A Shallow Narrative for a Complex Topic
Cognitive tolerance, UAP databases, and marketing your podcast's UAP episode in time for Disclosure Day.
UAP are rapidly moving into pop culture news space, and podcasters who haven’t seriously covered the topic are bringing on the most public-facing UAP personalities. These personalities bring a compressed, limited view of the phenomenon, which is something to be expected from the format. Podcasts and popular media tee up UAP for a coordinated media push that might come from the White House, or might not. Either way, the topic is becoming more digestible for the public, which would make an executive disclosure more consequential.
This episode of The Diary of a CEO may be the most mainstream and popular example about UAP, while still pushing some new informational value. Surprisingly, film director Dan Farah, and physicist Hal Puthoff bring up some critical cases in the interview that rarely get mentioned in any depth in mainstream coverage.
Farah speaks about the 2008 Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Applications Program. It’s hard to overstate how important this is for the topic today. Despite it’s relevance to today’s understanding of UAP, AAWSAP has rarely been mentioned. It was left out of The Age of Disclosure and all of the four congressional hearings on UAP from 2022-2025. Much of the questions we have about UAP today have been researched by this program. AAWSAP’s databases have thousands of cases from all over the world with enormous amounts of hard data on UAP, both from historical cases and their own investigations. There’s no question that Robert Bigelow has an incredible depth of knowledge on the topic, yet Congress hasn’t asked about him. Sure, AAWSAP was only revealed in 2022, but somehow, despite having both merit and compelling cases, it hasn’t received the attention it could have had. That being said, it’s a good sign that AAWSAP is being brought into a mainstream channel. Better late than never.
“The Photo Question”. Farah and Puthoff don’t give a compelling answer for the critical question of why we don’t have high-clarity UAP photos today, despite having billions of cameras at the ready 24/7. They mention classified secrecy, signature management, and the fact that an advanced intelligent species would not be seen if it didn’t want to be seen. I believe these are all real parts of the phenomenon, but they are rather unsatisfying responses to the photo question. This question of “why aren’t they photographed more” requires a layered and nuanced answer. I believe many people’s engagement in the UAP subject rests on how they interpret “the photo question” (as a photographer and VFX professional, I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I’m limiting the scope for this article).
Propaganda, Straight Up
There is a coordinated UAP narrative currently being executed today in the American mainstream media. If I was directing a news segment according to this framework, I would stick to these principles.
Legitimize the topic of UAP by government officials and pilots over all other sources.
Legitimize UAP through authoritative sources rather than scientific sources (DoD and White House authority instead of NASA, SETI, NSF).
Frame UAP not as a potential scientific discovery for the world, but as a national security problem to be solved.
Use the language of national security. Security is a language that Americans can understand. We’ve been through 9/11 and seen how the Pentagon spends money, and accept that it is all status quo- money follows defense. UAP as advanced aerial vehicles justifies credibility and attention. A potential threat gets investigated. A non-threat deserves no investigation.
Don’t mention the long history of abduction cases or cases that involve the “less scientifically and cognitively tolerable” elements like poltergeist activity, creature sightings, hitchhikers, portals, and other phenomena observed at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, despite all of it being explicitly studied and mentioned in AAWSAP documentation.
A Note on Scientific and Cognitive Tolerability
People like shortcuts. We are more comfortable with certainty, and we actively filter information that doesn’t fit into our worldview. We all have limited energy to entertain thoughts of things that may be true and claims from people who potentially could be lying. This is normal.
Many people have little tolerance for reading about potential alien life as non-fiction, and they have their own reasons for it (culture sensibilities, religion, etc). What is important to understand, is that this tolerance is initially built not by the individual, but by the individual’s environment- their social circles, their trusted news sources, their friends, family, and sources that teach them new things. If all of your friends spoke freely about UAP, you would find it less scary and more tolerable, just as you would if you all talked about the price of gasoline, the latest Netflix series, or how you were dealing with masking during the covid pandemic. When both the mainstream and alternative media do this, the topic is exposed and people become more open to newer, deeper, and potentially more accurate discussions of UAP. Less stigma means more possibility for truth. You can’t solve a problem you can’t talk about.
But, obviously, open discussion does not inherently bring truth.
If people only discuss UAP in the framing of curated government messaging, they will believe that’s where the phenomena starts and ends. Everything outside the bounds of that narrative will potentially be sorted into noise rather than signal. Outside narratives will feel like uncertainty, and as we know, we often run away from uncertainty to more solid ground.
If all we hear about are military and intelligence related cases of UAP, civilian studies like the databases of NUFORC, CUFOS, and international studies, as those done by GEIPAN and the Australian Joint Intelligence Organization document (one of the most critical pieces of context for the topic) will be left out of the conversation, and the public understanding will be weak and vulnerable to authoritative suggestion and policy.
Today, our clearest precedent is the Epstein files. Many people are primarily exposed to this topic through the mainstream news, and their main body of evidence to cite is the collection of documents released by the Department of Justice, a body that is protecting the president and has a clear conflict of interest. Regarding the Epstein Files, the DoJ narrative is inherently misaligned and incomplete, yet they have the institutional platform to define it for millions of Americans. They provide the shortest path to that solid-ground sense of certainty. “Trust your custodians of justice. There is nothing to see here, and the President did nothing wrong. If there was, we would be doing something about it”. It’s no different with the UAP situation, except instead of the Department of Justice, it’s the Department of Defense.
The subject isn’t going away anytime soon. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is coming out June 12, 2026, and that date is a boon to anyone talking about UAP. Podcasts and media networks who have rarely covered the topic will do a UAP episode just to stay relevant and boost their SEO.
Expect to hear more, not less about UAP in 2026 from the mainstream media, and consider sharing UAP Status with the people in your life.