Leslie Kean

Leslie Kean is an American investigative journalist known for her reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena and for her research into evidence bearing on the survival of consciousness after death. She was a longtime reporter for major metropolitan newspapers and wrote a well-received book about military encounters with UAP¹, and won a court case against NASA over the release of documents relating to the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania UAP incident².

In 2017, Kean was one of three reporters who shared a byline on a New York Times story about Luis Elizondo, meeting him as a freelancer in a nondescript Washington, D.C. hotel where he sat with his back to the wall, keeping an eye on the door³. She had been summoned to a hotel lobby meeting in Washington, D.C. for the purpose of being introduced to Elizondo⁴; Christopher Mellon, Jim Semivan and Harold Puthoff were also there, in the lobby of a hotel near the Pentagon⁵, for a meeting that lasted four hours⁶. She was shown documents there that she found astonishing⁷. Kean reported that a secret program studying unidentified objects had operated within the Pentagon for ten years starting in 2007, prior to the December 2017 New York Times UAP disclosure⁸. During that meeting, Kean learned for the first time of the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)⁹. After leaving To The Stars Academy’s announcement period, Elizondo travelled to Philadelphia to meet Kean again, this time joined by her colleague Ralph Blumenthal¹⁰; during that visit the three noticed two men with tight military-style haircuts watching them on the street, whom Elizondo believed were most likely an Air Force Office of Special Investigations surveillance team¹¹, and Kean photographed one of the men after he walked into a hotel lobby and discovered the three of them watching him¹².

In 2023, Kean and Blumenthal reported for The New York Times on claims made by a former intelligence officer, David Charles Grusch, who had provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense with the information he intended to disclose to them¹³, and, according to that reporting, his on-the-record statements were cleared for open publication on 2023-04-04 and 2023-04-06¹⁴. According to the same report, a representative of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence told Kean and Blumenthal in March 2023 that committee members were not able to comment on the content of a complaint or confirm the identity of a complainant¹⁵. Kean has said that covering UFO crash retrievals has been particularly difficult to get published in The New York Times, given the controversy involved and the classified nature of the underlying information¹⁶. According to journalist Ross Coulthart, in an interview on Project Unity both Kean and Blumenthal indicated they believe there is substance to allegations that the US government has recovered alien spacecraft or fragments of alien spacecraft¹⁷.

Kean has also researched evidence for the survival hypothesis, publishing her findings in Surviving Death. She has written that veridical out-of-body experiences indicate that aware minds seem to exist and function independently of the brain and physical body¹⁸. Working with Jim Tucker, she examined cases of children who reported memories of previous lives; in 2014 she travelled to Charlottesville, Virginia, to review case files with him at the Division of Perceptual Studies, some going back decades¹⁹. She focused particularly on James Leininger, who began exhibiting past-life statements before he turned two years old²⁰, matching the life of James M. Huston Jr., a World War II pilot who died in Japan in 1945²¹; Kean found no connection between the Leininger and Huston families²². She has said she considers the evidence points toward Leininger actually remembering and reliving a previous existence rather than acquiring the information through extrasensory perception (ESP)²³, and that she agrees with Tucker’s conclusion that the case warrants serious consideration as evidence of a continuity of consciousness²⁴.

Kean also investigated the case of Ryan Hammons, whom she met in Warner, Oklahoma, at age ten²⁵. After returning to New York, she went meticulously through the journal kept by his mother, Cyndi Hammons, noting his specific statements beginning with Cyndi Hammons’s first letter to Tucker in February 2010²⁶. Kean confirmed a source verifying each of Hammons’s key statements using public records - national archives, newspapers, obituaries, census reports, death certificates, travel documents and photographs²⁷ - and, including statements verified independently by Cyndi Hammons before Tucker’s involvement, counted a total of fifty-five accurate statements Hammons had made about the life of Marty Martyn, a former Hollywood talent agent²⁸. Not every statement checked out: Hammons said Martyn’s father died when Marty was a boy, when in fact the father died six years before Martyn’s own death²⁹.

Kean also conducted personal experiments with mental mediums, writing that strict controls - such as conducting a reading by phone, ensuring the medium knows nothing about the sitter, and revealing no information during the session - can rule out cold-reading explanations³⁰. She arranged a reading with Laura Lynne Jackson two months after emailing her, without giving her last name, having a friend with an unrelated email address conduct the correspondence on her behalf³¹. During the reading, Kean recounts that Jackson told her the male spirit present was older, had died two to three years earlier, and was not married to her - details she says matched her late friend Budd Hopkins³². Kean writes that Jackson also recognised a male on her father’s side as her brother³³, and that the brother thanked her, through Jackson, for keeping a secret - a private matter Kean says she had kept from her family at his request³⁴. She later sought a second reading, adopting the pseudonym “Lesley Lay” and having a friend conduct all correspondence on his own email address to conceal her identity³⁵; Sandra O’Hara had no phone number, email address, location or real name corresponding to her before the reading³⁶. She also received an informal reading in August 2015 from British medium Sandy Ingham at a mutual friend’s home in Northern England; Kean recounts that Ingham leaned over and whispered close to her ear, “You kept my secret”³⁷. She received the message “Thank you for keeping my secret,” or its equivalent, from three different mediums who had never spoken to one another³⁸. Kean has also described her own encounters with apparent after-death communication (ADC): during an apparition experience at her family’s summer house, she said a figure slowly dissolved into shimmering particles and then nothingness as her fear increased³⁹. She has said she considers there to be no scientifically viable way to resolve the debate between the living-agent psi (LAP) hypothesis and the survival hypothesis with respect to mental mediumship⁴⁰.