RIO RANCHO – Imagine a 5,000 – or 10,000 – square-foot building in the City of Vision for the National UFO Historical Records Center, attracting researchers and historians to pore through literally thousands of reports and other paperwork, as well as families to enjoy the museum portion.
“The focus in ’24,” David Marler — among the leading researchers and historians on the subject, says — “is to get funding for a free-standing facility,” for the 75-plus years of materials he’s gathered and been gifted with, often by ailing or from widows of recently deceased researchers who want to see all the hard work preserved, and not taken to a landfill.
Marler’s home and garage contain much of the material now, although he’s about to empty what’s in his Rio Rancho garage into a storage unit. He is the founder and curator. (Imagine that: Using a garage to park vehicles.)
“We don’t have any more room here,” he said, and there’s no way for a visitor to doubt that.
Although he doesn’t have an active imagination, he does have an active brain.
And he knows he’d rather have the research center in Rio Rancho, rather than Albuquerque or elsewhere. But let’s face it: Money talks.
He’s had verbal support from city, county and state officials. And it doesn’t hurt that the research center is a nonprofit, although he disappointingly discovered one possible benefactor for nonprofits needs a bankroll of $1 million – “If I had a million, I wouldn’t need that,” he says with a laugh.
But it’s money that he needs to get this all started, although he does have benefactors and knows if an empty building can be found and turned over to the research center, that would save a lot of money.
“What we’re envisioning is the first of its kind in the United States, not just New Mexico, but the United States. This can be viewed through multiple lenses … if you’re a military historian, this is of value to you; if you’re a physicist, these reports are of value to you; if you’re just a general historian, this is of interest to you,” he explained. “You can approach this from almost any lens, the UFO subject.”
He’s been making the proverbial rounds – interviews on radio, TV and in print. The interest is always there, but no one has come forward with funds to back the project. And that project also includes quarterly conferences and lectures to keep that interest peaking.
The collection keeps growing, with Marler ecstatic about a recent accumulation from what were once files belonging to APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization), and amounted to 13 four-drawer filing cabinets, with six of them containing actual case files, all jammed into a room built especially for his collection.
“These files are legendary,” Marler said. “There was a mystique that developed around them because they had been, you know, basically sequestered for 35 years. … I’ve been working every free waking hour for a month. I have 60 boxes in addition to 13 filing cabinets to sort through.” (There are 60 more boxes of materials from the late researcher Lee Speigel* in New York, awaiting shipment.)
APRO was sort of diametrically opposed to another research organization, NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena), which had a similar but different aim; APRO, Marler said, was more concerned with “humanoid” reports, not just the shapes, sizes and speeds of the “vehicles.” NICAP, he added, was “interested in UFOs but we’re not gonna go down the road of little green men.”
Jim and Coral Lorenzen, he said, founded APRO and once housed it in Alamogordo back in the 1950s, before they took it and moved to Tucson. For a time, they were civilian contractors for Holloman AFB in Alamogordo. Both passed away in the late 1980s.
“They were the first organized UFO organization,” he said. “She was the driving force.”
All told, Marler has 43 four-drawer filing cabinets in that room, which has become a maze of sorts as he works his way to show a video, then back to pertinent files referring to the video.
In this case, it was a Manitoba man’s contact with a flying disc when he was out working one day. He describes the disc, which appeared to be of highly polished metal, and as he approached it, he touched it with a gloved hand.
It not only burned the tip off the glove, but it also seemed to have burned, in an interesting pattern matching some shapes on the UFO, onto his chest.
Wouldn’t you know it: Marler has that glove and a small piece of the burned shirt the man wore in his collection, now in a nicely framed display, which he envisions to be an attraction someday in the museum.
One of the most interesting reports in his collection originated from Kirtland Air Force Base in 1959, tracking a UFO traveling 32 miles a minute (1,920 mph) with multiple right angles and tight turns no known Earth vehicle could accomplish.
“It’s not a meteor or something they picked up; it’s moving in a non-linear (path),” he said. “If it’s moving that fast, making those kinds of angular turns, there’s no way in hell we had anything like that in ’59.”
One could spend hours listening to the myriad reports, which would make a roomy, 5,000-square-foot facility – he expects phase 2 to add 5,000 more square feet – for researchers to absorb.
But wait – there’s more: Marler will be making a trip to Ohio to go over an 80-year-old researchers’ collection and bring it back to Rio Rancho.
“He reached out to us expressing interest in donating his collection, because he’s seen what we are doing,” Marler said. “He was a researcher. He wants help for his daughter to box it all up.”
Marler also has original copies of letters of interest in the subject from Carl Sagan, Clyde Tombaugh, Carl Jung, Sen. Joe McCarthy and President Gerald Ford. Most of them have signatures of those men, and although Marler knows he could sell the signatures, once authenticated, that’s not what museums should do.
It’s getting easier and easier to believe, especially after listening to Marler and seeing his materials, “They’re out there.” (nufohrc.org)
Hear about a famous sighting in California
Among all of Marler’s talks/lectures, and arguably the most fascinating, is the one he calls “The Battle for L.A.,” in which he details a 1942 incident that panicked residents in Los Angeles and sent the military scurrying to try and shoot down an “invader” along the Pacific coast.
He’ll present that Feb. 17 at 1 p.m. at Esther Bone Memorial Library. There is no charge to attend.
* Something to think about
Per a Facebook posting in 2021 by the late Lee Speigel: “We are NOT alone…and by that, I mean not alone in the universe. With upwards of 5,000 exo-planets already confirmed by various astronomical and scientific methods, there’s no doubt anymore that Earth and the other planets of our solar system are a small handful in a very big cosmic neighborhood. So, technically speaking, our planet is one of billions of others in our Milky Way Galaxy. And astronomers tell us there are, in fact, billions of galaxies, which contain billions of stars with planets orbiting them. I think it’s safe to conclude that we’re at least one step further along to learn (through science) that we humans aren’t the only ones in the universal ball park.”
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