Veteran investigative journalist Leslie Kean’s groundbreaking book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record,” followed by her co-authoring two major New York Times news stories about the Pentagon UFO program and Navy pilot sightings, has helped provide legitimacy to the unexplained. Her latest foray into the unknown, the 2017 book “Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence For An Afterlife”, continues her search for answers within these extraordinary topics. Kean is working on an upcoming documentary series based on “Surviving Death,” which includes coverage of past lives among other research areas. Both her non-fiction bodies of work are important in that they tie together multiple phenomena. Her research has shifted from UFOs to consciousness/afterlife, but did it feel like a logical progression?



“It did feel like a logical progression, partly because the topic of survival past death is something I’ve been interested in for a long time, throughout the years I was reporting on UFOs. It was sort of in the background for me, and at one point I assisted producers making a documentary on the topic, so I was exposed to a lot of the information and experts in the field. In doing that,” said Kean,”it wasn’t so much that I saw a link between these topics and UFOs, but I was very fascinated by the question of possible survival after death, and I knew there was a lot of research I could do on it. The difference was I didn’t know much about the topic yet. My UFO book represented the culmination of ten years of work, but this was different. I was jumping into something that was relatively new to me, and it was much more of an exploratory journey that took place while I was researching and writing ‘Surviving Death’. When I started, I didn’t know how it would come out, and never expected to have the experiences I had along the way.”



This past November, Kean was a guest of Professor Jeffrey Kripal at Rice University and presented some of her findings from “Surviving Death”. In her presentation she detailed some of the things she’s witnessed, which makes UFO sightings seem “normal” by comparison. Kean has witnessed a physical medium elicit ectoplasm, which would make for good evidence, but begs the question: would it ever be possible for a medium to do it on camera, or live on camera, to help convince the majority that this is legit?



“All of us would love to have that, and theoretically yes, it is possible. Historically, legitimate photographs were taken of ectoplasm, but others were faked, which creates major problems. To do this now, first of all it’s a matter of finding a medium who is trustworthy,” Kean said. “We would have to know there is no fraud. The medium would have to be developed enough to handle low-level light in the room and the equipment needed to film, without impacting the phenomenon itself. Ectoplasm is very sensitive to light. Then, this medium has to be willing to allow this. There are many reasons why a legitimate physical medium would not want to undergo the kind of controversy that would come from engaging in something like this.”



Kean has been working with Stewart Alexander, a British physical medium who has been practicing his mediumship for forty years. She has seen with her own eyes the manifestation of a “living” human hand form out of ectoplasm on multiple occasions, as have many others, and has touched the hand. These events occurred under controlled conditions so that Kean could be sure of their authenticity. Regarding filming this, Alexander is not in favor of the idea due to it’s potential professional and personal ramifications. Kean explained that Alexander is a private person, and doesn’t want to draw disruptive attention to his small, regular weekly circle and his family. The media hoopla would be destructive, and the skeptics and scientific community would no doubt claim the whole thing was bogus, as they have done to the detriment of genuine mediums in the past. Alexander wouldn’t want this hanging over his legacy, leaving his heirs to deal with such questions. The stress of this could affect the sensitivity he needs to maintain in order to continue with his mediumship.