In the 1940’s and 1950’s, there was a dramatic rise in news reports and personal accounts of encounters with UFO’s and extra-terrestrials. The “flying saucer” craze, as it came to be known, took root in cities and towns all over the country. Groups of concerned and/or fascinated citizens would get together to swap articles and stories from their own experience.
In Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, a woman named Coral Lorenzen had a UFO encounter of her own — she told her husband Jim about it, and the two of them quickly immersed themselves in the growing community of flying saucer enthusiasts. But the more they read up on the subject, the more they felt like there was a bit of a disconnect. Clearly, there was widespread interest in learning more about the growing number of reported sightings, but the conversations felt diffuse and disorganized. So, Jim and Coral decided to do something about it.
In 1952, they launched the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, or APRO. The idea was to become a centralized clearing house for everything UFO — personal stories, evidence of military research on UFOs, and reports from local newspapers about unexplained encounters. In 1960, they moved their operation to Tucson, Arizona.
In the world of UFO enthusiasts, APRO’s work is legendary. But for decades, their archives were inaccessible — until a couple years ago, when David Marler, the executive director of the National UFO Historical Records Center, worked out a deal to bring them to New Mexico, where the center is located, and put them on public display.
Marler has examined every word in the Lorenzen’s archives, and he says that while the word “pioneer” is overused, in the case of Jim and Coral’s work with APRO, it’s the truth.
Marler joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
DAVID MARLER: For the most part, the organizations that had existed before — and I use that term loosely, it was usually just social clubs, would probably be a better descriptive — they were rather parochial in nature. You might have a small group in Portland, Oregon. You might have a small group in Des Moines, Iowa, and they would all just talk amongst themselves about articles in the newspaper and magazines and maybe local sightings as well that had occurred.
What Jim and Coral did was create a nationwide network. They not only collected reports, they not only managed a team of investigators, they also issued a bimonthly newsletter. They lectured across the country. They wrote numerous books on the subject. They were compelled and driven by much of what I am compelled and driven by.
And that is not just promoting the mystery of the UFO subject, but truly trying to gain answers. And the only way we’re going to do that is by bringing puzzle pieces together in the form of case files, news reports, military accounts. The more data we have, arguably with regard to any subject that you’re studying, the better off you’re going to be.
SAM DINGMAN: And what do we know about Jim and Coral’s ultimate goal?
MARLER: They were very patriotic Americans, Jim and Coral Lorenzen. And in fact, for a time period before they moved to Tucson, Arizona, they were actually based at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and both worked at Holloman Air Force Base and established really great ties with scientists, engineers, and military personnel.
No surprise, that’s how they obtained a lot of the UFO reports was by being at Holloman and hearing about local sightings by military personnel, engineers, etc. So they weren’t anti-government. And so I think their primary goal really, in retrospect, was to educate the American public with regard to the UFO subject.
DINGMAN: That’s really interesting. Thank you for sharing that, David, because it aligns with a general sense I have in looking into Jim and Coral — and I wonder if you could confirm this — that they don’t really seem to have been ideologues or, as you said, like anti-government conspiracy theorists necessarily. It almost seems sort of ethnographic.
MARLER: Yes. And I think they felt, to some degree — and again, I can’t speak with certainty. But again, when you look at their correspondence, you read their books, I think that they felt that there was a social responsibility.
DINGMAN: Well, this makes me think of a pair of quotes from Coral that I’d love to get your perspective on that I found really interesting and different from what one might expect. She said, “We do not pretend to know the source or the substance of these objects,” referring to UFOs. “We just know that all these people surely could not have been having hallucinations, especially when groups of people all report the same observations.”
And for me, that sounds like something an anthropologist would say, like “There’s clearly some sort of social phenomenon happening here. Why wouldn’t we want to investigate it?”
MARLER: Absolutely. And people ask me, “So you believe in all this?” And I pause and I look at them and I say, “I don’t summarily believe all of this. But at the same time, as an educated, objective individual, I can’t summarily discount all of this.”
DINGMAN: Well, that makes me think of the other coral quote I wanted to — actually I don’t know if this was Jim or Coral. But at one point, somebody asked them to weigh in on whether they really thought there was any such thing as a UFO.
And they said, even if there is no such thing as a UFO, “many people throughout the world then must be suffering from some sort of mental aberration, which is an equally disturbing thought.”
MARLER: Absolutely. Which requires additional research. And I often say whether you relegate UFOs to fact, fiction or folklore, it should be an area of focus. Jim and Coral, one of the individuals that they corresponded with in the 1950s was Dr. Carl Jung. And Jung had a fascination with regard to the subject and, of course, wrote a book on the subject: “Flying Saucers.”
And Jung looked at it purely through a psychological perspective. He states in the in the letters that I’ve looked at to Jim and Coral, that he’s not a physicist. He can’t speak to the physical reality. But much to what you were alluding to, there is an experience that people are having. And he was trying to look at it through the lens of psychology.
DINGMAN: In a similar vein to what we’ve been talking about another quote of theirs that I found really interesting is when they were asked how they felt about the fact that the CIA was evidently monitoring APRO and its members.
They said, “This is fine. They’d be derelict in their duty if they didn’t. We don’t resent this at all, and we’d be pleased if they asked to see our files.”
MARLER: Absolutely, yeah. That was Jim and Coral. Again, they weren’t anti-establishment, anti-government. And in fact, it’s ironic because I can’t remember the date of that quote, but decades later — because I think that was from the 1950s or ’60s — decades later, we actually got the declassified Robertson Panel meeting notes.
The Robertson Panel was a Washington, D.C., think tank group that was established in January ’53. It was called the Robertson Panel, named after H.P. Robertson, a leading physicist at the time. Sponsored by the CIA. And one of the recommendations stated that they should spy on UFO organizations and UFO groups.
DINGMAN: And do we know what the reason for that surveillance was? Did the CIA think that groups like APRO were, I don’t know, in cahoots with the Soviet Union?
MARLER: Yes. To be quite honest, unlike APRO, there were some smaller UFO organizations and groups that did have a lot of anti-government rhetoric. And a lot of it was also tied at the time — there’s the UFO Contactee Movement. This is a group of individuals and groups that claimed that they were in touch with space beings and that people were coming from Venus and other planets to warn us about the ills of atomic testing and atomic weapons.
DINGMAN: But it seems like from what we’ve been talking about and some other things I was reading that Jim and Coral and APRO in general was consciously trying to stand in contrast to groups that had that sort of approach.
MARLER: Yes. And, unlike a lot of people in the UFO subject today, Jim and Coral Lawrenson did not do this for money. Yes, they issued a newsletter. Yes, they wrote books. But they in no way, shape or form ever came close to compensating themselves for the time and money that they invested.
Jim and Coral were husband and wife and they spent their life together, but they spent their life together pursuing this passion: studying UFOs. They were pioneers in the field.
And no surprise, suffered a lot of ridicule, at least in some corners. When they were dying — Jim passed away in ’86, and Coral passed away in ’88. Their wish was, “We want this material to be available to the general public, and we don’t want people to charge for it.” Thirteen file cabinets and 50 boxes of APRO material.
DINGMAN: Wow. Which you now have there at the National UFO Historical Record Center.
MARLER: We do. In June of 2024, we solidified a partnership with the Rio Rancho Public school system, who saw a value in the history that we were compiling, and they provided building space and grounds for us to expand and create a public-facing archive. And it’s been an incredible partnership. The school system is not here to promote belief in UFOs or aliens, but they do appreciate the history that’s tied to Arizona, New Mexico, and many other Southwestern states.
But we’re using the UFO subject as a vehicle, a Trojan horse — if I can use that term — to engage students but in the process teach them about physics, military history, engineering like radar. How does radar operate? Critical thinking skills, the investigative process, how to be objective, witness credibility, all of these things.
And it’s an interesting social experiment that both the school system and our organization have undertaken, and in large part due to the APRO files we now have the largest collection of historical UFO case files that has ever been assembled in the history of the United States.
