Dr. Garry Nolan and Beatriz Villarroel on Doing UAP Science the Right Way | The Sol Forum

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[Music] Now, now that brings me to, I think, a interesting turn in this conversation, which is we're going to be joined now by my co-founder at Soul and, uh, Soul's chairman of the board, uh, Stanford University, uh, medical school professor, entrepreneur, uh, inventor, cancer researcher, um, uh, uh, the remarkable Gary Nolan. Um, and this is going to be fun because I mean look, I as you both know and as many people listening know, you know, uh, even 10 years ago, but certainly 20 years ago, um, it was unthinkable that we would have, uh, scientists of your caliber, um, not just discussing UAP in public, but actually, um, doing, uh, uh, scientific research according to norms and with proper funding. um into the phenomena and you both do that and um you both are remarkably imaginative scientists, extremely rigorous scientists. So we want to give the audience an opportunity to hear the two of you in dialogue um uh about this research and for you Gary to to ask some more questions of Bri about the data, how she gathered it, how she analyzed it. Well, first I want to ping off of something that you just said a moment ago about uh doing science properly.

And so first I want to congratulate Beatatric on this remarkable series of papers uh that she's done. And and frankly the I think very careful way that you presented it by trying to stay away from uh hyperbolic claims. I mean, there's nothing wrong with saying, "Hey, there's an association with UAP." Of course, you're going to be quoted as saying uh in the newspapers that you these were UAP, but I I note in the language that you used, you were incredibly uh diplomatic and careful uh about it. But I want to also point out something that's been happening now for like the last two or three years. Whether it was the paper I published on the council bluffs material with Jacques and Larry Lenkkey or whether it was Kevin Nuth's papers or whether it was papers in fact frankly from Robert Powell and and others and now you and avi uh that those papers are not being criticized by the usual chorus of critics and I think that's first of all for two reasons Because scientifically, such as with your work, it was done correctly.

You make careful uh note of all the methodologies that were used, come up with alternative explanations, self-critique yourself, uh go to peer review, etc. And so I in essence almost what it does in a good way is make the paper boring. uh and so bor not in a negative sense but so boring that they can't be critiqued because the hyperbolic claims don't become a magnet for the trolls and what it does is it places it squarely in the realm of being able to be looked at by other scientists and what I hope that we're doing with the Soul Foundation is creating an area within which people can have a mature conversation and So, what I'd like to know first is from the let's say I'm I'm sure there's critics out there already in the astrophysics field who are uh already ringing the bell. Um besides those who are doing that is there so far any positive feedback that you're getting about where people are at least saying hey this is interesting tell me >> I have received yes this is interesting from some people some astronomers that they are like they're getting curious about it and I think that already makes me like happy because I don't think you can I I think people need to see that this work uh stands the test of time before they um yeah before they accept it. So and I think people are going to want to redo things.

So I hope we can make our samples public soon when the papers are uh published so that everyone can go into it and I'm almost even imagining imagine if you would have a website where you kind of jokingly put the title look for your flying saucers yourself and they can do all these tests with the raw data. They can look at the images. They can look at like do diagnostics because just looking at the images with your eyes is going to fool you because the eyes cannot very often you need diagnostics to tell the difference between a star and a round plate defect or something like that. But imagine a page that does all these diagnostics for you and then it goes in, it does the alignments test, it does the ombra test and then like a little bit like a game you can either arrive at the flying saucers or not. So I'm a little bit playing with that idea.

It would be kind kind of a fun thing to do. >> So that kind of leads to a question of I mean this data presumably is already available. I mean you got a hold of it. Where is it kept or behind what uh permissions uh are it is it kept that you had to overcome to be able to do the analysis that you did? >> Everyone have uh access to the images. you can get the raw images from the SDSCI survey and there's a lot of images there that you can get.

But then uh if you want to get um let's say the spa if you want to have a list of transients, the Spanish virtual observatory has already posted some of the uh transient cataloges. the latest that is a little bit cleaner than the others. uh we still haven't published and we have to do it together with the papers and um so you have of course these raw images and from these raw images you have to create a list of transients and there are different ways of doing this but you're going to have to uh compare images of different epochs and of course it's not enough to only compare two images because then you're going to get after every asteroid especially if you have 50 years of difference you're also going to have different um plate depth. So there's a lot of analysis going into selecting these transients. It's not as like too easy because you also need to look at every dot and try to make diagnostics.

Is this a star or is it a round thing or what is that? And then Ricky Solano has produced a beautiful catalog then where he has been cleaning up this data and done a lot of work with that. So a lot of the data then from what I'm understanding is collected but still offline waiting to be processed from raw data into usable data. >> Some is online some of these uh these steps there you can find them because they have been published with the M and RS and are at the Spanish virtual observatory web page. >> Got it. And um but the in the latest preprints we have a slightly cleaner sample and that one we still need to make available and I hope we can do it with the once the preprints are published.

>> So define clean in a way that hopefully convinces people that it doesn't sound like doctorred. >> What is what does doctor do mean? >> Uh fixed hoax played. Um so you you if you have a star let's say uh it's going to have a um PSF shape uh point spread function and you usually want to match your object to to this point spread function and you also have photographic plates that are slightly different than CCDs. So their response and the way how they build and the luminosity the objects is not the same as on CCDs. So what you need to do is to uh uh basically make sure that your the objects the points you have are matching this PSF that it has this uh point spread point spread function >> and that's how you select your stars.

You have you have the morphology you have this PSFs and you need to just get rid of rid of all the crap that >> could you define for maybe you already did what a point spread function basically. Um, so it's basically it's basically a gorian. You just look there and a dark spot in the middle with a fuzziness going out to the edge. >> Exactly. >> Yeah.

>> So that's what you do. You match against this caution. And that's [Music]