Garry Nolan's Kindergarten Alien Encounter

Immunologist and UFO researcher Garry Nolan told Australian journalist Ross Coulthart that he had encountered alien-like creatures in his childhood bedroom, confirming under his own name a story Diana Pasulka reported about "James," a pseudonym in American Cosmic (2019) that Pasulka indicated she used for Nolan. The two versions of the story agree in some details and differ markedly in important details. This shows exactly the kind of slips and distortions of memory that skeptics have long argued make witness memories an unreliable guide to events without corroborating details.

Here is Nolan's account as "James" in Diana Pasulka's reporting in American Cosmic​ three years ago:

At dinner that evening, I made sure to sit next to James. I offered him some wine, and he related his experiences with the phenomenon, which began in his childhood. When he was five or six years old, he recalled, little people would appear in his room. They stood by his bed or looked at him through his bedroom windows. He insisted that he was awake when these events took place, and he said emphatically, “I was not asleep. Oh, and I was paralyzed.” He complained to his parents, who told him that he had had some bad dreams. Yet, he told me that he knew that these night visitors were real.
 
[…] When he had arrived at our small hotel, the room James was given had a window that wouldn’t close all the way, and there were no shades. He made it clear to the proprietor that this was unacceptable. Later I realized that James had developed a fear of open windows in childhood and it was now a compulsion. He needed to close the windows and cover them up with curtains.
 
[…] After the incident with the presence in his bedroom, a chance occurrence opened James to the possibility that his experiences were related to UFO phenomena. An avid reader of science fiction, James picked up a book by Harvard researcher John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. James at first thought the book was fiction. He was shocked by what he read. The experiences of Mack’s subjects were exactly like his own. They described night visitors who paralyzed them and seemed to watch them in their sleep. The beings also spoke to the subjects telepathically. Mack had gained notoriety for his claim that the experiencers were psychologically healthy and that the experiences they described were common. He saw this as a significant cultural development that demanded serious scholarly attention. By the end of the book, James realized he was reading what amounted to the story of his life.

And here is Nolan telling the same story differently to Coulthart in a recent interview broadcast this week (51:00 mark):

Garry Nolan: This is probably the more unusual one. And again, it’s, I’m hardly the only individual to have had this as you wake up as a young boy. I would have been probably six or seven—because it was in our first house that we, my parents had bought in Windsor—of little men in the bedroom. You know, I mean, I was awake. I knew they were there. I could see them.
 
Ross Coulthart: Scared?
 
Nolan: I can’t remember being scared. But I remember telling my parents the next day about it.
 
Coulthart: Could it have been a dream?
 
Nolan: It could have been a dream. But when—so here’s the interesting thing. [Unintelligible] There’s little men in the bedroom. And it went on, I guess, for a few weeks, and then it just stopped. So I promptly forgot about it. It—but what was, what was critical, was about twenty years again later, actually here in Palo Alto, I was at a used book store, and I pulled out a book. And I’m pretty sure it was either John Mack’s or Whitley Streiber’s book.
 
Coulthart: Communion.
 
Nolan: Communion. And there on the front cover was—and I can feel the hair on my arms going up—was what I saw.
 
Coulthart: That’s the classic Grey alien face.
 
Nolan: And I remember I dropped the book because it was like, whoa. And it was a revelation, I guess.

Most notably, Nolan completely changes the book that supposedly created the revelation in his mind, conforming his story to the expectations and prompting of his interlocutor. Mack's book did not have alien faces on the cover, but Strieber's did, so Nolan's two stories cannot both be true as told. But other details differ, too, notably his insistence on being awake to Pasulka but confessing that it might have been a dream to Coulthart, and his claim to Coulthart that the alien visitations mysteriously stopped and he "forgot" about them while telling Pasulka his parents had told him they were bad dreams, after which the dream creatures ceased to trouble him.

In a second story reported in American Cosmic and to Ross Coulthart, Nolan told Pasulka that at 5:30 one morning on his paper route as a kid, he saw a "shapeless formation of lights" that was "twenty feet across" and silent. He became "frozen in a time warp of light." When he told Coulthart the same story, the "shapeless" object, now specified as arriving in March of 1972 or 1973, became "circular" and the lights restricted to four in number. The lights were now "pointing down" and there is no mention of being frozen in a time warp. Instead, he told Coulthart he was not scared. 

In 2019, he told Pasulka that he had long been an avid reader of science fiction, which is why he mistook John Mack's book for fiction. In 2022, he told Coulthart that he did not know what a UFO was until "twenty years" after his 1970s encounter. That is implausible if he were already an avid science fiction fan prior to Mack's 1994 abduction book.