The Pentagon Is Paying a Private Archive to Read Its Own History

The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office intends to award a sole-source contract to the National UFO Historical Records Center, a nonprofit in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, for subscription access to its archive. 12 The procurement notice went out from Washington Headquarters Services on July 31 and was reported by DefenseScoop this week. 12 The structure is a one-year base with four one-year options. No dollar figure has been published. 1

The center is run by the historian David Marler. It holds hundreds of thousands of case files, the complete archives of several of the early civilian research groups, and the personal papers of J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who served as the Air Force's scientific consultant on Project Blue Book. 14 The government's justification for skipping competition is blunt: no other organisation has the historical depth, the volume of unique records, or the expertise to meet its minimum needs, particularly for anything before 1990. 1

Why the government is a customer

The fiscal 2023 defence bill ordered AARO to produce a historical record of U.S. government involvement with the phenomenon going back to 1945. 1 Volume one of that record came out in 2024. The office has said since then that the second volume depends on material it does not hold.

That is the admission inside the paperwork. For most of the last eighty years the systematic record-keeping on this subject was done by private citizens, in filing cabinets and on index cards, while the official programmes closed and their files scattered. The archive the Pentagon now wants to rent was built out of the government's own neglect.

The office charged with writing the official history is buying the primary sources from the people who saved them.

Under the subscription the center stays custodian of the collection; AARO is buying access and analytical products, not the paper. 2 Marler has said only around fifteen percent of the holdings are digitised so far. 2

The gap it does not close

One writer has pointed out the obvious asymmetry: AARO is willing to pay for decades of civilian-collected reports, yet an ordinary citizen who sees something today still has no channel for reporting it directly to the office. 2 The reporting mechanism Congress asked for remains limited to current and former government personnel and contractors.

The contract had not been awarded at the time of writing. 2