When hearing UFO news, following the UAP Congressional hearings, joining online communities, or talking to experiencers you may notice something. People are often speaking from their preferred worldview(s).
A retired aerospace engineer, a Jungian psychotherapist, a Lakota elder and a Pentagon analyst can all be looking at the same testimony, the same footage, the same reported encounter - and each will see something entirely different. Not because one is smarter or more informed than the others, but because each is looking through a different lens: a set of deep assumptions about what is real, how we can know, and what matters.
This is not a problem to be solved. It is a feature of the territory.
The following video is based on a guide to eight lenses or worldviews often encountered in UFO/UAP disclosure and discovery discourse:
Empirical Sceptic
National Security Realist
Extraterrestrial Literalist
Interdimensional Investigator
Consciousness Explorer
Depth Psychologist
Spiritual Interpreter
Indigenous Witness
Every lens catches something real.
Every lens also misses something real.
No lens is presented as superior. This is an invitation to intellectual honesty: to see your own default assumptions more clearly, to recognise what others are seeing that you might be missing, and to engage across difference with curiosity rather than contempt.
Surfacing your own dominant lens(s)
Four questions below are designed to surface assumptions you may hold without necessarily having chosen them. They may have been inherited from your education, profession, culture, or formative experiences.
What are your immediate responses to the following?
Q1. When a credible person reports an encounter with something non-human, what is your first instinct about what actually happened?
Q2. What counts as good evidence? What would it take to genuinely change your mind?
Q3. If non-human intelligence is real and present, what do you assume its relationship to humanity is – and why?
Q4. Who do you most distrust in this conversation, and why?
Hold your responses and feelings loosely as you consider these eight lenses. You may find yourself in more than one lens. Most people do. You may have a dominant lens.
Each of the eight lenses is used thoughtfully by people considering the phenomena.
The Empirical Sceptic has a valid point that rigour matters. The National Security Realist has a valid point that the strategic dimensions are real. The Consciousness Explorer has a valid point that experiential testimony is important data. The Indigenous Witness has a valid point that Western frameworks are not the only or most sophisticated ones available.
Treating any single lens as the whole picture may be the most reliable path to misunderstanding or over-estimating what is happening.
The eight lenses described above are examples. There are many others. New lenses are likely to emerge as the phenomenon reveals more of itself – and as we progress on our individual and collective journeys of experience and understanding.
The question is not only “what are they?” It is also “who are we, in the asking?”
Note: This guide is currently being developed for an upcoming course intended for those new to the topic: UFO/UAP Disclosure, Discovery and Discernment. Suggested improvements are welcome.
Further reading: 8 Lenses in UAP Discourse (May 2026)