Avi Loeb, Lue Elizondo, and Garry Nolan

I have a big nose, so it’s easy for me to smell bullshit. And I was already fully convinced about the value of the scientific method several years before I moved to London - 47 years ago this month - to study ecology, biology, and psychology on a forward-thinking modular honours degree course.

For 48 years, I’ve observed the various goings-on that can be summed up with the single word “ufology”. I know more than most do about what’s at the heart of this intriguing subject, but I was still curious to see what governments made of the phenomenon.

Many individuals have taken a serious interest in UFOs over the decades. And, of course, it would be totally inappropriate to rubbish this collective of people looking for answers. But, overall, it hasn’t been good. Leaving aside the outright liars and hoaxers, the amount of irrational thinking and self-serving agendas has been blatant to the point of inducing nausea.

So it was a breath of fresh air when a new bunch burst onto the scene a few years ago. Overdue? Definitely. But better late than never.

I’ll start with Avi Loeb - simply because my colleague, Becky, has had a few lovely email exchanges with him. These began shortly before Extraterrestrial came out. We immediately picked up on Avi’s repeated use of the word “humility” in the opening pages of his book, prior to its publication date. We’re acutely aware that arrogance and the modern infatuation with “opinion” get in the way of facing reality. It’s part of the massive problem of psychological avoidance that’s usually avoided. So the need for humility - as a precursor for asking pertinent questions - is essential.

At the time, Avi was head of the Department of Astrophysics at Harvard University. He is now the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard.

Avi’s potential contribution to the UAP matter really took off in July 2021 when he launched an important new initiative, which we immediately covered here on EvolveFirst.org in our article The Galileo Project is daring to look. We quickly followed up with a second piece called Using a telescope to photograph UAP. The importance of obtaining a high-resolution photograph of any unknown anomalous probe or craft will be immense, especially because any claims of “Fake! Fake!” should be able to be confidently dismissed if such an image is eventually captured by Avi and his team. That said, there’ll still be the doubters; amazingly, many don’t accept that the Apollo Moon landings actually happened.

Avi’s courageous stance on the extraterrestrial subject is rational, practical, and totally in line with scientific investigation. And he is working on the basis of known physics, which should be applauded. Thankfully, the support for his project has been tremendous. Enough people want to know. But there have also been a fair share of small-minded, pompous, and jealous detractors. Avi has been called an “attention seeker”, amongst other things. Now, we fully know that contradictions and hypocrisy are unfortunately as common within current human psychology as flies around shit. So it would be imprudent of me to invoke Avi’s aforementioned fondness for humility as a cast-iron defence of the man. Nevertheless, what are the chances that his critics have misunderstood Avi’s intentions and conveniently missed this pronounced awareness of the need for humility? I would guess the word “high” might be reasonable.

Avi is acutely aware that young scientists need to be warned about the considerable risks of being dragged down into the “supposed-to-be” ways of academia, together with its associated institutions and practices. It’s a quagmire. Curiosity is commonly dulled. And integrity - always an endangered species - stands little chance of flourishing. So science suffers, as progress is temporarily stifled by mental limitations and poor social conditioning.

Whatever the eventual outcome proves to be of attempting to get an image or two of these unknown probes and craft, Avi and his team are doing their best to add something very useful. Genuine unknowns need to be clearly identified, then monitored. This contribution should be acknowledged by all.

Moving on, if I wanted someone beside me in a fight, it would be Lue Elizondo. He’s a warrior. Solid. Dependable. Smart.

Lue was a US Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and former employee of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He earlier studied microbiology, immunology, and parasitology.

In 2017, together with Chris Mellon, Lue facilitated the release of three, now-famous, UAP videos taken by US Navy pilots from the aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt. Our first article in this UAP section was aptly called Too real to ignore and it covered these videos.

After resigning from the Department of Defense, Lue subsequently appeared in numerous interviews and podcasts, promoting the need for a more intelligent discussion of the topic. His Twitter account boldly starts with a pinned Tweet, stating: “I will always tell you the truth.”

Chris and Lue are obviously working hard behind the scenes to get Congress informed and on board. They deserve considerable credit for this initiative, which seems to be working. Again, we’re continually covering what’s happening on the US legislative front.

Unsurprisingly, the daggers were soon out for Lue. Other voices were being somewhat ignored as a result of this intelligent tank of a man speaking on the subject, their cottage industries within “ufology” under threat. The competing pumped-up egos are even sillier than those in the better-known celebrity arena. A few journalists also had their doubts about Lue, perhaps because of being unfamiliar with the ways of someone trained in counterintelligence, noting that he was often quick to invoke his security oath.

A clue to Lue’s sense of duty and honour is his father, an immigrant from Cuba, who passed on his basic values for life to his son. Another clear indicator of Lue was when he met Robert Hastings for a documentary. Robert is a man who has done a lot of good work on the link between UFOs and nukes. He mentioned on film that he’d had a night-time “abduction” experience whilst camping. Despite obvious respect for Robert, Lue rightly approached an expert who was clear that the likely explanation was sleep paralysis. Put simply, sleep paralysis experiences can seem extremely real and often frightening - but they’re not objectively real. These claimed “alien abductions” fit within the known phenomenon. And, yes, I know I’ll piss off many in “ufology” by suggesting this, because they prefer the silly drama of believing that we’re slowly being invaded through some hybridisation program.

If Lue is the warrior, then we could characterise Garry Nolan as the analyst. Garry heads the Nolan Lab in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He’s studied the blood, for example, of individuals biologically affected through coming into close contact with UAP.

I’m always urging my colleagues: “It’s all detail!” Garry would appreciate this. I’m a big fan of Renaissance, a band who made several great albums in the 1970s, and I often quote their lyrics: “See everything on its own, and you’ll find you know the way.” Yes, everything must be appropriately linked into a connected whole, but it starts with the analysis and identification of individual detail.

Cognitive bias is always a big problem, making witness testimony notoriously unreliable. So anything which can be physically analysed should be. We need exact data, not belief. And Garry is clearly the man for the job. Nick Law quickly joined the Galileo Project, which was a worthy addition as he’d had previous experience in building new astronomical instruments. Garry and his team likewise invent any instrumentation that’s needed for a particular task, if it’s not already available. This makes Garry more than just a scientist. Like Avi and Lue, Garry has become a pioneer. And it’s genuine pioneers who make the breakthroughs.

I co-wrote an article on three of the greats of psychology: Richard Maurice Bucke, William James, and Abraham Maslow. They did a good job of getting to grips with oneness experiences (also known as mystical, transcendent, or peak experiences). These are real glimpses of our evolutionary potential - something sadly often hijacked and trashed by pseudoscience, cults, and even religion. It’s imperative that we cut through the bullshit. We need a few budding young psychologists - as smart and as brave as Avi, Lue, and Garry - to help bring this crucial subject out of the shadows. Transpersonal psychology has badly floundered since Maslow’s early death at the age of 62 in 1970. As we’ll be explaining in a forthcoming series of three films on UFOs or UAP - to be released on YouTube on Friday 4th November 2022 at 4.00pm GMT - these two areas are, in one way, definitely linked. And greater understanding of this will, eventually, propel the discussion of what’s going on to a higher level.

The dark days of UFO conspiracy theories, plus government embarrassment and dismissal, have to end. Schools, colleges, and universities need to get much better at teaching young people critical thinking skills. The time to dump all the stupidity is now. It’s too “easy” for people to distract their attention away from facing reality - whether it’s by trivialisation, intellectualisation, or the other forms of avoidance - and it won’t achieve anything worthwhile. Meanwhile, as the farce of “ufology” will no doubt continue a while longer, spare a thought for whoever’s behind the UFOs or UAP. We’re the emerging intelligent species - still at the semi-primitive stage - not them. And they’re not going to land on the proverbial White House lawn until we all grow up.

Written by Iain Scott, 22nd September 2022