Larry Hatch

Larry Hatch was not a field investigator or a public figure in the usual sense. He is remembered in ufology for something less glamorous and more lasting: a searchable, computer-based archive of UFO reports that other researchers used for decades.

The U* UFO Database

Hatch worked on the project independently from 1993, after a career as a computer programmer and engineer, and released the program in 1994. Its first form was an MS-DOS application that could be run on a home PC. Users could search by keyword, geography and report characteristics, and a mapping tool displayed cases visually. A 2002 version followed. Jan Aldrich helped vet cases and add new ones, according to a tribute page on the No UFOs In Memoriam page, which calls it "one of the most robust UFO databases up until that time."

The scale is the main point. The tribute quotes a late tally of "over 17,000 UFO cases" that Hatch entered himself, and a later public copy of the U* collection credits reports to "the late Larry Hatch" while describing its contents as drawn from publicly available internet data, with no guarantee of truth or accuracy. A 2023 Reddit thread describes the archive as drawing on hundreds of books, journals, magazines and correspondence, and puts it at roughly 18,000 events (r/UFOs discussion).

Death and afterlife of the archive

Hatch died on 3 August 2018. A January 2019 article by David B. Marler, reprinted on a UFO blog, says he lived in California and was "one of the most impressive" database builders in the field (Real TV UFOs). The tribute attributes his death to medical complications and says he had health problems from the mid-2000s and had largely left the field by then.

The archive nearly disappeared with him. According to the 2023 Reddit post, the program was later made available again and uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it can be run in a browser-based DOS emulator. That preservation matters: the database was built by one person over many years and has no institutional home.

Limits and caveats

A database is only as good as its sources, and the U* archive is a compilation rather than a verified catalogue. Its cases were gathered from secondary literature and correspondence, so errors, duplicates and unverified claims from the books it draws on are carried into it. Users of any large UFO compilation need to check the original report before treating an entry as established. The public copy of the archive itself disclaims any guarantee of accuracy.

The biographical record is also thin. No formal obituary or birth year was found, and the sources available are tribute pages and blog posts written by people in the UFO community. Claims about his personal history should be read with that in mind.

Why he matters

Ufology is often remembered through its famous cases and its loudest figures. Hatch's contribution is infrastructural. A searchable archive of tens of thousands of reports lets researchers test claims, count reports by year and region, and find cases that books have forgotten. Projects like his are the reason many later analysts could work from data rather than anecdote. He belongs in the record as one of the people who made the field's raw material accessible.