Leslie Kean

Leslie Kean is an American investigative journalist and author who specialises in unidentified aerial phenomena and afterlife research, best known for her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on Record and as co-author of the December 2017 New York Times article that disclosed the existence of the AATIP.

Early life and education

Kean is the daughter of environmentalist and philanthropist Hamilton Fish Kean (1925–2016) and granddaughter of Congressman Robert Kean; her uncle is former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, and her cousin is Congressman Thomas Kean Jr. According to The New Yorker, she draws "a modest family income" from inherited wealth. She grew up in New York City, attended Spence School and Bard College, and helped found a Zen centre in upstate New York.

Career

Early journalism and Burma reporting

Kean worked as a photographer at the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University before travelling to Burma in the 1990s to interview political prisoners, experiences that became the basis for her first book, Burma's Revolution of the Spirit (1994), co-authored with Alan Clements. She subsequently worked as an investigative journalist, producer, and on-air host at Berkeley-based Pacifica Radio Network station KPFA, on the programme Flashpoints.

UFO journalism and Kecksburg FOIA (2000–2009)

Kean began publishing work on UFOs in 2000 and has been a recurring guest on Coast to Coast AM. A photograph of a purported UFO taken in 1971 by the Costa Rican National Geographic Institute over Lake Cote was given to her by the Costa Rican government and hangs behind her desk; she has described it as "the finest image of a U.F.O. ever made public".

UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on Record (2010)

Kean's 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on Record, published by Harmony Books with a foreword by John Podesta, assembled testimony from senior military and government officials across multiple countries — including retired generals from France, Belgium, Chile, and the United States — arguing that a small percentage of UFO cases represent a genuine unknown phenomenon warranting serious scientific investigation. The book became a New York Times bestseller.

Surviving Death (2017)

In 2017 Kean published Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife, extending her investigative methodology to parapsychological subjects including mediumship and near-death experiences.

2017 New York Times AATIP article

Main article:

Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program

On 16 December 2017, Kean co-authored "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program" for The New York Times with Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper. The article revealed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a $22.5 million Pentagon programme that had quietly studied UAP from 2007 to 2012, sponsored by Senator Harry Reid. A companion piece, "2 Navy Airmen and an Object That 'Accelerated Like Nothing I've Ever Seen'", was published the same day and carried declassified gun-camera video of the 2004 Nimitz Tic Tac encounter, triggering a global news cycle. The role of Christopher Mellon in walking the Nimitz footage out of the Pentagon was subsequently confirmed, though Mellon allegedly had not wanted that detail in the original Times piece.

Between 2017 and 2020, Kean and Blumenthal were widely described as leading mainstream media coverage of formerly classified Pentagon UAP programmes.

2023 David Grusch article

Main article:

David Grusch

On 5 June 2023, Kean and Blumenthal published a report in The Debrief featuring David Grusch, a former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency officer who alleged that the U.S. government possesses retrieved non-human craft and biological remains. The pair had originally brought the Grusch story to the New York Times, which declined to publish it, a sequence corroborated by Australian journalist Ross Coulthart, who conducted a seven-hour interview with Grusch.

Ongoing investigations

Kean has continued to press intelligence-community sources on cases including the Varginha incident and other Brazilian UFO events. She is affiliated with the UFO research organisation UFODATA.

Skeptical assessment

Steven Greer has accused Kean of having embedded herself in the planning and execution of the Disclosure Project press conference and then allegedly betraying the organisation's trust by repackaging its witnesses and case studies for her own work, while purportedly adopting a posture of "fake agnosticism" — publicly maintaining that the nature of UFOs remained unknown — in order to secure mainstream media access. Greer further alleges that intelligence agencies jammed the Disclosure Project press conference signal for the first hour on the day of the event, and that Kean was reportedly present and aware that the conference had revealed too much.

Written works

• 1994. Burma's Revolution of the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity — with Alan Clements. ISBN 978-0893815806.
• 2010. UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record — foreword by John Podesta, Harmony Books, New York. ISBN 978-0307716842.
• 2017. Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. ISBN 978-0553419610.

See also

• The Debrief
• UAP disclosure movement
• Ralph Blumenthal
• David Grusch

External links

• Official website
• Leslie Kean at IMDb

References