Is the US government about to confirm that aliens are real?
That’s the claim floating around among those who believe in prediction markets as reliable soothsayers of the future, a promise that prediction markets would very much like you to buy into, so you overlook the obvious fact that they’re just another form of gambling.
Let’s cut to the chase. After it reviewed Kalshi trading data, The Atlantic reports that a single trader just bet nearly $100,000 that the Trump administration will confirm the existence of alien life or technology by the end of this year.
Actually, that was just the first big bet. Just 35 minutes later, another wager appeared, possibly by the same person, for nearly double that amount. What did the bettor(s) know? Could they possibly have inside knowledge on an impending ET revelation?
It’s not quite the spectacular smoking gun that Agent Mulder might’ve stumbled onto in the original run of “The X-Files.” But the beloved show’s upcoming reboot might consider shining a light on prediction markets as avenues of conspiracies in their own right.
Prediction markets allow users to bet on an unbelievable plethora of real-world outcomes beyond sports, ranging from geopolitical events to how many times Elon Musk tweets in a week. Because they’re less regulated than traditional gambling, critics fear that they’ll be a hotbed of insider trading.
Several scandals exemplifying these fears have already emerged. An anonymous Polymarket bettor on a freshly created account correctly guessed nearly every song that Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny would perform during his Super Bowl show, a statistical improbability.
Others implicate military and government insiders. Hours before the US launched an invasion into Venezuela and abducted its president Nicolás Maduro in January, an anonymous user placed a large bet that Maduro would be removed from power by the end of the month, netting them more than $400,000. In February, Israel arrested several citizens and IDF reservists for using classified information on upcoming strikes in Iran to place Polymarket bets.
The big Kalshi bets come amid an alien-laden news cycle. In an interview earlier this month, former president Barack Obama remarked that aliens are “real,” kicking up a media frenzy. Obama merely meant that the vast scale of the cosmos meant that aliens almost certainly existed somewhere. But UFO truthers took it as a sign that Obama had seen actual hard evidence, and president Trump capitalized on this “tremendous interest” to announce that he would direct government agencies to release files “related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).”
For whatever reason, the big bets on the confirmation of aliens weren’t placed until days after this media frenzy played out, with no new revelations coming to light since then, The Atlantic noted. It was also noteworthy that the bets were placed all in one go, instead of doled in slices to avoid spooking the market.
But perhaps the most puzzling fact is that there’s no clear purpose to the bets. Ben Shindel, an expert on prediction markets, told The Atlantic that the bold wagers may have simply been made by an inexperienced trader.
“The other possibility is that it’s an insider,” Shindel conceded.
More on prediction markets: Prediction Markets Are Sucking Huge Numbers of Young People Into Gambling
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