In early September 2026, a contracting notice revealed that AARO, the Pentagon’s office for investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena, wants to pay for access to a private UFO archive.

The target is the National UFO Historical Records Center, a New Mexico nonprofit run by UAP historian David Marler. It is reportedly North America’s largest private collection of UAP records: books, journals, newspapers, audio and video, photos and physical artifacts spanning more than 75 years. A defense official described hundreds of thousands of unique case files. Over the past six years, Marler has taken in whole legacy archives, including the complete files of a 1950s civilian research group and personal papers of J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer who advised the Air Force’s Project Blue Book.

AARO plans a sole-source contract, without competitive bidding, for a commercial data subscription: one base year plus four option years. It wants digital access to the center’s data and analysis, focused on material from before 1990. The Pentagon would not give an estimated cost, and the center did not respond to questions.

The reason is a homework assignment from Congress. The FY2023 defense bill told AARO to compile a full history of U.S. government involvement with UAP since 1945. An official said the archive could fill gaps in pre-1990 cases the government never properly indexed.

The deal means a government office leaning on decades of civilian record-keeping to reconstruct its own history.