https://www.newser.com/story/384462/somebody-made-some-very-unusual-bets-on-aliens.html
A nearly six-figure wager on aliens has turned one corner of Wall Street-style betting into a conspiracy theorist's dream. The Atlantic's Ross Andersen reports that on Monday night, a trader on prediction platform Kalshi suddenly dropped close to $100,000 on a contract that pays out only if the Trump administration formally confirms the existence of extraterrestrial life or technology by year's end. Around 35 minutes later, another bet almost twice that big was placed. The trades were so big and abrupt that, for a brief window, the market was pricing the odds of such a revelation at roughly one in three.
- "If the President, any member of the Cabinet, any member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or any US federal agency definitively states that extraterrestrial life or technology exists before Jan 1, 2027, then the market resolves to Yes," the Kalshi contract states. It says people not permitted to trade include "persons who are employed by any of the Source Agencies" and "persons who hold any material, non-public information on the Underlying." What makes it stranger, Andersen notes, is timing and technique: the bets arrived days after the latest flurry of alien chatter—Barack Obama's joking podcast remark and President Trump's order to start declassifying UFO-related files—had already faded, and they were placed in lump sums rather than the cautious "slicing" used by savvy traders. Ben Shindel, an expert on prediction markets, tells the Atlantic this looks either like a clumsy amateur or an insider with nonpublic information.
by TrickMirror9723