Documents / Report
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office issued this information paper in December 2024 on how sunlight reflecting off Starlink and other Low Earth Orbit satellites can be mistaken for UAP. It explains the difference between diffuse and specular reflection, Starlink trains, and flares, and it gives a step-by-step method for predicting flare windows. The method is shown with AARO photographs taken near Sidney, Nebraska, and applied to a 2022 airline pilot report near Gallup, New Mexico. AARO concluded that the lights in that report were very likely satellite flares.
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) 12 Figure 13: Images taken by AARO personnel near Sidney, NE before sunrise on 11-MAR 2024. Note that the azimuth to the Starlink flares falls within the predicted angles in Table 2 at the time of image capture. Camera settings: [7]. Figure 14 shows the geometry of an airborne observer and two ground-based observers. The altitude of an airborne observer extends the Line-of-Sight (LOS) distance to the horizon as compared to a ground-based observer at the same latitude and longitude location, O1. For the airborne observer, this is equivalent to shifting their observation point by a distance d (the arc length) to align with a ground-based observer at position O2.
Report, from the aaro collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 19 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.