TO Widespread panic about drones or other unknown low-flying objects has gripped New Jersey in recent days, but many other parts of the United States remain happily gripped by another very American mystery in the skies that has had a resurgence of modern interest: UFOs.
In the newly opened National Center for Historical UFO Records – a series of beige buildings on the grounds of Martin Luther King Jr Elementary School in Rio Rancho, New Mexico – records detailing unexplained aerial objects and the public fears around them fill literally dozens of filing cabinets.
For director David Marler, this public archive of historical UFO records, the first of its kind, is the culmination of a lifelong interest and research in UFOs or, as the military now prefers to designate them, UAPs: phenomena unidentified anomalies.
It comes at an opportune time: In recent years, hearings in Congress and the Senate have brought the issue back into the spotlight, which rises and falls in public attention, often at times of national or political insecurity.
Marler’s collection of UFO books, journals, magazines, newspapers, microfilm, audio recordings and case files from the past 75 years is impressive and includes files from early US Air Force studies (Project Sign , Project Grudge and Project Blue Book) as well. as well as the National Aerial Phenomena Investigation Committee, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (once based in Alamogordo, three and a half hours away), and the Akron, Ohio UFO Investigation Committee.
A military report from September 13, 1959 details an object making seven angular turns and was tracked by four military radar stations in New Mexico moving much faster than the fastest fighter aircraft of the time, the Convair 106.
“The Air Force was not interested from the quote-unquote ‘alien perspective,’ but from national defense, just as it is today,” Marler says. “Practical reasons, especially because there are qualified military and commercial pilots who report on these things.”
At congressional hearings last monthWitnesses claimed the government has a trove of information on UAPs dating back decades. Two former Navy pilots have reported firsthand sightings of unexplained objects that routinely violate US airspace.
Retired Maj. David Grusch, who previously served on the Pentagon’s UAP task force, said the U.S. government has long run a secret program to reverse engineer non-human material from crash sites.
But the US All-Domain Troubleshooting Officeo AARO, formed in 2022, has said no explanation addresses most reports of UAPs, or “anomalous detections,” and has not found any evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
At a Senate hearing, AARO Director Jon Kosloski saying “Reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, particularly near national security sites, should be treated seriously and investigated with scientific rigor by the United States government.”
Marler, who has been obsessively following the issue since he and his father went searching for UFOs during a spike in sightings in Missouri, says he is neutral on the phenomenon.
“You have to be skeptical, look at the evidence objectively and suspend any conclusions or beliefs,” he says. “What I believe doesn’t really matter unless I have data to back it up.”
Earlier this year, a New York software company launched an app, Enigma, to collect sightings by uploading videos and photos with descriptions, and to organize the collected data according to geographic and other criteria.
Engineers, looking for obvious deceptions, determined that New Mexico is the state with the highest number of sightings per capita, with 12.2 entries per 100,000 inhabitants, well above the closest states, Nevada and Arizona, and this year They presented several strange videos showing lights. about Albuquerque and Gallup.
This is the state, of course, that produced the Roswell incident, which cemented the idea of aliens as humanoids with smooth skin and slanted green eyes, where hippies and new agers came to live on Earth ships, and where a flame Pale and The Redhead David Bowie even played his alien character in The Man Who Fell to Earth.
It is also a site of nuclear activity, military testing grounds and clear skies; in other words, ideal for UFO observation.
Along the way, conceptions of UFOs have evolved: the new age of the 1950s and the contactee movement, the alien abduction movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Beautiful, ugly, super beings, alien rapists or genderless spirit guides: aliens submit to the metaphors of the day.
At the same time, with the rise of AI dominating the cultural landscape, the term of choice is “non-human intelligence,” NHI.
“New Mexico has always been an important place for the topic because you receive more reports per person,” says Alejandro Rojas, an Enigma consultant and researcher of anomalous phenomena.
Without data and information, Rojas points out, the public fills in the gaps. “Often the assumptions they make are quite extreme,” he says, adding that a better solution is one where scientists write articles and counter-articles, “and that’s where we need to go.”
The obsession with UFOs has been rising in waves since Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot, saw some disk-shaped objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington state in June 1947. The newspapers latched on to them and They called them “flying saucers.” Similar observations occurred that have never really stopped.
Greg Eghigian, author of a recent global history of the UFO phenomenon titled After the Flying Saucers Came, traces the current surge of interest to December 2017. article in the New York Times claiming that the Department of Defense had carried out a secret UFO research program between 2007 and 2012.
But, he said: “It must be recognized that, to a large extent, UFO or UAP sightings are often grassroots phenomena that are not triggered by anything other than people actually seeing things.”
The missing step is that, although people see things, they often do not report them. Additionally, the places where sightings usually occur are near military installations where, by definition, there is a lot of observation.
“There is an inherent observation bias,” Eghigian notes. But the idea that people in and around New Mexico are reporting sightings isn’t especially surprising. “They have 75 years of experience finding and reporting these things,” he says.
None of this answers the question of what our interest in UFOs is for, given that objects are undoubtedly being seen.
“It’s a great question,” Eghigian acknowledges. “UFOs, in the classical sense, are concoctions of some superpower here on Earth or some other technologically sophisticated entity from another planet or people from another dimension or our future.”
The idea that holds it all together is that they represent something futuristic.
However, mass sightings of mysterious objects – such as the phenomenon currently occurring in New Jersey – may have their origins in contemporary fears.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-New Jersey, claimed last week that Iran had parked a “mothership” off the Atlantic coast, generating what are believed to be drones that Van Drew wants to shoot down – an assessment the Pentagon rejected.
“Whenever this comes up, so does the story of government conspiracy and secrecy, but since 2016, with the advent of the notion of a deep state thwarting the efforts of the Republican Party and God-fearing Americans, this notion “UFOs or UAPs have been given new life,” says Eghigian.
Only one thing seems certain: seeing UFOs is not going away.
“There’s no doubt there’s something there that keeps everyone involved and coming back to the mystery,” Eghigian says.