“Galactic Macro”…In the Era of Spy Balloons and Declassified Pentagon UFO Reports

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• UFOs aren’t just the stuff of sci-fi movies. The U.S. shot one down off the East Coast last month. Until NORAD forces identified it, the infamous Chinese spy balloon was a UFO.
• Investor David Dorr says extraterrestrial craft have also been recovered — and studied — by the U.S. military, and that at least one private company is using out-of-this world technology in its aircraft now.
• David, whose asset management firm specializes in what he calls “galactic macro,” talks about the very real evidence of alien contact with Earth and the technological implications for humankind, which he believes forward-thinking investors should know about.

We talk about inflation quite a bit on my podcast, but this conversation went above and beyond my expectations.

Last month, a massive Chinese balloon floated into North American airspace and was tracked for several days before a U.S. fighter jet shot it down off the coast of South Carolina. It was so weird that it became a meme almost immediately, which overshadowed the very real threat it symbolized. 

The balloon was comparable in size to the Statue of Liberty, powered by solar panels and carrying high-tech communications equipment that was “clearly for intelligence surveillance,” including “multiple antennas” that were “likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications,” according to the State Department. 

It is believed that it may have been carrying out reconnaissance on U.S. missile bases. 

Within the space of a week, NORAD forces shot down three more craft over the continent. But we can’t assume they were also spy balloons, from China or elsewhere. The U.S. (and Canadian) governments have so far been silent about their nature and their apparent purpose, other than to say that neither country’s military was able to recover them.

“I’m not saying that those are alien spacecraft, but they do meet the definition of unidentified flying objects,” says David Dorr, the Managing Principal at Dorr Asset Management SEZC, who is both a global macroeconomics expert and a longtime student of UFOs — well, of the surprising amount of real-world, legitimate evidence of UFOs. 

“People tease me all the time on this until I start to present the evidence,” says David. “The stigma around the topic of UFOs and extraterrestrials is significant — little green men hopping out of spacecraft and everybody wearing tinfoil hats.”

That’s not a coincidence, he adds. “We have actual documentation showing that our intelligence departments and our military intended to create that stigma. Because when you look at the evidence, there were some very difficult things to answer.”

With decades of experience in global macro, risk management and trading technology, David is keen to explore what is known about UFOs, the possibility of life on other planets and what that means for Earth. His firm’s goal is to exploit alpha by finding “themes that are trending but are not yet reflected in asset classes” — and the extraterrestrial theme overlaps with major investment sectors, like energy, defense, travel and technology, to name a few. 

Serious conversation about UFOs is more timely than ever post-Balloongate, and amid the Pentagon’s declassification of its reports on unidentified aerial phenomena. The financial markets haven’t embraced the possibility that we’re not alone in the universe, but it’s impossible to innovate without taking risks. 

David joined me to make the case for evidence of extraterrestrial life — and off-world technology — on a Global Macro edition of the podcast. Here are a few highlights from a conversation that goes where no Top Traders episode has gone before.

Gravitating toward the galactic

David says the UFOs  — er, “balloon-like entities” — taken down by NORAD might have just been advanced drones from other countries, but he thinks the idea that they are unrecoverable is “completely implausible.” 

As he points out, “we’re the strongest military on the planet” with nearly unlimited resources. 

“We know that our defense agencies are supposed to be taking this stuff seriously. We know that behind the scenes, they do take it seriously,” David adds. “And yet the excuse to the public is that they just kind of tweaked the radar systems, so now they’re picking up balloons and other stuff. Nonsense.” 

He doesn’t believe that for a second — and he thinks the public needs to demand answers. 

David feels confident that those answers exist. The truth is out there, if you will. 

He began trading commodities as a teenager along with his little brother. Although they didn’t know what they were doing, they “slowly gravitated to finding our own strategy,” he says. 

The strategy that clicked: discretionary global macro, which the brothers have been using for 25 years. Grand Cayman-based Dorr Asset Management’s niche is “connecting dots around the world,” says David. “To find our edge, we look for things that people are not paying attention to, and over the years we’ve gotten really good at that … I think we’re the only macro guys out there talking about the subject of ‘galactic macro,’ as we affectionately like to call it.”

Star-charting a close encounter 

David has been fascinated by unexplained phenomena since he was a child. His father, “an open-minded but very serious guy,” was unabashedly interested in UFOs; the possibility of extraterrestrial life was dinner table conversation when he was growing up in Columbia, Missouri. 

As a child, David learned about the curious case of Betty and Barney Hill, a couple (allegedly) abducted by aliens in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1961. The incident is thought by many to be the first well-documented, feasibly legitimate UFO abduction in modern history. 

The Hills reported seeing a massive, silent craft that resembled a “huge pancake,” piloted by humanoid figures. But their memories of what happened next — and of driving home — were fragmented and fuzzy. They experienced “missing time” they couldn’t explain and were plagued by nightmares. 

Later, underneath hypnosis, they both told a similar story of being taken aboard the craft. Betty recalled seeing what looked like a map or star chart and drew it from memory. Several scientists examined the drawing, didn’t see anything recognizable, and chalked it up to her imagination. Then someone pointed out that our visual perspective of stars is from here on Earth, but if Betty was actually on a craft, her view would be different. The investigators began rotating star maps to see if they could line it up. 

David, who watched a simulation of this investigation at the St. Louis Science Museum, “will never forget this experience,” he says. “Guess what? It [the star chart] lined up perfectly.”

Today, the Hills’ encounter is sometimes known as the "Zeta Reticuli” incident — after the star system Betty drew from memory.

“How is that possible [that] somebody in the ’60s, who had nothing to do with stars or astrophysics or anything like that, [drew] a star chart under hypnosis … that looks like something from space looking back towards Earth?” David asks.

If the soundtrack from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” or “The X-Files” just began to play in your mind, you’re not alone.

The USS Nimitz ‘Tic Tac’ incident 

We don’t need to go back to the 1960s to get a credible, up-close-and-personal encounter with a UFO. 

In 2004, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz was on a routine training mission about 100 kilometers off the coast of San Diego. Over a series of days, the ship’s radar operators saw unexplained phenomena — what looked like about 14 objects dropping from 80,000 feet in the air to 50 feet above the ocean.  

Retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor got the order to scramble his jets for a better look at a 40-foot-long, wingless “Tic Tac” hovering above the ocean. 

The team “gets out there and Fravor dives down to get a closer look at it,” David explains. “And all of a sudden, this object engages with him. He’s actually on the recordings saying, ‘Oh, oh, oh — I’m engaged. I’m engaged. Oh, shit. I’m engaged.’” 

For a career fighter pilot like Fravor who is typically cool under pressure, that was a particularly unusual reaction.

The Tic Tac began to behave even more oddly, “zipping around him and rotating at about 180 degrees around him,” David adds.

Fravor later said the object created a disturbance on the water and moved faster than anything he’d ever seen. He told reporters he thought “it was not from this world.”

The USS Nimitz incident seems to suggest the existence of “transmedium craft” — what David describes as “objects that are intelligently controlled, that can cross from water to air to space effortlessly without creating any sonic booms.”

We humans haven’t made anything capable of these kinds of maneuvers. And notably, the Department of Defense acknowledged the videos of the Tic Tac in 2017.

“This is very, very serious technology,” David says. 

Area 51, Roswell and ‘E.T.’ tech

For the record, David believes that Area 51 (which the CIA publicly acknowledged as a U.S. military base in 2013) has been the site of government investigations into the technology of recovered “off-world craft.”

He also says the 1947 Roswell incident is “not just a conspiracy theory but something actually took place,” although he doesn’t elaborate on whether that means he believes the U.S. Air Force’s assertion that the infamous crashed UFO was actually a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. 

But he does say that it’s “not a coincidence that the United States National Defense Authorization Act of 2023 allows Congress to go back and collect information all the way back predating Roswell. There’s zero coincidence about that.”

David’s investigation of the UFO space (pun intended) led him to believe the U.S. has “made breakthroughs in the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial craft … I think that we have the craft. I think that we’ve had it for a very long time. I think that we’ve finally figured out how some of it works … I think that this information is going to continue to spill out and it’s going to create a very, very interesting world for us here very quickly.”

Life-changing … and market-changing

What does any of this have to do with investing?

Put simply, it speaks to America’s military capabilities. 

Lockheed Martin has an extraterrestrial spacecraft in its possession and has already built new assets using what it learned from that craft. If that is true, here’s a thought experiment: “What does that do for the U.S. dollar?” he asks. 

“Well, it certainly is going to strengthen the dollar. What does that do for being able to protect Taiwan? Maybe you want to be long [on] Taiwan equities, because now it looks like the U.S. could easily defend Taiwan in a conflict with China.”

Extraterrestrial technology will also lead to breakthroughs in space travel that will “go way beyond anything that SpaceX is doing,” says David. 

“SpaceX is going to look like a horse-drawn carriage versus the tech that we are probably already capable of deploying.”

Although David does note that in the wrong hands, technology this advanced could be extremely dangerous, he is more optimistic than wary about the possibilities. 

When I point out that nobody else seems to be talking about these possibilities in the investment space, he simply wonders why not — “because if even 1% of what I’m suggesting is taking place … it’s a life-changing conversation. It is market-changing.”

And the implications of extraterrestrial technology will affect us all, whether or not we scoff at the idea of UFOs. In fact, one could argue that it’s already happening.

“I think that it’s fascinating that if all of a sudden, we’re looking up at the stars rather than looking down at our mobile phones. That’s an incredible improvement over our current state of affairs,” he says. “So what keeps me up at night is the excitement more than the worry — thankfully.”

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This is based on an episode of Top Traders Unplugged, a bi-weekly podcast with the most interesting and experienced investors, economists, traders and thought leaders in the world. Sign up to our Newsletter or Subscribe on your preferred podcast platform so that you don’t miss out on future episodes.