FOIA Release Reveals Participants, Foreign Outreach, and Follow-On Plans Behind AARO's August 2025 Private UAP Workshop
Records released to The Black Vault under FOIA case 26-F-1773 provide the most detailed public accounting to date of AARO's invitation-only UAP research workshop held August 5–6, 2025, at Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), 2650 Park Tower Drive, Suite 700, Vienna, Virginia. The 91-page release, reported by John Greenewald on September 25, 2026, includes a working agenda naming speakers and panelists absent from AARO's published white paper, correspondence documenting a separate Pentagon engagement with Uruguay's official UAP commission (CRIDOVNI), and an internal reference to a planned follow-on workshop in early 2026 — written before the first event had occurred. The release adds institutional and personnel detail to what AARO's February 2026 white paper ("2025 UAP Workshop: Narrative Data, Infrastructures, and Analysis") had already disclosed about the workshop's methodological focus: standardizing narrative UAP data, linking disparate databases, and applying AI and machine learning to large datasets. AARO withheld 19 of 89 responsive pages in full under FOIA Exemption (b)(5) as deliberative inter- or intra-agency communications, and redacted portions of the remaining 70 pages. The records do not establish the identities of all 40 participants, the outcome of proposed CRIDOVNI collaboration, or whether the contemplated early-2026 follow-on workshop took place.