Leslie Kean

Leslie Kean grew up in New York City, attended the Spence School and Bard College, helped found a Zen center in upstate New York, and worked as a photographer at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, before a 1990s trip to Burma to interview political prisoners led to investigative journalism, according to The New Yorker. She worked as a producer and host of "Flashpoints" at the Berkeley radio station KPFA. Her grandfather Robert Winthrop Kean served ten terms in Congress and her uncle Thomas Kean was governor of New Jersey and chaired the 9/11 Commission.¹

Early UFO work

In 1999 a journalist friend in Paris sent Kean the report of the French group COMETA, "Les OVNI et la Défense," and in 2000 she wrote a summary for the Boston Globe Focus section, published May 21, 2000.¹ The New Yorker described her as "an independent investigative journalist and a novice U.F.O. researcher who had worked with Greer" (Steven Greer) when she watched his May 9, 2001 Disclosure Project event at the National Press Club, where she "knew then that I had to walk away" because of speakers' "outrageous, grandiose claims."¹ In 2002 Larry Landsman, director of projects for the Sci Fi Channel (now Syfy), invited her to lead a public effort to obtain government records on the Kecksburg, Pennsylvania incident of December 9, 1965. Sci Fi hired lawyers, researchers and the Washington firm PodestaMattoon; its Edwin S. Rothschild introduced her to John Podesta, who agreed to support publicly her lawsuit against NASA. The case ran four years and ended in a settlement; Kean received "hundreds of largely irrelevant documents."¹² By March 2003 the effort included an online petition at signpetition.com asking Congress to direct the General Accounting Office to examine Kecksburg and a plan to sue, through a law firm doing freedom-of-information work, wherever agencies short-changed requests for declassified files. Kean said of the case, "This case is so incredibly fascinating. Even now, the trail is not cold." Stan Gordon of Greensburg, then 53, was also part of the records effort, and Landsman said, "We're committed to solving this." The drive was "bankrolled by" the Sci Fi Channel, and Kean was described as a San Francisco-area freelance journalist whose writing had appeared on the opinion pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the news pages of the Boston Globe.³ Podesta wrote the foreword to her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (Random House imprint), and in June 2011 invited her to make a confidential presentation at the Center for American Progress, which he had founded. In August 2014 she met Podesta, then an adviser to Barack Obama, in the West Wing and proposed that one person in the Office of Science and Technology Policy be assigned to the subject; the proposal went nowhere.¹

Her later Huffington Post work drew on material from the Chilean government's Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (CEFAA). Her January 6, 2017 piece "Groundbreaking UFO Video Just Released by Chilean Navy" was analyzed on the forum Metabunk by Mick West and others, who concluded by January 11 that the object was Iberia flight IB6830 from Santiago to Madrid; Kean said of West that "if Mick were really interested in this stuff, he wouldn't debunk every single video."¹ New York Magazine describes her late partner as Budd Hopkins, the abduction researcher, in connection with her book Surviving Death.⁴

The December 2017 placement

Kean told Gideon Lewis-Kraus that on October 4, 2017, at the behest of Christopher Mellon, she was called to a confidential meeting in the bar of a hotel near the Pentagon, where Hal Puthoff and Jim Semivan introduced her to Luis Elizondo, who had left the Pentagon the previous day. She was shown documents for three hours and told she could have the videos, with chain-of-custody documentation, "if she could place a story in the Times." She telephoned Ralph Blumenthal, who wrote to executive editor Dean Baquet; the New York Times assigned Helene Cooper, and the three published "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program" on December 16, 2017. Kean told Lewis-Kraus: "I never would have ever imagined I could have ended up writing for the Times," and gave "all the credit to Elizondo and Mellon for coming forward." She also said she developed doubts about Tom DeLonge after his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, while having "full confidence" in Elizondo.¹ See December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report.

Keith Kloor reported in The Intercept in 2019 that Kean "wrote in 2016 that she was 'privileged to welcome' Chris Mellon into the UFO organization to which she belonged."⁵ The Pentagon's 2019 statements that Elizondo had "no responsibilities" for AATIP while in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and the dispute with Bryan Bender's December 2017 reporting, are set out on the event page.

After 2017

Kean has since covered the subject for the Times, sharing bylines with Blumenthal. A July 2020 article by the two referred to unclassified slides shown at congressional briefings that mentioned "off-world" vehicles and "crash retrievals" and said Harry Reid "believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts." The Times corrected the sentence the next day. Reid told Lewis-Kraus he had never seen proof of remnants and that he had "been told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials." A former Pentagon official told Lewis-Kraus that terms in Kean's slides were ones "we would never say." Kean told Lewis-Kraus she had come to believe that fragments had been "hoarded somewhere" and cited Jacques Vallee, who is working with Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan on purported crash material.¹ In June 2023 she and Blumenthal published the first account of the claims of David Grusch on The Debrief.⁴