Hi @Larry_Gregory,
Please see the post post, according to @Bargs (Elastic Team memeber), it is common behavior that unchecking "Hide missing field" is a common behavior to see the "keyword" field in Discover. And also it seems like there is bug in alias too, the issue has been raised since august 2018, but until now the error still hasn't been fixed.
Discover doesn't show field aliases · Issue #21705 · elastic/kibana · GitHub ](Discover doesn't show field aliases · Issue #21705 · elastic/kibana · GitHub
Here you can see the field mapping for the activity_type, activity_type.keyword, and the alias Activity_Type. I tried to filter in the activity_type.keyword, and also filter with alias Activity_Type. Both return correct result, but same problem also, the .keyword and alias column have empty value again.
Pic: filter with activity_type.keyword field, return correct result on the activity_type text field
Pic: Filter with alias "Activity_type", return correct result on the activity_type text field.