Creating A Column Based On If/Else With A List Of String Values For Each Condition

I'm trying to encode groups of shapes from the UFO sighting dataset to try and increase model accuracy but I'm not sure how to use a list as the condition for each conversion. Below is the code.

def shape_group(val):
      if val == ['changed' | 'changing'| 'unknown' |'unspecified' | 'other']: # Uncertain
         return 1
      else:
          return 0

its a reduced version but the idea is there. I originally tried with:

 if val == ['changed' , 'changing', 'unknown' ,'unspecified' , 'other']

and

no_nan_df['shape_group'] = no_nan_df['shape'].apply(shape_type)

returns no matches

Thanks!