Summary
A deeper companion to src-uap-aaro-research-workshop-2025. aaro published a ~17-page whitepaper titled “2025 UAP Workshop: Narrative Data, Infrastructures, and Analysis” in early 2026 summarizing an August 5–6, 2025 invite-only workshop of ~40 attendees organized by Associated Universities Inc.. This source adds material not in the DefenseScoop original reveal: IRB governance, the named AUI organizers (Gretchen Stahlman, Tim Souck), the full roster of participating organizations (nuforc, scu, galileo-project, uapx, National Archives), named speakers including jon-kosloski and robert-powell, a corpus-vs-narrative analytical framing, and specific data-collection field recommendations for witness reports. The story was broken by brandi-vincent at DefenseScoop on 2026-03-16.
Participating Organizations
- nuforc — National UFO Reporting Center
- scu — Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies
- galileo-project
- uapx
- National Archives
- aui (host / organizer)
- Academic ML / statistics researchers
- AARO personnel
Named Speakers
- jon-kosloski (AARO Director) — opening remarks
- robert-powell (scu) — keynote on standardized, verifiable data
- Christian Stepien (NUFORC CTO) — Day 2 presentation on NUFORC history; panelist on qualitative-vs-quantitative harmonization
- Gretchen Stahlman (aui) — moderator
Key Claims (attributed to the whitepaper via secondary coverage)
- Per the whitepaper (via DefenseScoop): “effective progress requires clear standards and common reporting templates, with robust metadata” capturing time, location, provenance, morphology, and environmental context. Reports today arrive from “military logs, pilot records, civilian testimony, and social media — none of it formatted in a way that allows for meaningful comparison.”
- Per the whitepaper (via The Debrief): linking military and civilian datasets “must balance interoperability with privacy, ethical, and classification constraints.”
- Credibility is “best assessed through corroboration,” but manual assessment does not scale to AARO’s 2,000+ case backlog.
- Endorsed a “hybrid human-AI model with human oversight” for transcription, clustering, and pattern detection.
- Distinguishes corpus-level methods (clustering, keyword trends, graph analysis — for pattern detection) from narrative/experiential methods (phenomenology, discourse analysis — for preserving witness meaning), concluding “UAP narratives cannot be reduced to a single analytic approach.”
- Specific field recommendations for witness reports (via The Debrief / DefenseScoop): ask witnesses how they estimated size / distance / speed; record recurrence of similar sightings; record approximate witness counts rather than yes/no; include a field for whether the object reacted to observer presence.
- Workshop findings “may influence how and where technical sensors are deployed” — narrative-data patterns may drive sensor placement.
Notable Quote
“The central role that standardized, verifiable data plays in advancing our collective understanding of UAP phenomena.” — Robert Powell (SCU), keynote (as reported by DefenseScoop)