UFO News Roundup: Jellyfish UFO Balloons, Garry Nolan's Major Interview, and More

​It was a big week for UFOs—or rather, for reality butting heads with UFOs. Yesterday, the Pentagon’s UFO office released its findings on the infamous “jellyfish” UFO video promoted by Jeremy Corbell, and, to no great surprise, they concluded that skeptics were indeed correct and the 2017 infrared video of a blob-like object in Iraq was a cluster of partially deflated balloons. Meanwhile, Lue Elizondo reported that a classified briefing on UFOs he was scheduled to attend with members of Congress was postponed, allegedly due to competing House priorities, but Rep. Anna Maria Luna stated that the real reason was that David Grusch refused to fly to Washington to testify, repeating a pattern where he avoids any situation where he might be asked difficult questions, particularly when required to provide evidence. (Grusch has previously spoken in public forums where he can claim evidence is classified, but he has declined all requests to speak in a classified setting where he would have to provide evidence.) 

​Meanwhile, a new so-called UFO whistleblower, Matthew Brown, claims that merely saying the words “David Grusch” is so powerful a talisman that the Pentagon will censure or fire whoever speaks the name. It’s a bit hard to square that with images of Pete Hegseth flapping about the Pentagon like a headless chicken searching for trans people and restocking Mein Kampf while planes fall from air craft carriers into the sea.
 
Nevertheless, Ohio State University political science professor Alexander Wendt seems to think that confirmation of aliens hasn’t happened yet, despite the boasts of UFO podcasters, since he is promoting a forthcoming book, The Last Humans: UFOs and National Security (Oxford University Press), in which he takes the position that contact with ETs would produce “ontological shock” (yes, ufology’s favorite new semi-scientific coinage) that would destroy the international political order and lead to widespread social collapse. There is no publication date listed for the book, but Wendt’s use of ufology’s language shouldn’t surprise anyone—he was a featured speaker at the 2024 Sol Foundation symposium and has latched on to UFOs after coming to the field through his embrace of concepts like panpsychism and quantum consciousness.

​In that embrace of UFOs as an expression of cockamamie ideas about consciousness, Wendt is a fellow-traveler with the Sol Foundation’s Garry Nolan, who recently sat down for a three-and-a-half-hour interview with Robinson Erhardt about his increasingly baroque UFO fantasies. In that interview, Nolan disagrees with Wendt—he thinks alien contact will be no big deal after about a week or so, as long as food is still on the table and the TVs work. I’ll be honest—3.5 hours of Garry Nolan talking is more than I can take. The video contains more than 31,000 spoken words—around a third the length of a book—so I read through a transcript to save time.
 
There were some interesting takeaways, though not necessarily those Nolan would want us to focus on. It’s interesting to me that he emphasizes the notion of “patterns”—he came to his “overwhelming” evidence through what he says are “patterns” in situations and cases he had examined, particularly around health problems. It’s interesting because he seems to be reasoning backward from being presented with situations he personally can’t explain, particularly with medical issues, and then concludes that this is inexplicable and the work of space aliens because he claims to be “a very good judge of character” and therefore knows that those with medical problems who claim contact with a UFO are telling the truth. I’m sure you can see the logical problems with such a line of reasoning, beginning with the fact that even if patients believe they encountered a UFO, it doesn’t mean that they actually met a space alien and ending with the fact that these collections of anomalous medical data are not necessarily a pattern at all, and even Nolan himself admits UFOs are “probably the least likely of a thousand different alternative explanations.”
 
No, instead, Nolan focuses on his “indignation” that the military has “ignored” those who claim UFO injuries and their UFO stories are not taken seriously. And that, of course, is the real “pattern” we see in ufology—anger at a perceived lack of respect from authorities, which transmutes into a hardening belief that the disrespect is itself proof of correctness. He brings this up several times, including one instance where he complains that “senior scientists” constantly told him that advances in immunology research that later came to pass were impossible, thus reinforcing for him the notion that authority figures were blinkered, wrong, and hostile to new ideas. He echoes this again when complaining about academia “poo-pooing” some of the more extreme ideas in physics.
 
For Nolan, the science seems to take a back seat to personal relationships and trust—of being part of a community. (He says he is “great friends” with David Grusch and that he hung out at a bar with Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon two weeks before the infamous 2017 New York Times UFO article, where they shared their UFO videos with him and “my hair stood on end.”) He even explicitly says that he is finally in a place where he no longer looks at others with “envy” because he is secure in his accomplishments—i.e., Nolan likes being seen as a sage. He also defensively argues that he doesn’t need validation from anyone else, even though he becomes incredibly defensive when he isn’t validated: “I don’t need anybody else to validate what I saw, and I don’t need anybody else to validate why I should be asking the question.” He’s also a little upset that the Schumer-Rounds UFO act didn’t pass because he was supposed to serve on the UFO declassification board the act would have established.
 
Consider, too, his comments about why he believes in the existence of evidence he has never seen:

To be honest, I'll make very few claims about UFOs per se apart from the fact that I've seen one up close when I was a paper boy, but that’s an anecdote … so … but it's what was important at the time and after the CIA got me involved. And then they introduced me to other scientists who were working literally with the government on this matter and who were and have now come out and said—and it'll be actually in a in a movie called Age of Disclosure coming out shortly—has said we worked on the on the reverse engineering program, we worked on alien craft. I mean those are claims, right? But I know these people; I've worked with them now for 10 years. I've worked with and spoken to probably at least half a dozen people who have worked on what’s called the Program or the Legacy Program and so, you know, have I seen an alien body? No. Have I seen a craft on the ground? No. But if I use the same kind of science insight that I do when I’m talking with another scientist about some subject matter that we’re both, you know, competent around and I look at their body language and I then put it together with a dozen or several hundred other things that I’ve heard from other people. the story all meshes together. But the objective though has to be from a scientific standpoint that all of those are at the end of the day just anecdotes and stories, and so I can’t hand as of yet to a colleague of mine the definitive proof.

​Now, as a thought experiment, try replacing those colleagues saying they worked on aliens with Christians taking hallucinogens and telling us they encountered angels and the Holy Ghost. Does it then become easier to see how people can be sincere in their beliefs and yet could be objectively wrong about what they experienced? Forming a personal relationship with someone is not scientific evidence.
 
And what Nolan sees as evidence is depressingly low quality. He considers “overwhelming” evidence the number of books and newspaper articles reporting UFO sightings over the past century or so.

When I say the evidence is overwhelming it’s that you can brush off one or two but you have a hard time brushing off all of that. You also have a hard time brushing off newspaper reports going back to the early 1900s where you get these repeating stories of a farmer saw this object in his in his field he went out to the object, there was a little man next to it, the little man saw him and then jumped in the thing and took off—an otherwise credible individual—and this is like from the Kansas local town paper right before they even knew what these things were called in the early 1900s.

This is not evidence of aliens any more than the frequent reports of ghost sightings are proof of life after death, or reports of Marian apparitions are proof that the Virgin Mary visits oil slicks and office park windows. These, too, are repeating stories, collected in books and reported in newspapers and also lack any scientific evidence for their reality outside of the minds of the people who claim to see them. And with older newspapers, you also have the cultural context to deal with—hoaxes and fake news stories were not just common but a popular form of entertainment in those days, and even in cases where people did see things, they interpreted them through cultural lenses. For instance, in the late 1800s a meteorite was once claimed to have alien writing on it because that is what believers expected to see, but there was nothing there except random scratch marks (either natural or hoaxed). You can’t take those stories at face value as though they were the reported results of a scientific experiment. A little education in historiography would have told Nolan that long ago.
 
When Erhardt brings up this point in a roundabout way (he frames it to try to give Nolan an out on the credibility question), Nolan gives the game away: “At the end of the day to me it doesn’t matter if anybody else believes me or believes that what I think is possible might be true because I’m on a mission to do it myself, right, and I'm on a mission with other people who are as compelled as I am to prove or disprove this with the money to back it, and so our answer is: We don’t care what you think.” And then in the next breath, thinking better of it, he backtracks: “If we get technology, you’re going to benefit. We might make money on the technology, but you’re going to benefit in the long run, so we’re in it for you; we’re not in it for us.” The longer Nolan speaks, the more clearly we see the push-and-pull between his public-facing claims of beneficence and his private grievance and fury.
 
Nolan also claims that the White House directly threatened him with assassination after he accidentally referred to secret information he had learned secondhand:

I was personally threatened because I knew of a conversation that happened somewhere, and I alluded to it in the most elliptical fashion on a public broadcast. Literally a couple of days later I get a phone call from a friend saying XYZ at the White House is really pissed at you and you should not ever say anything like that again because Title 18 applies. I said, “What does that mean? “Lethal force is operable. I’m not kidding you.” Oh my God, I put down the phone and I honestly nearly broke down in tears, and I called a reporter friend of mine and to just basically report it to them to say this just happened to me.

​Title 18 is the section of the U.S. code for crimes and criminal procedure, laying out court proceedings and imprisonment. It does not authorize the president to assassinate anyone, nor is the government allowed to punish someone for discussing classified material they did not leak themselves. (In 2010, Pres. Obama asserted the right to assassinate Americans he designated as threats, but as best I am aware, this claim has never been adjudicated.) It seems rather inefficient for the Deep State conspiracy to call a friend of Nolan’s to pass on a threat secondhand when they could simply have killed him. Of course, if the vast conspiracy were going around killing people at will, our government would probably look a lot different than it does today.
 
At the end of the day—to borrow Nolan’s preferred wording—it seems that Nolan is another in the long line of ufologists who have confused personal relationships for evidence and secrets for truths. It’s nice that he wants to belong to a community that respects him, but that is an awfully thin thread to hang a supposedly world-changing discovery upon.