Karl Nell

Karl E. Nell is a retired colonel of the United States Army and an aerospace executive. A biography published by the investor conference organizer SALT describes more than thirty years in firms including Bell Telephone Laboratories, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, TASC, CACI and ENSCO, service as vice president and general manager of a national-security research division, deputy chief technology officer of a "$2-billion company," and "Distinguished Fellow" of the Congressionally chartered IT Acquisition Advisory Council. It adds that he commanded "at every grade level through colonel," including activation of an expeditionary military intelligence brigade supporting the XVIII Airborne Corps and the Joint Special Operations Command, and was selected by name for an active-duty assignment advising the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.¹ The author note to his 2025 Sol Foundation paper lists him as modernization advisor to the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, deputy chief of staff for United States Africa Command, commander of the 336th Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade and technical intelligence operations officer for the Combined Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Center in Iraq, and says his last active-duty assignment was as Army director supporting the UAP Task Force and that he is chief executive officer of StarDustX Materials, Inc., "a multimillion-dollar VC-backed startup focused on metamaterial analysis and design."⁹

A second published biography states that he is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the United States Army War College, and that he was chief executive of a startup developing "iterative meta-materials generation."³

UAP Task Force

Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal wrote on June 5, 2023 that Nell was "a recently retired Army Colonel and current aerospace executive who was the Army's liaison for the UAP Task Force from 2021 to 2022 and worked with Grusch there." Kean and Blumenthal quote him as saying that David Grusch's "assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence." They also quote a 2022 performance evaluation by Laura A. Potter, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Headquarters, Department of the Army, calling him "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."² The SALT biography states that his engagements with senior Defense Department leaders and with Congress "directly contributed to the creation and inclusion of UAP legislation within the National Defense Authorization Acts of 2022 and 2023."¹

Sol Foundation and the Senate amendment

Nell was a keynote speaker at the first Sol Foundation symposium, held November 17 to 18, 2023 in Palo Alto, California (The Debrief called him a "top keynote speaker"), and returned in November 2024 to the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, where he and Garry Nolan held a fireside conversation on what they called the "UAP/NHI Hilbert Problems."⁴⁵ A catalogue of his appearances lists a Sol Foundation video titled "Karl Nell on The Schumer Amendment & Controlled Disclosure," a reference to the Senate amendment on UAP records sponsored by Chuck Schumer and Senator Mike Rounds in July 2023.³ A 2023 post on Der Standard's UFO blog, "Out there," titled "Ufo-Bombe mit kurzer Lunte: Die Sol Foundation," is reported by a search-engine summary to say that Nell presented himself as a principal author of that amendment; the post sits behind the site's consent wall, was not read, and the claim is not made on this page.⁶ The text of the amendment to S. 2226 as posted by the Senate Democrats names Schumer, Rounds, Marco Rubio and Kirsten Gillibrand as its proponents; its header carries the Senate Office of the Legislative Counsel file code "BAG23A78 JDP S.L.C." and names no other drafter.⁷

Statements and later appearances

At a May 21, 2024 SALT iConnections session in New York, Nell and Alex Klokus appeared under the title "'Zero Doubt' Non-Human Intelligence on Earth."³ The same catalogue lists a March 9, 2025 question-and-answer session after the South by Southwest premiere of the film "The Age of Disclosure," with the producer Dan Farah, Jim Semivan, Tim Gallaudet, Hal Puthoff and Nolan, and a 2025 appearance at the Archives of the Impossible conference.³

Nell does not appear among the signatories of the November 12, 2024 letter urging the review-board provisions of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act.⁸ His Sol paper of May 2025 argues for enactment of the Act's review-board and eminent-domain provisions "or by executive order."⁹