David Marler, MUFON, gave a presentation on UFOs at the Columbia Library.

By day, David Marler drives around and sells medical equipment. But by night, Marler engages in his real passion: Picking away at the mysteries of Unidentified Flying Objects.

As a member of the Mutual UFO Network, Marler was at the Columbia Public Library Thursday night to present his findings and to give a crash course on the history of UFO sightings.

“I want to clarify before we start that I am not talking about extraterrestrial life but UFO’s, which are simply what the name implies,” Marler said. “Whether you believe in them or not, I am not here to persuade you, but hope you make up your own opinions.”

Marler also said 90 percent of UFO sighting are misidentifications, whether that is a weather balloon or a planet. It is the remaining 10 percent that are MUFON’s bread and butter.

“We take all these claims and go through a process of elimination to identify what the sighting could possibly be,” Marler said.

These sightings have been prevalent in the 20th and 21st centuries, with 1897 seeing a wave of UFO reports in the Midwest. During World War II, Allied and Axis pilots reported seeing balls of light or metallic spheres dubbed “Foo Fighters.”

This continued through the 1947 sightings and the 1952 Washington, D.C. wave, where UFO’s were seen flying in restricted airspace over the White House.

To illustrate the severity of some of these sightings, Marler had an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” play relating to the 1989-1992 Belgian UFO wave.

The show re-enacted a scene where the Belgian Air Force took to the skies to hunt down these UFO’s. Problem was, the blips on their radar changed altitude and speed so fast they couldn’t lock-on to the targets.

While this didn’t turn out to be a serious threat, an incident in 1967 at Minot Air Force Base in Minot, N.D., was a little stickier. Officials at the base reported seeing a UFO hovering near a missile silo and then disappearing. After the UFO left, personnel discovered that the missile was armed and unlocked in launch mode and the nuclear warhead was armed.

“While people may laugh at UFO’s, I can assure you that the military was not laughing at this,” Marler said.

And of course we can’t forget the multiple sightings of a large UFO over Millstadt in the early morning of Jan. 5, 2000.

“During my ten years of investigating UFOs, I have never had a case like the one that occurred in the early morning hours of Jan. 5, 2000,” Marler said in an article he wrote shortly after the incident. “The UFO incident involved multiple witnesses, which mainly consisted of police officers from a number of small Illinois towns. The officers were able to track the unknown object and maintain radio contact with each other during the event.”

These incidents added together mark something of a peculiarity in the UFO field, as Marler said only 10 percent of the population is willing to report a UFO sighting.

“Most people don’t want to be ridiculed and draw attention to themselves so they keep quiet,” Marler said. “So really, there is so much stuff out there we don’t even know about.”

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