In July 2023, David Grusch testified that witnesses had told him that the US government recovered craft of non-human origin, and that special access programs exist to research these craft. He claimed that white collar crime was involved in these programs.
One possible outcome to the Congressional investigation is that an 85-year coverup has existed to steal taxpayer funds to pay defense contractors and government officials for unauthorized or fake work unrelated to aliens or UFOs, and that this conspiracy uses these topics to discredit people from investigating who is actually receiving the money.
This market resolves to YES if, by December 31, 2025 at 11:59:59pm EST, all three of the following are apparent from official US government sources:
Crimes have been committed to misallocate or steal taxpayer dollars by using "aliens" in some way as an excuse or diversion for those crimes
The scale of the conspiracy is one of the largest in the history of the world - defined as exceeding the value of the FTX/Alameda Research/associated companies' bankruptcy estate in nominal dollars
The government does not confirm the existence of non-human intelligence
Otherwise, it resolves to NO.
At least one indictment would be sufficient to satisfy #1. #2 requires a document that suggests the losses incurred, such as a Congressional report that estimates the scale of the fraud (or, the indictment itself may include this figure.) The status quo is sufficient for #3.
Related questions
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-ufo-craze-was-created-by-government
>To sum up the story as far as I understand its convoluted depths: diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research” and being the “sole bidder” for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to Lacatski himself, the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including—you may have guessed it by now—dino-beavers. Viola! That’s how there was a “government-funded program to study UFOs.”
Thought this was interesting, though I'm not sure it's relevant to this market. It does seem like the people who got this contract really did study UFOs, even if the value of that work is somewhat dubious.
>The scale of the conspiracy is one of the largest in the history of the world - defined as exceeding the size of the FTX/Alameda Research/associated companies' bankruptcy estate in nominal dollar values
How does this resolve if there was a historical conspiracy larger than FTX? For example, Bernie Madoff is said to have stolen between $20 billion and $65 billion, depending on how you count. That's larger than FTX.
@Nick332 I was thinking of the number of victims, since here the victim would be every taxpayer. FTX is probably the largest scam in history in number of victims.
Whatever the case, since people have already bet, the text will have to stay as written, with the comparison being to FTX.
@SteveSokolowski To clarify further, in case it isn't clear already, the actual comparison is to the size of the bankruptcy estate for all approximately 150 companies in the FTX case, as officially filed in the bankruptcy docket, if it comes down to a precise number.
@SteveSokolowski "I was thinking of the number of victims, since here the victim would be every taxpayer. FTX is probably the largest scam in history in number of victims." Is this resolved using number of victims, or number of dollars?
@jonsimon 2 million people (including me) lost $10 billion in a scam run by a private entity (FTX), so why wouldn't it be plausible that a government entity could exceed that? If the scam exists, that would be a trivial amount of money.
@SteveSokolowski Because this whole market is about placating the absence of one wild conspiracy with another wild conspiracy. Smart money doesn't bet yes on "this will be the biggest X in history" without a whole lot of evidence. Especially when that X likely doesn't even exist.
@Symmetry The issue I have is that there is obviously something going on with UFOs.
I'm curious as to whether this market will actually end up as less likely than aliens existing, which would be an insane outcome.
@SteveSokolowski I agree, but I wonder how accurate the markets are at their extremes. Why invest your play money to push a market from 4% to 3% if you can expect higher yields elsewhere? This market may or may not end up around or below the other one for no good reason at all.
@Symmetry My intuition is that it actually may be less likely that such a fraud has occurred than that aliens have been visiting the Earth. And, because those two are the only two realistic outcomes at this point, given that some 40 witnesses wouldn't intentionally lie to an inspector general just for fun, that implies that the odds of aliens existing may actually exceed 50%. But that probability doesn't seem to jive with common sense, hence why I hope (but won't bet) this market turns out to have a higher probability to make things sensible again.
I am going to bet no on the alien markets solely because they all have closing dates in 2023, and that's before AGI will be achieved. The odds are high enough that a very simple explanation to the UFOs, the "why now this whistleblower" question, and the Fermi paradox is Star Trek's prime directive: aliens make first contact immediately before superintelligence arises, because they don't want the universe turning into an @EliezerYudkowsky paperclip generator.
@SteveSokolowski While I agree that something is definitely off here, I don't really believe either of the two options. There might be some fraudulent and/or highly classified shenanigans going on in the depths of the US military-industrial complex but I still can't rule out that Grusch isn't simply a fraud and/or has been deceived for whatever reason or that whatever is happening is completely different than it might appear.
As for aliens: I highly doubt that interstellar/interdimensional/interwhatever beings could freely traverse time and space just to crash their vessels into our mountains, get shot down by our planes or observed by our radar (however, they might not care at all about being observed).
Funnily enough, when asking myself about the potential reason of aliens intervening on earth, I came to the same conclusion, that they'd most likely do it to avert a paperclip maximizer turning the universe into little metal bars. However I still don't quite understand why they would need to crash their vessels for that. Considering that we already have reasonably well working self-driving cars and autonomous planes, they can't be fundamentally opposed to AI-systems and should therefore be able to train their space-ships to not crash into our oceans or get shot down by our planes.