Scottsdale, Arizona UFO Sighting (December 19, 1958) — FBI Files
An FBI memo on Claude Marck, Jr., a Scottsdale civilian who collected flying-saucer and sea-mystery material and corresponded with Gray Barker — a window into the Bureau's Cold War surveillance of the amateur UFO research community.
Background
This file is not a sighting report. It is an FBI memorandum about a person: Claude Marck, Jr. of Scottsdale, Arizona, interviewed by agents in December 1958 about his hobby of collecting material on flying saucers and “sea mysteries.” That such an interview happened at all — and was filed, retained for nearly seventy years, and ultimately swept into a presidential UAP disclosure — documents something the sighting files cannot: the Bureau’s Cold War-era practice of keeping tabs on the civilian UFO research community itself.
The names Marck gave his interviewers map the amateur saucer world of 1958 precisely. Donald Keyhoe, the retired Marine Corps major whose books argued the Air Force was concealing what it knew, had just become director of NICAP, the largest civilian UFO investigation group in the country and a persistent thorn in official sides. Gray Barker, with whom Marck said he corresponded, ran the Saucerian Press in West Virginia and had already published the book that introduced the “Men in Black” mythos to American culture — and who, the record would later show, was as much a showman as an investigator. An Arizona collector writing to Barker and reading Keyhoe was a perfectly ordinary node in that network; the FBI memo preserves the moment when ordinary curiosity about the subject was itself considered worth a federal file. On December 19, 1958, in Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S. government investigators recorded the interview later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is a Cold War-era case investigated under the Air Force’s Project Blue Book or its predecessors. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
Claude Marck, Jr. informed FBI agents that he collects information on flying saucers and sea mysteries. He referenced books by Donald Keyhoe and Gray Barker as sources for his research. Marck also mentioned corresponding with Barker, who allegedly runs a civilian investigative agency focused on UFOs.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Type of case
The document is an FBI interview memorandum concerning a civilian UFO researcher — an investigative file on a person, not a sighting report.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.