An October surprise is an unexpected event or piece of information that comes out right before the election, and its upended entire campaigns before.

One of the predictions in the Politico article that hasn’t yet happened (but at this point might not surprise) came from the Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb: “Our research suggests that it’s only a matter of time before we’ll find something that signals that we’re not alone in the universe. And that will change a lot of things.”