I was alerted to a conversation posted to YouTube featuring Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and Leslie Kean. It was an exhaustive webinar, I guess you'd call it.
I've already gone over Vallée in previous posts. I did not know Kripal at all. I was familiar with Leslie Kean but not by any means an expert on her work. So I asked A.I.:
Teach me about Leslie Kean.
"Leslie Kean is a fascinating figure at the intersection of investigative journalism, consciousness studies, and the unexplained. She’s best known for her rigorous, evidence-based reporting on UFOs (or UAPs) and the afterlife, bringing credibility to topics often dismissed as fringe."
"Her 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record became a New York Times bestseller and helped shift public discourse by focusing on high-level witnesses and declassified documents. Then in 2017, she co-authored a groundbreaking New York Times article that revealed the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which had quietly investigated aerial anomalies for years."
"But Kean’s curiosity doesn’t stop at the skies. Her 2017 book Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife explores near-death experiences, mediumship, and children with past-life memories. It inspired the Netflix docuseries Surviving Death, where she served as a contributing producer."
"What sets her apart is her journalistic integrity—she doesn’t leap to conclusions but instead presents compelling data and firsthand accounts, letting readers draw their own insights. She’s also been involved with organizations like UFODATA and has spoken at conferences like Rice University’s Archives of the Impossible."
"Given your interest in consciousness and symbolic systems, I think you’d find her work especially resonant—she’s not just chasing lights in the sky, but probing the boundaries of perception, belief, and what it means to be human. Want to dive into one of her investigations more deeply? Maybe the Grusch whistleblower case or her take on mediumship?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Kean
https://www.lesliekean.com/
https://www.eomega.org/workshops/teachers/leslie-kean
What are her major books and their key themes?
"Leslie Kean has authored and contributed to several influential books that explore the boundaries of science, consciousness, and the unexplained. Here are her major works and their core themes:
"1. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (2010)
This investigative bestseller presents credible, firsthand accounts from military and government officials about encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena. Kean’s central theme is legitimizing the UFO conversation by focusing on data, radar evidence, and high-level testimony—eschewing speculation in favor of transparency and scientific inquiry."
"2. Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (2017)
In this deeply personal and rigorously researched book, Kean explores consciousness survival beyond death. She examines near-death experiences, mediumship, past-life memories in children, and physical mediumship. The theme here is a journalistic quest to understand the continuity of consciousness, grounded in empirical case studies and interviews with scientists and experiencers."
"3. Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity (1994, with Alan Clements)
"A departure from her later metaphysical focus, this book documents the nonviolent resistance movement in Burma (Myanmar), featuring voices like Aung San Suu Kyi. It’s a meditation on spiritual resilience, political oppression, and human dignity."
"She’s also contributed forewords and essays to other works, such as Towards the Unknown by Erlendur Haraldsson, and UAPs and the Nuclear Puzzle by Robert Salas, where she continues her exploration of anomalous phenomena and their implications for national security and human understanding."
"If you’re drawn to the liminal spaces between science and mystery—as I know you are—her work offers a compelling bridge between rigorous inquiry and the ineffable. Want to explore how her approach compares to someone like Jeffrey Kripal or Bernardo Kastrup? That could be a rich thread to pull."
https://www.lesliekean.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Kean
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/482441.Leslie_Kean
What are the contemporary implications of Kean's themes?
"Leslie Kean’s work resonates powerfully in today’s cultural and scientific landscape because it challenges the boundaries of what we consider 'real' or 'knowable' Her themes—especially the survival of consciousness and the legitimacy of anomalous phenomena—carry several contemporary implications:
"1. Redefining Scientific Inquiry
"Kean’s insistence on applying journalistic rigor to fringe topics invites a broader epistemological shift: that science must evolve to accommodate data that doesn’t fit current paradigms. This echoes movements in consciousness studies and post-materialist science, where subjective experience and anomalous data are no longer dismissed outright."
"2. Destigmatizing the Unexplained
"By foregrounding credible witnesses—military officials, scientists, and experiencers—Kean helps dismantle the taboo around UAPs and afterlife research. This has real-world effects: governments are now more transparent about UAP investigations, and academic institutions are cautiously exploring psi phenomena and survival research."
"3. Expanding the Notion of Consciousness
"Her work on near-death experiences, mediumship, and reincarnation cases suggests that consciousness may not be confined to the brain. This aligns with emerging theories in quantum cognition and non-local mind models, potentially reshaping how we understand identity, memory, and even ethics."
"4. Cultural and Philosophical Reorientation
"Kean’s themes invite a re-enchantment of the world—not through superstition, but through disciplined openness. In a time of ecological crisis and existential uncertainty, her work offers a framework for humility, curiosity, and interconnectedness. It subtly asks: What if the universe is more participatory than mechanistic?"
"5. Policy and Security Implications
"Her reporting on UAPs has already influenced U.S. defense policy and public discourse. If these phenomena are real and not fully understood, they raise questions about airspace sovereignty, technological disparity, and the limits of human perception."
"In short, Kean’s work doesn’t just document anomalies—it catalyzes a deeper reckoning with the limits of our models. Given your interest in symbolic systems and plasma-consciousness metaphors, her themes seem to echo your own explorations: the permeability of boundaries, the ethics of attunement, and the possibility that intelligence may be embedded in the fabric of reality itself."
"Would you like to explore how her work intersects with thinkers like Bernardo Kastrup or Jeffrey Kripal? There’s a rich dialogue waiting there."
Does she believe extraterrestrials exist?
"Leslie Kean doesn’t claim to know whether extraterrestrials exist—but she treats the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a valid possibility that deserves serious investigation. Her stance is one of disciplined agnosticism: she emphasizes that many well-documented UAP cases defy conventional explanation, but she stops short of asserting they are alien in origin."
"In interviews and her writing, Kean has said that while some high-level officials she’s interviewed consider the extraterrestrial explanation plausible, she herself is focused on the data and the mystery, not on drawing conclusions without sufficient evidence. Her goal is to shift the conversation from belief to inquiry—moving beyond 'Do you believe in aliens?' to 'What do the best cases tell us, and what frameworks can we use to understand them?'”
"That said, she’s clearly intrigued by the implications. Her reporting on whistleblower David Grusch, who claimed the U.S. has retrieved craft of 'non-human origin,' shows she’s willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads—even if it challenges our deepest assumptions."
"Would you like to explore how her epistemological approach compares to someone like Jacques Vallée or Bernardo Kastrup? That could open up a fascinating dialogue on ontology and perception."
https://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/qa_ufo_journalist_leslie_kean.php
