Documents / Report
This white paper, sponsored by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and hosted with Associated Universities, Inc. and Florida State University, synthesizes a workshop held August 5 and 6, 2025, that brought together 40 participants. The workshop examined how to collect, standardize, link and analyze UAP narrative reports. It calls for standard metadata templates, human oversight of AI tools, triage of reports, preservation of historical records, better public reporting portals and further workshops.
5 August 5, 2025 began with a plenary talk, followed by the first panel discussion, “Opportunities and challenges with AI”, and a second breakout session (“Pathways for data analysis and interpretation at scale”). Day 1 concluded with a brief whole group discussion. A workshop dinner was held at a restaurant near the workshop venue. Day 2 began with a second plenary talk and second panel discussion, “Harmonizing qualitative and quantitative perspectives on narrative data.” After lunch, a series of lightning talks were delivered by participants ahead of the final breakout session (“Cleaning, organizing and linking data: What can and should be done?”). Throughout the event, the organizing team collected notes that were later transcribed and anonymized. For each breakout session, moderators collected records, and notetakers were assigned to further ensure a robust record of the workshop proceedings. Breakout Discussion Summaries Prompts for each breakout session are included in Appendix D: Breakout Session Prompts. Breakout Session #1: Identifying, accessing, and integrating data sources [DAY 1] The first breakout session addressed central challenges of UAP research. Discussions revealed the scope of the UAP data landscape as a patchwork of historical case files, contemporary narrative reports, sensor-based data (radar, imagery, flight data), and environmental or contextual datasets (weather, astronomical, seismological). Participants expressed enthusiasm for the potential to link these disparate sources, but they also acknowledged the barriers posed by inconsistency in metadata, classification restrictions, missing or inaccessible records, and stigma around UAP reporting. Despite these challenges, groups converged on the outlook that with clear standards, prototype integration projects, and intentional collaboration across organizations, it is possible to create interoperable and sharable datasets that would enable more rigorous and scalable analysis of UAP reports. Breakout Session #2: Pathways for data analysis and interpretation at scale [DAY 1] The second breakout session explored methods and limitations for analyzing UAP narrative data. Across groups, participants grappled with the tension between extracting operationally useful signals and respecting the experiential, cultural, and historical richness embedded in reports. Overall, groups agreed that UAP narratives cannot be reduced to a single analytic approach. Corpus-level methods (time/space clustering, keyword trends, statistical correlation, graph analysis) are useful for pattern detection and hypothesis generation, while narrative/experiential methods (phenomenology, discourse analysis) are useful for preserving meaning, cultural context, and witness voices. Infrastructures should allow these modes to coexist. Breakout Session #3: Cleaning, organizing, and linking data: What can and should be done? [DAY 2] The third and final breakout activity analyzed the structure of a hypothetical online reporting form that has collected 1,000 UAP reports stored as PDF files to identify possibilities for data
Report, from the aaro collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 17 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.