A national collection of UFO records housed at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, is expanding its educational and research role as additional material arrives, KOB reported on July 23. The National UFO Historical Records Center occupies part of the former school building through a partnership with Rio Rancho Public Schools.
Center director David Marler told the station that the archive conservatively holds between 50,000 and 75,000 domestic and international files. He said boxes containing declassified government records continue to arrive each week. The estimate describes the volume of the collection, not the number of incidents independently verified by the center.
The school district partnership gives students supervised access to the material. Organizers said the collection can support work in mathematics, physics, history and critical thinking, while a new series of lectures is planned for the coming school year. The program treats the records as source material to examine rather than as proof of an extraordinary explanation.
New Mexico state Senator Jay Block directed $40,000 in state funding toward interactive touchscreens for the center, according to the report. Local and state officials are also considering a permanent facility and the archive's potential value for research tourism, while visiting researchers already use the collection.
Digitization is the center's next major undertaking. Marler said the goal is to scan the records and eventually use artificial-intelligence tools to connect names, dates, locations and recurring details across otherwise separate files. Such tools could make the holdings searchable at scale, although their findings would still require human review and source checking.
Marler also drew a boundary between an unidentified report and an extraterrestrial conclusion. He said the center does not equate an unexplained record with an alien craft and that claims of alien origin require proof. That distinction is central to the archive's public value: preservation can make historical claims easier to test without deciding in advance what produced them.