Leslie Kean
speaker
92 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Leslie Kean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We had an exclusive source, basically, who gave us slides that were shown to, you know, within the Pentagon, showing or naming, actually mentioning recovery, material recoveries of UFO remains, retrievals. This phenomenon does not lend itself to documentation for whatever reason.
Well, they keep putting up the original videos that we had, you know, the Navy videos. And, yeah, I mean, we keep getting told that we changed the paradigm. I try not to believe all that stuff, but it was satisfying.
Well, as you know, George and Jeremy, timing has a lot to do with it, and we were fortunate to come in at a very good time. I mean, for example, today, with everything going on with Trump, it's not a great time to get UFO stories, UAP stories into the paper. There's just too much noise out there, too much competition.
So this happened to come at a good time, and I must say we had, you know, some very good people at the Times. I had left... the staff officially in 2009, but I kept up my contacts. And in 2017, the stars came into alignment. Dean Baquet was the executive editor. I went to him. I knew him. You know the story. Leslie had gone down to Washington, D.C.
and had this meeting with Lou Elizondo and others and learned about the secret program. We called it ATIP. We now know it really had a you know, earlier incarnation as OSAP, which you guys have never let me forget. But so she found out about this program and that, you know, the government was supposedly out of the UFO business with Blue Book at the end of 69. But of course, they weren't.
They kept the a very high level of interest. So Leslie found out about that and told me and even though I was off the staff, I had been working on my John Mack book since basically 2004.
So it was not a topic that was totally foreign to me but she surprised me by telling me that the government was very much in the UFO business and not only that but Lou Elizondo had submitted a letter of resignation to Jim Mattis, Defense Secretary, because he was so ticked off at the opposition he was getting. So there were a lot of elements to the story that were really of high interest.
So I took it to Dean Baquet, and to his credit, He jumped on it pretty quickly. He put us together with an editor for the Washington Bureau. We laid it out. We had everything on the record, which is something we can talk about. I mean, we were very insistent on, you know, the Times standards are very high. I don't have to tell you that for getting especially a story like this into the paper.
So we had it all on the record, named sources, no unnamed sources. And they put us together with Helene Cooper in the Washington Bureau, which was a big plus because she knew the Pentagon. Not that they would say anything, but at least we knew who to go to. So to answer your question more directly, it was not as difficult as you might think. Yes, the times had been very hostile traditionally.
to the whole UFO subject, with some notable exceptions. But this story sailed through and got on the front page on a Sunday. You couldn't ask for better play than that.
Well, maybe it's a good thing we didn't know all that stuff. You're right. But I got to tell you, when you look at the story, it really was very tightly written and constrained. We did not have a lot of space. So a lot of stuff that we knew for example, about retrievals and things like that, never made it into that story.
Not that we would have gone there necessarily, but we had to keep really a narrow focus. And with every story we did then and since for The Times and others, we left out a lot of stuff, some by design, but mostly because of space constraints. So maybe The Times did us a favor by confining us into a fairly narrow space. you
Well, we learned so much since, it's kind of hard to remember what we knew then. But, you know, as a journalist, you're always – I got to tell you, I got some advice from a colleague years ago when I got – this is a little sideline, but I got put on the –
media beat briefly when the media guy was going on vacation and it happened to come right at the time of a job action against the New York Times. So this thing drops into my lap. I'm the New York, I'm the media reporter when the Times is basically on strike. And how do you handle that kind of news about your employer? So this guy gave me a bit of advice.
He said, Ralph, don't write everything you know. And I took that to heart because I knew a lot of stuff about the times that I didn't put into that, you know, those stories about the job action. So it's always a selective process. So, you know, we know a lot of stuff, Leslie and I, as you guys know a lot of stuff. Not all of it is well sourced.
Some of it you know on background, some of it you know off the record. Yeah, that comes into play. But we didn't know a lot of the things then that we know now. I mean, we made a lot of progress. This is something really worth noting that the government has come a long way from the days when, you know, it described anyone with a sighting as basically nuts.
Now they're saying they're encouraging military personnel to come forward with accounts. And so there's been a lot of change, you know, within the Pentagon. But I got to say that there was not a lot of stuff we knew that we kept out. We'd heard stories about retrievals, for example, but we fleshed a lot of that out since then. And you've tried to get that story on, right?
Well, we did, and we did get it in piecemeal. We did a story for The Times sometime later, a couple of years later, and we did get in the retrievals. It came in, if you remember the story, kind of obliquely. And a very good part of that story, we had actually slides naming recoveries.
We had an exclusive source, basically, who gave us slides that were shown to, you know, within the Pentagon showing or naming recoveries. actually mentioning recovery, material recoveries of UFO remains, retrievals. We got that into the Times, but the slides only got in with another story that we did about how we got the story.
So I guess in shorthand, the stuff gets in, but not always the way you want it to get in. And that was a particularly difficult lift, retrievals, as it remains.
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