A place to call home: UFO records center plans close encounter with Rio Rancho Public Schools

Two weeks ago, David Marler received four separate collections of materials from Ohio to add to the many thousands of Unidentified Flying Object files he houses in an addition to his Rio Rancho home.

“The collection continues to grow,” said Marler, executive director of the National UFO Historical Records Center. “First, we received all the case files, mainly from the ‘50s and ‘60s, of the prominent Cleveland Ufology Project.

“Next, we received all the original case files and sighting reports from the UFO Research Committee of Akron. With both, we have original correspondence, plus front-page newspaper clippings about reported sightings. And we got private collections owned by two Ohio residents and researchers.”

Coming soon to the UFO Historical Records Center are 1,000 case files from the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization.

If you think space is growing sparse in Marler’s flying saucer research center, you are on to something.

That’s why it was welcome news when the Rio Rancho Public Schools announced this past week that it will provide new housing for the records in existing school facilities.

“We are excited to embark on this unique partnership with the National UFO Historical Records Center,” Michael Baker, RRPS chief operations officer, said. “This collaboration will not only preserve important historical documents, but also provide our students with exceptional educational experiences.”

Marler is pumped about the arrangement as well.

“We are proud to partner with Rio Rancho Public Schools to inspire the next generation of historians and scientists,” he said.

‘An exciting venture’

The National UFO Historical Records Center is a nonprofit affiliation of about 10 of the leading historians and archivists in UFO studies, people who have spent the last four or five decades collecting materials related to the topic.

Marler said members are spread out across America, from Seattle to Boston, and their holdings, preserved at Marler’s Rio Rancho home, are incredible.

Right now, those holdings are squeezed into a space that looks as if it could have been a set for an episode of “The X-Files” TV series. Stacks of boxes sit atop rows of file cabinets. Science-fiction movie posters share wall space with framed newspaper stories reporting mysterious entities in the sky. Computers, other electronic devices and green-shaded bankers lamps are spread about.

RRPS’s Baker said UFO records and other contents of the records center will soon be stored in two portable classroom buildings at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Rio Rancho.

He said he hoped the records would be transferred to the portable buildings in the early fall. The collection will not be opened to the public during set hours.

“Once everything is moved there, interested members of the public will have to make an appointment,” Baker said. “David Marler is the curator of the records, so appointments will be made with him, and he will manage the viewing of those records.”

Marler said the appointment-only arrangement assures that an individual will have time to review materials in the collection without “rubbing elbows’ with other researchers.

The terms of the agreement between RRPS and the National UFO Historical Records Center are for five years, with the possibility of renewal.

“We are looking at a long-term plan for putting them in a larger facility,” Marler said. “And we want to get actively involved in digitizing the material to make it available to researchers worldwide.”

Baker said that over the next several months, RRPS staff will develop a curriculum based on the contents of the collection and input from students.

“We believe the subject matter (UFOs) will pique the interest of students in areas such as critical thinking, scientific method, preservation of historical records and the investigative process,” he said. “We believe there will be some elective classes offered to students in the future and a series of lectures as early as January 2025.”

Marler will be one of the primary lecturers.

“This is an exciting venture we have entered into,” he said. “Schools are having difficulty engaging students in science and math. We are using (the records collection) as a vehicle to inspire kids to be more involved in physics, meteorology, astronomy, radar and how it works, military history.”

Marler said it is not the intention of the records center and RRPS schools to make kids or anyone else believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth.

“We are looking at UFOs as part of New Mexico history and using it as a springboard to teach all these related subjects,” he said.

Then it was gone

The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) files will be coming to the records center from Sedona, Arizona. Marler said APRO is among the oldest of the civilian UFO research organizations.

“Jim and Coral Lorenzen founded it in 1952 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin,” he said. “But they moved for their work and (APRO) was based in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the mid to late ‘50s. They settled in Tucson.

“We received their case files — 13 file cabinets, 60 boxes of material — last November. But I recently was contacted by a gentleman who found an additional thousand case files.”

Records center materials range from recordings of radio programs in which people report seeing strange flying objects to books about alien visitation to records from Project Blue Book, the Air Force investigation of UFOs, which ended in 1969.

“You have to see the collection to appreciate the scope and magnitude of it all,” Marler said. “Obviously, we hear about Roswell (supposed 1947 UFO crash in New Mexico) constantly, but we want to expand the dialogue beyond Roswell to the tens of thousands of cases all around the world.

“We have relatively minimal material on Roswell related to some of the other cases.”

Marler, 55, is from southern Illinois, across the river from St. Louis. He works in business development for a hospital system in Albuquerque.

“It’s always important people know I have a day job, so they don’t think I’m just some UFO nut,” he said.

He has been involved in UFO research for more than 30 years, but it was an incident in the summer of 1977, when he was about 9, that pulled him into the world of unexplained flying phenomena.

“My sister and her husband had a close encounter with something outside of Kansas City,” he said. “They were driving home from St. Louis and left about 7 in the evening.

“It’s a four-hour drive to Kansas City. My sister was in the passenger seat. She had fallen to sleep and woke up because her husband was punching her arm, calling her name and saying, ‘Wake up, wake up.’ She said she wondered why it was daylight. She could see the road and the fields around them like it was daylight.”

Marler said it was dark when his brother-in-law came to a stop sign. But then there was something above the car that was very bright. Marler said the object made no sound, and there was no downwash of air as there would have been if it were a police helicopter.

“It lasted for several seconds, too long to have been a meteor, and then, like turning a switch off, it was gone,” Marler said.

“They never publicized it, but it would come up at family gatherings — like Thanksgiving. ‘Tell us about the UFO you saw.’”

Marler pauses.

“You know, we probably need to get (my sister) on camera,” he said.