A couple of weeks ago the National UFO Historical Records Center (NUFOHRC) led by David Marler issued some great news: the records of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) have been finally recovered, and are now under their keeping at their center in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.
APRO, for people who still think the study of UFOs began in 2017, was one of the oldest and most important civilian groups in existence in the United States in the XXth century. Led by Coral Lorenzen and her husband, Jim, this group diverted in scope from the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) —the other major American UFO group in the golden age of flying saucers)— in the sense that they were more open to the accounts of interactions between human witnesses, and those pesky humanoids who were inexplicably more interested in communicating with chicken farmers and housewives than landing in the White House lawn to greet all the bigwigs in Washington who we are now expecting to disclose all the answers about the UFO mystery.
And if you think my hyperbole is uncalled for, just consider the fact that in the 1950s NICAP (led by ret. Major Donald Keyhoe) was totally against accounts of flying saucers actually touching ground and landing, because to their ‘sensible’ thinking these ‘extraterrestrial probes’ were still making a preliminary reconnaissance of our planet, and therefore reports of them leaving actual marks on the terrain were unreliable. It was only after a mountain of cases from all over the world were piling over the desks of civilian groups that these ‘experts’ had to cave in and admit that Yes, apparently UFOs do land… from time to time.
The same thing happened over and over throughout the years, when close encounter reports became more rich and elaborate, and instead of just landing for a few seconds the flying saucers were now opening their ‘hatches’ to let their furtive occupants hop out to collect soil samples —not before ‘zapping’ a few hapless witnesses who apparently caught them right in the act, like in the famous Valensole case investigated by Aime Michel and Jacques Vallée. And once again, NICAP was too preoccupied with their battle for transparency against the US government to pay much attention to these reports during the first years of the modern UFO era —besides, you appear more legitimate to mainstream media if you only focus on the ‘technology’ aspects and highlight cases with ‘reliable’ witnesses like Air Force pilots, right?
Not so with APRO, who were the ones who brought light to cases such as the Antonio Vilas Boas abduction in Brazil, along with strange reports of hairy humanoids coming from other places in South America —something I personally wanted to highlight when I created the Empress card for the UFOlogy Tarot project.
But getting back to the recovered APRO files, they became something of a legend among aging UFO buffs because after the Lorenzens passed away, they were reportedly kept inside some neglected garage in Arizona, and the custodians of these papers were seemingly unwilling to bequeath them without some serious financial compensation.
So, Kudos to David Marler and NUFOHRC for this outstanding achievement. Here is hoping we can now learn a bit more about some really interesting moments in the history of UFO research, like for instance when Bill Moore (once a prominent member of APRO) was playing mole for ‘Falcon’ and Rick Doty on behalf of the US government, informing them about the goings on of fellow researchers, as well as seeding poor Paul Bennewitz misinformation which contributed to his eventual mental breakdown —to learn more about this, you should refer to Greg Bishop’s Project Beta, as well as Adam Gorightly’s Saucers, Spooks & Kooks.
