with a purported
UFO taken in 1971 by the Costa Rican National Geographic Institute and given to Kean by the Costa Rican government|alt=Purported UFO photo over Lake Cote, Costa Rica form 1971 Kean worked as a photographer at the Lab of Ornithology at
Cornell University. After visiting
Burma to interview political prisoners in the 1990s, she began working as an investigative journalist, producer, and on-air host at
KPFA, a
Berkeley, California-based radio station and the flagship station of the
Pacifica Radio Network and for
Flashpoints, a left-wing drive-time news program covering wrongful convictions, the death penalty, and other criminal-justice issues. Kean has published works relating to
UFOs since 2000, and has been a guest on
Coast to Coast AM. Her book
UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, published by
Penguin Random House, was a
New York Times best seller. Kean belongs to the UFO organization UFODATA. On December 16, 2017,
The New York Times featured an article written by
Helene Cooper,
Ralph Blumenthal and Kean, which revealed the fact that the
U.S. Department of Defense had spent $22.5M on a secret program titled the
Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that investigated
UFOs. According to Gideon Lewis-Kraus in April 2021, Kean has a photo of a purported UFO hanging on a wall behind her desk that was gifted to her by the Costa Rican government. This photo was taken by the Costa Rican National Geographic Institute in 1971 over Lake Cote and is considered by Kean to be "the finest image of a U.F.O. ever made public". On 5 June 2023, Kean and writer
Ralph Blumenthal reported that former United States Air Force officer and intelligence official
David Grusch claimed that the United States has a secret UFO retrieval program with multiple vehicles of non-human origin as well as records of dead pilots in its possession. ==Written works==