With respect to Kean, I said "relatively new", as opposed to "new". She's done a fair bit of homework, and although she's done some good work, she basically stumbled into the field and her main purpose appears to have been to further her career as a journalist rather than as a serious ufologist. Her initiation into the ranks of UFO proponents occurred in 1999 when she was given a copy of a French UFO report called COMETA. Compared to a number of others, including Gene and Chris and others on this forum and elsewhere, that's "relatively new".
Gene for example tells of his involvement all the way back to the days of NICAP and APRO which were 50s and 60s era organizations, and even our group ( USI ) which is also "relatively new" was founded in 1989 ( 10 years prior to Kean getting into ufology ), and I was personally into it all the way back to my childhood inn the late 60s. Guys like Friedman date back to the 1970s. Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record was copyrighted in 2010, and although there are certainly worse books, it doesn't really contain a lot of info we didn't already know about.
I also don't like her "agnostic" approach. That characterization comes across to me as more of a sales pitch, and even if it is genuine, then that just means her role has been to exploit the field as much as possible ( which she's done really well at ), all while being aligned with some other players who have made a choice to distance themselves from ufology because they don't want to be associated with all the controversial figures ( as if they themselves aren't ) who believe in aliens ( when they're investigating exactly the same cases and phenomena ). I find that disingenuous and hypocritical.
All that being said, like I've said many times before, I want to like Kean. I own her book and have listened to more than one interview and watched videos in which she is featured, I just wish she'd taken a little different of a path to her success. Her more recent alignment with CUFOS is IMO a step in the right direction, Not that CUFOS doesn't seem have a few problems of its own, but historically I like it better than MUFON, and what UFO interest group doesn't have problems?.
But more importantly, the topic of Kean herself isn't really what I was getting at with respect to my comment, and I probably should have just left her name out of it altogether. Setting up some kind of monitoring program is an idea that people who come into the field seem to hit on fairly early, and maybe try to develop at some point. But the reality is that there are already numerous tracking systems run by government agencies with billions of dollars, and just because they aren't branded as "UFO tracking stations" doesn't mean they don't detect pretty much everything going on out there, including UFOs.
So my point is that somebody in that system knows alien visitation is real, and many of us out here in the public know alien visitation is real. So what is the point of another tracking system project? Who do we need to convince? Why? I'm not opposed to private tracking systems, but what's the end-game? Fame? Fortune? Does someone get to go on TV and say, "Hey here's the evidence that UFOs are real?" My point is, we already know that, so what further questions would such a project hope to answer?
