{"type":"people","slug":"tyler-cowen","title":"Tyler Cowen","url":"https://disclosdex.com/people/tyler-cowen","description":"Economist whose public UAP commentary frames disclosure as a data, secrecy, and national-security problem rather than revelation","date":"2019-05-02T00:00:00.000Z","tags":["Academic"],"updated":"2026-05-18T11:22:24.000Z","disclosureRating":2,"connectionCount":6,"content":{"markdown":"Tyler Cowen is a George Mason University economics professor, Mercatus Center leader, author, blogger, podcaster, and grant-program founder who has written recurring UAP commentary since 2019.[^1][^2][^6]\n\n## Economist With a Disclosure Sideline\n\nGeorge Mason University's economics department identifies Cowen as a professor of economics with research fields in monetary theory, financial economics, and welfare economics.[^2] The Mercatus Center identifies him as the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, chairman and faculty director of Mercatus, a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the F.A. Hayek Program, co-founder of Marginal Revolution University, host of *Conversations with Tyler*, and founder of Emergent Ventures.[^1] Cowen's official site and Marginal Revolution's about page place his public role in daily blogging, books, podcasts, online economics education, and broad policy debate rather than in UFO investigation or government disclosure work.[^3][^4] Mercatus describes Emergent Ventures as a grant program for scalable ideas and Fast Grants as a COVID-19 science-funding effort.[^5]\n\n## The 2019 Entry Point\n\nCowen's public UAP relevance centers first on a May 2, 2019 Bloomberg Opinion column republished by ThePrint after the U.S. military's UFO-sighting reports had become a mainstream policy topic.[^6] In that column, Cowen treated the pilot reports as a low-probability but serious question, argued that stigma should not suppress inquiry, and framed possible alien visitation as only one hypothesis among several.[^6]\n\nBy December 2020, Cowen had brought the topic into *Conversations with Tyler* by asking former CIA Director John O. Brennan how he would analyze the released Navy UFO videos.[^7] Brennan answered that some phenomena could involve a different form of life while emphasizing that analysts would need extensive data and expertise before reaching conclusions.[^7]\n\n## Sensors, Reports, and Probability Language\n\nThe ODNI's June 25, 2021 preliminary UAP assessment gave Cowen's later writing a government reference point by saying that most reported UAP probably represented physical objects and that some reports involved multiple sensors.[^8] Cowen's same-day Marginal Revolution post interpreted the report as evidence that unexplained measurements were real enough to study while still leaving mundane explanations, sensor limits, foreign systems, and unknowns on the table.[^9] In the December 2021 *Conversations with Tyler* retrospective, Cowen said he thought there was only a small chance that the UAP data came from an alien civilization, but he still treated the Navy data as a genuine puzzle.[^10] In a 2022 conversation with Stewart Brand, Cowen again framed the videos as a serious multi-sensor problem and gave an alien drone-probe interpretation a low but nonzero probability.[^11] In Joe Walker's December 2022 interview with Cowen, Cowen put the alien drone-probe possibility above ten percent but below fifty percent, while also noting that Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan considered his view irrational.[^12]\n\nCowen's May 2022 Marginal Revolution post converted that probability language into a structured argument for and against alien visitation.[^13] The strongest pro-visitation argument, as Cowen presented it, was that some well-attested cases seemed hard to reduce to ordinary drones, balloons, birds, sensor artifacts, or pilot error.[^13] His strongest anti-visitation arguments included the lack of a single decisive public photograph, the possibility of selection effects, and the danger of treating exclusion of familiar explanations as proof of an alien one.[^13]\n\n## Hearings, Secrecy, and the Schumer-Rounds Problem\n\nAfter the 2023 congressional hearings associated with [David Grusch](/people/david-grusch) and broader [congressional UAP oversight](/events/2022-congressional-intel-counterterrorism-uap-hearings), Cowen rejected the claim that the U.S. government possessed alien spacecraft remains or alien bodies.[^14] He nevertheless argued that the combined pilot, radar, infrared, and eyewitness record made UAP a serious national-security and intelligence puzzle, and he described the government as puzzled rather than all-knowing or conspiratorial.[^14] Cowen treated the hearings as a reason for investigation rather than evidence for crash retrieval.[^14]\n\nCowen's December 2023 post on UAP disclosure policy treated [Chuck Schumer](/people/chuck-schumer)'s UAP amendment as a difficult secrecy problem rather than a simple transparency mandate.[^15][^16] The amendment text defined terms such as legacy program, non-human intelligence, and technologies of unknown origin, which explains why Cowen treated it as broader than ordinary document release.[^16] Cowen argued that immediate maximal disclosure might help if the phenomenon were alien but might harm U.S. interests if the unknowns involved Chinese, Russian, or other terrestrial capabilities.[^15] In June 2024, he returned to the same theme by arguing that the central problem was institutional difficulty admitting uncertainty, not proof that hidden officials already knew the answer.[^17]\n\n## Limits on the Cowen Record\n\nIn 2023, Cowen said he did not believe the U.S. government had alien remains or alien bodies.[^14] The March 2024 [AARO](/programs/aaro) historical report said AARO found no empirical evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel confirmed UAP sightings as extraterrestrial technology.[^18] Cowen accepted the relevance of that negative institutional baseline while criticizing the [AARO Historical Record Report Volume 1](/documents/2024-aaro-historical-record-report-volume-1) for not resolving prominent Navy-video cases such as Nimitz, Gimbal, and GoFast.[^19]\n\nStatistician Andrew Gelman criticized Cowen's attention to alien-body and UFO discussions as part of a media-insider pattern that, in Gelman's view, lowered evidentiary standards around UFO-as-space-alien claims.[^20] In May 2026, Cowen wrote that there was no proof of any specific UAP explanation, that he did not expect an alien-body or alien-technology disclosure, and that there was probably not a hidden [Roswell](/events/the-roswell-incident)-style revelation waiting behind the record.[^21]\n\n## References\n\n[^1]: [Mercatus Center, \"Tyler Cowen\"](https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/tyler-cowen)\n[^2]: [George Mason University Department of Economics, \"Tyler Cowen\"](https://economics.gmu.edu/people/tcowen)\n[^3]: [Tyler Cowen, official site](https://tylercowen.com/)\n[^4]: [Marginal Revolution, \"About\"](https://marginalrevolution.com/about)\n[^5]: [Mercatus Center, \"Emergent Ventures\"](https://www.mercatus.org/emergent-ventures)\n[^6]: [Tyler Cowen, \"Are aliens visiting us? US military seems to think so,\" ThePrint republication of Bloomberg Opinion, May 2, 2019](https://theprint.in/opinion/are-aliens-visiting-us-us-military-seems-to-think-so/230117/)\n[^7]: [Tyler Cowen and John O. Brennan, \"John O. Brennan on Life in the CIA,\" *Conversations with Tyler*, December 9, 2020](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/john-o-brennan/)\n[^8]: [Office of the Director of National Intelligence, \"Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,\" June 25, 2021](https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf)\n[^9]: [Tyler Cowen, \"The UAPs [UFOs] report,\" Marginal Revolution, June 25, 2021](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/the-uaps-ufos-report.html)\n[^10]: [Tyler Cowen, \"Conversations with Tyler 2021 Retrospective,\" *Conversations with Tyler*, December 29, 2021](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/conversations-with-tyler-2021-retrospective/)\n[^11]: [Tyler Cowen and Stewart Brand, \"Stewart Brand on Decivilization, Western Civilization, and the Value of Maintenance,\" *Conversations with Tyler*, January 12, 2022](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/stewart-brand/)\n[^12]: [Joe Walker and Tyler Cowen, \"Talent Is That Which Is Scarce,\" *The Joe Walker Podcast*, December 31, 2022](https://josephnoelwalker.com/142-talent-is-that-which-is-scarce-tyler-cowen/)\n[^13]: [Tyler Cowen, \"The best arguments for and against the alien visitation hypothesis,\" Marginal Revolution, May 26, 2022](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/05/the-best-arguments-for-and-against-the-alien-visitation-hypothesis.html)\n[^14]: [Tyler Cowen, \"My views on the UFO hearings,\" Marginal Revolution, August 2, 2023](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/my-views-on-the-ufo-hearings.html)\n[^15]: [Tyler Cowen, \"What should UAP disclosure policy be?,\" Marginal Revolution, December 14, 2023](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/what-should-uap-disclosure-policy-be.html)\n[^16]: [Senate Democrats, \"Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023\"](https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment.pdf)\n[^17]: [Tyler Cowen, \"How to think about UAPs,\" Marginal Revolution, June 14, 2024](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/06/how-to-think-about-uaps.html)\n[^18]: [All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, \"Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume I,\" March 2024](https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/08/2003409233/-1/-1/0/AARO_Historical_Record_Report_Vol_1_2024.pdf)\n[^19]: [Tyler Cowen, \"The new UAPs report,\" Marginal Revolution, March 8, 2024](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/03/the-new-uaps-report.html)\n[^20]: [Andrew Gelman, \"On the border between credulity and postmodernism: the case of the UFOs as space aliens media insiders,\" Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, February 27, 2024](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/02/27/on-the-border-between-credulity-and-postmodernism-the-case-of-the-ufos-as-space-aliens-media-insiders/)\n[^21]: [Tyler Cowen, \"The UAP report, so far,\" Marginal Revolution, May 9, 2026](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/05/the-uap-report-so-far.html)","readingTime":"6 min read"},"relatedRecords":[{"ref":{"type":"documents","slug":"2024-aaro-historical-record-report-volume-1","title":"AARO Historical Record Report Volume 1 (2024)","url":"https://disclosdex.com/documents/2024-aaro-historical-record-report-volume-1"},"direction":"outbound","weight":1},{"ref":{"type":"programs","slug":"aaro","title":"All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)","url":"https://disclosdex.com/programs/aaro"},"direction":"outbound","weight":1},{"ref":{"type":"events","slug":"2022-congressional-intel-counterterrorism-uap-hearings","title":"2022 Congressional UAP Hearing","url":"https://disclosdex.com/events/2022-congressional-intel-counterterrorism-uap-hearings"},"direction":"outbound","weight":1},{"ref":{"type":"people","slug":"david-grusch","title":"David Grusch","url":"https://disclosdex.com/people/david-grusch"},"direction":"outbound","weight":1},{"ref":{"type":"people","slug":"chuck-schumer","title":"Chuck Schumer","url":"https://disclosdex.com/people/chuck-schumer"},"direction":"outbound","weight":1},{"ref":{"type":"events","slug":"the-roswell-incident","title":"The Roswell Incident","url":"https://disclosdex.com/events/the-roswell-incident"},"direction":"outbound","weight":1}],"citation":{"canonicalUrl":"https://disclosdex.com/people/tyler-cowen","title":"Tyler Cowen","publisher":"Disclosdex","retrievedFrom":"https://disclosdex.com/api/v1/people/tyler-cowen","license":"CC-BY-4.0"}}