Robin Hanson

George Mason economist who has blogged on UFOs-as-aliens since 2008 and joined the UAP Science Advisory Council, where he proposes a testimony data project.

Current role: Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University; member of the UAP Science Advisory Council (statistics and economics)

Former roles:

Research Associate, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Chief Scientist, Consensus Point
Researcher in AI, Bayesian statistics and hypertext publishing at Lockheed and NASA

Background

Robin Hanson, born in 1959, is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, where he has taught since 1999. He holds physics degrees from UC Irvine and the University of Chicago and a PhD in social science from Caltech (1997), and earlier worked on AI and Bayesian statistics at Lockheed and NASA. He is known for prediction-market design, the "futarchy" proposal, the books The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain, and the "grabby aliens" model of expanding civilisations. On his blog Overcoming Bias he has written since 2008 about the probability that some UFO reports are aliens, and about why the topic is treated as low status. In 2026 Avi Loeb's roster listed him for statistics and economics, and Leonard David reported his addition on 11 July, after the initial council announced on 13 June and reported by DefenseScoop. The council is advisory only: it works from unclassified data, its members hold no clearances, and it has no published charter or budget.

On the record

2026-09-04 – Overcoming Bias, "Disclosure Seems Unlikely" – on whether governments will release strong evidence: "the long history of new revelations offers a low base rate, suggesting that disclosure is pretty unlikely anytime soon." Overcoming Bias
2026-08-27 – Overcoming Bias, "Testimony Data Project" – "I'm now on the White House UAP Science Advisory Council, where the two main hopes for normalization today seem to be [...]" He proposes to "opaquely collect very detailed data on random spacetime regions" and fit statistical models to events near people reporting strange experiences. Overcoming Bias
2026-07-11 – reported as a council member by Leonard David, who corrected an earlier misspelling of his name. Loeb's Medium roster lists him for statistics and economics. Leonard David · Loeb roster on Medium
2021-05-05 – Overcoming Bias, "UFOs Show Govt. Competence As Either Surprisingly High Or Low" – argued that error and hoax explanations seem less likely than secret human or alien technology: "Aliens, in contrast, are predicted to exist by our best theories." Overcoming Bias
2008-08-20 – Overcoming Bias, "Are UFOs Aliens?" – "we would have to assign roughly a 5% chance that some UFOs really are aliens." Overcoming Bias

Timeline of involvement

2008-08-20 – first Overcoming Bias post on UFOs as aliens
2021-03 to 2021-06 – series of UFO posts, including on likelihood ratios for physical hypotheses
2026-07-11 – reported as a UAP Science Advisory Council member
2026-08-27 – proposes a testimony data project as a council member
2026-09-04 – argues that disclosure is unlikely soon

Relevant links

Part of the Key People in Disclosure series. Verified 2026-10-10. Spotted an error? Reach out.