The New Yorker: “Since 2017, [Leslie] Kean has covered the UFO beat for the Times, sharing a byline with Ralph Blumenthal on a handful of stories. These have steered clear of such genre mainstays as crop circles and Nazca Lines, but their most recent article, published last July, veered into fringe territory. In it, they referred to ‘a series of unclassified slides,’ of somewhat uncertain lineage but apparently shown at congressional briefings, that mentioned ‘off-world’ vehicles and ‘crash retrievals.’ Kean told me in an uncharacteristically hesitant but nonetheless matter-of-fact way that she had begun to come around to the idea that UFO fragments had been hoarded somewhere. In 2019, Luis Elizondo had suggested to Tucker Carlson that such detritus existed. Kean cited Jacques Vallée, perhaps the most famous living ufologist, and the basis for François Truffaut’s character in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ who has been working with Garry Nolan, a Stanford immunologist, to analyze purported crash material for scientific publication.”

“In the story, Kean and Blumenthal wrote that Harry Reid ‘believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.’ The day after its publication, the Times had to append a correction: Senator Reid did not believe that crash debris had been allocated to private military contractors for study; he believed that U.F.O.s may have crashed, and that, if so, we should be studying the fallout. When I asked Reid about the confusion, he told me that he admired Kean but that he had never seen proof of any remnants – something Kean had never actually claimed. He left no doubt in our conversation as to his personal assessment. ‘I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,’ he said. ‘And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don’t know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me.’ He told me that the Pentagon had not provided a reason. I asked if that was why he’d requested sap status for aatip. He said, ‘Yeah, that’s why I wanted them to take a look at it. But they wouldn’t give me the clearance.'”