Garry Nolan & Diana Pasulka Come Clean About UFOs (First Time Interviewed Together)

Every so often, a conversation drops that rearranges the entire UFO rumor mill. That’s exactly what happened when Dr. Gary Nolan and Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka sat down together for the first time on Chris Lehto’s show, The Lehto Files, and finally compared notes on their notorious, blindfolded trip to a supposed UFO crash site in the New Mexico desert. If you’ve followed this story—from Pasulka’s American Cosmic to whispers about “Tyler D.” (widely understood to be Tim Taylor)—this interview was the missing puzzle piece. And it came with fresh details, scientific clarification, and a few curveballs about who knew what, and when.

Here’s why this matters: this was the rare moment when the two principal witnesses and researchers to a key modern UFO lore event spoke candidly, together, and on record. No secondhand summaries. No clipped quotes. Just their timeline, their evidence, and their best current understanding.

It also matters because Nolan addressed the controversy over the materials collected at the site—what they looked like, how they tested, why early signals looked “anomalous,” and what improved analysis later revealed. That clarity alone helps separate data from hype.

Finally, the interview doubled as a status update on Skywatcher, the data-driven effort Nolan’s been involved with to measure the phenomenon using sensor arrays. The takeaway? The tech is real, the data are piling up, and a scientific analysis phase—with an eye toward peer review—is underway.

The interview everyone was waiting for

Nolan and Pasulka’s joint appearance is a big deal. Pasulka has spoken about the trip before, most notably in American Cosmic, but Nolan has kept comparatively quiet. Seeing them compare memories in real time brought new context and, in places, correction.

The setting: New Mexico. The guide: “Tyler D.” (identified by many in the community as Tim Taylor, a NASA-connected figure linked to other experiencers). The premise: Tyler blindfolded Pasulka and Nolan, drove them to a remote site, and told them they were about to walk an alleged UFO crash field.

What they found in the desert

According to both, the site was a strange mix. There were mundane relics—old bottles, rusted odds and ends, even a crushed tomato can with visible 1930s labeling—scattered across a long, flat area. But mixed in were aerospace-looking fragments.

• A “honeycomb” panel, the kind you’d expect in lightweight aero structures, overlaid with a net-like weave that had been set into resin.

• A silvery-black metal that was slightly friable, almost crumbly.

• Several clear, aluminum-like pieces with patterned scratch marks and a brown residue—nothing like hieroglyphs, just odd surface patterning.

Pasulka recalled that she kept spotting fragments like a “divining rod,” while Nolan spent time up on a ridge, trying to map a plausible trajectory for whatever was said to have come in over the hill, clipped the ridge, scattered debris, and ended up across the flat.

The airport scare—and what the instruments really saw

One of the most repeated lore points from this saga is the airport incident: Nolan put the samples through security and the metal detector shut down. That, he says, absolutely happened—and it scared him. He was certain TSA would open the bag, find odd materials, and start asking questions. They didn’t. He got the samples home and began to test them.

Early mass spectrometry runs looked… weird. There were apparent “anomalous” signatures—element mixes that didn’t fit neatly. Nolan told Pasulka what he saw at the time. She included those impressions, cautiously framed, in her account. Then he did what good scientists do: he asked for help from domain experts.

That’s where “diatomics” entered the story. In simple terms, when a mass spec ionizes a sample, individual atoms can sometimes pair up briefly. Two silicon atoms, for instance, can show up as a bonded pair in the ion cloud and masquerade as the mass of a different element. Without tuning the instrument to minimize these pairings—or diluting and separating the sample more carefully—you can misread the chart. Nolan says that explained a lot of the initially strange signals. The result: those particular fragments weren’t proof of off-world isotopes; they were victims of a well-known analytical pitfall.

Crucially, Nolan owned the miscommunication. Pasulka had reported exactly what he told her then; his understanding evolved after consulting metallurgical experts. That clarification, shared directly and respectfully between them, goes a long way toward cooling online drama that tried to pit their statements against each other.

So what was the “alien honeycomb”?

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. Nolan and collaborator Larry Lumpkin dug into historical aero materials and found near-exact matches from early aviation: honeycomb-like structures used as aerofoil cores, reinforced with a netting pattern that, knot for knot, resembled an old fisherman’s web style from the early 1900s. In other words, the structure itself wasn’t unprecedented—and could plausibly have terrestrial origins from a past era of aerospace experimentation.

But “not alien” is not the same as “explained.” Nolan still has the samples. Whether they were placed there deliberately, or fell there from an event, remains open. And he emphasizes a key point: just because something is made from elements common to our universe doesn’t necessarily tell you who manufactured it or why it ended up where it did.

Physical traces that hint at a crash

Beyond the scrap, Nolan describes one piece of physical evidence that impressed him: along the ridge, ancient cypress trees lined the crest—resinous wood that resists decay and, for that reason, often endures for centuries. Exactly where a trajectory would predict an impact, one large cypress had been snapped and forced down in the direction of travel. It was still partially alive when Nolan saw it, with new shoots attempting to grow around old damage—suggesting the break wasn’t recent, but also that something heavy had indeed hit it.

Meanwhile, the debris field below looked purposefully contaminated—like a dump site where old domestic junk had been mixed with aerospace material, out in the middle of nowhere. Whether that was an attempt to hide something or simply a coincidence remains part of the mystery.

Who owns the story—and the land?

This is where timelines blur. In the interview, Pasulka says Tyler had been researching and excavating that site for about 40 years and knew the owners. Others have claimed he learned of it only in the early 2010s at a private experiencer gathering. Both narratives exist in the community; the interview doesn’t resolve that discrepancy.

What it does confirm is that Nolan and Tyler explored buying the land (or a portion of it). It turned out to be Bureau of Land Management property with a lease; they even had a late-lunch meeting with the leaseholder at a little gas-station diner, dog and all. The idea fizzled, but that detail—along with the airport incident and the on-site observations—adds texture that was missing before.

How the science moved forward

Nolan’s bigger lesson is methodological: be curious enough to test, humble enough to consult specialists, and patient enough to revise your conclusions. Early signals can mislead; instruments have quirks; context matters. That’s not a dodge—it’s how real science progresses.

And that theme carries into Skywatcher, the measurement effort Nolan has been involved with. His update is cautiously exciting: the phenomenon is more measurable than he expected thanks to modern, integrated sensor suites. The hard part is interpretation—turning fast-moving blips, thermal signatures, RF oddities, and optical streaks into conclusions that satisfy scientific standards.

Skywatcher: more sensors, more data, more patience

Pressed for the “best evidence” he’s seen for non-human intelligence, Nolan mentioned Skywatcher operations where a “call” is made and unusual objects reportedly show up inside a known time window. He describes high-speed objects captured across just a few frames of high-rate cameras—close to a helicopter in one case—that he insists aren’t bugs or birds. Those events don’t prove the origin of the objects, but they do suggest there is measurable, repeatable weirdness showing up on multiple instruments.

There’s also a personnel update: James Fowler—recently profiled for his role in Skywatcher’s field tech—has moved on. In a public post, Nolan wished him well and shared that Skywatcher is entering a new phase: parsing a vast trove of collected data, applying rigorous analytics, and, if the results warrant, preparing a report suitable for peer review. Nolan emphasized what anyone who’s wrangled big datasets knows—collection is quick; analysis takes months. The goal is to do it right, then publish on an appropriate preprint server before aiming for peer-reviewed venues.

Why this interview hit differently

Two things can be true at once: parts of this story still don’t add up, and yet the interview felt like progress. Hearing Nolan directly explain how an apparent anomaly can evaporate under better settings and expert scrutiny is exactly the kind of adult conversation the field needs. Hearing Pasulka describe her concern at the airport, her initial skepticism, and the pattern-recognition that nudged her toward taking the phenomenon seriously adds human stakes.

And those site details—the cypress tree strike, the mix of dumped detritus and aerospace scraps, the land-lease wrinkle—create a more grounded portrait than the usual mythmaking. You can debate what those facts mean, but at least we’re talking about observable things, not only hearsay.

What it means for the UFO conversation

If you care about moving from belief to knowledge, the takeaways are clear:

• Evidence lives and dies in the details. Instrument settings matter. So do historical analogs. So does context on the ground.

• Collaboration beats siloed speculation. Pasulka and Nolan comparing notes publicly gave the community more clarity in one hour than months of online arguing.

• Measurement is catching up. With efforts like Skywatcher, the conversation is shifting from “Did anything happen?” to “What exactly did we measure, and how do we validate it?”

• Patience is a virtue. Nolan’s message—collect carefully, analyze slowly, publish properly—should be the norm, not the exception.

The bottom line

No, the New Mexico fragments haven’t been declared alien. Yes, some of them resemble early aero materials. And yet, there’s still smoke here: a suspicious debris field, a damaged tree aligned with a reported trajectory, a guide with a controversial backstory, and researchers who are still holding—carefully—to what they found.

As for Skywatcher, the story is just beginning. If Nolan and team release a transparent, data-rich report and submit it for peer review, that would be a watershed moment. Imagine reproducible sensor captures, cross-validated across modalities, with enough detail for independent analysts to weigh in. That’s how you turn anecdotes into evidence.

Conclusion: keep your curiosity—and your standards—high

This interview didn’t deliver a smoking gun, but it did deliver something more valuable: a model for how to talk about the phenomenon without hype. Ask hard questions. Share data. Admit uncertainty. Update your views as better information arrives. If the community can keep that energy—and if teams like Skywatcher can pair bold collection with sober analysis—we’ll trade legends for learning, one dataset at a time.

If you haven’t watched the full conversation, it’s worth your time. Until the next data drop, keep an open mind and a critical eye. That’s how real progress happens.