Robin Hanson is an American economist at George Mason University, known for his work on prediction markets and for coining the "Great Filter," one of the most widely discussed answers to the Fermi paradox. Unusually for an established academic, he has argued that the possibility that some UFOs are alien craft deserves explicit probability estimates rather than dismissal. In June 2026 he joined the UAP Science Advisory Council chaired by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb.

Born Robin Dale Hanson on August 28, 1959, he earned a bachelor's degree in physics at the University of California, Irvine, in 1981, and in 1984 master's degrees in physics and in the conceptual foundations of science at the University of Chicago. He then worked on artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistics and hypertext publishing at Lockheed, NASA and elsewhere, and in 1990 set up an internal prediction market at the hypertext venture Xanadu. He completed a doctorate in social science at Caltech in 1997, joined the economics faculty at George Mason in 1999, where he is an associate professor, and has been a research associate at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.

Hanson's academic reputation rests largely on proposals for using betting markets to pool information. He invented the logarithmic market scoring rule used in many prediction markets, was involved in DARPA's FutureMAP project, is credited with originating the Policy Analysis Market concept and proposed "futarchy," a system in which voters set goals and markets choose the policies most likely to achieve them. He is the author of The Age of Em (2016), about an economy of emulated human minds, and, with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain (2018), about hidden motives in everyday behavior. He has written the blog Overcoming Bias for many years.

His cosmic arguments began with the essay "The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?", which reasoned that because nearby space shows no sign of colonization, some step between lifeless matter and an expanding civilization must be extremely improbable, and that it matters greatly whether that step lies behind humanity or ahead of it. A 2021 paper in The Astrophysical Journal, written with Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter and Jonathan Paulson, developed his "grabby aliens" model of rapidly expanding civilizations. That year he also listed on Overcoming Bias the features a UFOs-as-aliens theory would have to explain, and offered a tentative scenario of visitors from a sibling world seeded with life from the same source as Earth, run by a stable government that restrains its own expansion, while stressing that this was his best attempt and not strong evidence.

Hanson announced his membership of the council on June 18, 2026, and Loeb confirmed it the same day. In August he appeared on the Sol Foundation's Sol Forum with Peter Skafish, approaching the odds that some UAP are non-anthropogenic through his Great Filter and expansion work and discussing what the low observability of UAP might imply about any intelligence behind them. Skeptic Mick West answered that selection bias explains the low observability, since objects seen clearly enough would be identified and stop being UFOs. Hanson's appointment gave the council a member whose best-known work asks why the universe looks empty, and whose published arguments treat nearby nonhuman visitors as a hypothesis to be assigned odds.