In mid-January 2026, The Times of London reported that Helen McCaw, a senior financial-security analyst at the Bank of England for ten years until 2012, had written to Governor Andrew Bailey urging him to prepare a contingency plan in case the U.S. government confirms the existence of non-human intelligence.

Her argument went like this. Washington appears to be partway through a multiyear process of declassifying what it knows about unidentified anomalous phenomena. If UAP turn out to be non-human, governments would have to acknowledge a power greater than their own, and central bankers may never have been briefed. She predicted “ontological shock,” extreme price swings, a collapse in confidence and a rush to safe assets such as gold, and said authorities should be ready for unrest. Some reports say she also suggested Bitcoin could benefit.

The story went viral within days, and some headlines turned it into the Bank itself preparing for aliens. It wasn’t. The warning came from a former employee, and the Bank has not publicly responded.

McCaw has a link to another of the year’s big stories. She had contacted Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb months earlier, after he began writing about the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, and Loeb cited her letter in an essay of his own that same week.