A Stanford professor who has researched unidentified aerial phenomena for the US government says he believes extraterrestrial intelligence has not only visited earth but “it’s been here a long time and it’s still here”.

Dr Garry Nolan also claimed that whistleblowers who have worked on “reverse-engineering downed craft” had recently given classified testimony to Congress, creating a “hornet’s nest in Washington”.

Dr Nolan, a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine who has published more than 300 research articles and holds 40 US patents, made the bombshell comments during a talk at the Salt iConnections conference in New York on Thursday titled “The Pentagon, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Crashed UFOs”.

The respected researcher is one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying the phenomenon, including by analysing the brains of people who say they’ve experienced a UFO encounter.

During the session, moderator Alex Klokus, founder and managing partner of Salt Fund, asked Dr Nolan, “Do you believe that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited planet earth?”

“I think you can go a step further — it hasn’t just visited, it’s been here a long time and it’s still here,” Dr Nolan replied.

“You know, people talk about the ‘Wow! signal’ looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The ‘Wow! signal’ is that people see it on an almost regular basis, that’s the communication that’s already here.”

The ‘Wow! signal’ was a powerful 72-second, narrow-bandwidth signal picked up by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope in 1977 which has not been detected since, and has long been a source of speculation in the stargazing community.

Mr Klokus told Dr Nolan his statement would be “tough to believe” for many, asking him “what probability” he would assign.

“One hundred per cent,” Dr Nolan said.

“And that’s not just my opinion — the National Defense [Authorization] Act passed last year, signed by Biden in December, 30 pages of that is the establishment of an unidentified aerial phenomena office.”

Dr Nolan said that office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which has 25 people working in it, had been tasked with “collecting the information across all of the US Department of Defense, intelligence offices, and collation of that into a uniform format for the very first time, and provision of that then to Congress”.

“Twelve US Senators have signed onto a document that basically says we want the information,” he said.

“The creation of a whistleblower program specifically that allows people from within who, I’m going to say this, have been working on the reverse-engineering programs, reverse-engineering of objects, so that they can come in and break their oaths but specifically just to talk to Congress and give that information in classified settings.”

He added, “And the most recent one that happened was just last weekend and it created quite a hornet’s nest in Washington.”

Asked by Mr Klokus what the “most compelling evidence” was for his claim, Dr Nolan said “you just need to look at what your government is doing right now about it”.

“Just go and look at the number of politicians on both sides of the aisle who have come together and signed off on this statement,” he said.

“What are they basing their opinions on? They’re basing their opinions on the dozens of individuals who in one manner or another have come forward and talked to them in classified settings.”

Dr Nolan said in addition he had “personal experience” with “people who, frankly, I know have worked or are working on the reverse-engineering programs”.

“Of downed craft,” he stressed.

“Now the first question that people will ask is, well if they’re so frigging advanced why are they crashing? Because what’s crashing is not actual living things. I use this example a lot — if you wanted to study a tribe of cannibals in the middle of the Amazon, are you going to go yourself and show up in the middle of the tribe and not hopefully become dinner? If you’re an advanced intelligence, you’re not going to put your life and limb at risk by coming here.”

Dr Nolan said “mostly what you’re seeing here are either drones or some sort of advanced AI or whatever it is”.

“We’re already dealing with an alien intelligence in our own emails, ChatGPT et cetera, we don’t know what it’s doing, so imagine if you were a million years ahead of us — how do you have a dialogue with something like that?” he said.

Dr Nolan also discussed his work analysing alleged materials from UAPs.

“What is it you hope to discover out of a material?” he said.

“A grain of silicon back in the ‘50s or ‘60s changed our culture and world. Something as small as that, the discovery of what you could accomplish with a little piece of germanium doped with the right elements changed our understanding.”

Alluding to the now-famous 2004 USS Nimitz incident off the coast of San Diego, Dr Nolan noted “we have multiple simultaneous sensor systems that have seen these objects go from 50 feet above the water to up to 14 miles and then back in less than a second”.

“It does stuff that we can’t do, we know that the Russians and Chinese are not doing … what is the physics that accomplishes that?” he said.

“What that tells you is we need to rethink our physics, first of all. We saw birds fly, it took us 3000 years and we figured out how to fly. But now we see these things doing this, so what is it that that lets us do?”

Dr Nolan said he knew “some of the physicists on the inside who work at some of these big defence corporations, who basically said here’s how you tweak general relativity to accomplish that”.

“But then how much energy is required to do it? Well more than the whole nuclear output of the planet per day,” he said.

“Who could do that? We can’t. Will we be able to do it in a thousand years? But if we had a piece of any of this, let’s say it’s a thousand revolutions ahead of us, a million revolutions ahead of us, even a tiny piece of knowledge from that could revolutionise what we’re doing.”

Mr Klokus asked if Dr Nolan was sure humans possessed “literal physical material to evaluate, to analyse”.

“Yes, 100 per cent,” he said.

“It’s there. I was working with a group about seven or eight years ago and I literally got within a few weeks of gaining access to one of the objects. And when the people who didn’t want us to gain access to it found out about it they pulled some bureaucratic administrative tricks and snatched it away.”

Mr Klokus remarked at one point, “I’m glad we’ve got some people here to witness these statements — I think they’re very consequential.”

Previous speakers at the Salt conference, billed as a “global thought leadership forum encompassing finance, technology and public policy”, include US President Joe Biden, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.

Dr Nolan’s comments come after the head of Pentagon’s new UFO office told Congress last month it had no credible evidence of aliens.

In a rare open hearing, AARO head Dr Sean Kirkpatrick said his team were reviewing more than 650 potential UFO cases.

Despite the unexplained sightings, Dr Kirkpatrick said there was no suggestion of alien activity.

“AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” he said at the hearing.

Most UAPs turn out to be “balloons, aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources”, Dr Kirkpatrick added.