Leslie Kean will discuss her twenty-three years of research and mainstream reporting on UFOs, now called UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena). Her effort has included numerous print stories, press conferences, documentaries, and a best-selling book as she battled a stigma that precluded government acknowledgment of the phenomenon. That all changed in 2017, when she co-authored a front-page New York Times story that was a catalyst for a series of unprecedented developments over the last six years – from the release of Navy videos to a UAP Task Force, new legislation and three open Congressional hearings. Lecture will be followed by Q & A.

Leslie Kean is an investigative journalist and author of the 2010 New York Times bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record. She co-authored a series of groundbreaking stories for The New York Times from 2017 to 2022. Kean’s two decades of reporting on UFOs were profiled in The New Yorker in 2021. She helped produce the Break Thru Films 2023 documentary series “UFOs: Investigating the Unknown,” originally made for CNN. In June 2023, Kean and Ralph Blumenthal broke the story of whistleblower David Grusch’s investigation into UAP crash retrievals, which led to an open hearing by the U.S. House Oversight Subcommittee in July 2023.