Introduction: How to Sell a UFO (Narrative)
After four years of fascination with the topic of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena- I started UAP Status. The idea came to me in after discussing with a friend how to talk about the topic to our circles. Congress had been holding hearings about pilot sightings and government secrecy around the subject a few years prior. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was in session talking about his proposed UAP Disclosure Act, an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that directly asserted that UAP exist, and recovered technology of unknown origin should be disclosed to the public. Crazy. Absolutely nuts. I wanted to share the idea and gather opinions, but the topic has so much stigma around it.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the UAP Disclosure Act- 1 minute
Credibility was key. I wanted to differentiate myself from the clickbait and ancient aliens. I would ONLY share clips from witness sworn testimony from the recent hearings. The idea was to completely remove the sensationalism and “woo” to attract the smart, curious people who are normally turned off of the subject. I got enough positive feedback from the group I was part of, and I started an Instagram account and YouTube channel titled UAP Status. Today the channels are still small, but they contain one of the most easily accessible and coherent collections of Congressional testimony about UAP that include over 50 short videos from four hearings between 2022 and 2025. Below are some of these clips.
Reports of Non-Human Biologics with Recovered Craft- 1 minute
UFO Flight Characteristics from the 2004 Nimitz Carrier sighting- 1 minute
2012 Massive Flying Triangle Sighting Above Langley AFB- 3 minutes
Missing FAA Process for Reporting UAP- 45 seconds
The past few years have seen the topic explode. Mainstream exposure of UAP is no longer consigned to the History channel and The Joe Rogan Experience.
Seeing the everything discussed by Congress feels pretty weird, but it’s also kind of refreshing to see it be bipartisan. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was asking about what the FAA can do better to facilitate better UAP reporting. Nancy Mace was asking the reputationally scary (but absolutely necessary) questions about alien bodies. Today, the UAP topic is just as much about government transparency as it is about aliens and flying saucers.
Four Congressional Hearings about UAP
Links to Full Coverage of the Hearings
Over the four hearings, patterns emerged. We got a glimpse of what departments are involved with the UAP topic. We saw how unprepared and uninformed the intelligence community was. UFOs are disabling nuclear weapons in their silos? Never heard of it! We saw the stated reasons for secrecy (national security) and desire to release decades of data. Every hearing brought one more witness than the last. There was a real curiosity and concern that congress was being kept out of important decisions regarding advanced programs and exotic tech. This was how the government publicly acknowledged the existence of UAP.
Currently, the organization responsible for UFOs in the US is the All-Domain Resolution Office (AARO), which was established in 2022. Unfortunately, AARO has misrepresented the history of the subject, and has not been fully trusted by House Oversight subcommittee members and even witnesses on the panel. For reference, AARO falls under the DoD and specifically the office of the Secretary of Defense, so calibrate your expectations accordingly.
The Debrief: AARO’s Historical Report: A Tale of Factual Errors and Old Mistakes Repeated
The Hill: Pentagon’s flawed UFO report demands congressional action
“The universe is changing” / “Our life is what our thoughts make it”
Ironically, AARO’s reports still remain at Level 1 on the UAP scale, despite most of the Congressional committees witnesses are at Level 3 and beyond.
Measuring the Level of Discourse
The UAP Scale has 5 levels that indicate the level of depth, conspiracy, and how far someone is willing to seriously engage with the topic, from acknowledging that UFOs are legitimate phenomena worth investigating, to characterizing non-human intelligence in relation to humans. The scale prioritizes convenience over strict accuracy, and I built it to easily categorize and tag clips on my media channels.
Below are details on each level of the UAP Scale.
The scale is inspired by J. Allen Hynek’s categories of close encounters. Close Encounters of the First Kind were UFO sightings hundreds of feet away. The Second Kind displayed tangible evidence like marks left on vegetation or adverse health effects on witnesses. The Third Kind involved reports of witnesses seeing the UFO “occupants”, either inside or outside of the craft.
The 1968 UFO Hearings
Before 2022, the last time the House of Representatives had an on-the-record conversation about UFOs was in 1968, with the Committee on Science and Astronautics. Carl Sagan joined five other scientists of different disciplines to give statements on the situation. One of them, UC Berkeley civil engineering professor James A. Harder cited a 1953 report from another scientist, a chemist who witnessed a UFO while wearing polarized glasses and saw dark rings around the craft as it flew, giving a potential clue to its propulsion capabilities. Below is a quote from Harding about the sighting.
Mr. Wells Allen Webb, an applied chemist with a master of science degree from the University of California, was 1 mile north of Spain Flying Field, 7 miles east of Yuma, Ariz., just off U.S. Highway No. 80, when his attention was drawn to the sky to the north by some low-flying jet aircraft. Then he noticed a small white cloud-like object in an otherwise cloudless sky. He watched for about 5 minutes as it traveled eastward; as it reached a spot north-northeast of his location, it abruptly altered shape from being oblong and subtending about half the angle of the full moon—about 15 minutes of arc—to be circular and subtending about 5 minutes of arc. Webb was wearing polaroid glasses and noted that there appeared around the object a series of dark rings, the outermost of which was about six times the diameter of the central white or silvery object, or about the diameter of the full moon. The object or cloud then decreased in apparent diameter, as if it were traveling away from him, and disappeared in another few minutes. During this time Webb repeatedly took off his glasses and then put them back on, noting each time that the rings appeared only when he was wearing the glasses.
Transcript of the Full Hearing
NICAP Report on the 1953 Yuma Arizona Sighting
1968 was another period where UFOs made the news and the government brought on experts to testify. The full transcript contains dozens of other reports of separate incidents and scientific explanations. Among the experts who testified, all of them believed that the phenomenon was real and warranted further study.
Suddenly, UFOs are Mainstream
While the topic has been popular for decades, there is a noticeable crescendo that is still happening today. Mainstream shows that have never seriously covered UFOs are doing so. The Age of Disclosure documentary has been marketed relentlessly (see my review here) as an authoritative source. Spielberg’s next film coming in 2026 has been working under the title Disclosure. Below are just a few examples of modern mainstream talk show coverage of UFOs.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver- UFOs- 2024
Overtime with Bill Maher: The Age of Disclosure- 2025
Bill Clinton Teases Area 51 Secrecy, Invisibility, and John Podesta's Interest
Jimmy Kimmel Asks President Obama about Aliens
Presidents have interview questions approved in advance when they appear on shows. Is there a script being followed, or a message being tested? Do we want to have this conversation in this moment of historically low trust in government? Or is that the point?
Before I started following the UFO topic in 2021, my fascination was the business models and incentives of social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as their effects on attention spans, anxiety, and the externalities that resulted from them. Optimization for time-on-device, and incentivized addictive patterns have changed the way we communicate. At scale, social media is strategically used to sow division, promote propaganda, and directly influence voters.
The Center for Humane Technology’s Ledger of Harms- A collection of the invisible cost on young and old minds from years of social media.
Why is a special interest documentary about UFOs being advertised on ABC, CNN, FOX, and Joe Rogan's podcast? Are UAP a threat? Are they classified human tech from Lockheed Martin or not? This is the intersection of government messaging and UAP. Like any other issue, the US government will only show you the parts it wants you to see. No, the skeletons in the closet will not be televised.
There is a widely accepted idea in social media and advertising that if you receive the product for free, then you are somebody else’s product. If that’s true here, then what kind of product are we? Who is the buyer? Why is the public slowly being included into decades long secrets of UFOs? This question is exactly what I will be answering with future posts on UAP Status.
(and if you made it all the way here, thank you for your early support!)