Bon Voyage, Lee Speigel: Let's Send Lee To Space!

Our friend, fellow journalist, and famed UFO researcher Lee Speigel passed away on Aug 14 — and those close to him are planning a final salute to this great man. We are sending his cremated ashes into space.

“Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, noted astronomer Clyde Tombaugh and legendary Harvard professor Timothy Leary are among several notables who have been memorialized with a space burial. We plan to do the same for Lee, and we’re asking for your help.

Lee blazed a singular path in life. He came to New York City from New Hampshire in the early 1970s with a guitar in hand, aiming to be a folk singer, eventually playing on some of the same Greenwich Village stages that Harry Belafonte and Bob Dylan had a few years earlier.

In his early years in New York, Lee’s interest in UFOs intensified. While the public basked in science fiction and pop culture camp, Lee focused on recording interviews with scientists, military officers and other credible witnesses who maintained that they had witnessed an unexplained phenomena. This culminated in his 1976 audio documentary album, “UFOs: The Credibility Factor,” a landmark work in UFOlogy.

Two years later, Lee hosted and produced the first — and, to date, only — presentation on UFOs at the United Nations, attended by the UN Secretary-General and other world dignitaries. He would soon host “The Edge of Reality” show on NBC Radio in New York, sharing a studio for a time with the legendary Howard Stern, who had a hilarious impression of our old friend, as many of us know all too well.

“The Edge of Reality” ran for eight years, with roughly 1,500 episodes on local and national radio. Lee later served as a science consultant for NBC News Radio in New York, and a copy editor for ABCNews.com. In his later years, he covered unexplained phenomena for AOL News and The Huffington Post. In 2012, he was named Researcher of the Year at the International UFO Congress.

As a capstone to his career, Lee revived “Edge of Reality” on the UN-X Digital Broadcast Network, pushing forward his amazing research and conversations. Lee was also deeply involved in the writing and production of “The Phenomenon,” a James Fox documentary that featured original interviews of former White House chief of staff John Podesta and former U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who admitted that a lot of evidence “hasn’t seen the light of day.”

Lee was a great reporter. While other journalists would sneer at those who claimed they saw UFOs, Lee was earnest and respectful. It is amazing that his life ends just as the federal government and general public has begun to take these claims seriously and reconsider evidence that had earlier been ignored or suppressed.

Lee was a stargazer and a dreamer. He was also a kind spirt who was loved by so many. We intend to launch his remains into orbit with the help of Beyond Burials. We expect the launch itself to cost roughly $3,000. We hope to raise additional funds to preserve Lee’s massive archive of interviews and case files — more than six decades of material.

With your help, Lee’s life work will find a new home at The National UFO Historical Records Center in New Mexico. This GoFundMe will be administered by Lee’s wife, Lorraine Simone, and Buck Wolf, Lee’s manager at HuffPost and ABC News colleague.

We appreciate your donation. We know this project would bring Lee joy. And we look forward to celebrating his life at the upcoming memorial service and various tribute shows and news reports now in the works. Details to come soon.