I KNEW OF MARC BARASCH AS A JOURNALIST-EDITOR who’d transformed New Age Journal into a National Magazine Award-winner. He wrote the bestselling books Remarkable Recovery and The Compassionate Life (which Desmond Tutu declared a compulsory read for all), and founded the Green World Campaign, planting millions of trees in struggling communities in a dozen countries. For the past decade, his organization has focused on Kenya’s Swahili Coast, helping small farmers restore their arid land.
His innate curiosity also led to an interest in that mother of all mysteries, UFOs. After being asked by Ted Turner to create an environmental special on the Rio Earth Summit, Marc suggested working with CNN to finally answer the baffling conundrum of unidentified flying objects. He traveled to myriad UFO conferences, surprised to find a goldmine of rigorous investigations by obsessed researchers the major media were simply ignoring. When the network found it all a bridge too far, Marc went on to produce The Roswell Incident as well as The Phenomenon, a documentary that has become mandatory viewing at the Pentagon.
Marc introduced me to Warren Langford, ex-Meow Wolf employee and co-founder of 505OMATIC. The two first met at the Teahouse through a mutual friend, a Navy pilot who in 2004 had been stationed on the USS Nimitz when her squadron encountered a 40-foot TicTac-shaped craft that ran rings around their F18 Super Hornets. The flying white lozenge had no wings, no tail, no control surfaces, no engine plume, yet its physics-defying maneuvers, at speeds estimated up to 20,000 mph, were verified by radar and by the astonished pilots. The incident became public in a New York Times front-page article that revealed a covert government program to study UAP or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
Warren mentioned he was doing work with the renowned archivist David Marler, who had assembled one of the world’s largest collection of UFO cases. These synchronicities made it a no-brainer to hop into the faithful Kia Sportage to visit David at his National UFO Historical Records Center housed in portable classrooms in Rio Rancho. David, whose calm, scholarly mien hides the ferocity of an iconoclast on a mission, gave us a tour of file cabinets containing hundreds of thousands of newspaper clippings, government documents, letters, maps, and video and audio recordings. —SFM
You all have the largest assemblage of UFO historical collections in North America. You’ve just tracked all this down yourself over the years?
Dave: In my spare time. Yeah, it’s exhausting. The years it can take for one person with a normal day job to verify one authentic photo! I like to think that the one skill I have is good networking ability, which is why researchers have entrusted me with their private collections. Here are shelves of audiovisual content from a guy in Indiana who sends us boxes every week, thousands of radio shows and TV shows. I try to work with everybody, unless you’re a liar. I’m the last sane UFOlogist.
Warren: Or maybe you’re the first!
Dave: There’s one thing I focus on more than anything: credibility. Credibility for myself, credibility for the archive, credibility for the history. And, after years of so many researchers laboring in obscurity, the topic has really heated up.
Marc: Yes, it’s really achieved peak lions and tigers and bears, oh my! You’ve got UAP buzzing high security military bases in New Jersey, televised hearings by the Congressional Oversight Committee, a national defense bill that mentions nonhuman intelligence 22 times, high-level intelligence community whistleblowers.
Dave: We’re trying to use verified documentation to separate the wheat from the chaff — what’s real, what’s bogus, what’s still in the gray zone.
So what have you concluded after spending such a big chunk of your life gathering this all this material?
Dave: Our fundamental premise is that the “U” in UFO means Unidentified. I don’t subscribe to aliens or extraterrestrials or any pet theory. When people ask: Are UFOs real? I say yes, but I’m more excited by the question we’re finally getting to in this new era, past the misinformation, the disinformation campaigns, the ridicule curtain: what are UFOs?
And the answer is?
Dave: The only way we’re going to answer it is devoid of belief. These hundreds of thousands of case files are all data points. So what does the data state? It’s not what you believe, not what I believe — that’s irrelevant.
Why do there seem to be so many cases in New Mexico?
Dave: It’s true that if you were to poll people across the country and ask them what state they associate most with the UFO subject, I think New Mexico would win. There’s Roswell, of course, but I think it’s because we have so many sensitive military and technological development areas here. I have the original military files showing a huge preponderance of sightings at Los Alamos National Laboratories, White Sands Proving Ground, and Sandia, going back decades. The credibility of these sightings is higher than many because there are a lot of military people, technical folks, trained observers here.
Marc: When I was doing my film The Roswell Incident, I interviewed the base historian at Kirtland AFB, and he casually let drop that when he was stationed at White Sands, they used to see UFOs hovering over the igloos, earth-covered, concrete bunkers where they stored the atomic bomb components. He made it sound almost routine. He told me people would sit out on deck chairs in the afternoon just to watch for these things to show up, hang out for a few minutes, and zip off at bullet speed. A friend of mine named Bob Hastings wrote a heavily researched book called UFOs and Nukes that revealed an eerie, persistent pattern of surveillance and incursion of nuclear facilities by unexplained objects since the dawn of the atomic era.
Warren: As someone who grew up here, there is something about New Mexico. That sense of wonder when you behold those vast dark skies, the fusion of cultures, folklore compounding on folklore. It does feel like the impossible might actually happen here. Under the surface, though, there’s something darker about our susceptibility to the UFO mythos. The state’s been conquered and colonized, its history whitewashed and packaged. This is where they built a secret town to develop history’s most terrible weapon, tested it and then lied to the generations who were left to deal with the cancers. Skepticism’s in our blood. A mistrust of government and the military, but also of the credibility of even respectable journalists, or for that matter, UFO whistleblowers whose claims may include debunkable “evidence” and wild speculation. I gravitate toward David because he’s been through the wringer, but he hasn’t lost the plot.
What are the historic New Mexico sightings people haven’t heard of?
Dave: A 1964 encounter in Socorro. A police officer named Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeder when he saw a fiery object descending into an arroyo and he veered off to investigate. He assumed it was a crashing plane, but when he rounded a bend, he instead saw a white egg-shaped object sitting on the ground. It had red lettering or symbols on it. He saw two small humanoids standing next to it who quickly climbed back into their craft and flew off. The Air Force came out to investigate and confirmed that Lonnie was a solid, sober, well-respected local cop and documented a bunch of physical evidence on the ground — burned areas, a still smoldering bush, and four deep depressions in the soil in keeping with Lonnie’s description of the craft’s landing gear. Once the media got wind of the incident, the Air Force instructed Lonnie not to ever draw the actual symbol he’d seen but instead use a fake one they invented. We found an article from a Santa Fe newspaper that shows the actual original symbol.
Marc: Lonnie’s description of the diminutive beings was pretty amazing. He said they turned their heads to look at him and seemed very startled.
A lot of claims are pretty spectacular, but they mostly rely on one witness.
Dave: That’s where being really dogged in collecting every piece of possible evidence makes a critical difference. We found out that 36 hours after the Socorro incident, another witness from Santa Fe reported seeing a similar egg-shaped craft land in La Madera. We obtained these letters from the New Mexico State Police who managed to get there before the Air Force. They took color photos showing burned areas and soil indentations, just like the Socorro case. Air Force investigators also photographed and mapped the site right afterward, and we located those records in the official file. By tracking down all this material on a second case, we get corroboration, and we can begin to triangulate on what might have actually happened. This is the beauty of contemporaneous records – not what you’re reading on the internet, not what someone wrote about it twenty years later. When you can go to the original investigator’s notes, it doesn’t get better than that.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: What about Roswell? Was it really a crashed alien spaceship?
Marc: The media still treat Roswell as an amusing sideshow. But several teams of researchers — military vets, private investigators, a famous physicist, many of whom I personally met – spent decades tracking down hundreds of personnel from the 1947 Roswell Army Air Field yearbook. They used witness interviews and official documents to piece together an incredibly detailed, nearly hour-by-hour account of what they concluded was an epochal event in human history: the recovery of the wreckage of a nonhuman craft and, some claim, its nonhuman occupants, right around the corner from what was then the world’s only atomic bombing wing. Given the extremely high security there, the Roswell personnel were some of the best of the best, highly trained, exhaustively vetted, no yokels. We interviewed the public information officer who wrote the press release announcing a flying disc had been retrieved. Hours later, he was ordered by high-up brass to issue a retraction and say it had been a weather balloon. The base intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, a decorated World War II vet with high nuclear security clearances, was forced to pose with a scattering of balsa wood sticks, rubber, and tinfoil and say he’d thought it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
I’ve seen the press photo. The guy has this mortified half-grin on his face. This was a man with specialized technical skills in identifying exotic aircraft and aerial debris. Years later, he stated on camera that he’d personally handled large pieces of thin, very lightweight, seemingly indestructible metal that he said was not anything from this Earth — that I’m quite sure of. In the 90s, the Air Force tried to spin up an alternate balloon story that was just poked full of holes and deflated. We have footage of Brigadier General Thomas Dubose admitting flat-out, as he put it, the balloon part of it was a cover story we were told to give to the public — the real story was above Top Secret, bigger than the Bomb.
So this was the pivotal moment the U.S. government found it hard to deny that we are not alone?
Marc: Yeah, and it must have scared the hell out of them. They could game out the worst case scenarios: War of the Worlds-style mass panic, a collapse of institutions and belief systems, Soviet agents somehow getting their hands on the technology. So even if these “others” weren’t hostile, here was an unknown potential adversary with exotic aircraft powered by advanced propulsion against which the U.S. military had no defense, so the public must never, ever know. We included in our film a 1947 memo from General Nathan Twining of the Air Materiel Command who’d made a trip on short notice to New Mexico a week or so after Roswell. His memo stated that UFOs were real and not visionary or fictitious, describing them as disks that flew in ways superior to any known aircraft with extreme rates of climb and unheard-of maneuverability.
These sound like the same kinds of observations we hear about today.
Marc: Yes, and this highlights the value of David’s historical records. When some military spokesperson claims the UAP must be some kind of new hypersonic Russian or Chinese drones, they omit to mention that U.S. Air Force studies from the late forties reported unknown radar blips moving at up to nine thousand miles an hour when the top speed of our and Russia’s fastest combat jets back then was only six hundred mph.
There was definitely no aircraft 75 years ago in any country’s military inventory that had these extremely advanced technical capabilities. Nor is there today. U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gillaudet stated recently, Non-human higher intelligence possess craft that can do things we can’t explain, with technology we can’t explain, and with laws of physics that are not what we know them to be. Gillaudet, by the way, was the Navy’s chief oceanographer and meteorologist, and ran the U.S. Naval Observatory.
If the public and the major social and political establishments knew UFOs to be an inarguable fact, how do you think it would change the world?
Marc: If the reality of UFOs becomes widely accepted, it would transform our view of our history and future, the thrust of our scientific and technological endeavors, our social, political, economic, religious and military institutions, and even our sense of reality. It’ll be a Copernican Revolution 2.0 on steroids. 1.0 was, like, Newsflash: The universe doesn’t revolve around the Earth. But what if version 2.0 reveals there are others from somewhere in that vast universe who’ve been right here for who knows how long, observing and engaging with humanity. And they are not only technologically superior but likely more evolutionarily advanced. As one counterintelligence agent put it, What if it turns out we’re not at the top of the food chain, but somewhere in the middle? If governments have for nearly a century concealed a staggering existential truth, it could erode what’s left of public trust.
You can manufacture anything digitally; what evidence could we accept?
Marc: This is why the old pre-digital photos that David’s amassed are so important. Some are original prints or negatives that can be analyzed for the relatively crude fakery people used in those days. But it’s also a question whether any news or photo or video produced today could erase all doubt. People don’t trust authorities or the media. If the government had released an authenticated 4K video of a UFO even five or ten years ago — and various high-level national security players have assured us they exist – it would have been the shot heard ‘round the world. But today, in a post-truth world of fake media and AI wizardry, could anything real get through the clutter?
Dave: We think there is an immense amount of new scientific knowledge that can be derived from our collection. For the first time, we have decades of old case files from disparate organizations and people, assembled under one roof here in New Mexico. We’re now negotiating with parties that want to invest in applying advanced AI to them. We can start to derive insights into trends, patterns, and correlations. I can’t overemphasize the potential significance of this.
You can be endlessly curious, but at some point, where does the accumulation of data lead you?
Dave: I will need physical evidence that’s irrefutably not of this world or not of our technology. That, I think, is what science demands.
Marc: Nearly a decade ago, I met the Nobel-nominated Stanford microbiologist Garry Nolan when I was researching the cutting edge of cancer immunology. He’s also a prolific inventor with a raft of patents on devices that can analyze material at a molecular level. We’d filmed him in his lab studying fragments of what he calls meta-materials alleged to have been recovered from UFO crash sites. Garry has published several peer-reviewed papers showing how “isotopic forensics” seem to indicate that the metal could not be human technology. Garry told us off-camera, Whoever made this is ten to a hundred scientific revolutions ahead of us. That’s a pretty mind-boggling assertion when you consider that scientific revolutions are things like the theory of gravity, evolution, quantum physics, the Big Bang, antibiotics, DNA’s double helix, the microchip, AI. But this isn’t just about pure research, but actual R&D. He says, I want to figure out what this is and then I want to make things with it.
Marc, you told me Garry also has founded a new scientific and academic organization called the Sol Foundation, and that you attended its first conference at Stanford. Warren, you did, as well.
Marc: It was an extraordinary, invite-only gathering of several hundred highly credentialed scientists, tech CEOs, ex-defense and intelligence officials, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, theologians and others who didn’t even question whether UAP are real. They are working to bring it under the academic umbrella, do top-tier civilian research, formulate public policy agendas, and figure out how best to bring unbiased information out to the general public. This first meeting was pretty hush-hush, with so-called Charter House Rules, no name tags, no press. I realized only afterwards, I’d been sitting next to film director Chris Nolan of Interstellar and Oppenheimer.
Warren: Still it seemed to me that people were coming there with a high volume of shared belief, where they’re almost reciting chapter and verse. I have respect for the credentials of many of them, but most of the scientific community is definitely not on the same page as they are, so either the people in that room are not doing enough to provide traditional scientific proofs, or the scientific community is just completely unwilling to accept their discoveries. I tend to cycle between skeptic and believer. If this really is established science, why is the world not on fire with this knowledge?
Marc: I think everyone at that first Sol conference was a little gobsmacked when a Colonel named Karl Nell presented a detailed chart of a five-year plan for controlled disclosure across all sectors of society to prevent a scenario he called catastrophic disclosure he believes could destablize civilization. This is a guy who was a commanding officer at U.S. Space Command, Chief Strategy Officer for U.S. Army modernization, and worked for Bell Labs. He has publicly said there is zero doubt that nonhuman intelligence exists and has been interacting with humanity for a long time.
Warren: Whatever is happening, I do think it’s the biggest story in the world. Even if it’s all some kind of elaborate psy-op and head-fake to deceive both the public and our adversaries, it’s still the biggest story of all time. It means we’ve been lied to and manipulated for a century.
Dave: There definitely need to be scientists and academics across many disciplines to be deeply inquiring into the whole of it. But the area our Center has carved out, history, is needed to provide context for what these folks are all looking at. It’s an excavation of empirical knowledge. It provides the background, reveals the derivation. And history has another really vital function: to make the accounts of anomalous experiences more available in all their idosyncratic detail. To normalize the cultural conversation.
Diego: And it crosses many cultures. I’m from Peru, and I’ve talked to researchers who’ve chronicled cases in Chile, Argentina, Brazil. I know the UFO topic is not just an American experience but a global phenomenon.
How do you see that normalization process playing out?
Dave: It goes down to the families that have been touched by this phenomenon in one way or the other. Maybe someone’s seen something they couldn’t explain but feel a need to keep it under wraps. Or they have the weird uncle at the dinner table that they don’t want to talk to because maybe he’s crazy. This is a sociological reality – we are living alongside people, family and friends, who have had anomalous experiences. Relationships have been broken due to the stigma. So legitimizing the history – having the government acknowledge it or someone opening one of our files and seeing, Oh, wow, this person saw the same thing my uncle saw in 1965. The word we often hear is validating.
The history of more advanced cultures meeting less advanced ones isn’t always so kind. What if these visitors’ intentions aren’t benevolent?
Diego: If there are beings who built machines that could harness the vast energies needed to warp spacetime and travel between the stars – Carl Sagan for one thought they must have overcome conflict and aggression. He believed a society couldn’t carry off such a massive technological enterprise and control this immense power unless they’d figured out peaceful coexistence.
Marc: Yes, indigenous cultures have crumbled and never recovered from first contact with more advanced societies. But others, like Japan, after the shock of seeing Admiral Perry’s steam-powered Black Ships sail into their harbor, achieved a social transformation and technological learning curve that enabled them to build one of the world’s greatest navies. Ronald Reagan once made a famous speech to the U.N. musing how our differences might vanish if we were facing a threat from outside this world. But the obverse could also prove true: in sworn testimony before Congress, whistleblowers have claimed there is a high stakes, secret space race between the U.S., Russia and China to retrieve and reverse engineer nonhuman technology in a struggle for dominance.
Maybe we need some kind of adult supervision.
Marc: There was a famous incident reported by an Air Force officer named Captain Robert Salas who was stationed at the Malmstrom nuclear missile base near Great Falls, Montana. One night in 1967, an enormous red glowing disc-shaped object showed up on his watch and hovered over the ICBM silos. All ten of the missiles under his command just turned off in quick succession, even though this terrifying breach of security of a whole brace of loaded doomsday weapons was supposed to be impossible. No mechanical flaw was ever found. Salas has said the message that he took away from this was basically, Don’t play with matches, kids, it’s too dangerous. Maybe we’ll just have to take away your matchbook!
David, you have a new partnership with the school system in New Mexico.
Dave: I see the UFO subject as a vehicle to teach science, physics, critical thinking, the investigative method. Schools have struggled with keeping their students interested and attentive since COVID. We came along when the New Mexico school system was tasked with finding creative ways to get kids engaged and excited. It’s like giving your dog a pill — you wedge it in a meaty treat. The UFO subject is the meaty treat. We’re not here to make kids believe in UFOs. It’s simply a vehicle to teach core curriculum, along with the legitimate history of the UFO subject.
Are the kids more receptive?
Dave: The kids ask better questions. They’re not tainted. They’re open.
See, we want to create a place where all the public can access this material. We feel it’s not ours — it belongs to everyone. This information is more urgent than people think. It isn’t just a collection of papers. When the government did studies on disclosure, it always came down to people cannot handle the truth. In the 21st century, with democratization of information, people can not only handle the truth – they need it.
Marc: There’s a song by the Band that has a lyric, We can talk about it now/It’s the same old riddle/only starts from the middle. It does seem as we start to collectively talk about this, the only starting place is from the middle, right smack in the midst of the muddle, because that’s where we ineluctably find ourselves.
Dave: At least we can have the conversation that, for decades, we could not without fear of ridicule by individuals, by institutions, by the government. We now can have that conversation, because now we have the tools.
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