The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office released four information papers in 2024 and 2025 that together form the most detailed public accounting yet of how AARO thinks about the mundane explanations for UAP reports, the structural limits on what it can declassify, and what it would take to actually build a credible research data pipeline. None of the papers contains new evidence of anomalous phenomena. What they do contain is a frank — and sometimes quietly uncomfortable — account of how broken the current system is.
What the documents say
The most technically specific of the four papers, Effect of Forced Perspective and Parallax View on UAP Observations (May 2024), walks through the optical mechanics behind two phenomena AARO says routinely distort witness accounts. Forced perspective, the paper explains, causes observers to misjudge an object's size and distance when no reliable reference is available. The paper uses the Leaning Tower of Pisa as a visual anchor — a 190-foot structure that can be made to look hand-sized in a photograph — to illustrate how the same illusion operates when pilots or ground observers try to estimate the dimensions of an unknown object against a featureless sky.
Parallax is the companion problem. When an airborne sensor platform moves rapidly relative to a stationary object, the paper states, "stationary objects can appear to have motion, and slow-moving objects can appear to move very fast." The faster the sensor moves, the more dramatic the apparent motion. The paper is careful not to overreach: "Not all reports of fast-moving UAP are attributable to the effects of forced perspective or parallax." Single-observer reports, it notes, "are critical to consider in AARO analyses" and can supplement sensor data to build a more complete picture. The caveat is real, but the overall thrust is clear — a significant portion of reports describing anomalous speed or size can be explained by these well-understood effects.
"stationary objects can appear to have motion, and slow-moving objects can appear to move very fast."
The second paper, Correlations of Starlink Satellite Flaring with UAP Observations (December 2024), addresses a more recent and rapidly expanding problem. As of late November 2024, AARO counts more than 6,700 Starlink satellites in orbit, with tens of thousands more planned across constellations operated by SpaceX, Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, and China's G60 program. The paper distinguishes between two types of reflection: diffuse reflection from rough surfaces, which can make satellites appear as moving stars visible for several minutes, and specular reflection — glint — from smooth surfaces, which produces brief, intensely bright flashes. Those flashes, the paper states, "can be interpreted as unidentified anomalous phenomena." It provides a practical method for observers to check whether a sighting correlates with satellite position using publicly available tools, including the tracking site heavens-above.com.
The declassification paper, AARO and the Declassification Process (September 2025), is the most institutionally revealing of the four. It opens with a notable bureaucratic detail: the document identifies AARO as "the U.S. Department of War office established to investigate and resolve report of unidentified anomalous phenomena." The use of "Department of War" — the pre-1947 name for what became the Department of Defense — appears to be a drafting artifact rather than an intentional signal, but it is present in the released text and warrants noting.
On substance, the paper explains why AARO cannot unilaterally release most of what it reviews. Classification authority in the U.S. government rests with the originating office — not with the entity that later accesses the information. Since AARO pulls data from systems owned by the Military Departments and other agencies, it must work with those owners to seek declassification case by case. The paper uses a concrete example: an image of an ordinary soda can captured by an F-35's camera could remain classified not because of the can, but because releasing the raw image might reveal the resolution, metadata, or other technical parameters of the fighter's sensors — information an adversary could use to understand how to evade detection. The same logic applies to UAP imagery: "UAP imagery is often classified to protect sensitive information associated with the platform, location, or methods used to capture it." And crucially, "even when AARO resolves a case as unremarkable, the underlying data may remain classified if it originates or is derived from sensitive sources or methods."
The paper states flatly that "AARO has found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings or technology to date," while also acknowledging the office "considers all available evidence in conducting its analyses." The paper includes a screenshot from the video known as "the jellyfish video," which depicts footage taken at Al Taqaddum and is available publicly on the DVIDS platform.
The fourth document is a synthesis report from a government-sponsored workshop: 2025 UAP Workshop: Narrative Data, Infrastructures, and Analysis, dated August 5–6, 2025, and organized by Associated Universities, Inc. under AARO sponsorship. Forty participants from government, academia, and independent research organizations attended. The document was cleared for open publication by the DoD Office of Prepublication and Security Review on February 11, 2026.
The workshop's conclusions are more diagnostic than prescriptive. "Most UAP reports are fragmented, sparse, and unstructured," the report states, "ranging from military logs and pilot reports to archival records, social media posts, and civilian testimony." Reports typically lack standardized metadata. Integrating data across military databases, civilian reporting systems, archival records, and social media "poses significant challenges for harmonization and verification of data and construction of evidence."
On artificial intelligence, the workshop was cautiously optimistic but explicit about the risks. AI and machine learning tools "offer capacity for transcription, triage, clustering, and semantic search, but they must be deployed cautiously to avoid hallucination, bias, and amplification of hoaxes." The group's recommended next steps include establishing common metadata templates, combining human expertise with AI tools, improving reporting interfaces, and prioritizing collection of new high-quality reports while integrating historical data. The report notes that "UAP narrative data may influence how and where technical sensors are deployed" — a quiet acknowledgment that the messy qualitative record isn't just a documentation problem, it has operational implications.
Context, connections, and what remains unresolved
These four papers connect directly to the broader body of government UAP work this publication has tracked. The NASA UAP Independent Study Team — whose May 2023 public meeting agenda and September 2023 final report are part of the public record — reached similar conclusions about data quality. The UAPIST report found that "analysis of UAP data is hampered by poor sensor calibration, the lack of multiple measurements, the lack of sensor metadata, and the lack of baseline data," and recommended NASA leverage the Aviation Safety Reporting System, which it administers for the FAA and which receives roughly 100,000 reports per year, as a structured channel for pilot UAP reporting. The 2025 workshop's findings echo this: the infrastructure problem hasn't been solved in the two years since NASA's panel flagged it.
The NASA report also identified reporting stigma as a data loss problem — a conclusion the new AARO workshop document implicitly endorses by recommending improved reporting interfaces and community trust-building. There is a minor tension worth noting: AARO's declassification paper emphasizes transparency while simultaneously explaining, in structural terms, why most of what AARO reviews cannot be made public regardless of AARO's intentions. The office says it "places a heavy emphasis on transparency," but the classification architecture it describes is one in which transparency is largely dependent on the cooperation of other agencies over which AARO has no authority.
The identification of AARO as a "Department of War" office in the September 2025 declassification paper is a factual anomaly — the Department of War was abolished in 1947 and succeeded by the Department of Defense — and should not be read as meaningful. It is the kind of editing error that survives prepublication review.
What these papers don't answer is the harder question underlying all of it: whether the small percentage of UAP reports that remain unexplained after AARO's review represent genuine measurement or observation gaps, or something more. AARO's position — no evidence of extraterrestrial technology, but cases that resist resolution — has been consistent. The workshop's conclusion that the data infrastructure is still inadequate for rigorous analysis is, if anything, a reason to hold that position lightly in both directions. A system that can't reliably collect, standardize, or cross-reference its own reports cannot confidently rule much in or out.
The 2025 workshop report recommends convening more expert groups and building toward a "community of practice" for UAP research. Whether that ambition translates into funded infrastructure, or remains a set of recommendations waiting for the next workshop, the documents don't say.