A tourist photograph of someone pinching the top of the Eiffel Tower between two fingers works because the camera sits close to the hand and far from the tower. Move the camera a few feet and the illusion falls apart. That ordinary trick of distance and angle turned out to be the starting point for a short paper the Pentagon’s UAP office posted online in May 2024, arguing that some of the more startling size and speed estimates in its files might come from the same optical mechanics, not from anything performing beyond the laws of physics.
The Document
On May 8, 2024, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the Department of Defense unit that investigates reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, posted a short paper through its official X account, then known as @DoD_AARO. Its title is exact and unglamorous: “Effect of Forced Perspective and Parallax View on UAP Observations.” The PDF header dates it to May 2024. The Black Vault, the public-records site run by journalist John Greenewald, summarized the release the same day.
There is no case number on the document, no classification marking, and no reference to a specific incident file. It reads as a general information paper, the kind an office writes to explain a method rather than to close a case.
What the Paper Says
The paper opens by conceding its own limits: “While no single explanation or method of analysis can account for all unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) cases received by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the effects of forced perspective and parallax can frequently explain excessively large sizes or high speeds described in UAP reports.”
Forced perspective, it explains, is a shift in an object’s apparent size depending on where it sits relative to something used as a reference point, the same principle behind photographs of tourists appearing to hold up the Eiffel Tower or prop up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A distant object can look smaller and closer than it really is, or the reverse: something nearby can look larger and farther off.
Parallax works differently. It is the apparent motion of an object that is not actually moving, produced by movement of the observer. The paper describes the object appearing to be “projected” against different points in the background as the viewer’s position changes, creating an illusion of motion where none exists. Neither definition is illustrated with a photograph, a video, or a case file. Both stand alone, backed only by the tourist analogy and a labeled figure.
How Far AARO Takes It
AARO extends the argument past human eyewitnesses to instruments. The same parallax effect, the paper states, applies to electronic sensors on airborne platforms: when a moving aircraft’s sensor sweeps past a stationary object, that object can appear to be moving, and the illusion grows stronger as the platform’s own speed increases.
The paper stops short of dismissing single-observer reports outright. It states that such reports remain useful to AARO’s analysis, since they can be checked against additional sensor data to build a fuller picture of an object’s size and speed. It closes with a qualifier of its own: “Not all reports of fast-moving UAP are attributable to the effects of forced perspective or parallax. However, in some cases, the effects of these phenomena are known to cause inaccurate estimations of a UAP’s size, speed, and direction of travel.” That is a bounded claim: common and plausible, not universal.
What Is Missing
Nowhere in the paper is a named case reinterpreted using this framework. No incident report is walked through, no video is timestamped and reanalyzed, no witness account is cited and corrected. The document gives no percentage, count, or estimate of how much of AARO’s caseload these two effects might explain, only the word “frequently.” It also does not describe a method for deciding, case by case, whether forced perspective or parallax, rather than something else entirely, accounts for a given report.
None of this is evidence of concealment. It is a description of the document as it exists: a mechanism, stated in general terms, with no worked example attached to it.
The Shape of the Silence
AARO’s own 2024 annual report describes this paper as one of several educational pieces produced by its science and technology directorate, alongside material on satellite flare and other sensor artifacts. That framing suggests the office was building a small public library of explanations rather than resolving one report, which would make the silence on specific cases simply a matter of genre: an explainer, not a case file.
There is at least one later data point outside the document itself. AARO’s director, Jon Kosloski, has since described using a similar analysis, built on trigonometry, to account for a widely circulated video known as “GoFast,” telling reporters that the office had published a detailed paper on parallax so that the public could “literally check our math on this analysis.” That remark ties this paper to a specific case, but it does so in a spoken comment made afterward, not in the document, which never mentions GoFast or any other incident by name.
Whether the May 2024 paper was written as a standalone education piece, a preface to case findings released elsewhere, or a quiet answer to one report AARO chose not to name, the text does not say. It is complete as a document and open as an explanation, and the record, as posted, stops there.
Notes on what was checked: no subject–verb agreement errors found; article usage correct; verb tenses consistent (present tense for document content, past tense for events, present perfect for Kosloski’s ongoing description); homophones (its/it’s) correctly used throughout; spelling consistent American English (“summarized,” not mixed with British forms); punctuation and quotation marks matched and consistent; capitalization of proper nouns (AARO, Eiffel Tower, Leaning Tower of Pisa, GoFast, Jon Kosloski) correct. No relative-to-today time references were present, all dates are already absolute (May 8, 2024; May 2024), so no changes were needed there.