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
Well, as I said, I mean, there was not too much that we knew then that we've learned a lot since. But, you know, you raise an interesting point. How much do you put in? to a story, I would say that if you have it confirmed and you have it on the record with a name source, there's not much I would leave out. I'm not trying to spare the American people any hard evidence.
The problem is getting that hard evidence or at least getting people talking about it on the record. On the other hand, you're right. We were aware that this is a difficult subject. We didn't want to get too much ahead of ourselves. I mean, the basic news was important, that the Pentagon had a secret UFO unit. After years of denying an interest in the subject, the Pentagon was, in fact,
hunting for UFOs and getting evidence, collecting evidence, very important evidence. That in itself we thought was a big story. The question of retrievals of non-human remains, things like that, we hadn't really gotten to that point yet. I'm not sure if we'd had it, we would have put it in. I don't know. We didn't have it.
It is wild. We did not know that stuff then. I mean, the idea of calling in UFOs is a fairly new phenomenon. We haven't really checked that out. We've heard the stories. We were in contact with people. We're looking into that along with a lot of other stuff. But we certainly didn't know it then. I mean, it was enough to think that there were these objects coming in.
Even then, we didn't know that they were underwater. I mean, we just talked about them coming in from space. So the underwater part was another new element that we learned from Dave Fravor some months or maybe a year or two later.
So but we did not know about psionics, people calling them in or technology that, you know, frequencies that that brings in the UFO or people controlling the technology with their minds. I know the government has has been studying that. That's really interesting. So the answer is, you know, we didn't know very much about that in the beginning.
Yeah, you know, all my books really kind of fell into my lap. It's very strange. They say that, you know, writers don't pick subjects. Subjects pick writers. I mean, it's kind of a Zen thing. And it was true in my case. Every book I did was not the end of a process of me looking around for a subject, but something happened. that sort of forced me to do a book about it.
And it was the same in this case. I was in Texas for the New York Times And I used to you know haunt the used book shops and in one of them I picked up a copy of Passport to the Cosmos which was John Mack's second book. John Mack was the Harvard psychiatrist who famously learned about accounts of abduction from Bud Hopkins and decided at great risk to his lofty reputation at Harvard
to study it, to study the phenomenon. So I picked up this book. I was intrigued by the idea of an eminent Harvard faculty member getting involved in accounts of abduction by alien beings. And I thought it would be good to interview this guy. I didn't know, by the way, he was already very famous, but he had not come into my realm at all. I was a hard news reporter.
I was covering national politics in Texas and national events. It's just not something I knew anything about. But I did think he was worth a story, very interesting. And as fate would have it, a few days later, I picked up the New York Times to find out he had been run over and killed in London. He had gone there for a conference on Lawrence of Arabia.
He had written a Pulitzer Prize winning book, a biography of T.H. Lawrence. And 30 years later, he went back to London and he came out of the underground, looked the wrong way and got killed. uh, hit by a car. A lot of, you know, at the time it was, um, uh, you know, uh, the conspiracists had a field day, uh, you know, but it turned, I checked it out very carefully. It was a complete hit and run.
The guy didn't know who he was hitting. Uh, Mac was disoriented. He was, it was late at night. He couldn't see well. He had trouble seeing anyway. Um, So now I had an interest in John Mack, but he was dead. So I did go to the family quite quickly, and of course the family was in no mood to discuss a book about John Mack. They were grieving.
He was just about 75 years old, but he was not expected to die, unfortunately. The family was in deep mourning. But we stayed in touch, and eventually I convinced them to let me do a book, and they turned over all his archives to me. And, I mean, as a trained New York Times reporter, this became very important to me because, you know, it was one thing to imagine
his life, it was another thing to be able to document every stage of it through his papers, which I was able to do. Even his therapy sessions with his therapist. As a psychiatrist, he had to be analyzed. And he went through analysis and he taped those analysis sessions. So I know really his innermost thoughts with his therapist. And he wrote a lot. He was not a secretive guy.
He put everything out there. So I had all this material. and I decided to do a book, and I didn't know how long it would take me. It ended up taking 17 years, which was much longer than I expected and much more arduous.
Every project, every book, every article, as you guys know, is more work than you imagine, but this was a tremendous amount more work than I expected because I had to go into the whole process UFO phenomenon and the whole history of UFOs and all the other people who were doing work like Stan Friedman and Bud Hopkins. And I mean, it was a whole universe that had to be explored.
Anyway, so that's how I was. I happened to be in the end stages, the last few years of my John Mack research, when this opportunity came up with Lesley. So that's why you could say I was well-positioned to pursue the story in The New York Times.
Well, that's the hardest thing to get because this phenomenon does not lend itself to documentation for whatever reason. At the crucial moment, the camera doesn't work, the image doesn't come out. You guys know from your research at Skinwalkers how the
that were pointed at, you know, whatever was out there failed at the crucial moment or the guts were ripped out of one and the other one was trained on it, didn't pick it up. I mean, that is extraordinary that technology always seems to fail. when we're at the brink of discovering something. So I think the hardest part of the story is documenting these interactions with these abduction accounts.
So what we can do, though, is use our technology or the government technology to at least document the objects. So as I said before, that is a big step forward, is that the government is now acknowledging that these things are real. You know, for a long time, they were dismissed as hallucinations. People were crazy. There were reflections off the desert floor.
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