The Pentagon’s UFO office is trying to buy its way into a private archive.
On July 31, Washington Headquarters Services posted a notice of intent to award a sole-source, firm-fixed-price contract to the National Unidentified Flying Object Historic Records Center in Rio Rancho, New Mexico – the nonprofit built by historian David Marler. The buyer is AARO. The product is not consulting. It is a multi-year commercial data subscription for digital access to proprietary records, metadata, and analytical products, with the work scoped to pre-1990 cases.
DefenseScoop’s Brandi Vincent reported the notice this week and got a War Department official to repeat the justification on the record: no other organization, in the government’s market research, has the historical depth, the volume of unique files, or the specialized analysis AARO says it needs.
That is a striking admission from an office Congress created to assemble the complete historical record of U.S. government UAP involvement back to 1945. Volume I of that report came out in February 2024. Volume II is still missing.
What the Contracting Notice Actually Says
The special notice, NUFOHRC_20260731, is not a request for bids. It cites 10 U.S.C. 3204(a)(1) and FAR 6.302-1: only one responsible source. Capability statements were due August 17. The structure is a one-year base plus four one-year options.
The notice names the vendor’s address – 1301 Nicklaus Drive SE, Rio Rancho, on the campus of a Rio Rancho public school – and states that NUFOHRC holds “hundreds of thousands of unique case files that exist exclusively within its archives and are not available in any other public or private repository.”
A War Department official told DefenseScoop the subscription “is not for professional labor or advisory services.” Cost was not disclosed. NUFOHRC did not comment.
The contracting paperwork uses Historic Records Center. Marler’s public branding is Historical. Same shop.
Why Pre-1990 Files Live in Rio Rancho
Official UFO programs were shut down, scattered, or boxed. After Project Blue Book closed in 1969, a large share of what civilian researchers had assembled never went back into a single federal reading room. Families donated papers when investigators retired or died. Marler spent years taking those loads in.
DefenseScoop notes that over the last six years he took custody of multiple legacy archives, including the complete files of one of the earliest civilian scientific UFO groups founded in the 1950s – APRO, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization – and rare personal files once belonging to Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book’s scientific consultant and later the founder of CUFOS. The Debrief, covering NUFOHRC’s public facility opening, described the APRO transfer from a private Arizona house: photographs, original artwork, and physical artifacts spanning decades.
Rio Rancho Public Schools gave the center space behind Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary. Marler has said the point is not to make visitors believe in aliens. It is to keep the paper from rotting and to let students and researchers argue from documents.
The Mandate AARO Is Trying to Finish
The FY2023 NDAA told AARO to compile a comprehensive historical record of U.S. intelligence and military UAP engagements from 1945 onward. Later bills created a UAP Records Collection at NARA and ordered agencies to review, digitize, and transfer government or government-funded UAP records for public release. President Trump’s 2026 declassification push sits on top of that.
The problem AARO is describing in the notice is older than PURSUE. Mid-century military UFO files were classified, split across offices, or preserved only by civilians after the official projects ended. A subscription to NUFOHRC is a way to see case files that never made the federal handoff – and, the Pentagon’s own language suggests, to trace government paperwork that is no longer sitting where a records officer would look.
Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence
View full profile →Christopher Mellon has argued for years that AARO is not getting the internal data – satellite imagery, NORAD uncorrelated tracks, Air Force and CIA files. Buying a civilian archive does not fix those holes. It does show that the office now says the private stack is part of the minimum it needs to do the historical job Congress assigned.
AARO director Jon Kosloski has told the Senate the office has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Volume I of the historical report reached the same conclusion. Volume II has not appeared. The notice does not say the subscription will produce Volume II. It says AARO wants unique pre-1990 cases and analysis it cannot get elsewhere.
NARA’s UAP collection is supposed to be the public federal stack. NUFOHRC is the private one. If the sole-source holds, AARO will be reading both – and the private side is the one the Pentagon has now put in writing as irreplaceable.
| Date | Record |
|---|---|
| Feb 2024 | AARO Historical Record Report, Volume I |
| FY2023–24 NDAAs | Historical review to 1945; NARA UAP Records Collection |
| Jul 31, 2026 | WHS sole-source intent: NUFOHRC subscription, pre-1990 focus |
| Aug 17, 2026 | Capability-statement deadline |
| Sep 2, 2026 | DefenseScoop: War Department official confirms the unique-source claim |
Sources: DefenseScoop · WHS notice NUFOHRC_20260731 · The Debrief on NUFOHRC · Albuquerque Journal
