Four recently published documents from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office — cleared by the Department of Defense's Office of Prepublication and Security Review — offer the most granular official account to date of how AARO understands the mundane causes of many UAP reports, why most underlying case data remains classified even after a case is resolved, and what a May 2025 government-sponsored workshop concluded about the sorry state of UAP narrative data. Taken together, they constitute a methodological self-portrait of the office: what tools it has, what authorities it lacks, and where it believes the scientific community needs to build infrastructure from scratch.
What the Documents Say
On optical misidentification: forced perspective and satellite flaring
The earliest of the four papers, dated May 2024, is titled Effect of Forced Perspective and Parallax View on UAP Observations. It opens with a statement that sets the paper's scope carefully: "While no single explanation or method of analysis can account for all unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) cases received by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the effects of forced perspective and parallax can frequently explain excessively large sizes or high speeds described in UAP reports."
The paper walks through both phenomena in plain terms. Forced perspective — the same optical trick used in tourist photographs of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which the document notes stands approximately 190 feet tall — distorts perceived size when objects at very different distances share a frame. Applied to airborne UAP observations, the paper argues that observers routinely misjudge an object's actual dimensions because they lack a reliable reference point. "Accurately estimating an object's size and distance without a known reference is difficult," the paper states, particularly for objects with no discernible surface features such as windows, propellers, or wings.
"Accurately estimating an object's size and distance without a known reference is difficult"
The parallax section is more consequential for the existing body of UAP video evidence. The paper explains that as an airborne sensor platform moves, a stationary object appears to shift position against the background — and the faster the sensor moves, "the higher the perceived speed of the object." A worked diagram shows an observer traversing three positions above a river: a stationary object suspended above the water appears to cross from one bank to the other entirely because of the changing projection angle. "Because of parallax, stationary objects can appear to have motion, and slow-moving objects can appear to move very fast."
The paper stops well short of claiming these effects explain all UAP reports. "Not all reports of fast-moving UAP are attributable to the effects of forced perspective or parallax," it states explicitly. And it notes that "single-observer reports are critical to consider in AARO analyses" even given their susceptibility to these distortions, because they can supplement multi-sensor data to build a more complete picture.
The companion paper on satellite flaring, dated December 2024 and titled Correlations of Starlink Satellite Flaring with UAP Observations, addresses a newer and rapidly growing source of misidentification. With over 6,700 Starlink satellites in orbit as of late November 2024 — part of a broader LEO population the paper puts at nearly 10,000 across all operators, including Eutelsat OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper, and Chinese G60 constellations — the paper documents how both diffuse and specular reflection of sunlight can produce UAP-consistent visual signatures. Specular reflection, or glint, occurs from smooth mirror-like surfaces and produces brief, extremely bright flashes; diffuse reflection from rougher surfaces produces a dimmer but longer-duration glow comparable to starlight. "The effects of specular and diffuse reflection from man-made satellites can be interpreted as unidentified anomalous phenomena," the paper states. It provides a method for observers to cross-reference observations against publicly available satellite tracking tools, citing heavens-above.com as one resource.
On declassification: what AARO cannot do on its own
The September 2025 paper AARO and the Declassification Process addresses a question that has generated considerable public frustration: why does AARO routinely decline to release imagery or data from cases it has already resolved as unremarkable?
The paper's answer is structural. "AARO cannot declassify information on its own because the classified information relevant to the UAP reports was created by other government entities outside of AARO — for example, the Military Departments. The office that originally created the information has the primary authority to declassify it."
This means that even a case AARO has closed — a balloon, a bird, a commercial drone — may involve sensor data that remains classified because of what it reveals about the platform that collected it, not about the object being observed. The paper illustrates this with a hypothetical: an F-35 pilot photographing a soda can produces an image that could be classified not because of the soda can, but because "the raw image may include information about the resolution, metadata, or other sensitive information that could be used to deduce that camera's capabilities and limitations."
The paper reiterates AARO's standing finding: "AARO has found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings or technology to date." It also describes UAP in characteristically measured terms — "as-yet-unknown objects that exhibit potentially anomalous characteristics" — while noting that "the vast majority of UAP reports are eventually determined to be mundane objects — such as balloons, satellites, and birds — after further review."
One notable textual anomaly: the paper refers to AARO as "the U.S. Department of War office," an archaic designation that does not reflect the office's actual institutional home within the Department of Defense. Whether this represents a drafting error or an intentional anachronism the document does not explain, and it stands as written.
On data infrastructure: the 2025 workshop findings
The most forward-looking of the four papers synthesizes findings from a two-day workshop held August 5–6, 2025, co-organized by AARO and Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI). The event drew 40 participants from government, academia, and independent research organizations. Its subject was narrow but important: how to handle UAP narrative data — the written reports, interview transcripts, archival records, and social media posts that constitute the bulk of the historical record but resist the kind of quantitative analysis more easily applied to sensor data.
The workshop's diagnosis is blunt. "Most UAP reports are fragmented, sparse, and unstructured, ranging from military logs and pilot reports to archival records, social media posts, and civilian testimony." The paper identifies the absence of standardized metadata as the foundational problem: without consistent fields capturing time, location, provenance, morphology, and context, reports from different sources cannot be meaningfully compared or aggregated.
The workshop participants identified artificial intelligence and machine learning as potentially valuable tools for transcription, triage, clustering, and semantic search across large unstructured datasets — but the paper is 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. Human oversight and iterative workflows remain essential."
The paper's recommended next steps are concrete: establish standard metadata templates; develop automated methods to filter reports and surface the most promising for investigation; link military and civilian datasets while navigating privacy, ethical, and classification constraints; and invest in community engagement to build a sustainable "community of practice" for UAP research. It also notes that narrative data analysis is not merely a secondary effort — the workshop concluded that "UAP narrative data may influence how and where technical sensors are deployed," suggesting that improving the quality of written reports has operational as well as archival value.
Connection to the NASA independent study team
The fifth and sixth source documents in this release are an agenda and final report from the NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team's public meeting, held May 31, 2023. Dr. Karlin Toner, a Federal Aviation Administration researcher who presented on "Reporting Challenges" at that meeting, also served as a member of the 16-person study team — one of the connections linking the NASA effort directly to the government agencies that feed AARO's intake pipeline.
The NASA team's final report, which preceded these AARO papers, reached conclusions that the AARO documents now echo and in some cases operationalize. The NASA team 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" — the same diagnostic the 2025 workshop paper makes the centerpiece of its recommendations. The NASA report also proposed that the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), which NASA administers for the FAA and which receives approximately 100,000 reports per year, could serve as a vehicle for commercial pilot UAP reporting — a specific, actionable recommendation that the more recent AARO workshop paper's call for improved civilian reporting interfaces implicitly extends.
The NASA team included then-AARO Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick as a presenter at the May 2023 public meeting, alongside FAA Air Traffic Surveillance Services Office representative Mr. Mike Freie. That institutional lineup — NASA, AARO, and FAA in the same room — reflects the whole-of-government framework both organizations publicly endorse, though the precise division of responsibilities between them has not been fully resolved in any of the documents reviewed here.
Why It Matters
These papers do not break new ground on the central question — whether any UAP represent non-human technology — and they do not claim to. What they do is define the institutional and methodological perimeter within which that question is being officially investigated.
The declassification paper confirms something researchers and journalists covering AARO have long suspected: the office's transparency commitments are real but structurally limited. AARO can advocate for declassification; it cannot compel it. Cases that AARO closes as unremarkable may remain opaque to the public indefinitely, not because AARO is withholding its conclusions but because the underlying sensor data belongs to agencies with separate equities and separate timelines.
The optical phenomena papers — on forced perspective and satellite flaring — represent the most technically detailed public accounting AARO has produced of the mundane explanations it applies to the majority of its caseload. Both papers are careful to acknowledge their own limits: forced perspective and parallax do not explain every case; satellite flaring is a method for observers to check, not a blanket dismissal. That rhetorical caution is consistent with AARO's stated position that a small percentage of UAP reports remain genuinely unresolved.
The 2025 workshop paper is the most significant of the four for anyone tracking the long-term scientific trajectory of UAP research. Its finding that the data infrastructure required for serious analysis essentially does not yet exist — no standard metadata, no unified reporting interface, no validated method for linking military and civilian records — puts a sharp point on the gap between the ambition of whole-of-government UAP investigation and its current operational reality. The paper's endorsement of AI tools is paired with unusually direct caution about their misuse: the specific phrase "amplification of hoaxes" appears in the executive summary, a concern not often stated this plainly in official government documents.
What none of these papers address is the ongoing tension between AARO's stated mandate — receiving, processing, and adjudicating UAP reports — and the claims of former government personnel who assert that significant UAP-related programs and materials exist outside AARO's current access. That question remains open, and these documents do not close it.