In June, the Pentagon will release a report containing "a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data and intelligence" collected by the US Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and the FBI. It'll be interesting to see if the report confirms the existence of extraterrestrials (highly unlikely), the possibility that a foreign government has much more advanced aeronautical capabilities than the US (somewhat likely), the fact that weird stuff appears in the sky and we haven't been able to conclusively identify what it is (very likely), and/or that there's been a pretty incredible failure of US intelligence (even more likely). Over at Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, opines on what the various scenarios could do to the stock market. From Bloomberg Opinion:
To consider one concrete scenario, suppose that the federal government fulfills its legislative promise to release all classified information about UFOs this summer, and several senators hold a press conference and announce that alien origin cannot be ruled out as a hypothesis. This hardly seems impossible.
My first prediction is that most market prices won't move very much. In the short run, VIX might rise, because some traders might wonder if there is more than meets the eye to this announcement. But as investors realize that senators really are puzzled, and there are no little green men locked up in a facility somewhere, VIX would probably return to normal levels[…]
My main prediction is that alien UFOs will be bullish for the dollar. The U.S. government seems most closely connected to the UFO phenomenon, for whatever reason. (Maybe its pilots fly more sallies and record better data?) In any case, if alien UFOs become more likely, an informational advantage would accrue to the federal government. And the dollar already has a tradition as a safe haven currency.
image: Close Encounters of the Third Kind
