PA-AARO RoundTableTranscript 11-15-24 (FOIA 25-F-3931)

The fundamental issue is that AARO receives cases from our partners. And in most cases, to
date, because we've been working through the services, those partners are providing data that
is gathered from sensitive platforms. And we need to make sure that we are protecting sensitive
sources and methods not introducing vulnerabilities to their operations.
So even though that there's nothing inherently classified about the existence of a UAP, we have
to protect that information. When AARO receives those interesting cases, the cases that we're
just briefly talking about, we try to identify if the UAP information can be isolated from the
sensitive -- usually it's metadata that identifies characteristics of the platform.
And we work to downgrade that material as much as we can. But we can't do it unilaterally. It
has to be in partnership with the folks that brought that information. That is a very deliberate
process, as you can imagine, to make sure that we're not releasing sensitive information. So we
have taken significant steps to speed that up. We've hired a number of declassification experts.
We're going to be hosting a declassification workshop, so we can make sure we're implementing
best practices from across the DOD and the IC. All of that takes more time than I think the
public would like for it to take, but AARO is working on it. We recognize that the types of cases
that I was just talking about are, from my perspective, true anomalies.
And we're going to need significant scientific rigor to address those. And yes, the U.S.
government has a lot of nice scientists, little bias there, but we're going to need the help of
academia and the public to address some of these so we need to build that more transparent
partnership.
Q: And just to follow-up sort of on the flip side, you know, is there any -- as you look at cases to
release for example, you talked about how at least one of the interesting ones is sort of
ongoing. Is there a world where you hold back release out of fear of drawing more reports, you
know, sort of drawing attention to a location and getting copycats or you know what have you
sort of muddying the data?
DR. KOSLOSKI: Yes, so that concern has been raised to us. Because bad data in gets bad analysis
out. However, no data in gets no analysis out. And so, being an NSA guy, I'm a firm believer in
big data is going to lead to better conclusions. And I would rather have to filter out some of
those copycat cases but have more substantive data. If we're looking for a needle in a haystack,
I'd rather have multiple haystacks to go digging through rather than just one.
Q: Thank you.
STAFF: Brandi.
Q: Just one quick follow up.