Here is a question nobody at the SEC wants to answer: if a defense contractor has been quietly storing a crashed flying saucer in a Nevada hangar, did it have to mention that in its 10-K?

It sounds ridiculous. It is also a real disclosure question—at least in theory. In February, the White House said it would begin releasing government files on “alien and extraterrestrial life.” The Pentagon has since released several batches of records, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued preliminary disclosure guidance on July 31. None of the material has confirmed the existence of aliens; the Pentagon has said it has found no verifiable evidence. But the disclosure process is real, and in finance, the process is often where the money is.

So let’s imagine the President walks up to a podium and says: “They’re real. We have one. It’s fine.”

What goes up? The first instinct is defense stocks. That may be wrong, or at least incomplete. If the technology is real and the government has had it for 70 years, the valuable asset may be the government’s hangar, not Lockheed’s order book. The company to watch would be whoever has the contract to study the thing. It is probably private, and it probably has a boring name like Advanced Aerospace Solutions LLC. Markets hate this.

What goes down? Certainty. It is not a stock, but uncertainty helps price every stock. One way to think about the equity risk premium is as part of the price investors demand for bearing risk. And “there are other civilizations, and at least one has better engines than we do” would make the future feel a lot stranger. Some investors would reach for gold, as they often do when the outlook gets hard to read.

Then, of course, come the lawsuits. It is a rule of this newsletter that every bad thing that happens to a public company is also securities fraud. A company knew something material. It did not disclose it. The stock fell when the truth came out. Shareholders sue. The legal theory is the same whether the undisclosed fact is a factory fire or a space alien. Somewhere, a plaintiffs’ lawyer is already drafting the complaint: “Defendants’ risk factors warned of geopolitical uncertainty but failed to disclose that the relevant geopolitics included Zeta Reticuli.”

There is insurance, too. Commercial policies often list wars, floods and “acts of God” under force majeure. Is an alien an act of God? Nobody knows. This could be a very lucrative decade for insurance litigators.

Markets might fall for a week, recover in a month, then spend ten years arguing about who should have disclosed what. When you think about it, that is what markets do with everything.

Anyway.