Famed UFO Reporter Puts Skeptics On Blast With A Defiant Final Act

When Lee Speigel arrived in New York City in the early 1970s, there was a word for people who reported seeing a UFO ― “kooks.”

The world this 74-year-old man left behind on Aug. 14, after a battle with esophageal cancer, has vastly changed. Politicians, scientists and law enforcement officials are no longer laughing at those who say they’ve witnessed an unexplained phenomenon.

Just weeks before Speigel’s death, military whistleblowers testified before a congressional committee, claiming the government has secretly retrieved and reverse-engineered unidentified flying objects. And though the Pentagon denied those claims, it soon unveiled a website devoted to sightings of unidentified flying objects.

As 2023 drew to a close, Congress ordered all files on UFOs ― now classified as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) ― released within 25 years so long as there was no Oval Office objection. These are files that government officials barely acknowledged in years past ― and information Speigel and other UFO investigators spent their lives in search of.

NASA still maintains that there’s no proof UFOs are the work of extraterrestrials, but it’s a conversation that can no longer be ignored.

To be sure, no single person can take credit for shifting public opinion, but Speigel’s contributions over his 60-year career stand out. He is renowned as the first person to organize and host a conference at the United Nations on UFOs, attended by dignitaries from around the world.

“Lee sought out interviews with military officers, commercial airline pilots and the best sources he could find. These people put their credibility on the line when they claimed they saw something in the sky that defied explanation,” said Buck Wolf, director of