industrial indigenous societies.”
“I believe that a graduated process of disclosure would avert a crisis atmosphere while prompting new investments in technology, scientific research, and a rash of collaborative international meetings and initiatives. Processing this unsettling information would certainly take time, but danger and fear of the unknown have always been inherent in the human condition, and people would, as always, adapt. If some UAP proves to be extraterrestrial, people would still get out of bed the next day, go through their morning wake-up rituals, and head to school or work. …Disclosure would undoubtedly alter the trajectory of our species, but almost certainly for the better.”

Kevin Knuth on The Physics of UAP

Kevin Knuth is an associate professor of physics at the University of Albany, former NASA scientist, and a member of UAPX, a UFO investigation group. His talk was about some of the commonly observed traits of UFOs, and how those traits work within our understanding of physics.
Starts by talking about UAP speed — sudden or instantaneous acceleration, and hypersonic velocity without signatures like a sonic boom.
Mentions that the tic-tac UFOs in the Nimitz encounter were observed to drop from 28k feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds:
- “That is crazy and really anomalous. How anomalous? Do the calculations. You can estimate the minimum acceleration. If they accelerated halfway and then decelerated the other way, that gives you a lower bound for the acceleration, which comes out to be 5400 Gs — 5000 times the acceleration of gravity. People aren’t going to survive this. Most equipment won’t survive this. An F-35s wings will rip off at about 13 Gs, so 5000 Gs is really anomalous.”
“We estimated the power this would take. Of course to do this you need to know the mass. We don't know the mass. These things were estimated to be about the size of an F18 and an F18 is around 10,000 kg of mass. We decided let's take a much lower bound, one tenth of that. So assuming that this was maybe one tenth of the mass of an F18, you come out to a power of 1,100 GW. This is more than 10 times the total nuclear power output of the United States.”
He discusses a few other cases with good radar data, which show high speeds. The radar observations from the Minot AFB encounter in 1968 showed Mach 12 (9200 mph) pulling 209 Gs. And the radar from the JAL encounter over Alaska in 1986 showed Mach 350 (269,000 mph) pulling 9000 Gs (!). “296,000 mph, through the air, with no sonic boom. Don’t ask me how, this is the anomaly.”
“They don’t make sonic booms or fireballs, which you would expect, so something very strange is going on. One thing that’s almost never mentioned is there’s no energy deposition when they stop. This thing drops from 28,000 feet to sea level, getting up to about 42,000 mph in the middle and then stops. Where did all that energy go? Energy doesn't just disappear. When this thing comes to a stop there ought to have been an explosion and given the amount of power that it took you can estimate how big that would have been. It should have been an explosion with about the same amount of energy as 100 tons of TNT, or 250 Tomahawk cruise missiles simultaneously blowing. That's what should have happened. It didn't. What's going on? We don't know. I treat these all as clues to figure out how these things work.”
“Why do people always assume they’re spacecraft? It’s simple. Because they fly as fast as spacecraft do… At 296,000 mph, you can get to the moon in less than 60 minutes! …This is really remarkable.”
- “Here’s a plot of ship speed under constant acceleration. If you accelerate at 1000 Gs, you can get to 90% of the speed of light in 17 hours. You can get to 90% of the speed of light in less than a day if you maintain that acceleration in space. That’s at 1000 Gs. The tic-tac case, we estimated to be 5000 Gs. The JAL Airlines case was 10,000 Gs. At 10,000 Gs you can get up to 90% the speed of light much, much faster.”
- “How far can you go? Well, once you’re traveling close to the speed of light, relativity kicks in, so for the traveler, you can traverse great distances in short periods of time. At 2000 Gs you can get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in about 3 days. At 10,000 Gs, you can reach any star within 50 light years in less than a day. It’s a day trip for you. For the rest of us, it’s 50 years. It’s possible.”
He talked about some other things, including luminosity. Many UFOs are reported to be brightly glowing, and from photos you can estimate how bright, and how much power it takes.
- “Luminosities on the order of 2000 to 30,000 MW of light coming off the craft. Who the heck needs 1000 MW lights. What would you use them for? Why would you do this? It doesn’t make any sense. I have no idea what the purpose of such a light would be. Perhaps the propulsion system somehow gave off light like this as a byproduct, which would give you a clue as to how their propulsion systems work, which is interesting. But then you have to worry what kind of people have propulsion systems that waste thousands of megawatts and they don’t really care about it. That tells you something about the amounts of energy they’re willing and able to play with.”
- One interesting thing he notes that an object this bright should be illuminating everything around it like the sun, but we don’t see that in the photos, which suggests that either we don’t understand the effect, or the light is somehow targeted at the viewer. Targeted light would take much less energy… but why?
He also talked about transmedium craft and UFOs moving through water without experience any apparent resistance, but by this point my brain was kinda fried. If you’re a physics-type person, I think you’d really enjoy this talk.
My favorite bit is that he mentions a commonly reported effect of UFO encounters is they turn off electronics, including car engines. He shares the story of watching “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and the scene where the truck engine is killed by a UFO, and then starts up again when it leaves, and he thought “oh that’s nonsense.”
- He then proceeds to explain how a car’s engine works as an electrical circuit, and a strong enough electric field would cause the circuit to short out.
- BUT when it leaves, it leaves a charge that will cause the sparkplug to fire, and if the piston is in the correct position, there will be fuel ready to ignite and it would restart the engine!
- That would only happen about 10% of the time AND in a survey of UFO reports, we see that about 10% of the people whose cars stopped said they started again afterward!

Karl Nell on The Schumer Amendment & Controlled Disclosure

Karl Nell is a retired Army Colonel, and former Army liason to the UAP task force. We first heard his name in the article introducing David Grusch, where he backed up Grusch’s claims.
- “‘His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub- rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,’ said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.”
- “In a 2022 performance evaluation, Laura A. Potter, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Headquarters, Department of the Army, described Nell as ‘an officer with the strongest possible moral compass.’”
We also talked about him back when the SOL conference happened, because one of his slides outlining a plan for disclosure leaked, sparking a lot of discussion about “catastrophic disclosure.”
His video is fascinating, but unfortunately, he tried to fit an hour of talk into a 30 minute timeslot.
- The first 20 minutes are a deep dive into the Schumer UAP Disclosure bill, which unfortunately, failed to pass. As a result, the part I found most interesting was the final ten minutes where he crams in about 30 minutes of slides about the disclosure process itself. What we got was great, but I wanted so much more detail. I’d love to see him give a longer version of just this part of the talk, because he was obviously feeling a bit stressed about time and was flying through slides and glossing over points.
He starts by bringing up a list of reasons NOT to disclose. He explains that any group planning for disclosure has to have a plan to address these issues. There are six big reasons he lists, though he says he doesn’t know if these are the real reasons, but these are reasons you can “derive from first principles.”
- National Security:
  - Keeping knowledge from adversaries.
  - Protecting people from themselves.
- Lack of Credible Plan:
  - NHI intentions remain unknown
  - New physics or tech have unpredictable ramifications
- Societal Disruption:
  - Challenge to legitimacy of existing authority structures
  - Ontological shock / memetic virus
  - Financial instability
- Covert Agreement:
  - Unaccountable parties advancing unknown agenda
  - Disclosure will precipitate or accelerate negative repercussion
  - NHI quid pro quo
- Cover for Misdeeds:
  - Unequitable accrual of power, privilege, or monetary gain
  - Significant criminal misconduct or violation of civil liberties
- Organizational Intransigence/Distraction from Priorities
On the other hand, he said there are three reasons to favor disclosure:
- Moral Right:
  - NHI existence is ultimately not government information
  - Restore proper oversight and accountability / redress misdeeds
- Avoid Catastrophic Disclosure
  - All disclosure concerns will be realized unless:
  - Manage risk through controlled disclosure
  - Transition approach from reactive to proactive
  - Superintend the message and the timing
  - Mitigate negative effects of UAP knowledge
  - Aggressively plan transition to post-disclosure world
- Prevent Loss of Technological Dominance
  - Some evidence suggests USA may be losing a UAP “arms race”
  - Compartmentalization hinders the scientific method.
  - Whole-of-government approach is required
“If you look through these issues, you realize these are really not government issues. These issues are more effectively solved in the private sector, in the academic sector, in legal reviews and political discussions, in the natural sciences. This tees up the opportunity for the SOL foundation and the members here to contribute to the solution of this plan, because there needs to be a campaign plan to synchronize all this.”
He says there are three important parts to the proposed end state of this plan
- Oversight: Restoration of proper federal government oversight over all UAP legacy and ongoing program efforts.
- Disclosure: Prevention of UAP catastrophic disclosure through successful implementation of policy recommendations. “We want disclosure, but we want to get it through a controlled process that doesn’t create societal collapse.”
- Science: Transformative technological and societal advancement derived from successful UAP science and technology and NHI engagement.
Which brings us back to the slide that leaked. He said “Here is the obligatory DOD-type of campaign plan chart,” which made everyone laugh. We discussed this slide back then, but now we have the context — he’s outlining a plan that would restore oversight, avoid catastrophic disclosure, and advance scientific understanding.
- “Disclosure is a process, it's not an event, and it's going to stair step across these phases.”
- Phase 0 was called “Shaping” and it involved things like the AATIP, the leaked Navy videos, and the 2017 NYT article.
- Phase 1, called “Demonstrate Existence” had a goal of government acceptance.
  - “We've had phase one. We've completed phase one. I would argue phase one ends when we get [Schumer’s disclosure act] and so it says demonstrate UAP existence by January of 24, and you're like, well that's crazy, it's never going to happen. It probably won't happen in my lifetime. I'm saying that that already happened. The gang of eight just said that we need this legislation and they don't have proper oversight.”
- Phase 2, called “Correlate Signatures” was targeted for January 2026, and has a goal of academic acceptance.
  - Garry Nolan, asked if he was seeing a change in how seriously academics and scientists take the phenomenon: “The short answer is yes, and incredibly so. Just looking at the audience at the SOL symposium itself, it was probably about a third academics from various disciplines. I counted and saw at least a dozen Stanford professors in the audience, many of whom, I only know of them as Stanford professors, I don’t know them personally. Many of whom, afterwards, wrote to me and said ‘Thank you for this, I’ve always been interested in this area, but I’ve never felt comfortable going to the kinds of meetings that were advertised.’ So having a sober discussion and a place where non-hyperbolic discussion could be had was welcome to them. I gave a talk at Harvard Medical School and the organizer said ‘how much of your time are you going to use to talk about UAP? Would you please at least address the topic in your talk, because everyone wants to hear about it.’ I mean the room was packed. I said ‘I’d be happy to come back another time to talk about UAP, I haven’t prepared for it.’ And that’s the third time in recent months that I’ve been asked to take time out of my day talk to talk about UAP because people are so excited. There’s not a dinner I go to, I mean, that evening at Harvard, at the dinner, all anyone wanted to talk about was UAP. They didn’t want to talk about the stuff about the cancer.”
- Phase 3, called “Characterize Performance” was targeted for October 2030, and has a goal of public acceptance.
  - He said this would be the final phase driven by the government, because it ends with public disclosure. From that point forward, the ongoing work is done in the humanities, scientific investigations, and the private sector.
  - He also says we shouldn’t wait for the government. Since most of the reasons not to disclose weren’t necessarily government problems, we should work to address the ones we can to make it less risky to advance disclosure.
- Line of Effort A: Government
  - Enact the Schumer amendment
  - Grant legal amnesty for past misdeeds
  - Centralize all UAP data
  - Fund a national-level UAP research project akin to the Manhattan Project
- Line of Effort B: Humanities
  - Develop sociological models for analyzing societal impact of UAP disclosure and mitigation of possible ontological shock
  - Codify laws of ethics in an environment where we might have a hierarchy of being where everyone isn’t necessarily having equal competitive potential.
    - “You’ve got the problem of a more advanced civilization coming in and disrupting a less advanced civilization. It’s the same issue with AI or colonialism or NHI.”
- Line of Effort C: Natural Sciences
  - “Extend the theoretical as well as practical methods of material science enabling accurate prediction and modeling of unique properties associated with novel molecular configurations and isotopic ratios across classes of meta-materials.”
- Line of Effort D: Private Sector
  - Look into how corporations can legally collaborate to reverse engineer NHI tech on loan from the government.
  - Figure out the legal issues around ownership of NHI tech.
  - Figure out how to introduce new energy sources without destroying every existing energy company.

References

Episode 39, posted on March 3, 2024