A professor has been testing the brains of people who say they've experienced a UFO encounter and has found several key symptoms that they all share.
Dr Garry Nolan is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University and has spent the past decade analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP).
He told Vice Motherboard that he first started looking into the topic when asked to help with cases of pilots who were close to alleged UAPs and experienced 'horrible' brain damage.
Advert
"If you've ever looked at an MRI of somebody with multiple sclerosis, there's something called white matter disease. It's scarring" Nolan said.
"It's a big white blob, or multiple white blobs, scattered throughout the MRI. It's essentially dead tissue where the immune system has attacked the brain.
"That's probably the closest thing that you could come to if you wanted to look at a snapshot from one of these individuals. You can pretty quickly see that there's something wrong."
Advert
Nolan analysed around 100 patients, mostly 'defence or governmental personnel or people working in the aerospace industry'.
"You have a smorgasbord of patients, some of whom had heard weird noises buzzing in their head, got sick, etc," Nolan explained.
"A reasonable subset of them had claimed to have seen UAPs and some claimed to be close to things that got them sick."
Nolan's team initially thought the brains of these patients were damaged, but in fact, they had an 'over-connection of neurons between the head of the caudate and the putamen'.
Advert
These two parts are important to the brain: the caudate nucleus plays a critical role in various higher neurological functions and the putamen influences motor planning, learning, and execution.
This phenomenon among the patients caused Nolan to ask: "Did coming in contact with whatever it was cause it or not?"
According to the scientist, approximately a quarter of the MRI patients who claimed they had an encounter died from their injuries.
Advert
The majority of these were found to have symptoms identical to Havana syndrome - a set of medical symptoms with unknown causes experienced mostly abroad by U.S. government officials and military personnel.
These symptoms can range from pain and ringing in the ears to cognitive difficulties and were first reported in 2016 by U.S. and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba.
However, some people who had seen UAPs didn't have Havana syndrome, and instead, a wide range of symptoms.
Speaking to Motherboard, Nolan said: "For a couple of these individuals we had MRIs from prior years.
Advert
"They had it before they had these incidents. It was pretty obvious, then, that this was something that people were born with."
Featured Image Credit: Youtube/Jesse Michels
Topics: World News, Strange