The 'eX-cop Files' and the odd

Aug. 28—In an early episode of "The X-Files," an FBI investigator open to the unknown had a message for his skeptical partner: "Much as you try to bury it, the truth is out there."

Thirty years later, a pair of former Gilbert cops could be named after the TV show's main characters as "The Scully and Mulder of the East Valley" because they're searching for the truth — and investigating the unknown.

The "known" switch flipped to "unknown" for former Gilbert Police Officer Dave Rich, a Mesa resident, in 2017, when his sergeant told him to investigate a weird case.

During an Aug. 17 presentation with fellow former Gilbert cop Marianne Robb, a Queen Creek resident, at the UFO Experience mini-museum in Scottsdale, Rich shared audio from the mysterious call.

"What is your emergency?" a dispatcher asks.

"I scare," whispers a female voice.

"You're scared?" the dispatcher says.

"No! I ... scare," the voice hisses.

The female stops talking, despite the dispatcher's repeated questioning. The call was tracked to a Gilbert high school. Two officers promptly went to the school, finding a phone off the hook at the front desk — but no one there.

Looking around, they enter a nurse's office just behind the front desk.

One of the officers later told Rich: "We didn't see anything — then we felt something rush past us."

The Gilbert cops followed the direction they felt the "unknown entity" was headed. Outside the office and around the school grounds, they found nothing.

As part of his investigation, Rich talked to the school nurse. After being dodgy at first, she finally came clean: "She told me her entire life, she's been followed by a ghost."

Cue "The X-Files" theme ...

Robb and Rich say skepticism — and open mockery — keeps many law enforcement officers from reporting things that are not easily explained, including unknown flying objects, commonly called UFOs.

Rich and Robb call their presentation "Real Encounters: When Law Enforcement Meets the Unknown."

"We want to get the word out that we are here to support law enforcement officers who have nowhere else to go when they see something they can't explain," said Robb, who retired after 34 years as a cop. "Often if they share with their colleagues they get ridiculed.

"We want them to know there is someplace for them to go and be taken seriously."

'Over the taboo'

Robb and Rich hope the U.S. military's new openness to unknown events will spread into law enforcement.

After decades of half-hearted explanations, such as routinely writing off mysterious objects in the sky as weather balloons, the military and federal government are opening their books on the unexplained.

"For decades, flying saucers were a punch line," a 2021 New Yorker investigative piece stated. "Then the U.S. government got over the taboo."

The magazine story related how Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, former chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, told CBS News he saw reports of mysterious flying objects in restricted airspace. "We don't know what it is," he said, "and it isn't ours."

In recent months, the UFO scene has accelerated like a nuclear-powered spaceship.

Six weeks ago, a congressional subcommittee heard testimony from several military officers who alleged the government is concealing evidence of unidentified flying objects/UFOs — or, as they are now called, "unidentified anomalous phenomena," aka UAPs.

An NPR story reported retired Maj. David Grusch, "who went from being part of the Pentagon's UAP Task Force to becoming a whistleblower," told a national security subcommittee he knows the "exact locations" of UAPs being examined by the military.

The U.S. Air Force's website states from 1947 to 1969, an Air Force program called "Project Blue Book" investigated 12,618 UFO cases.

Though 701 of those cases remain "unidentified," the Air Force insists "there was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as 'unidentified' were extraterrestrial vehicles."

See something — say nothing?

Though the "Phoenix Lights" incidents were later debunked as military planes, the response illustrates what Robb and Rich are up against.

Shortly after the 1997 sightings of mysterious lights hovering in formation over Phoenix, then-Gov. Fife Symington held a press conference, joking that "they found who was responsible" and revealing an aide dressed in an alien costume.

A decade later, Symington told national news outlets that as a military pilot, he witnessed an object "bigger than anything that I've ever seen. It remains a great mystery."

Symington told a UFO investigator making a documentary that he didn't go public with his experience previously "because he didn't want to panic the populace."

In other words: See something — say nothing.

That illustrates what Robb and Rich face: How can they get police officers, adept at investigating citizens — but often are reluctant to share their own unexplained experiences — to feel comfortable going public?

At the UFO Experience in Scottsdale's Arizona Boardwalk, the ex-cops shared stories that seemed lifted from "The X-Files" scripts — but really happened, they swear.

Robb told the story of a fellow Gilbert officer who believes he encountered a "skinwalker" or "shapeshifter" creature while driving on a highway at night through a reservation in northern Arizona.

And though he said there were several details he would not make public, Rich told about his haunted high school investigation — which, he said, led to mocking by his fellow cops, who put tin foil hats in his squad car.

"Our whole point isn't just to bring you guys an entertaining presentation," Rich told the crowd of about 50. "Ultimately we're trying to help these officers negotiate with what I went through."

Before recently putting in his retirement papers, Rich spent 25 years with the Gilbert PD, moving up from patrol to a detective investigating gangs, homicide, sex crimes and drugs.

"We worked on some teams," said Robb, who had been working for the Gilbert PD for a decade before Rich joined her.

Rich and Robb are partners again — as field investigators with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

The Valley's version of Scully and Mulder started a group called UAP-PD. As their website explains:

"We are retired law enforcement sharing information and investigating Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, aka UFOs) and other phenomena."

Rich said she was introduced to the world of the unexplained when her husband started going to MUFON meetings and introduced her to UFO researchers.

A recent NBC News story noted "the Federal Aviation Administration has no mechanism for pilots to report UAPs, the term preferred to UFOs, instead directing them to civilian UFO groups that are often dismissed as the domain of cranks and conspiracy theorists."

To address that, according to the story, a former Navy pilot started a website for pilots to report unexplained experiences.

Similarly, Robb and Rich hope law enforcement officers will reach out to them to report bizarre incidents.

The Progress asked Scottsdale Sgt. Allison Sempsis about the procedure and training of the Scottsdale Police Department regarding unexplained incidents witnessed by officers.

"While we currently do not have training for such events as something 'unexplained,' our officers can document events that take place or something they see/observe on a field interview card, or initiating what's called an 'on view' event, and clear the event through their computer with comments," Sempsis said.

"The government and others researching this phenomenon," Rich said, "are all looking for the same thing — the truth."

Then again, as Scully warns her partner in an "X-Files" episode:

"The truth is out there — but so are lies."

For more information about UAP-PD, visit uap-pd.com.