Should Financial Regulators Pay Attention To A UFO Risk?
Insight
Written by Helen McCaw - 14 June 2023
Insight from an Economist and former Senior Analyst in Financial Stability at the Bank of England
In December 2021 I started to wonder if financial regulators should be concerned with a UFO risk to the financial system. The US government has been studying UFOs for decades, with greater transparency in recent years. Last year I wrote an article on whether we should start to take UFOs seriously.
Since then, Dr. Garry Nolan, a Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University, who also has close ties to senior individuals from within the US defence and intelligence community, spoke at a SALT conference in May 2023 in New York. SALT is a forum that encompasses finance, technology, and public policy. At this conference, Dr. Nolan said he was “100% certain” an advanced non-human intelligence “has been here a long time, and still is here” and that he knows people who have been “working on the reverse engineering programmes of downed craft.” Dr. Nolan also said he assisted in the drafting of some of the thirty pages of UFO legislation that is in the US National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2023. This UFO legislation was signed into law in December 2022, following true bipartisan support. The NDAA 2023 requires the US government’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (ARRO) to review all US government UFO archives since 1945. It also provides whistleblower protection to those who report any secret UFO programmes, meaning individuals can testify to Congress without risking imprisonment for breaking their Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). Dr. Nolan urged the need for transparency because “the best people are not working on this technology, and we need them.”
In early June, Christopher Mellon, former minority staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence, wrote a stunning piece in Politico entitled “If the US Government Has UFO Crash Materials, It’s Time to Reveal Them.” Mellon wrote:
“Since AARO was established, I have referred four witnesses to them who claim to have knowledge of a secret U.S. government program involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft. Other sources who, rightly or wrongly do not trust AARO’s leadership, have also contacted me with additional details and information about an alleged secret U.S. government reverse engineering program. Some have supplied information to the intelligence community’s inspector general, others directly to staff of the congressional oversight committees. As this process has progressed, and the credibility of these claims has grown, so too have my concerns.”
If it is proven that the US government is in the possession of advanced non-human technology, Mellon writes that “a successful reverse engineering program might bring about a revolution in energy, transportation and materials technologies.”
Christopher Mellon
Days after Mellon’s own revelations, highly credentialed journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal (who broke the original 2017 story in the New York Times about the US government’s involvement in a secret UFO study programme, and later a classified briefing to a Defense department agency about retrievals of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth”) revealed that whistleblower David Charles Grusch had “given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”
Furthermore, Grusch asserts that this information “has been illegally withheld from Congress” and he “filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures.” The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found Grusch’s assertion that UFO-related information was being inappropriately concealed from Congress to be both “urgent and credible.”
David Grusch
Keen and Blumenthal described Grusch as “a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, is a veteran of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). He served as the reconnaissance office’s representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force from 2019-2021. From late 2021 to July 2022, he was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and its representative to the task force.” Grusch is represented by Charles McCullough III, the former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, appointed by President Obama.
In a subsequent interview with award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart, whistleblower Grusch said that the US government was in possession of “quite a number” of crashed spacecraft of “non-human exotic origin” that have either “landed or crashed” and that the US government was concealing the existence of a “non-human intelligence” on this planet. Grusch also said that at least one private company was also involved, “basically a sole source arrangement and you allow certain private corporate elements to look at this develop but a potential insight and then sell it back to the government for profit. And I think that’s totally unethical.”
As the US Congress continues to grapple, under the terms of the NDAA 2023, with these astounding allegations, I wonder, what financial regulators, and my former employer, the Bank of England, should make of all this?
Firstly, if we were to have confirmation of an advanced non-human intelligence here on Earth, there could be extreme price volatility in financial markets as participants are uncertain how to price assets using any of the familiar methods. How successful have any secret reverse-engineering programmes been? What does our view of the future look like now? What has changed? This would have implications for the energy and utility sectors, transportation, materials technologies, defence, and space exploration.
Secondly, there may be price volatility due to suspicion or accusation that specific companies have been given illegal uncompetitive advantages from governments engaged in the retrieval and reverse engineering of recovered advanced non-human technologies.
Thirdly, and perhaps of greatest consequence, is what any confirmation of an advanced non-human intelligence could do to the anthropocentric state, and thus to the ability of financial regulators to operate, or mitigate risks, in global financial markets. In 2008, Dr. Alexander Wendt, Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University., published an academic journal article entitled, “Sovereignty and the UFO.” In this article, Dr. Wendt argues that the modern state is anthropocentric, meaning human beings are sovereign, the only intelligent life is human, and if this is undermined it brings into question the foundation of the entire modern state and world order. At a conference for the Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies (SCU) in June 2022, Dr. Wendt argued that, “intuitively it seems kind of obvious that an up close discovery and/or contact with ETs would be a completely different animal than discovering or contacting ETs around distant stars as in the SETI scenario…the distance that protects us in the SETI world is evaporated in the UAP world.”
Image showing distant stars
In 1961, the Brookings Institution prepared a report for NASA on “Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs” (often referred to as "The Brookings Report") with coverage provided in the New York Times. Small sections of the report cover the social and economic implications of the discovery of extraterrestrial life, where the report notes (page 225), “if super intelligence is discovered, the results become quite unpredictable” and “It has been speculated that, of all groups, scientists and engineers might be the most devastated by the discovery of relatively superior creatures.” Indeed, Dr. Wendt postulates that in a worst-case scenario there will be ontological insecurity and government distrust: “eight billion people will start wondering individually what that means for their religion, their ideology, their economic wellbeing, wondering about everything, questioning everything that we thought we knew, that we could always take for granted.”
The report also includes some thoughts on “leadership” on page 215:
“The discovery would certainly be front-page news everywhere; the degree of political or social repercussion would probably depend on leadership's interpretation of (1) its own role, (2) threats to that role, and (3) national and personal opportunities to take advantage of the disruption or reinforcement of the attitudes and values of others. Since leadership itself might have great need to gauge the direction and intensity of public attitudes, to strengthen its own morale and for decision making purposes, it would be most advantageous to have more to go on than personal opinions about the opinions of the public and other leadership groups.”
And some recommendations for further research on page 216:
“Historical and empirical studies of the behavior of peoples and their leaders when confronted with dramatic and unfamiliar events or social pressures. Such studies might help to provide programs for meeting and adjusting to the implications of such a discovery. Questions one might wish to answer by such studies would include: How might such information, under what circumstances, be presented to or withheld from the public for what ends? What might be the role of the discovering scientists and other decision makers regarding release of the fact of discovery?”
Thus, if we were to have confirmation of an advanced non-human intelligence here on Earth, it could, in the worst-case scenario, undermine the legitimacy of governments and their institutions worldwide.
In light of ongoing events within the US government to bring transparency to the UFO topic, it would appear prescient for financial regulators to pay serious attention to the UFO topic and consider any risks it might present to their institutional remits.
Helen McCaw is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and worked as an Economist and as a Senior Analyst in Financial Stability at the Bank of England, including during the 2008 global financial crisis.