David Marler is an American UFO researcher and historian who founded and directs the National UFO Historical Records Center (NUFOHRC), a nonprofit archive in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Over more than three decades he has gathered civilian sighting reports, investigators' files, recordings and press coverage of UFO cases, and in 2026 that collection became the subject of a proposed Pentagon records subscription.

According to the center's biography, Marler joined the Mutual UFO Network in 1990 and rose to become its Illinois state director. The same biography lists a bachelor's degree in psychology from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and a career in health care in New Mexico. He wrote Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation, a study of reports of large triangular craft. He has lectured at universities and assisted television and documentary productions, and he serves on the board of the Center for UFO Studies.

His private library became an institutional archive in November 2020. That month Center for UFO Studies director Mark Rodeghier transferred the center's files to him, including personal files of astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the Air Force's longtime scientific consultant on UFOs. Marler announced NUFOHRC in 2022 as an effort to preserve ufology's pre-2004 history, telling The Debrief, "There are no National Archives of Ufology." The center has since taken in files from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, along with personal collections from veteran researchers. In October 2024 it opened facilities in Rio Rancho under a five-year agreement with Rio Rancho Public Schools.

Marler's public work centers on reconstructing older cases from contemporary records. He has discussed the documentary trail of the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles, and the archive holds original investigators' notes on the 1964 Socorro landing report. On July 31, 2026, Washington Headquarters Services posted notice of its intent to award a sole-source subscription. The subscription would give the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office digital access to the center's pre-1990 data, metadata and analytical products for a base year and four option years. A War Department official told DefenseScoop that the center held "hundreds of thousands of unique case files that exist exclusively within its archives." The department declined to give an estimated cost, and the notice made no promise of public release.

The proposal drew scrutiny. A Blackgrove analysis circulated in August 2026 noted that the center's own website still described digitization and cloud access as goals awaiting funding. It argued that this sat uneasily with the notice's description of a pre-existing commercial product. Whatever the contract's final terms, the episode marked a turning point for Marler. He built his archive largely from files donated by aging researchers and their families, and he now holds records whose depth, in a War Department official's words, no other organization possesses.