PART I: PROLEGOMENA
In 1996, when I was just beginning my graduate work in the humanities, a liberal physicist named Alan Sokol, to demonstrate the absurdity of trendy Leftist academic postmodern gibberish of the time, snookered the editors of the journal Social Text into publishing a nonsensical paper (“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”).
It was loaded with nonsense physics, but also sprinkled with poststructuralist catch-phrases then in vogue on The Hipster Left. One section is called, “Quantum Mechanics: Uncertainty, Complementarity, Discontinuity and Interconnectedness.” Another is called “Manifold Theory: (W)holes and Boundaries,” which anybody who has read Jacques Derrida will recognize as a not-so-subtle nod. Words and phrases like “essentiality,” “liberatory,” and “counter-hegemonic narratives” rain down the page, and if none of that makes sense to you, you’re smarter than the editors of Social Text.
The journal, caught with its pants down on the day of publication, was indignant but unrepentant, more or less proving Sokol’s point: if you flattered a postmodern leftist with enough postmodern political claptrap, they’d print anything and believe anything.
But Sokol had a much more important point: that truth is a real thing, and knowing it is serious business, and disciplined intellectual activity must not be so easily taken in. It was a moment when the Left had to police itself against a strong tendency away from intellectual precision, towards a gauzy self-congratulatory bias and smugness about being so very right.
What’s that got to do with aliens? Sit tight, this is going to take a minute.
Imagine you’ve been listening to Garry Nolan or The History Channel or the National Enquirer or some similar advocate for Aliens Among Us, and you are flirting with the belief that we have hard evidence of extra-terrestrial visitations.
Well, let’s talk about that. And by “talk about” I do not mean “talk you out of it,” and by “that,” I mean epistemology, how we know things are true or worthy of belief, which is the solemnest of industries enacted on the earth, after loving your neighbor as yourself.
There’s plenty to say.
Before we begin, let’s be clear about some things so you can stop reading at once if this isn’t your cuppa.
First, this essay began its life when my sister, who is actually an alien who lays eggs in the desiccated husks of her human food-supply (I have proof, but you’re not allowed to see it), linked me to a podcast about the possibilities of alien presences on earth (more on that below). No doubt she was outraged because of the competition.
I promised her I’d listen and construct a response, but as so often happens, one question led to another, one thought led to another, and before you know it you can’t prepare for the alien invasion because you’re too busy thinking and writing about truth, truth-claims, falsehoods, and refreshing yourself on things like Scottish Realism and Radical Skepticism and Logical Positivism and the strange truth-funnel the American Right has borrowed from the American Left of the 1990’s.
You know how it is.
But I promise, we’ll get to the aliens. If you’re only here for the aliens, skip to the bottom of this essay beneath the image of the Happy Alien, and we’ll have all the aliens. For the rest of us, the aliens will just have to wait until we’ve dealt with some human problems.
PART II: TRUTH, TRUTH-CLAIMS, AND KNOWING THINGS
Extraordinary claims, such as “aliens are responsible for certain symptoms in human beings,” or that God has miraculously intervened in history, or what’s sometimes called “intelligent design,” or “There are such things as fairy giraffes with butterfly wings,” are not foolish or out of bounds just because they’re unusual; but they do demand extraordinary intellectual rigor when it comes to determining whether they’re true or worthy of belief. They demand extraordinary clarity about what we do and don’t mean and why.
We live in a world saturated in truth-claims coming at us through the firehose of digital media, all of which can find a critical mass of support on Reddit or X or on some news-site or other. Evaluating them is a full-time job now, and the usual short-cuts don’t work anymore because we aren’t teaching or practicing mental precision. We are very much in the intellectual condition of the European Middle Ages, when there was tremendous intellectual and artistic energy but also a flood of hoaxes, folk-science, and popular superstition that could sluice knowledge way out of its true riverbed. One couldn’t just consult an encyclopedia to decide whether Prester John was a real person or whether the Encircling Seas had a terminus, or where Sarras was, if such a place existed.
The body of knowledge was, then as now, growing; but its imperfections were engrained in it very deeply, then as now. If you doubt that, have a conversation with a flat earther or a climate denialist or a vaccine skeptic: they will have structured their information-base around their pet idea, and it will be as impregnable as the belief in witchcraft was in 1450.
If you tell me that a door slammed because of a draft, I’m unlikely to demand you clarify your reasoning: air-pressure is well-understood, and there’s no disagreement on the fundamentals of how it works. If you tell me it slammed because fairy giraffes with butterfly wings were protecting you from an alien axe-murderer, I’m likely to ask you a lot of probing questions, and no number of followers on r/FairyGiraffeWithButterflyWings is going to answer those questions. No matter how often Fairy Giraffe News Channel reassures you with expert talking-heads that your viewpoint is the best explanation of reality, it’s still not going to turn your explanation into reality.
To determine what’s real, what’s true, requires a much straighter, sharper scalpel.
That’s not to say I rule out the possibility of fairy giraffes with butterfly wings, or of extraterrestrial life, or even the claim that extraterrestrial life has visited earth in some form; I just don’t see why they’re a necessary conclusion to the evidence available. I grew up evangelical and charismatic, which means that my life was surrounded by freaky shit that had no immediate explanation but to which the label “the Holy Spirit” was appended as an “explanation,” an ethereal, extrasensory being that could not be seen, heard or felt but which had infinite explanatory power.1 If you had an intuition that proved true or if something fortuitous or serendipitous or unusual happened, it was The Holy Spirit, and that claim could not be falsified, and therefore it could not really be questioned; so it was just presumed to be “true.” You could deny it, but of course that left you without any explanation, which was always presumed to be evidence of a weakened spiritual state in that kingdom of spiritual certainties that was the Church.
So I’m pretty expert at having a ready-made, unfalsifiable explanation for anything that was strange or unusual, and I don’t reject that framework in toto; there’s freaky shit going on out there, it can be traced all throughout history, and you might as well say “the Holy Spirit” as “something we don’t understand” or “crowd psychology” or “mass hysteria.” The Holy Spirit can make you give up heroin addiction, but crowd psychology is unlikely to do so, even if the two terms describe the exact same experience: faith and the way you frame the experience to yourself can itself be salutary, as every Twelve Step program knows (hence the “higher power” required in Alcoholics Anonymous).
But on the other hand, thinking about crowd psychology can help you see through a demand that you send your Social Security check to a huckster; calling it the Holy Spirit is unlikely to help you with that. Jim Jones, in coaxing his followers into mass suicide, did not appeal to mass hysteria but rather to the Holy Spirit. So there are definitely trade-offs: different choices for different contexts. Jesus said, “You’ll know by their fruits,” implying that if something turns out well, it’s the Holy Spirit, if it doesn’t, it isn’t. Fair play, even though it’s what’s called the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Please note that I’m not speaking here theologically but epistemologically. I’ve no interest in denying that there’s such a thing as the Holy Spirit or of reducing the experience of it to neurologically-explicable phenomena. What’s of interest to me here is not how one parses a theological claim but rather how one evaluates any large truth-claims that are intended to explain everything in the available evidence: there is such a thing as The Holy Spirit, or neurology can explain faith-healings. Evaluating the meaning and truth of such claims goes a long way towards clarifying whether they’re entitled to our belief; whether they explain the things they try to explain; whether they’re mutually exclusive of one another; and a host of other fuzzy things besides.
Hang on, your aliens are almost ready.
PART III: THE IMPORTANCE OF THINGS WE DON’T KNOW
The second important thing to disclaim is that there’s some weird shit out there, and I don’t pretend to explain it: I’m thinking of genuinely bizarre videos of unexplained flying objects that genuinely baffle pilots and other experts on how things do and don’t move in the air. I’ve got no idea what’s up with that, but then I don’t even know what my own government’s military is working on… even the Department of Defense has an Anomaly Resolution Office because they don’t know who knows what, and they don’t always know what they’re seeing.
And that’s tremendously important, this business of what I do not know. For all I know, some military or other is working on a sensor-fooling device that has fooled sensors. And for all I know, aliens are daily playing tag with each other in our airspace.
But because I don’t know a lot, I do reserve the right to reject an explanation that amounts to speculation or avoids the rigid rules of falsification: I’m not obligated to have an opinion about something I know so very little about. If a simple explanation, such as faulty equipment or a human weapon designed to have this effect, can explain something, it should. It can’t always, but we still have to follow the rules of disciplined thinking if we’re to evaluate our beliefs with any accuracy. Because every conceivable half-witted, half-baked explanation imaginable likely has some online community you can join to reinforce a dumb idea and protect you from difficult truths. We truly are beyond shaming that way.
Which brings us, finally, to extraterrestrials. Almost.
Claims about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs, the government’s official name for UFO’s) are extraordinary by nature, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena also use the initialism “UAPs,” and the two meanings will be interchangeable here.)
PART IV: LEFT- AND RIGHT-MINDED PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
So while we’re plating the aliens, let’s talk about how we talk about truth and introduce ourselves to Jordan Peterson and Garry Nolan. Who are they, and why does their opinion matter? And most importantly, what is the intellectual climate in which they work?
For starters, they’re what’s called “public intellectuals,” and this will be important below, so we should understand what we mean. Umberto Eco in an interview with The Paris Review had this to say about public intellectuals, and it’s worth quoting at length:
If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function. [. . . ]
I don’t believe that in order to be politically committed an intellectual must act as a member of a party or, worse, write exclusively about contemporary social problems. Intellectuals should be as politically engaged as any other citizen. At most, an intellectual can use his reputation to support a given cause. If there is a manifesto on the environmental question, for instance, my signature might help, so I would use my reputation for a single instance of common engagement. The problem is that the intellectual is truly useful only as far as the future is concerned, not the present. If you are in a theater and there is a fire, a poet must not climb up on a seat and recite a poem. He has to call the fireman like everyone else.
The function of the intellectual is to say beforehand, Pay attention to that theater because it’s old and dangerous! So his word can have the prophetic function of an appeal. The intellectual’s function is to say, We should do that, not, We must do this now!—that’s the politician’s job. If the utopia of Thomas More were ever realized, I have little doubt it would be a Stalinist society.
If we accept Eco’s depressing description (I do, with mild reservations), we are obliged to count among our current public intellectuals the uneven figure of psychologist and cultural critic Jordan B. Peterson.
I say “uneven” because Peterson is an abysmal debater and a dodgy polemicist, often underprepared and with only a shallow grasp of his subjects. He became famous (or infamous) for opining against a Canadian bill, Bill C-16, now a law, that he either misrepresented or did not fully understand.
And then too, if you’re going toe to toe in debate with Slavoj Žižek on Marxism, you might consider reading more Marx. Peterson lost that debate in the moment when Žižek challenged him to name a single academic who espoused the awful Marxism Peterson had painted so vividly. Of course Peterson couldn’t: his sketch of Marxism was an imaginary straw-man, and I decline to speculate about where he absorbed it, but I’m sure it wasn’t from Das Kapital or anywhere in real academia.
But on the other hand, he can be an intelligent, brilliant, and informed conversationalist. The debate with Žižek was at its brightest when Peterson let go of his need to destroy an idea he didn’t fully understand and instead fell back on listening to Žižek, and finding they had much to agree about, especially about multiculturalism and identity politics. The impression it all gave was that Žižek had come to his opinions through his thinking while Peterson had come to his (error-riddled) thinking by trying to justify his opinions.
Similarly, his discussion with Camille Paglia about the fascism of tolerance is a rare and brilliant model of what intelligent conversation should be: respectful, informed, courteous but firm, with an absence of the need to set things straight for one’s interlocutor. Paglia and Peterson shape ideas together like wet clay; where they disagree, they do so cordially, sketching the lines of disagreement with clarity. It’s what academic conversation ought to be about (and this is essential) because it’s marked by humility on both sides, an understanding of what one doesn’t know and still has to learn. Anybody interested in the life of the mind knows that your best moments are likely to be as a foil for somebody else.
In Eco’s sense, those discussions do advance, for better and worse, our common life, such as it is. They are about the future, as much as they describe the past and the present. Peterson has something to say about the future, and when he remembers what he does not know, he’s pretty good at it. His public intellectualism is a sort of performance art in which truth-claims are more important for the artistic affect they have on the audience than for any particular intellectual clarity. He needs a Camille Paglia or a Slavoj Žižek to keep him intellectually rigorous. If you happen to agree with him, as I do, that we need stronger gravity in our mythic center in order to be fully human, you probably don’t need to hear it. But he does himself no favors in critiquing a nightmare-Marxism that doesn’t exist.
It’s crucial to understand this, because Peterson is on the cutting edge of a movement in Right Wing intellectualism that is probing at perceived weaknesses in traditional scientific thought, just as the poststructuralists did in the 1990’s: the seam between science and culture.2 We’ll see that in his podcast chat with Garry Nolan. What Peterson does and does not do as a public intellectual has enormous effects for how we evaluate the claims he puts forward or platforms on his podcast.
PART V: THE RIGHT’S INTELLECTUAL CRISIS
And this leads us to an intellectual crisis, not historically peculiar to the political Right but currently urgent there as it was on the Left in the 1990’s: it comes from fear and anger that results in a loss of epistemological clarity.3 It’s happening for essentially the same reasons as the one on the Left, namely a fearful response to a loss of power, status, or respect.
The essence of Conservative intellectualism is that politics comes after real life, that the political self emerges from the preoccupations of our responsible liberty. But since the 1990’s, conservative media has forced a shift to a front-action, driven by for-profit rage-merchants who have persuaded the movement that liberty itself is suspicious. Any knowledge, science, or understanding of the world then that does not support one’s beliefs or practices has to be rooted out. And in the philosophy of the Right just now, this belief imagines a kind of totalitarianism that dwarfs anything perpetrated by the Woke movement. Whether something is true or not is of little interest when it threatens what you most ardently believe; and if you most ardently believe the truth-tellers are trying to deprive you of your liberty, there’s no real interest in intellectual precision.
Peterson entertains ideas without much discipline or rigor, in the Internet-comfortable, TED-Talk, format or playing the Just Asking Questions (JAQ) podcast-host that allows the viewer to come away consoled or outraged rather than challenged: “Huh. Scientists believe in aliens. Who knew.” In debate, where someone is permitted to point out that his assumptions are all wrong, this value is destroyed, and Peterson is rarely prepared to do the hard work of protecting his intellectual supply-lines.
That brings us to the July 17, 2025 edition of his podcast, a conversation about UAPs and the scientific process with Garry Nolan.
Nolan is a respected scientist in pathology, genetics and immunology with an advanced degree from Stanford, and he’s started a dozen biotech firms. He was instrumental in debunking the claim that the Atacama skeleton was that of an extraterrestrial.
It’s important at the outset to note that Nolan, like Peterson and many others, has been a strong critic of peer-review, calling “corrupt” the process by which people who actually understand a field of study are permitted to review the data generated by a practitioner in that field.
Hostility towards the processes of traditional science is, as we said above, a common trope particularly on the political Right at the moment, where litanies of academic abuse of peer review are common and usually employed to deprive scientific consensus of its legitimacy. The Right has been steadily pushing a theory of knowledge based on intuition and common sense (which is often indistinguishable from naked bias) for at least the last thirty years, and undermining public faith in traditional science was always the first step. It’s not surprising then to find Peterson platforming Nolan.
But critiques can also be found from the Left and pretty much throughout the history of publishing. It would be foolish to pretend that abuses of peer-review, particularly in the Humanities, are not real. But peer review remains the best path towards achieving scientific consensus and identifying junk-data that can swamp the social media ecosystem. It’s what keeps a pathologist from making pronouncements on metallurgy and what keeps a biologist from misunderstanding climate science.
Why does the Right find peer-review objectionable? Most basically, of course, people don’t like being told that they’re wrong. Intellectual structures always emerge that protect people from having their ideas falsified, and the easier it is for people of strange opinions to find each other the more true this becomes. For example, conspiracy theories persist, in spite of overwhelming evidence that falsifies the claim, that mRNA vaccines such as the Covid shot “rewrite DNA.” Add an economic motivation, and all bets are off: anthropogenic climate change, which is the consensus of climate scientists, has produced some bewildering hysteria among Congressional Republicans, many of whom are beholden to the fossil fuel industry in one way or another. (Many Democrats, including the Clintons and Kamala Harris, have also taken money from the oil and gas industry, but climate denialism remains a delusion of the Right.)
In the Peterson podcast, Nolan and Peterson present science in much the same way that Leftists did in the 1990’s: as essentially contingent. Whereas 1990’s-era poststructuralism considered everything in science a social construct, Nolan and Peterson seem to think it a great discovery that scientists are individuals; but the net effect is the same. It produces superficially plausible grounds for objecting to any particular scientific product that you happen to disagree with. Consider this quotation:
Yeah, you know, one of the things that's always struck me as peculiar about scientific research papers is that the introductions are always a lie. You know, it's so interesting because I thought about this for a long time. It really struck me when I was first in graduate school because when you write a scientific research paper, you present the situation as if all the background reading that you did produced an incremental transformation in your thinking such that you generated a hypothesis.
And that's almost never the case. Usually what happens is that people have an intuition that's derived from some pattern recognition, and then they backfill it and make it look like it's algorithmic. And then the other thing that's so bloody peculiar about that is that there's almost no discussion in graduate school training, maybe this was different where you went, on hypothesis generation itself.
This is superficially true; intuition is a major motivation for science. But it is not a lie to say that one’s hypotheses and research grow together organically. An intuition exposed to actual research will wither quickly. The intent here is not to solidify the role of intuition so much as it is to undermine the traditional process; and we know this because of Peterson’s and Nolan’s public statements.
I know a lot of scientists. I was a college educator for twenty years, and many of my closest friends are either scientists or social scientists. And I’m pretty confident in saying that these assumptions only apply completely to bad researchers and scientists. And I suspect that neither Nolan nor Peterson, both of whom are scientists who talk easily about the caudate and the basal ganglia in the podcast, treat scientific product with the suspicion these paragraphs imply.
Or more precisely, they trust the scientific process of hypothesis and falsification and consensus to smooth out whatever human frailties exist in hypothesis generation. Which is precisely how science works and why it’s the gold-standard for truth. “You cannot trust science,” an evangelical mentor once told me. “It’s always changing.” But of course that’s why you should trust it more than something that claims it’s always right and always was and always will be.
And so, finally, to the aliens.
Even the aliens are relieved. Here, have a happy alien.
PART VI: YOU’VE WAITED LONG ENOUGH. LET US TALK ABOUT ALIENS.
It’s been important to note the condition of Right Wing (I decline to call it “conservative”) thought because of what comes next.
Nolan, who steers Peterson away from the notion that he’s hypothesizing “extraterrestrial origin,” nevertheless assembles suggestions that… well, there has been extraterrestrial activity on earth.
He reports that he did work identifying Havana Syndrome in about 90 patients. Of that set, “five or six” people who reported being harmed in some way by a UAP had different symptoms4:
These are intelligence agents, diplomatic corps, military personnel, et cetera, all who had said that they were hearing buzzing in their ears, and then a small subset of them said that they'd been in proximity to things that you would call a UFO [. . . .]
What was left on the table [after subjects had been diagnosed with Havana Syndrome] were the oddities, and those were now the people who had gotten close to UAP, they claimed at least some of them. They had, as it turned out, slightly different symptomologies.
Some of those were more likely to have erythemas or scarring on the skin as opposed to internally, or manifestations on the back of their neck, some kind of irradiative damage of some kind. Now, there though [. . . ] The pattern was always anecdotal, unfortunately, in that they had a story that you, at face to face [. . . ] You’re down to about five or six people.
We need to note first that this is a very, very small sample of people. They have peculiar symptoms that are off the data-set. They were psychologically screened, so we can plausibly rule out psychosis.
That they all had UAP encounters will become important in a moment. For now, we should note that Nolan by his own account had begun traveling in UAP-interested circles some ten years prior, and had absorbed “fifty stories” about UAP encounters. He had begun to hypothesize, he says, about a UAP explanation for the unusual symptoms of his five or six subjects. That seems reasonable: five people with atypical (though not identical) symptoms, all of whom report what is vaguely described here as a UAP experience.
But notice the position we’re in here. There’s a lot we do not know. But what seems clear is that Nolan is doing what he and Peterson described earlier: constructing a hypothesis based on “intuition” and “backfilling it” with data later. This is not science; this is bias confirmation.
What kind of UAP experience have these people had?
Well, one was a guy by the name of John Burroughs in the Randall Shull Forest case where he literally got close to one. That came down near our nuclear storage facilities there. It's a very famous case.
Burroughs’ medical file was classified as Top Secret, but when, with the help of a U.S. Senator, Nolan found it, he reports, “Why do you have to make his file top secret? What’s in it? There was nothing in it, frankly.”
This is an argument from silence: the file does not say anything, so we must conclude… Aliens.
Peterson probes into the UAP experience of John Burroughs:
PETERSON: And so what did he experience?
NOLAN: He saw something, he came close to something, something that was about five feet across on the ground. And I don't know, I mean, I wasn't there, I'm just relaying the story.
PETERSON: Right, right, right. And what's the typical pattern of encounter?
NOLAN: You know, I mean...
PETERSON: Is there a pattern of the phenomena?
NOLAN: No, no, there's not enough of a... This is the problem, is that you can't repeat harm. You know, when harm happens, it's sort of incidental. And so you just have to deal with... And I think it's less about the harm. So I mean, I think we should move away from a discussion of the harm and just talk more about what it is that people are seeing.
I suppose we must assume that Nolan considered that “something that was five feet across on the ground” at a nuclear storage facility might produce unusual symptoms without being extra-terrestrial. Neither he nor Peterson considers it.
They turn immediately to materials-science, something in which Nolan is not a credentialed expert but with which he has some experience through his companies. He gives an account of receiving some physical materials from renowned UFOlogist Jacques Vallée (who was the inspiration for the scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, incidentally). Here’s his report:
And so, one of the things that I got a hold of, we showed recently to be, that was from a beach in Ubatuba, Brazil, that a fisherman had seen this object drop from some other, from this UFO, and it was, it shattered, and he picked up some pieces of it, and it made its way through what I would consider to be a reasonable chain of custody.
And we measured it, and it was 99.999% silicon. Okay, that's not hard to make today, but it's not something in the late 1950s or early 1960s, you drop giant pieces of all over a beach in Ubatuba, Mexico. So, whatever that was, it was clearly an object of industrial purpose, right?
There's no 99.999% silicon anywhere on planet Earth. It's all contaminated. And I actually have an atomic map of one of these pieces that we did with atomic probe tomography.
What was fascinating was that one of the two chains of custody that I obtained also had magnesium ratios that were not what you would expect from Earth. They were different than the standard magnesium ratio. So, magnesium has three isotopes, 24, 25, and 26.
24 is like, let's just say, rounded up to 80% and the other two are 9% and 11%.
Whereas one of the two chains of custody, the magnesium ratios were just higgledy-piggledy all over the map. They didn’t look anything like what you’d expect to find from a piece of silcon on Earth. Anywhere you look on Earth, you’re going to find silicon, sorry, the magnesium at the 80, 11, and 9 ratio.
For starters, we must take Nolan’s “chain of custody” confidence on faith. He doesn’t specify what the chain of custody was, and it’s of huge importance since he appeals to the fact that a piece of silicon would be peculiar in the 1950’s or 1960’s (he’s even imprecise on the dates).
As we said at the outset, extraordinary claims require extraordinary precision. Is 99.999% silicon “not hard to make today” or is there “no 99.999% silicon anywhere on planet earth”? (Of note: there is, in fact, silicon of 99.999% purity on planet earth.)
Notice too what he says about magnesium isotopes: the 24. Mg (magnesium-24) ratio in his sample is 80%, and also, “anywhere you look on Earth, you’re going to find… magnesium at the 80,” presumably 80% for 24. Mg. So… what am I missing here? Similiarly, the 11 and 9 ratios for 25 . Mg and 26. Mg are expected according to his final statement.
For a scientific hypothesis to succeed, it must be falsifiable. Nolan’s isn’t. We have neither his samples to check, nor a chain of custody, nor really anything that would constitute an inductive reason to believe that aliens are responsible for these things. Partly this is because of the recent tendency for science to become umbrella’d under corporations, to treat knowledge with an eye on patent law and intellectual property rules. As he says in response to another Peterson question, he cannot answer directly “because it’s a company and I’m not the official spokesperson for it.” Well… so much for open-source, open-data science.
To his credit, Nolan and his collaborators (including Valée) did publish one peer-reviewed article on their findings. It has been cited in about fifteen scholarly papers, mostly ones pleading for more openness towards researching UAP. None of the reviews I found addressed Nolan’s unconventional application of biological spectroscopy techniques to physical materials or reviews of his isotopic analysis: that remains one of the opaque areas here. In other words, they cited the paper to support a scientific agenda, but not to discuss the actual science in it. And though it seems churlish to say, “But Nolan isn’t a materials scientist,” it is also somewhat troubling to think that there is no body of data about how his spectroscopy on organic tissue requires adjustment when applied to silicates or magnesium isotopes, and no specialists who are prepared to discuss his novel use of the technology. The technology sells, and that seems to be enough for the moment.
More troublingly, I can find no evidence that the analyzed materials have been made available to other researchers, and more particularly to materials scientists or metallurgists.
In other words, there has been no serious scientific peer review of his work, at least partly by design. You can’t call him a liar on his data, because you don’t have access to the samples he used; you can’t call him a liar on the chain of custody because he doesn’t detail it. And if you can’t call him a liar because he’s made falsifiability impossible, you can’t call him truthful either.
But Nolan has his fingers in other pies, including a group called Skywatcher that, as advertised, watches the skies:
And because I'm a scientist, I'm like their principal advisor to this group. And we're setting up and doing the kinds of measurements that I think are necessary, because I'm not going to wait for the government. You know, I'm not going to wait for daddy government to tell me what's right.
I'm just going to, I'm a scientist, I'm going to go out and do it myself. And so that's what we've done, and we've raised significant funds. I mean, and you can go look up Skywatcher on the Internet, and what it is that we're doing [. . . .]
Some of them were simply drones. Some of them, though, were moving in ways that would be hard to explain by drones. But all the stuff that we observed close to shore was clearly human activity.
Note in passing the reference to “daddy government,” how Skywatcher is presented as renegade, rogue science in search of pure truth, the kind of thing that delights a Peter Thiel or a Curtis Yarvin, those critics of classical liberalism and classical science. “Move fast and break things,” Facebook used to say, and that’s the kind of science-as-industry that Nolan embraces.
But “truth is a river that is sober and slow,” as Mark Heard sang long ago, and the flashy, sexy discoveries of “things moving in ways that would be hard to explain” will drive the news, not understanding those things.
As I wrote at the beginning of this essay, there are many things we do not understand, and we cannot preclude alien technology as part of the long list of possibilities: Nolan continues his talk with Peterson about observed UAPs:
There's very few things that we know of that can go from zero to 5,000 miles an hour and then stop on a dime, without squishing everybody on the inside, you know, sending them through the windshield. So, when you see these things go from, in the case of the, I think it was the Nimitz or the Eisenhower, goes from sea level to space in less than a second, and they have the radar trackings of those things. And now imagine the size of the object, let's say it weighs a ton.
To instantaneously accelerate and decelerate at that level, it takes more than the, would take the energy of more than the nuclear output of the United States for a year. Okay, so, where did you get that energy, first of all? So, instantaneous acceleration and deceleration.
He’s not referring to original Skywatch data, here, but to released UAP sightings by the U.S. military. While it’s possible to skeptically niggle the available data, the effect of that niggling should be to remind us of how much we do not know. Some apparently-conclusive footage quickly turns pedestrian when it’s analyzed properly; but the reactions of trained Navy pilots observing phenomena on radar with simultaneous visual contact is tough to dismiss. The best technology in the world is in the hands of the U.S. military, and if they’re boggled, there’s something we do not know. I have no quarrel with Nolan wanting to know.
I do have some quarrel with the insinuating way in which he presents his data.
That Nolan is UAP-community adjacent may be coloring his interpretation of the data, in much the same way that proximity to a fervent fundamentalist community might condition him to see the touch of a demon: these are his peeps, and he naturally wants to make the comforting noise that reinforces their community.
Nolan and Peterson know this, and they congratulate each other on thinking so far outside the scientific box:
NOLAN: There's very few papers that you will ever read that ever say there is, at least in biology, this is a conclusion. There's all kinds of weasel words that we, as biologists, use to give ourselves diplomatic egress, just in case.
But when people like Neil deGrasse Tyson say there's no evidence, well, that's just a lack of understanding of what the difference between data and evidence is. There's reams of evidence, there's libraries full of evidence, there's books I could throw, I could drown people in with evidence, but that's not a conclusion. That's not what we think of as scientists as proof.
Now, I have, I'm of personally two minds. As far as I'm concerned, there's definitely something going on that appears to be not human. That's just my personal...
PETERSON: But that's different than science, right? I'm sure.
NOLAN: Yeah, right, right, right.
Again, Nolan begins by describing sloppy science (“weasel words”) and perjuring all science with it. It’s a very slightly elevated JAQ (just asking questions) move designed to destabilize what is known in order to achieve what one wants to be known.
Because Neil deGrasse Tyson is right that there’s little evidence in the sense that all scientists mean the word, and there’s no evidence that inductively or deductively lead us to a necessary conclusion of alien intervention in our lives. The syllogism would look like this:
A.) WE DO NOT KNOW OF ANY OBJECTS THAT MOVE IN THIS MANNER.
B.). ANYTHING WE DO NOT KNOW OF MUST BE THE RESULT OF EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE.
C.) THEREFORE THESE UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA ARE OF EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL ORIGIN.
You can see how silly that seems, but it somehow feels newsworthy when Nolan cushions the logic this way:
PETERSON: So what do you make of this?
NOLAN: That there's something non-human here, and it's been here for a long time, is my provisional conclusion. And the question is not, that people should ask, is not, is there something here? You have to ask the question first, can there something be here?”
Wasn’t he just lecturing us on weasel words in science…?
The actual logic involves laying out a lot more options, from undocumented natural occurrences to unknown human tech to, yes, alien life; and the data as of now seem to support no definite conclusions.
But by swaying so easily between their roles as scientists and their roles as public intellectuals of the Right who speak the language of illiberalism and eschew the slow, musty processes of traditional science, it is really Nolan and Peterson who are confusing the issues. It gets a lot of headlines: we’re all very interested in whether we’re alone in the universe. (The likelihood is slender.)
But to clarify those issues, they need to do better science before offering up these postcards to the Internet from the edge of knowledge.
And that means harder work, and a better method.
For those who did not grow up being taught this way: the Holy Spirit is the term orthodox Christians attach to the third person of the Trinity. God is assumed to be one, but existing in three persons, which is presumed to be a mystery, and a lot of ink and even blood has been spilled over it. The Holy Spirit is the usual orthodox translation of the Greek "ἁγίο [ἁγίος] πνεῦμα" (Ágio(s) Pnéuma), which can mean also “a holy breath” or “a holy wind.” Christian theology literally personifies this phrase that means something like “an emanation or utterance from God.” The concept carries a lot of epistemological weight in Christianity, where it is used to explain the miraculous including the presumed supernatural changing of the mind. The idea of a holy spirit has a long history going back to the ancient Hebrews, and in the Christian church is attested from the earliest writings, though at this point it is lacquered over with a tremendous amount of theorizing and (it must be said) experience.
As a further example: tens of thousands of red-pilled young men find in Peterson’s thought an assurance that they’re right about American masculinity, which is troubling because the formal justification for their grievance often cultivates poison. Peterson might be right, or partially right, or wrong about masculinity, and his perspective might help a lot of young men towards some understanding of themselves. But what’s unavoidable is that he’s the House Intellectual for Andrew Tate’s kind of toxic masculinity; Peterson might not approve of Tate, but there’s nothing I’ve read or heard in his philosophy that precludes Tate-ism, because his philosophy has the shakiest of bridges between nature (the root of masculinity) and culture (which is all that restrains aggression). I’ve no objection to Peterson’s (or Paglia’s) concentration on the biological roots of masculinity; I have a great deal of trouble with the jittery, ephemeral road they both map from there back to civilization, functional democracy, and women’s rights. If you begin with nature, you better quickly and clearly come up with a really good argument for human rights that goes beyond culture, or you’re just shilling for barbarism, as Tate’s wing of the Peterson camp shows.
This isn’t the place to unpack it, but this is a flaw intrinsic to Right Wing intellectualism generally. We can find it in Heidegger, for example, and Hegel; and of course Nietzsche could be included in this observation. More obvious examples can be easily found in, for instance, the pseudo-sciences that evaluated “The Sons of Ham,” or “the Physiognomy of the Jew.”
I’m taking the text from the official transcript of the podcast.