Documents / Official release
This information paper from the Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is dated December 2024 and was released in full in February 2025. It explains how sunlight reflecting off Starlink and other low Earth orbit satellites produces bright flares and satellite trains that observers can mistake for UAP. It gives step-by-step methods for predicting flare windows from the ground and from aircraft. It concludes that lights reported by an airline pilot near Gallup, New Mexico, in October 2022 were very likely satellite flares.
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) 11 Figure 12: Images taken by AARO personnel near Sidney, NE after sunset on March 10, 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. The LOS distance can be found using the Pythagorean theorem as: 𝑅𝐿𝑂𝑆 = √(𝑅𝐸 + ℎ𝐴𝐿𝑇)2 − 𝑅𝐸 2 (2)027Page determined to be Unclassified Reviewed by Chief of Staff, AARO IAW FY24 NDAA, Section 1841(a)(1)(C) Date: 2/14/2025
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Official release, from the nara collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 18 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.