The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 33: A New Kind of War
(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)
Chapter 33: A New Kind of War
Here’s what I already knew. Garry Nolan – a Stanford professor of pathology with specialised knowledge of cancer and immunology - had become involved in the anomalous injuries field when Kit Green had brought him blood samples of people injured from exposure to radiation from UFOs. The samples were unlike any Nolan had seen before.
Intelligence officers, military personnel, pilots, scientists – many with high security clearances - were presenting with inexplicable neurological signatures.
Their MRIs revealed what appeared to be trauma to a region of the brain linked to various types of learning, voluntary motor control, cognition and emotion.
But that didn’t make sense. Given the extent of the damage, these people should have been comatose or dead.
In addition to being linked by similar kinds of defence, intelligence and government work, many of the hundred or so people Nolan and Green examined were ‘high-functioning’, with some clearly ‘on the spectrum’ – more, perhaps, on the ADHD than the autistic side of it, but still. Here were the beginnings of a pattern.
On deeper examination, what they had initially seen as damage turned out to be something else: an over-connection of neurons between the head of the caudate and the putamen. These structures form part of the basal ganglia, a group of nuclei connected to the cerebral cortex, the thalamus and the brainstem that are integral to facilitating higher neurological functions. “if you looked at a hundred average people, you wouldn’t see this kind of density,” Nolan said. “But these individuals had it.” In spades, as it turned out.
The question was: had they always, or had it developed upon ‘contact’?