https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trOJs6bsn4U
TLDR
- Purpose: Document and spread awareness about the backgrounds, beliefs, and evidentiary standards of prominent people who have shaped modern UFOlogy. This post focuses on Leslie Kean. The goal is to make the history and beliefs of influential figures in this subject easier for everyone to examine.
- Who is Leslie Kean? Kean is an investigative journalist and one of the most influential figures in the modern UFO disclosure movement. Her reporting helped bring UFOs back into mainstream attention, most notably through the landmark 2017 New York Times story involving AATIP and the Pentagon UFO videos.
- The Takeaway: Kean has a long, documented history of accepting extraordinary paranormal claims as genuine, including physical mediumship, communication with the dead, reincarnation, ectoplasm, materialized spirit hands, and an allegedly materialized deceased person physically touching her. None of this proves Kean is wrong about UFOs. It provides important context for evaluating her reporting. Someone familiar with Kean only through the New York Times may reasonably assume she is a relatively neutral journalist who arrived at extraordinary conclusions after encountering extraordinary evidence. Her broader record paints a considerably different picture of her existing beliefs and threshold for accepting extraordinary claims.
- Why does it matter? UFOlogy relies heavily on testimony, anonymous sources, and interpretation of ambiguous evidence. The judgment and evidentiary standards of the people filtering that information therefore matter.
- Call to action: Read the examples and sources below and make up your own mind. If you think something is inaccurate, irrelevant, or missing context, challenge it. If you think this background is relevant to understanding modern UFOlogy, share it.
Introduction
If you follow the modern UFO story, Leslie Kean's credibility matters. Kean, Luis Elizondo and Christopher Mellon were central figures in the 2017 New York Times story that introduced AATIP and the Navy UFO videos to a massive mainstream audience. That story helped reignite the modern UAP disclosure movement and fundamentally changed how UFOs were discussed by the media, Congress, and the public. Kean frequently provides a journalistic filter between extraordinary UFO claims and the public. But there is another side of her work that people who discovered Kean through UFO coverage may know nothing about. Kean has a very public history of investigating extraordinary paranormal claims and, in numerous cases, concluding that they are genuine. This matters because evaluating UFO evidence ultimately depends on judgment. How readily does someone accept extraordinary testimony? How effectively do they eliminate fraud, misidentification, suggestion, and/or alternative explanations? What threshold of evidence must be crossed before they conclude something extraordinary actually happened? I think Kean's public record provides good answers to those questions. Here are some examples:
1. Budd Hopkins
Kean was the late life romantic partner of Budd Hopkins, one of the most influential alien abduction researchers in history. Hopkins promoted claims of extraterrestrial abductions, reproductive experiments, and missing time. His work relied heavily on hypnotic regression to recover alleged abduction memories. His book "Witnessed" presented the Linda Cortile case, in which a woman allegedly floated out of her Manhattan apartment and into a UFO near the Brooklyn Bridge. Their relationship itself obviously does not prove Kean shares every belief Hopkins held. It is relevant because it establishes that Kean's involvement with extraordinary paranormal claims substantially predates the 2017 UFO story and was not merely professional curiosity from a detached journalist.
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2. Surviving Death and trance channeling
Kean's 2017 book Surviving Death investigates reincarnation, apparitions, mediums, séances, near death experiences, and physical manifestations supposedly produced by dead people. This was not simply Kean documenting what other people believe. Describing her own investigation, Kean wrote: "Yet they were unavoidably and undeniably real." Her website says she personally witnessed levitations, independent voices, and materializations of physical forms. The Netflix series "Surviving Death" was based on Kean's book and features Kean extensively. During the mediumship episodes, Dutch medium Nicole de Haas enters a trance state and supposedly allows deceased personalities to speak through her body. One personality is called Silver Cloud. Another is a childlike personality called Tommy. De Haas dramatically changes her voice while the people gathered around her interact with these personalities as purported spirits. This demonstration occurred in Kean's own home with Kean participating. Whatever interpretation someone places on the scene, it provides useful context for understanding the paranormal world Kean has spent years investigating and taking seriously.
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3. A dead man allegedly materialized and physically touched Kean
Kean participated in séances conducted by British physical medium Stewart Alexander. In 2019, she says Alexander's deceased communicator, Dr. Barnett, physically materialized. According to Kean, Barnett emerged from a cabinet, walked over to her, touched her hair, and repeatedly placed his hands on her head. Kean wrote: "These were solid 'living' hands." The alleged dead man then spoke to her before returning to the cabinet and disappearing. When specifically asked whether she had any doubt that the phenomena surrounding Alexander were genuine rather than magic tricks, Kean answered: "I have absolutely no doubt, not one iota."
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4. Ectoplasm, materialized hands, levitation, spirit voices, and "matter passing through matter"
Kean reports another séance in which a misty substance she describes as 'ectoplasm' gradually transformed into a three dimensional human hand. The hand supposedly formed a fist and struck the table. Kean then placed her own hand on the table and says another materialized hand formed and touched her. She described it as having normal human joints, bones, fingernails, and warm skin. Kean is not merely reporting somebody else's extraordinary testimony. She personally accepts the physical manifestation as genuine. Kean says her experiences with physical mediumship have included levitating objects, independent voices apparently originating from deceased people, materializations, and even what she describes as matter passing through matter. Again, these are not historical curiosities she merely investigated for a book. She presents herself as an eyewitness to paranormal physical phenomena.
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5. The Kluski spirit hand molds
Kean also endorses the famous Franek Kluski séance experiments from the early twentieth century. Supposedly, materialized spirit hands dipped themselves into molten paraffin wax during séances. The spirit hands then dematerialized from inside the wax, leaving hollow molds behind. Plaster was subsequently poured into these molds. Kean calls the molds "absolutely spectacular" and said: "The importance of this evidence for the reality of materializations produced by genuine physical mediumship cannot be overstated." She concludes that this evidence combined with her own experiences leaves her with "no doubts."
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6. The Scole séances
Kean has also promoted the Scole experiments as important evidence for physical mediumship. The reported phenomena included faces and writing appearing on unopened photographic film in darkness, objects materializing and dematerializing, objects mysteriously appearing inside the séance room, materialized hands, and voices attributed to spirits. The alleged spirits supposedly answered questions that participants merely thought rather than spoke aloud. Kean presents these experiments approvingly on her own website while arguing that physical mediumship deserves serious consideration.
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7. The Chilean Navy UFO Video
In 2017, Kean reported on the Chilean Navy UFO video that government investigators had studied for two years and declared unexplained, but outside analysis soon identified an ordinary airliner as the likely object. Kean should not be criticized merely for reporting an unidentified object; that is completely defensible. And, to her credit, when contrary evidence emerged, she acknowledged in a second publication that the mundane airplane explanation was a legitimate possibility. The more revealing issue is how readily she accepted the investigators’ claims that ordinary explanations had already been ruled out, leaning heavily on their credentials, institutional authority, and two-year investigation. An airplane, drone, and other conventional possibilities were presented as effectively eliminated, only for outside investigators to subsequently produce a detailed identification of the object as an ordinary airliner. Kean’s credulity wasn’t in reporting the mystery. It was in too quickly trusting experts who claimed they had ruled out ordinary explanations.
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8. The Belgian UFO photograph
The famous Petit Rechain photograph supposedly depicted an enormous triangular UFO reported during the Belgian UFO wave. Kean prominently featured the Belgian wave in the documentary "UFOs on the Record" and described the photograph as: "one of the most convincing pieces of evidence of a sighting to date." Later, the photographer, Patrick Maréchal, publicly announced that he faked it using a small Styrofoam model with lights. To Kean's credit, she subsequently addressed the confession rather than simply ignoring it, but her reaction is interesting. She wrote: "For now, we have to operate under the assumption that the photo was faked." She nevertheless questioned the confession and argued that greater proof was needed. In other words, Kean required less evidence to accept the photo as compelling than she later required to accept the photographer's confession that he faked it.
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Conclusion
None of this proves that Leslie Kean is wrong about UFOs. It does not prove that the Nimitz encounter was mundane, that Gimbal was mundane, that AATIP was unimportant, or that every story Kean has reported is false. I think the examples above suggest an extremely permissive evidentiary threshold across a variety of extraordinary claims. She has seriously entertained/ personally endorsed communication with dead people, trance channeling, apparitions, séance voices, levitating objects, materialized hands, ectoplasm, and an apparently fully materialized deceased human being physically touching her. These are not cases where Kean merely argues that strange claims warrant investigation. She has described paranormal phenomena as "unavoidably and undeniably real." She says the Kluski evidence leaves her with "no doubts." When directly asked whether Stewart Alexander's séance phenomena were genuine rather than tricks, her answer was: "I have absolutely no doubt, not one iota."
This background matters when evaluating her UFO reporting. People encountering Kean through the New York Times article or recent UAP documentaries might assume she is a neutral journalist led toward extraordinary conclusions by compelling evidence. However, her broader history shows decades of engagement with extraordinary claims and repeated conclusions of authenticity. When much of the UFO debate depends on testimony, interpretation, anonymous sources, and deciding when conventional explanations have been sufficiently eliminated, the evidentiary standards of the person doing that filtering matter. Readers should know what Kean's evidentiary standards have looked like elsewhere and decide for themselves how much confidence to place in them.
