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Leslie Kean

Bpelta

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Jun 22, 2010
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I don't know anything about UFOs but Leslie Kean was on Colbert last night talking about a new UFO book and how awhile back there was a UFO at OHare Airport and there was a front page Chicago Tribune article about it. What's the deal with this lady and her claims? (Initial Google searches aren't giving me anything but UFO promoting sites and uncritical reviews)
 
I've read the first couple of chapters of the book thanks to Amazon's Kindle preview service. Nick Pope spoke quite highly of it last weekend at the Weird '10 conference, so as soon as my new Kindle turns up I'll almost certainly buy a copy - the first chapter or so looked pretty good.
 
I've been discussing her on another forum of a podcast which she recently appeared on. I'm impressed that Michio Kaku is supporting her. I haven't read the book but she seems to be taking the most skeptical approach I have seen in a book of this type. Her claim is that about 5% of UFOs remain unexplained. I'm fine with that since she isn't automatically positing that they're aliens.
 
sophia8 said:
Really? He used to be a middle-range civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, running their UFO reports desk. Perhaps you're confusing him with this Nick Pope?
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Not at all but can you tell me how many other middle-range civil servants have since leaving released more than 7 books on what is basically unsupported woo

He marketed himself as the UK's Fox Mulder. He didn't do that because he was running a charity
At the FKCUK conference 2006 he confided in me that he had never read anything in his days at the MOD that didn't have a much more rational and mundane explanation, maybe that was the rum and coke he was consuming talking eh, either way that was not what he told the general audience
:p
 
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Sorry Marduk, I missed the smiley. But hey, don't diss us ex-civil servants!
 
sophia8 said:
Sorry Marduk, I missed the smiley. But hey, don't diss us ex-civil servants!
Click to expand...

Market yourself as the UK's Agent Scully and start churning those books out
:p

I'm allowed to diss ex civil servants, I used to be in charge of their security, I am thinking of writing a series of books, I could market myself as the UK's Agent Skinner
:D

Don't get me wrong, I think Nicks cool, he clearly has two modes of reply, one to secure woo funds and one to secure his state of mind with the rest of us, he clearly studied at the Sir Humphrey Appleby school for ministerial advancement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_Appleby
:D
 
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Marduk said:
Market yourself as the UK's Agent Scully and start churning those books out
:p
Click to expand...
Hmmm... As a Clerical Assistant in PO Telecommunications in the 1960s, I didn't learn many secrets. I wasted my powers of subterfuge and persuasion on getting the younger telephone engineers to show me how their Strowger switches worked!
:D
Though I suppose I could embellish the stories I heard about mysterious tunnels under Tottenham Court Road, and MIBs with top-level security passes flitting in and out of exchange switch-banks.....
To the word processor!
 
Michio Kaku ostensibly reviewing Leslie Kean's book:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pw13F7ahjY



I gather Kean's book talks about how 95% of UFO sightings can be explained and proved as being of earthly origin, and how 5% can't be explained even by the military etc who are paid to explain them.

UFO nuts are quote-mining this quote from Kaku: "this book is as close as you are going to get to the smoking gun."

Taken in context... he'd just said "I wouldn't go that far" as saying the 5% unexplained sightings confirm the existence of life on other planets.
 
I saw this on msnbc.com this morning. She seems rather defensive (and uses 'skeptic' as a dirty word):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38977500/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Skeptic misses point behind UFO book
Solid sightings cited in ‘UFOs’; serious investigation needed

...

That didn’t stop James Oberg, a space analyst for NBC News, from complaining that the book was based on a “questionable foundation.”

In the biographical note appended to his commentary, he notes that he spent 22 years at NASA’s Mission Control and has written books about space policy and exploration. But he neglects to inform readers of something UFO researchers already know all too well: that he is a founding fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, formerly CSICOP), a group whose aim is to debunk UFOs and any other unexplained phenomena that challenge our familiar ways of thinking.

...
Click to expand...
 
Nothing new on the subject

PaulV said:
I've read the first couple of chapters of the book thanks to Amazon's Kindle preview service. Nick Pope spoke quite highly of it last weekend at the Weird '10 conference, so as soon as my new Kindle turns up I'll almost certainly buy a copy - the first chapter or so looked pretty good.
Click to expand...

Don't waste your money on the book,if you haven't done so yet.I borrowed it from the library,and was not at all impressed.The bottom line is found in the following passage from her book,which concerns then President Carter's request to NASA to reopen the study of UFOs:



"After a fairly lengthy series of letters, memos, and inquiries made
through various levels of the hierarchical NASA bureaucracy, the agency
turned down the president of the United States in December 1977—
without giving a project officer a chance to review the accumulated data.
Frosch said that NASA needed "bona fide physical evidence from credible
sources ... tangible or physical evidence available for thorough laboratory
analysis" in order to do so. Due to the absence of such evidence, he said,
"we have not been able to devise a sound scientific procedure for
investigating these phenomena." Therefore, he proposed that no steps be
taken to "establish a research activity in this area or to convene a
symposium on this subject." [12]
 
the only sensible explanation about UFO sightings in the airport is that it is just another military expiriment just like in China.
 
Leslie Kean - UFOs- Generals, Pilots & Government Officials Go On the Record

Shouldn't you get back on topic?

No one has posted a review of this book on JREF yet.

Lampet
 
Here is a link supplying some information on Kean (who she is and what she is all about):
(http://www.freedomofinfo.org/)

Here is a link to the report of the investigation into the O'Hare incident produced by National Aviation Reporting Centre for Anomalous Phenomenon (NARCAP):
(http://www.narcap.org/reports/010/TR10_Case_18a.pdf)

Kean seems to be a serious researcher and the O'Hare incident seems to be one of the better researched UFO cases going around.
 
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