Peter Diamandis is an American engineer, physician and entrepreneur, born on May 20, 1961, in the Bronx, New York City. He is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which runs large cash competitions for technical breakthroughs, and a longtime promoter of commercial spaceflight. He entered the UAP debate in September 2026 with an essay arguing that the subject had become too significant to dismiss. A month later he hosted a gathering where a possible XPRIZE for proof of non-human technology was discussed.

Diamandis earned bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School. As an MIT student in 1980 he co-founded Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, and in 1987 he co-founded the International Space University. He co-founded the Zero Gravity Corporation, which flies parabolic weightless flights, in 1994, and was an early backer of the space-tourism company Space Adventures.

He founded XPRIZE in 1994. Its first major competition, the Ansari XPRIZE for private human spaceflight, was won in 2004 by SpaceShipOne, a team led by Burt Rutan and funded by Paul Allen. Diamandis co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil in 2008, the asteroid-mining company Planetary Resources in 2012, and Human Longevity Inc. in 2014, and he co-founded and chairs the longevity company Fountain Life. With Steven Kotler he wrote Abundance (2012), Bold (2015) and The Future Is Faster Than You Think (2020), and he hosts the Moonshots podcast.

His essay, "The Evidence Around UAPs Is Getting Harder to Ignore," appeared on X on September 7, 2026. Diamandis wrote that he had "no personal firsthand experience" with the phenomenon, but that mounting evidence had "captured my attention." He cited testimony from former officials including David Grusch and Luis Elizondo, studies linking UFO reports to nuclear testing, and a report that the UAP Science Advisory Council had been told at an August 31 meeting that the government had a "preparedness plan in place" if non-human intelligence were confirmed. He suggested UAP activity might also track the rise of artificial superintelligence, while noting that correlation is not causation, and closed: "I am not asking you to believe. I am asking you to look." He is not a member of the council, which Avi Loeb chairs.

On October 3, 2026, Diamandis and the filmmaker Lyn Lear co-hosted a UAP salon of about 100 people at his Santa Monica home, with talks by Loeb, Garry Nolan, Ryan Graves and Peter Skafish of the Sol Foundation. Three days later the journalist Ben Schreckinger reported, citing four people involved, that Diamandis was exploring a new XPRIZE for proof of alien technology. Loeb said the criteria would ask a winner to identify "technologies that are of non-human origin in the form of objects near Earth," and that he had found a potential funder. Neither Diamandis nor the foundation commented for the report, and any prize would still need the XPRIZE board's approval. If it goes ahead, it would bring the foundation behind the Ansari XPRIZE, which helped open the era of private spaceflight, into the search for non-human technology.