If a private company could make these kinds of things, what benefit would they get by not selling it to a government? They could set their price and immediately become world renowned.
Unless you are saying that there is a shadowy secret organization that controls the world with space lasers and UAPs….
As you return home, henchman grab you, blindfold you and take you to my secret lair, then bind you to a table with a laser mounted on the ceiling pointed at the table. I walk up to the table and power on the laser and its beam slowly moves toward you between your legs.
Me: "You figured it out. SPECTRE rules the world with UAPs and space lasers!! And that's unfortunate for you."
I start to walk away...
You struggle with the bonds confining you to the table, to no avail. And with just a hint of panic in your voice:
You: "Do you expect me to talk?"
I laugh and say:
Me: "No Atotalnoob. I expect you to die."
With apologies to Ian Fleming[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfinger_(film)
Edit: Fixed typo and formatting.
You should. It's fun. And Sean Connery (IMNSHO) was the best Bond.
Ze Peniz iz Bäd! Ze Gun iz Good!
That'd be a neat trick, given that he's been dead for four years.
Does he jump out of his grave to do that?
I think it's something trivial, probably boring, yet locked in some sort of confidential arrangement. I think we're on a scenario that the public should know something, but we can't know what UAPs are, and these two conditions are deadlocked.
Would that not be a government by definition?
Hedge fund stock market bullshit. You know, the kind that has people track movements of various CEOs, or buy aerial/satellite images of parking lots, and stuff.
That would be my main guess. As for "monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe" specifically, I'd look at PMCs and data brokers, but there's probably many more scenarios I'm failing to imagine right now.
EDIT: Also, to channel my inner Matt Levine: securities fraud?
They could play countries off each other to gain soft power over policy that affects other investments, ones easier to leverage that selling weapons. “That’s a nice military you got there, it’d be a shame if China/Taiwan/Israel/Iran/NK/Russia/USA had this one weird trick to obsolete it.”
It’d be even more impactful if it changed the nuclear MAD game, because the company could hide behind the risk of escalation. Don’t sell to any one nuclear power so that the others don’t immediately start nuclear war to preempt the new technology.
This is all ridiculously speculative but if humans managed to make a flying craft as fast and maneuverable as UFO witnesses say they are, missile defense and the end of MAD is my first thought.