What you need to know to invest in UAP
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I have no doubt that the vast and growing domain of non-human intelligence and off-world life presents the most exciting new field for innovation. The search and “contact modalities” for detection and engagement with these other forms of life are many, but UAP take the lead as the most dynamic at the grassroots level. We can celebrate the institutional wins and creative approaches of mainstream SETI. But UAP is the “hottest lead.” It helps that the highest echelons of state power continue engaging the UAP subject in ways both fascinating and frustrating.
The pursuit of AGI, intelligence amplification, and the counterintuitive human-augmented computing casts an intriguing reflection of these longstanding manifestations of other intelligences.
Chemist Lee Cronin posted a swipe at Sam Altman’s proposal to raise trillions of dollars for computer chip-making: “I think we should spend $10T on finding / making aliens because that will yield more benefits than spending it on chips for AI to just machine learn what we already know.” To this Altman quipped, “obviously we need the ai to find the aliens bro.”
As breathtaking as the UAP story is, it’s far from clear how new businesses, and institutional and private investors, might start to engage in market-savvy ways.
As I’ve been involved in this domain, and running the leadership incubator Future Folklore, I’ve come to a few tentative tips for wise engagement. These will apply to varying degrees based on patience, risk profile, industry, and interest in facing “the phenomenon” directly or indirectly.
I find this latter point—handling the weighty metaphysics of who “they” are, why they’re here, and so on—to be like looking at the sun. Eventually you have to divert your gaze or face injury. It’s a hazardous thing to face the unsettling questions that emerge in the voluminous contact literature, not to mention the global, worldwide traditions embedding memories of otherworldly intelligences, entities, purposes, travels, realms, and much more. It may be that most people will live in the warmth of the sun, so to speak, and take for granted advances generated from UAP inquiries.
It remains to be seen how much the “nuts and bolts” can be sundered from the more esoteric aspects of UAP. But for now, variously dividing up the topic is a helpful heuristic to imagine ways to build businesses, apply existing tools, expertise, infrastructure, and to deploy capital.
So here are just a few tips I’ve found that stay evergreen. If you’d like to discuss further, you can always reach me via email or on X/Twitter.
Lay the legal, policy, and collaborative groundwork
At the recent Sol Foundation inaugural symposium at Stanford (which I was fortunate to attend), Karl Nell commented on private sector engagement with UAP. His points underline the thorny issues surrounding direct access to TUO (technologies of unknown origin)—in other words, the recovered anomalous craft and debris—and biological evidence. This makes sense, as Nell was speaking to the startling “Schumer amendment” which, though watered down in its final passage, aspired to be:
“Legislation … to afford complete and timely access to all knowledge gained by the Federal Government concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena in furtherance of comprehensive open scientific and technological research and development essential to avoiding or mitigating potential technological surprise in furtherance of urgent national security concerns and the public interest.”
In this part of Nell’s Sol presentation, he argues we will need:
Networks of businesses, non-profits and foundations, and other legal entities with “wargame”-level coordination. These need to be orchestrated to discover useful ways to access materials and do R&D—and not just terminate as expensive think tanks and consultancies, we might add.
Robust legal rationales for tendering access to craft and supporting intellectual property rights from research. (Related to these first two bullets, Lester Nare/UAP Caucus recently suggested the sovereign wealth fund model.)
Plans for the pipeline of energy sector R&D and impacts on several other sectors, including global finance, domestic business, and physical infrastructure—in other words, everything. One can imagine modeling other sectors.
The Sol Foundation itself is one key player doing work like this. There is room for more.
Some questions emerge: What if a consortium forms around just one vertical market or domain, say, therapies or biological effects, or more specifically neurology? One wonders if those who are willing to do the legwork setting up R&D pipelines will get first dibs on accessing materials. In any case, the wisdom hard-won through the groundwork will only pay dividends later.
As the 2023 book Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations shows, this kind of work doesn’t need to wait for direct access to materials. The endless and patterned case archives remain virtually untapped, and to a large extent can be creatively “reverse engineered.” Kevin Knuth demonstrated this at the Sol symposium as well. He showed, for instance, what could account for a car’s engine stopping and restarting on its own—not trivial engineering-wise—in close proximity to an anomalous craft.
Another thing I tell project leaders on the more pure research side is to be the first users of the data. Start creatively building on it, not just to “solve” the enigma, but to dream up real-world applications.
From what I gather, there are investors watching the UAP story and more or less “waiting to see what happens.” I suspect what really needs to happen is for them to get involved and start trying things. As Peter Skafish compellingly argued at a recent New York City conference, it may be the involvement of the private sector that ratchets up the urgency of UAP disclosure in the halls of power. Financial stakes will make UAP feel more "real" and easier to digest for industry decision-makers and lawmakers. After all, this is the lingua franca of our political economy.
To those already read up and interested, now is the time to lay foundation stones on which the rest of the economic development gets aligned.
Consider all domains for your product
Teams building products engaging UAP topics directly should consider other domains where their hard work will apply. Take the growing list of UAP-related apps. These skywatching platforms tend to be aimed directly at UAP—literally! If you see a UAP, record it with us and add to the stock of data about this mystery, they say.
But why not make the app an aerial domain awareness app? How many more users might you capture with your sophisticated camera overlays and integrated data streams? If you can identify what’s not an anomalous object, make that a positive feature of the app too. With more satellites, rocket launches, and other air traffic—not to mention ever-present constellations and neighboring planets—there will be users interested in informed skywatching in general. Sure, UAP can be a fun hook and the ultimate aerial goldmine. But there’s no reason to limit a product to the UAP community of interest, which is by all measures a fairly small and very opinionated(!) niche audience.
I share this idea with those I talk to on app teams. One of those is Project Nanu, whose team is represented in Future Folklore’s incubator. What encourages me about Nanu is that they’re building a platform for all manner of anomalous topics, not just UAP. And they’re community-driven, enabling the sharing of stories and discussion about experiences. This engages the whole person, not just heady science.
While not a UAP company per se, I’m reminded of Copernicus Space Corp., which is building the Swarm Architecture: multi-modal, self-replicating miniature satellites custom-designed for space missions. Their tech can enable the search for life—a feature which they headline—but all manner of other missions too.
I suggest to project leaders that maybe your most important ongoing task is bridging your work to the wider world. This applies to ways you tell stories in which your product feels inevitable. It also applies to more brass tacks business sense: How can you apply and sell the amazing and useful thing you’ve made to the most people?
Hire analysts.
This strikes me as the most obvious and cost-efficient way to stay head of the curve. With UAP, you can’t rely on institutional memory, business publications, or social media chatter to make market sense of things. There isn’t really a market there to make sense of.
Plus the story continues unfolding in fits and starts. The intelligence community seems ever-present. There are cloaks and daggers. You’re going to need ears on the ground at all times. Because the domain is wrapped up in a dynamic landscape of political and military maneuvering, you’re going to have to follow the news yourself and build reliable sources.
To take a somewhat extreme example: If you’re not personally involved in helping structure (or at least closely watching) the tendering process for accessing intel on the “craft”—if in fact this materializes—I’d bet it won’t sound entirely straightforward once you hear it. And you might find yourself toward the back of the line.
In other words, the best way to stay up to date is to get involved. Shape the story. Don’t just watch it. Get yourself some hands-on, networked analysts.
Make some wild bets
At the end of the day, we’re in unknown territory—unknown to most, that is. The UAP story shows that the collective memory is short, and that the map for making sense of it all can get manipulated too (take the the terribly mixed-message 1968 University of Colorado UFO Project—the Condon Committee—as just one of many examples).
What might a wild bet look like? Here’s one example I’ve posed before.
Let's assume we have just civilian-held material to work with, like the Council Bluffs UAP artifacts.
As the story goes, these metallic pieces were discovered in a molten state in cold Big Lake Park of Council Bluffs, Iowa, in December, 1977. The composite accounts of multiple groups of witnesses tell of a round object with blinking red lights around the periphery, hovering near treetop level. A molten mass drops—from the object?—landing on the freezing ground and erupting in flames 8-10 feet high. There was a lot of it. Prosaic explanations have been tried and found wanting.
A recent peer-reviewed study of the material led by Stanford's Garry Nolan discusses possible technologies surrounding this strange metal. Homopolar machines, closed cycle magneto-hydrodynamic generators that may need to eject liquid metal...
It's worth underlining that the paper brainstorms these as possibilities—not conclusions—for a technology apparatus. It’s a way of reading the material "upwards" to its possible function in an engineered device.
"Should the Council Bluffs material be determined to be engineered for a function we don’t currently understand, it remains that our physics are as yet insufficient to explain the purpose of such a material."
See the paper’s rich discussion under "5.3. Liquid metal, MHD and advanced flying vehicles.”
Here's one way you could approach a case like this. Risking that this case—well attested—does indicate a technology of unknown origin, start building a device that, for its successful operation, would need to eject molten metal with the same composition as the Council Bluffs material. This is a way to take the artifact as a lead, a limit, and build prototypes that may have never crossed the minds of engineers without the existence of the strange alloy.
Will a workable machine result? If so, will the machine resemble exactly whatever originally dropped this material? Maybe, maybe not.
Will some kind of discovery result? Hopefully. The upshot could be a new engineering insight that yields benefits in entirely unforeseen directions, with the original UAP case and material remaining a mystery. If that's the worst case scenario, we're still better off.
Nolan’s presentation at the Sol symposium presents other impressive technology trajectories stemming from research into off-world life. He shows that the question, Are we alone? historically set the stage for huge swaths of the biotech industry.
The more profound the questions, the more curiosity-propellant you have to accelerate and keep moving. As Nolan has put it, there are countless technology innovations on the table. There will be no uninteresting outcomes for those who venture in.
The speculative Council Bluffs magneto-hydrodynamic machine is only a sketch of an idea for a high-risk project. It’s all to say, we need to pursue the leads we do have now, rather than wait around for answers from on high, or higher-fidelity specimens. We need to accept that any projects engaging UAP will carry higher than average market risks.
The returns could be unprecedented
As Karl Nell’s slide above mentions, rolling out derived technologies from UAP should be done equitably and to minimize disruption. That’s partly because the performance of UAP suggest technologies orders of magnitude beyond state of the art. New innovations and tools might be needed simply to make progress on understanding their performance.
What Harvard’s Avi Loeb said in a 2020 Scientific American article I think also applies to UAP. He wrote about how the “‘gold rush’ opportunity of mining the sky for new technological ideas offers a financial incentive for becoming an observational astronomer.” Loeb leads Harvard’s Galileo Project, which studies unidentifieds in Earth’s atmosphere and interstellar objects.
Some find the mingling of commercial incentives and UAP unsettling. As I like to think of it though, why not give first dibs to ethical commercial stewardship to those most read up on the full spectrum and complexity of the phenomenon? If corporate interests will one day rush in, it’s better to set good precedent early on than have to worry about competition later.
One thing I appreciate about the recent UFO whistleblowers is that, in terms of their stated intentions at least, they're basically on a rogue peace and innovation mission. Per Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal’s breaking story in The Debrief, the whistleblowers are calling out a decades-long "publicly unknown Cold War" and "eighty-year arms race" that's stifling innovation and leaving the public unprepared for overt contact.
There is an unprecedented opportunity to take this same bundle of convictions and steer capital towards the most startling and thrilling story in human history, unfolding right before our eyes. Who will leave their mark?
As Harvard’s John Mack would say, let’s “join in the mystery.”