Which country will have first contact with aliens? Place your bets.
There was a time when bookmakers offered just the win, draw and lose in football and the victor in horse racing. Such innocent times are long gone and you can bet on pretty much anything these days, from 1st half total corners in football to who will leave the cast of The Only Way is Essex next.
This is undoubtedly good news for punters as the more markets available to bet on, the greater chance of finding an edge against the bookies’ overworked oddsmakers. And some of these newer markets really do take the liberalisation of betting to the nth degree. A case in point being Paddy Power’s rather amusing book on which country will have first contact with aliens, which I stumbled upon recently.
Yes, you did read that right. You can actually place money on the first head of state to confirm their country has been in contact with alternative life beings from another planet. You’ve got to love that. Curious to know why Paddy Power bothered to price up such a bizarre market, I mailed their press office to get a few more details. Here’s what they had to say:
"Betting on the existence of aliens is definitely one of our wackier markets but you`d be surprised at the amount of interest we receive from our punters. So far we`ve taken €5000+ on what year alien existence will be proven. 2010 had been the most backed but obviously that`s a dead bet now. Over €1000 has been staked on 2011, leaving punters with just 34 days to find an ET!”
So there you go. Amazingly enough, people do actually place their hard-earned cash on such unlikely events.
Looking through the odds for the market, I noticed that Sweden were favourites.* That struck me as a bid odd given Sweden isn’t a particularly big country and surely the bigger a nation’s land mass the more chance of aliens landing there. It turns out my knowledge of alien sightings was lacking, however, which my now Paddy Power BFF soon cleared up:
*“Sweden was installed as our favourite because of the fact there were sightings of a UFO crash in 1999. In fact we had lots of people requesting odds specifically for Sweden.”
Ah. They’d certainly done their homework.
My BFF continued: “Interestingly though, since July, when the market first went live on our website, Russia has been the most backed.”
Well, that at least makes sense to me. Russia is the biggest country in the world, after all, and aliens would at least be momentarily undisturbed if landing in the Siberian tundra given no one actually lives there.
With that logic in mind I mailed my Paddy Power BFF again to find out the odds on Canada – the 2nd largest country in the mind and statistically 99.99% (in my mind) made of ice. It turns out they didn’t have Canada on their book, so they kindly added it to the market just for me. *And as crazy as it sounds I actually quite liked the odds – 10/1 – and may well take them up on their offer. I guess I became a believer in little green men.
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