Lost/Alvar Hanso

Alvar Hanso Lost
Actor	Ian Patrick Williams
First Appearance	2x03 - Orientation
Last Appearance	—
Show Status	Series: Guest Star
Episode Count	1
Notable Episodes	2x03 - Orientation
Flashback Count	0

Alvar Hanso is a mysterious Danish industrialist and munitions magnate. He presumably founded The Hanso Foundation, and provided the financial backing for The DHARMA Initiative. He appeared very briefly in the Swan's orientation film in Orientation.

Information about Alvar Hanso is from the Lost Experience.

Basic Information

First making his mark during World War II, Alvar Hanso provided munitions to various resistance movements around Europe. After the War, Hanso became the leading purveyor of high-technology armaments for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

After decades of keeping the world safe through the development of sophisticated weapons systems, Hanso turned his attention to critical areas of science and technology — always searching for new ways to improve the human experience, and create a brighter future for all humanity.

However, the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly brought humanity to the brink of destruction through nuclear fire. The United States and the Soviet Union nearly fulfilled the promise of mutual assured destruction yet continued to foster their destructive policies through the Cold War. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United Nations Security Council commissioned Enzo Valenzetti to find a solution to the problem and his result was the Valenzetti Equation — an equation that predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself. The UN Security Council buried Valenzetti's results, but Hanso created the DHARMA Initiative in a joint venture with Gerald and Karen DeGroot to find a solution to the Valenzetti Equation and thereby save humanity.

Driven by a need for privacy and a deep-seated sense of humility, Hanso has released few details of his personal life to the public. However, Hanso continues to run his vast network of companies, including The Hanso Foundation, and has set new standards for philanthropy and the support of pure scientific research for the betterment of the entire race.

The last record of any public appearance by Hanso was on December 31, 2002 in Madrid, Spain. While staying a hotel, Hanso collapsed with a myocardial infection and, in a state of mild delirium, was admitted to a hospital by hotel staff. Hanso refused to have any blood drawn and demanded to be discharged once his personal physician and staff arrived. However, the doctor attending to Hanso had secretly drawn blood from him. After getting the results of his blood back, she found the tests results "most unusual" and believes he may suffer a serious and even fatal heart attack in the near future.

Since his public appearance in Madrid, Alvar Hanso had not been seen in public, nor on security cameras at The Hanso Foundation in Copehagen. Any and all correspondence written to him had been returned unopened. Unbeknownst to the outside world, Alvar Hanso was a prisoner in his own home in Narvik, Norway; a prisoner of the man who was to be his successor — Thomas Mittelwerk. With Mittelwerk's flight from authorities, Alvar Hanso was freed from his imprisonment and has returned to The Hanso Foundation, promising to change it for the better.

Character History

• 2x03 - Orientation: Appeared very briefly from afar in the Swan's orientation film.
• The Lost Experience: Appeared as the narrator in an orientation film.

Quotes

• “From the dawn of our species, Man has been blessed with curiosity. Our most precious gift, without exception, is the desire to know more — to look beyond what is accepted as the truth and to imagine what is possible.”

Alvar Hanso, Address to the U.N. Security Council, 1967

• "The future need not be an undiscovered country. Through science and technology we can turn our inexorable forward motion into a safe journey into a well-charted haven of tranquility."
• "Prevention is the number one reason people live longer lives today. The time has come for everyone in our world to understand how a minimum investment of time and effort can lead to a vastly longer and happier life."
• "A society should not merely be measured by its brightest lights, but on how the brightest light the way for those who cannot shine for themselves."
• "To understand where our world is going, we must first seek to understand how the world was made."
• "Given enough time, there is no end to what human beings can accomplish, no frontiers that we cannot cross, and no experiences that we cannot live to pass on to future generations."