Why Is The Pentagon Paying For This?

A public school in New Mexico now holds the largest collection of UFO records in the country. Tens of thousands of files. Government documents that go back to the 1920s. On Monday night, the school board that houses it voted 4 to 1 to give the archives even more room. The man who voted no is actually a scientist at one of the country's national laboratories. Dr. Michael Barry states that the Rio Rancho district can't show what it is actually getting out of this. Wait, what? You would think that he would be the one pushing for something like this. Let's just say there's a lot to cover. Hey UFOlogers, I'm Cristina Gomez and this is your UFO News Update. So on Monday night, the Rio Rancho Public Schools Board voted 4 to 1 to expand its partnership with the National UFO Historical Records Center. The lone no came from Dr. Michael Barry, one of the board's newest members and a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. The vote didn't extend the existing agreement, which actually began in 2024 and has run for several years now. But it actually amended it. Under the new terms, the center gains one classroom at Rio Tech, the district's career and technological campus where students train in hands-on job skills. In return, it doubles its public lectures from 6 to 12 a year and launches a student club built around studying and preserving records. And whatever the center teaches has to meet the same district standards as any other class, such as reading, math and science. But it looks like the new guy wants to make a name for himself in a more controversial way. In order for this to make a bit more sense, we actually need to go back 10 years ago. For a long time, the belief among UFO researchers was that the truth would come from the very top, from the White House itself. And that idea has been laid out in detail in a recent American Alchemy interview with veteran researcher Grant Cameron, a Canadian investigator who has spent close to 50 years studying what presidents know about the UFO subject. Cameron describes a plan tied to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and from her campaign chairman, John Podesta, built around finally making this type of material public. This is all planned that she was going to do disclosure. So when she didn't get it, Chris Podesta was feeding me all the material about what was going on. They were going to drop this thing with Hillary Clinton. They had it all planned out and all this stuff was going to be disclosure. And then Hillary lost the election. So I phoned up Chris the same day. I said, Chris, so what's going on? Is it dead? No, he said, green light, still going. It's even bigger than before. And I go, OK. And then it took him nine, 10 months for Tom DeLonge to get the next team of people. And then they made that October 11th appearance on To the Stars. And that's when To the Stars It was all planned, he said. The reveal that was supposed to come from the top never arrived. The records ended up somewhere nobody expected, and they ended up with a man named David Marler. Marler is a longtime researcher who has spent decades gathering UFO files, and he opened his center in October of 2024 inside two portable classrooms at Martin Luther King Junior Elementary. And it holds what reporters describe as the largest collection of UFO records in North America, estimated between 50,000 and 75,000 files. Some documents go back all the way to the 1920s. Now, over the years, he took in the archives of major research programs and groups, along with personal files of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the scientist who worked on the Air Force's own UFO study called Project Blue Book. For a long time, most of it actually just sat inside of Marler's house until very recently. And now with that information in one place, there is one more entity now interested in this archive, and it's actually the federal government. According to reporting from Defense Scoop in early September, the Pentagon's Aero Office moved to issue a sole source contract to buy a subscription, not the entire archive, just a subscription to this center's archive. And a sole source contract means the government decides that only one supplier can meet its needs. In a public filing, an official said market research found no other organization on earth with the depth, the volume, and the expertise to match this collection. For Marler, having the Pentagon coming to ask is a pretty big deal. And for the government, it's a quieter kind of admission. It's asking to pay for access the same way really anyone else would. Even in the Pentagon, it turns out that you can't get around a subscription. But hold on. If the government has to pay a private citizen to read its own history with this subject, how complete was the official record to begin with? And I think this is a good place to address John Podesta. He ran Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, and years earlier, he served as White House Chief of Staff. In June of 2016, at the public tech conference, Podesta said he had filed a FOIA request for UFO documents, a legal request that forces the government to hand over records over a certain period of time. Cameron says Podesta went even further behind the scenes, pushing reporters to actually raise the topic with Clinton, saying, ask her, ask her, please. So when Hillary lost the election, because they talked about the seven-year plan, the same as Schumer, they talked about the seven-year plan with the nine people under the president, and we've got subpoena power, and we can force all the material back from the contractors and stuff. That was all before 2016, Hillary was going to do it. And Hillary, according to the Podesta notes, she had this all planned, that they were going to promote this stuff. And John Podesta was actually saying, ask her about the aliens. One of the reporters, come on, ask her about the aliens. He wanted this story out because he wanted Hillary to talk about, she was going to do the disclosure thing. The emails found from the campaign did show Podesta trading messages about this topic for years. So the interest was real. But the question was always whether it would reach the public, which brings us back to the story to Dr. Berry, the lone no vote, and his objection probably deserves a closer look. Because Berry is a working scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, a federal science and national security lab in New Mexico. And he brought a scientist's demand for evidence to the table. Now, he did not call the UFO material worthless. He said the opposite, that it is good work and that plenty of people find the subject interesting. His problem was the district's role. He argued the partnership has generated enthusiasm, but no measurable results. He warned that signs tying the school district to the center could be read by the public as an endorsement. And he raised even a process question. If the district approves this group, what is the standard for turning down the next one? But then the following question would be, why turn down the next one? Aren't scientists always asking for more data? Isn't this the biggest archive in the US? Shouldn't we all have our hands on it to do and collect more information on this subject? But the government's own move really cuts against Berry's doubt. The Pentagon isn't ignoring these records. It is trying to buy them by subscription. As of now, the material now sits on a public school campus and a student club may soon help preserve and even digitize them. Board President Amanda Galbraith made that case, calling the collection a source no other district in the country can ever offer. And I think that's a pretty fair thing to brag about. But public interest at this level is not new, and neither is the promise attached to it. We have been waiting a long time for a figure at the top to speak about this openly. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton did exactly that, talking about the subject on TV, including on Jimmy Kimmel's show. And Cameron says that she was ready for it, that she had prepared to use an appearance like this to open up the subject. By Cameron's account, that preparation was aimed at a reveal that never came off the way that the campaign even planned it. And then Clinton was pressed on it. She made a statement that is still quoted today. Kimmel had it. It's in the press emails. Holy ----. And then she goes in April. Wow. And then he asked her the question. That's when she says, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. And he said, well, your husband tried to get to the bottom of it. He couldn't get anywhere. Well, I'm going to do it again, she said. She said versions of that in public more than once, but she did lose that election and the top down disclosure never came. And then a decade later, The Deepest Records is a nonprofit run out of a converted house, now sitting inside a public school. And the government is paying a subscription to read it. The district is trying to hold a middle line here. Superintendent Dr. Robert Dodd backed the partnership, but drew a very clear boundary on it. The district is not endorsing any belief about the material. It is treating it as a real educational resource. And he said the district can build a way to measure its value this year, which is the exact accountability that Barry asked for. So if we look at this all together, you have the New Mexico classroom that has decades of files that are being sorted and opened to the public with the government now asking to pay for it. The Rio Rancho vote looks like a small local news, but based on who is now paying attention to that archive, it's anything but small. I'm Cristina Gomez. That's it for today. I will see you again next time for another UFO news update. Be safe and remember, keep your eyes on the skies. If you enjoyed today's show, hit that like button. And if you're not subscribed, what are you waiting for? Hit the notification bell as I do daily UFO news and updates, fresh UAP stories, government disclosures, and breaking developments land here every single day.