THE SOFT LANDING: The Holding Company Behind the Army’s $4 Billion Recruitment Contract Produced the Doritos Alien Super Bowl Ad.

The corporate architecture connecting UAP disclosure to consumer advertising doesn’t require a conspiracy. It requires a holding company.

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SUBJECT: CORPORATE INFRASTRUCTURE // UAP DISCLOSURE ACTORS // CONSUMER ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS // 2023-2026

DATE: APRIL 7, 2026

CROSS-REF: THE OPERATOR

DATA CONFIDENCE: HIGH (federal procurement records, FOIA documents, corporate press releases, trade press). MODERATE on intermediary pathways and personnel crossover.

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WHAT YOU SAW

If you watched the 2025 Super Bowl, you saw aliens.

Doritos ran a spot called “Abduction.” A UFO tractor-beams a man’s chip bag. He fights back. The spaceship crashes. They share snacks. Totino’s Pizza Rolls killed an alien named Chazmo on camera while Tim Robinson ate pizza rolls. HexClad told you Pete Davidson was an extraterrestrial. Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand, ran a straightforward product spot. Seconds later, a Tubi commercial aired that pretended the Poppi ad you had just watched was actually a trailer for a Tubi original movie about alien greasers from space. The two brands had coordinated their ad sequencing in advance so the bit would land. Two unrelated companies, a soda brand and a streaming platform, planned and purchased adjacent Super Bowl slots specifically to build a shared alien narrative. The alien premise wasn’t incidental to either product. It was the creative infrastructure connecting them.

Four alien-themed ads in a single broadcast. The A.V. Club called 2025 “the year of the post-human Super Bowl commercial.” Ad Age flagged aliens as a recurring motif. Everyone agreed it was a trend.

Then 2026 came. Kinder Bueno’s first-ever Big Game ad put astronauts in a spaceship dodging asteroids. Spielberg dropped billboards in Times Square: “All will be disclosed.” Two months later, the President ordered the Pentagon to start releasing UAP files.

The trade press treated all of this as organic creative trend-chasing. Agencies riding the zeitgeist. A cultural moment monetized.

Nobody pulled up the federal contract database. Nobody asked who owns the agencies producing these ads.

We did. Here is what we found.

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WHAT OMNICOM OWNS

Start with the Doritos ad. The agency of record was Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, based in San Francisco.

Goodby Silverstein is a wholly owned subsidiary of Omnicom Group. One of the four largest advertising holding companies on Earth.

Now open USAspending.gov.

In 2018, Omnicom’s DDB Chicago won the U.S. Army’s marketing account. Not a small buy. Not a campaign. The entire account. $4 billion over ten years. Media, creative, digital, PR, direct marketing. Everything the Army uses to convince eighteen-year-olds to enlist. Omnicom’s GSD&M separately handles Air Force recruitment. Two branches. One holding company.

Same corporate parent. Same org chart. One subsidiary tells you to join the military. Another subsidiary tells you aliens eat Doritos.

In December 2024, Omnicom merged with the Interpublic Group. $13.5 billion. The deal closed November 2025. DDB was folded into TBWA. The Army is restructuring its next contract. The combined entity is the largest advertising conglomerate in history.

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WHAT DENTSU BUILDS

The Totino’s alien spot was produced by Dentsu. Another global holding company. Another federal contract database entry you were not supposed to look up.

In January 2023, Dentsu’s government division, Isobar Public Sector, won a prime position on a $900 million IDIQ contract for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. Contract prefix FA8684. Development planning. Systems development. Synthetic environment development. For the Air Force Materiel Command. Their Chief Growth Officer said publicly that the division helps the Air Force “enhance the capability of the warfighter.”

One side of Dentsu builds synthetic environments for the United States Air Force. The other side made the commercial where Tim Robinson watches an alien get crushed to death over pizza rolls.

And then there’s Stagwell. The holding company that celebrated the 2026 Kinder Bueno alien ad is chaired by Mark Penn. Penn co-founded Penn Schoen Berland at Harvard. He was White House Pollster for Clinton’s 1996 re-election. Chief strategist for Hillary Clinton in 2008. Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft. Stagwell operates the Harris Poll. We searched for Stagwell defense contracts and Harris Poll UAP surveys. None verified. What is verified: the most sophisticated political opinion infrastructure in American advertising is running alien content during the most active disclosure window in eighty years.

Three campaigns. Three holding companies. Combined Pentagon-adjacent contract value in the billions. All sourced from the agencies’ own press releases and federal procurement records.

THE SENTINEL ASSESSMENT: The separation between government strategic communications and consumer advertising does not exist at the holding company level. Omnicom held the $4 billion Army marketing account while its subsidiary produced the Doritos alien ad. Dentsu holds a $900 million USAF IDIQ while its creative teams produced the Totino’s alien spot. These are not inferences. They are contract awards announced in the agencies’ own press releases.

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THE FIRST HIRE

Before the Super Bowl wave, there was a marshmallow pie.

In December 2023, the Tombras Group launched a campaign for MoonPie that did something no advertising agency had ever done. They hired a military UAP witness as a paid consultant.

Sean Cahill is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Master-at-Arms. He served aboard the USS Princeton during the 2004 Nimitz Carrier Strike Group encounters with what the Navy would eventually classify as unidentified aerial phenomena. The Tic-Tac incident. One of the most documented military UAP encounters in history. Cahill testified publicly about what happened.

Tombras brought Cahill in alongside Daniel Oberhaus, a science journalist and MIT Press author whose book Extraterrestrial Languages explores how to encode messages in mathematical structures a non-human intelligence could decode. And Holly Wood, a UK-based UAP researcher whose organization, Investigate the Unknown, co-signed the Declaration on SETI and UAP Research out of Durham University.

Together, they built an out-of-home advertising campaign written in a constructed language based on binary bitmap code. The idea was that a human couldn’t read it, but a non-human reader theoretically could. Tombras placed the billboards in locations the consultants identified as UAP activity hotspots: Times Square, Washington D.C., Roswell, Cape Canaveral, London, and Tokyo. They ended the campaign with a drone light show over the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico.

This launched five months after David Grusch testified under oath that the U.S. government had been recovering non-human craft for decades. The Drum, Marketing Dive, Communication Arts, and shots Magazine all covered the campaign. Ad Age named Tombras 2025 Agency of the Year. The MoonPie work was in the winning portfolio.

Tombras is the largest family-owned advertising firm in the United States. 450 employees. $720 million in annual billings. Independent. Not a subsidiary of any holding company. But independent does not mean disconnected from the federal apparatus.

Alice Mathews, the agency’s CEO since January 2019, managed Tombras’ Washington D.C. office for 15 years and supervised the U.S. Department of Transportation / NHTSA account for 18 years. Her verified speaker biography identifies DHS, FEMA, and the EPA among the federal clients she serviced. An ad agency executive who spent nearly two decades managing federal safety and crisis communications. Then became CEO. Then her agency hired a military UAP witness to sell marshmallow pies to aliens.

Who connected Sean Cahill to Tombras? We searched interviews, podcasts, social media, and conference appearances. Nothing. That question is open.

THE SENTINEL ASSESSMENT: The agency that produced the first consumer campaign to embed a military UAP witness has an 18-year federal communications pipeline, verified DHS and FEMA client work, and a CEO who built her career managing government safety messaging. The intermediary who brokered the Cahill introduction remains unidentified.

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THE 84 PAGES

The advertising pipeline is one vector. The entertainment pipeline is another. And they converge on a single filmmaker.

Joseph Kosinski directed Top Gun: Maverick. The Department of Defense provided extensive, formalized production support. The War Zone obtained the full production assistance agreement via FOIA from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Eighty-four pages.

The Navy assigned an officer to review the script’s “thematics” and “weave in key talking points relevant to the aviation community.” Actors met military grooming standards. The DoD charged $11,374 per hour of F/A-18 flight time. The F-35 was excluded from active flight sequences to protect classified capabilities. Paramount provided a pre-release screening for Pentagon brass.

The producer was Jerry Bruckheimer. His Pentagon resume runs deep. The original Top Gun increased Navy recruitment by 500 percent. Black Hawk Down. Pearl Harbor. Armageddon. All made with formal DoD production assistance.

In March 2025, Kosinski and Bruckheimer sold an untitled UAP thriller to Apple Original Films. Tens of millions of dollars. Nine studios bid. Apple won. The Hollywood Reporter described it as a “UFO-themed All the President’s Men.” Two national security operatives uncover a classified program to recover and reverse-engineer crashed UAPs.

David Grusch is consultant and associate producer.

Follow the chain. Grusch testifies to Congress in July 2023. ICIG intake interview under oath. Appearance at the Sol Foundation symposium at Stanford. Hired as Special Advisor to Representative Eric Burlison in March 2025. Now an associate producer on a major studio film. Classified intelligence briefings to Hollywood production credits in under two years.

Kosinski said it in December 2025: “It isn’t science fiction, but rather science fact. We’re working with two people who are at the very center of the topic.”

The same filmmaker who submitted his script to the Pentagon for approval is now making a film about the Pentagon covering up UFOs. With the actual whistleblower in the credits.

Whether the new film has sought DoD cooperation is a FOIA-able question. Someone should file it.

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THE RED LINE THAT MOVED

In 1996, the DoD had a production assistance agreement for Independence Day. Director Roland Emmerich refused a direct government request to remove all references to Area 51. The DoD cancelled the agreement.

That was the red line. The Pentagon’s position, thirty years ago, was that alien-related government secrecy narratives were unacceptable in DoD-supported productions.

Today, Spielberg’s Disclosure Day uses the exact terminology of the UAP transparency movement as its title. Kosinski’s Apple film is built entirely around the premise that the government is hiding crashed non-human craft. At least five major UAP-themed productions are in active development.

The premise that got Independence Day’s support cancelled is now the genre’s defining narrative.

We searched for evidence that any current production has sought DoD cooperation. None found. The DoD does not routinely disclose active agreements. What we can document: the red line moved. Where it moved to is an open question.

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THE DOG THAT DIDN’T BARK

If the U.S. government were running a coordinated campaign to prepare the public for confirmation of non-human intelligence, there would be a document somewhere that says so. A strategy memo. A communications framework. A line item. A phrase in a congressional hearing transcript. Something.

We went looking.

NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team report. AARO’s Historical Record Report. Sol Foundation symposia proceedings. RAND Corporation publications. Brookings Institution archives. Congressional hearing transcripts from July 2023 through September 2025. Every publicly available document where the words “managed disclosure,” “public acclimation,” or “ontological shock” might appear.

They don’t. Anywhere.

In 1960, the Brookings Institution warned NASA that discovering extraterrestrial life could destabilize civilizations and that governments might need to control public exposure to the reality. Sixty-six years later, no modern follow-up exists in Brookings’ publication database. AARO’s Historical Record Report addressed why the public believes in UFO cover-ups. Their explanation: “confirmation bias.” Not a word about whether the government has ever considered preparing the public. Not a word about whether it should. The Sol Foundation gathered retired Army colonels, Stanford immunologists, Harvard astrophysicists, and the actual congressional whistleblower across two symposia. Nobody presented on media strategy. Nobody discussed advertising. Nobody mentioned normalization pipelines.

Every institution we searched is silent on the question of whether anyone, anywhere, is using consumer media to soften the public for what’s coming.

That silence is the final finding of this report. And it cuts both ways.

If you were designing a system to normalize the most destabilizing revelation in human history without leaving a paper trail, it would look exactly like what we just documented. It would run through holding companies where the defense division and the consumer division never need to speak to each other. It would use the most expensive, most visible advertising inventory on Earth. And when someone finally went looking for the directive, they would find exactly what we found.

Nothing.

THE SENTINEL ASSESSMENT: The infrastructure connecting defense communications to consumer advertising is documented, verified, and structurally frictionless. Whether it has been deliberately activated cannot be confirmed. What can be confirmed: the holding companies producing alien-themed consumer ads hold billions in Pentagon contracts. The filmmaker making the UAP disclosure thriller has a FOIA-documented relationship with the DoD. The ad industry’s top award went to the agency that hired a military UAP witness for a snack campaign. No government document we reviewed acknowledges or denies the existence of a public acclimation strategy. The architecture exists. The silence exists. What fills the gap between them is the question this publication will continue investigating.

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The org chart is the conspiracy. The budget is the motive. The Super Bowl is the delivery mechanism.

Keep looking up.

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Previous briefings: THE FLOOR | THE ARCHITECT | THE BLIND SPOT | THE DIAGNOSTIC GAP | THE PHONE GAP | THE OPERATING SYSTEM | THE NARROW BAND | THE SKY IS FALLING | THE LONG COUNT | THE GREEN BURIAL | THE DEAD DROP | THE GHOST GENERAL | THE WEIGH-IN | THE VERDICT | THE ANCIENT ENGINE | THE CURATED ORBIT | THE WIDE ANGLE | THE IGNITION SEQUENCE | THE HEARTBEAT | THE GHOST COMA | THE SURGE | THE SUPPRESSION GRADIENT | THE SILENT EDIT | CONFIRMED: THE TESS CONTINGENCY | THE DECEMBER INTERSECTION | THE SENTINEL DOSSIER