David Marler is a U.S.-based UFO historian, author, former MUFON Illinois state director, CUFOS board archivist, and National UFO Historical Records Center executive director whose public record centers on triangular UFO reports and the preservation of civilian UAP case files.12
MUFON Investigator and CUFOS Archivist
NUFOHRC's team profile and CUFOS's board profile identify Marler as joining the Mutual UFO Network in 1990, later serving as a field investigator, state section director, and Illinois state director.12 CUFOS identifies him as its board archivist and lists a Bachelor of Science in psychology from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, hypnotherapy certification, sleep-disorder work, medical-equipment industry experience, and hospital administration in New Mexico as part of his background.2
From Piedmont Stories to Triangle Cases
Rachel Whitt reported in a May 15, 2017 article for the University of New Mexico Newsroom that Marler first heard family stories in 1973 about sightings near Piedmont, Missouri, where his father knew witnesses to a major local event.3 Whitt also reported that his later MUFON work in Illinois brought him into police-witness reports of a triangular object near Scott Air Force Base, an episode covered in the site's Illinois Police Officers Sighting entry, which Marler compared with descriptions from the Belgian UFO wave.34 Triangular reports then became his long-running research focus.3
The Triangle-Case Argument
His 2013 book, Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation, presents a book-length analysis built from hundreds of reports, newspaper archives, military records, UFO periodicals, and witness interviews.34 CUFOS's "Triangular UFOs" page summarizes Marler's primary and secondary characteristics for the reports, including recurring descriptions of very large objects, slow and low-altitude movement, hovering, silence, rapid acceleration, and lights at the corners of the triangle.4
Evidence Threshold
In Santa Fe Magazine's interview with Marc Barasch, Warren Langford, Diego Diaz, and Marler, Marler emphasized contemporaneous investigator notes and original files as stronger than later retellings, and said the standard for a nonhuman or non-Earth conclusion would have to be physical evidence that could not be explained as terrestrial technology.5
Building the National UFO Archive
In November 2020, Marler became curator of a large historical UFO case-file collection that CUFOS identifies as including NICAP files, CUFOS files, and J. Allen Hynek's original Project Blue Book files.2 NUFOHRC's team profile identifies him as executive director and describes his accumulated library of UFO books, journals, magazines, newspapers, microfilms, recordings, and case files covering more than 75 years.1 A 2022 NUFOHRC press release introduced the organization as a U.S. nonprofit led by Marler with historians and archivists including Jan Aldrich, Rod Dyke, Barry Greenwood, Mark Rodeghier, and Rob Swiatek, with a mission to centralize and digitize historical UFO materials regardless of belief or non-belief.6
In 2024, Rio Rancho Public Schools and NUFOHRC announced a memorandum of agreement to house and secure UFO-related historical documents, including declassified military reports, in school facilities for preservation and educational use.7 In Tommy Lopez's KOB report after the 2023 congressional UAP hearing, Marler called the hearing a change in the dialogue while also saying evidence was still required beyond statements and claims.8
Conventional Explanations Remain in Play
John B. Alexander's 2016 Journal of Scientific Exploration review of Marler's book and AARO's February 2024 historical report point to ordinary objects or phenomena, misidentification, cultural or media reinforcement, and broad category definitions as important limits on case interpretation.910 Alexander also noted a basic definitional problem: "UFO" covers observations ranging from distant lights to large close-range objects, making any single explanation or statistical treatment difficult.9
What the Record Does Not Prove
Marler's archive work preserves civilian UFO records, while his triangle-case writing relies on case files, witness reports, and pattern comparison.1467 Preservation alone does not independently verify each underlying sighting, and large triangle reports remain vulnerable to prosaic explanations and broad category definitions.910 Marler's public comments reserve nonhuman-origin conclusions for physical evidence beyond terrestrial explanation.5