UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDPERSONNEL FILE

Leslie Kean is an American investigative journalist. Before turning to UFOs she reported on political prisoners in Burma, co-writing the 1994 book ‘Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit’, and worked as a producer and on-air host at the Berkeley radio station KPFA. She has written about UFOs since 2000, and has also written about claimed evidence for life after death.

Her 2010 book ‘UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record’ gathered first-person accounts from military, aviation and government figures and became a New York Times bestseller. Her 2017 book ‘Surviving Death’ examined claims of an afterlife. She has said she has never claimed that UFOs are alien spaceships.

On December 16, 2017, The New York Times published a front-page story by Kean, Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal revealing the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which had spent about $22 million studying UFO reports. Kean has said the story ‘reverberated around the world’, and she credits it with prompting congressional briefings and new Navy reporting guidelines. She and Blumenthal went on to write further UAP stories for the Times.

On June 5, 2023, Kean and Blumenthal published former intelligence official David Grusch’s claims that secret U.S. programs held ‘intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin’. The story ran on The Debrief, a small science-news website, after other outlets, reportedly including The New York Times, did not publish it. Grusch went on to testify before a House subcommittee in July 2023.

Kean’s work has drawn criticism. Journalist Keith Kloor called a 2020 Times article she co-wrote ‘thinly-sourced and slanted’, and other commentators noted that Grusch offered no public evidence beyond his own account. The Pentagon has denied the existence of the programs Grusch described, and no public evidence has confirmed his central claims. Kean has said she stands by her reporting.

In recent years Kean helped produce the National Geographic documentary series ‘UFOs: Investigating the Unknown’, which streams on Hulu. She continues to write and speak about UAP, and in May 2026 she gave a public presentation, ‘The Reality of UFOs/UAP’, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.