Helen McCaw is a former economist and senior analyst in financial stability at the Bank of England. Press accounts say she spent about a decade at the Bank before leaving in 2012. Since 2024 she has argued that governments, central banks and finance ministries should prepare for the economic and psychological fallout if the U.S. government ever confirms that some unidentified anomalous phenomena are non-human in origin, a case that drew wide coverage in January 2026.

McCaw holds a Cambridge MA. IBTimes UK reported that her interest in the subject began in 2021, when she came across work by the NASA astronomer Richard Stothers. In May 2024 the Sol Foundation published her policy paper "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Policy Implications for the Government of the United Kingdom," which called on the UK to treat UAP as a serious national security, scientific, financial and societal issue. She has since written that the paper recommended raising UAP with the Financial Stability Board's Standing Committee on Assessment of Vulnerabilities.

In January 2026 The Times reported that McCaw had written to Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England's governor, urging him to set out contingencies in case the White House ever confirms the existence of alien life. Coverage quoted her warning that there "might be extreme price volatility in financial markets due to catastrophising or euphoria," along with a collapse in confidence, and she described the likely effect of disclosure as ontological shock. She framed the request as contingency planning worth doing even if confirmation is judged unlikely, not as a forecast that it will come.

In May 2026 she told Christopher Sharp of Liberation Times that "central banks ought to already be treating UAP disclosure as an emerging risk to global financial stability," noted that Bailey chairs the Financial Stability Board, which reports to the G20, and suggested disclosure "might even be the new 'Minsky moment.'" In a September 2026 piece for the Global Policy journal's blog, she cited questions put to the Ministry of Defence by MP Clive Lewis about a Five Eyes UAP caucus and argued that the UK's G20 presidency, beginning in December 2026, would be a reasonable year to have machinery ready for any US confirmation. She also stressed that nothing released so far confirms a non-human origin and observed that no central bank or finance ministry had yet published a word on the subject.

McCaw is writing a chapter on UAP and central banking for a Stanford University Press volume on the politics of UAP. Sharp has grouped her with fund manager Matthew Tuttle among the voices on the market side of disclosure. Her case draws on her years in the Bank's financial-stability work: that official confirmation of non-human UAP, however unlikely, belongs among the shocks central banks and finance ministries plan for.