Ross Coulthart | |
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 Coulthart in 2012 | |
| Citizenship | Australian |
| Education | Victoria University of Wellington |
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Ross Coulthart is an Australian investigative journalist and author who has also worked in public relations. He is an advocate for the idea that governments are covering up knowledge of UFOs and alien visitations.
Coulthart was born in the UK. He later moved along with his family to New Zealand and enrolled at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he graduated with a law degree. He then moved to Australia, where he started his career as a journalist. [1]
On a 1994 episode of the Australian TV program Four Corners , Coulthart broadcast an allegation that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service "secretly holds tens of thousands of files on Australian citizens, a database completely outside privacy laws". [2] Coulthart's allegations prompted the Minister for Foreign Affairs Gareth Evans to call a "root and branch" review of the ASIS led by Justice Gordon Samuels and Mike Codd. In their Report on the Australian Secret Intelligence Service released in 1995, Coulthart's allegation was investigated and denied by Samuels and Codd, [3] : xxiii but Evans did acknowledge that "ASIS does have some files, as one would expect in an organisation of that nature, even though its brief extends to activities outside the country rather than inside. They are essentially of an administrative nature." [4] While Samuels and Codd did find that certain grievances of former ASIS officers were well founded, [3] : xxxi they observed that the information published in the Four Corners program was "skewed towards the false", [3] : xx that "the level of factual accuracy about operational matters was not high", [3] : xxiii and, quoting an aphorism, that "what was disturbing was not true and what was true was not disturbing". [3] : xxiii They concluded that the disclosure of the information was unnecessary and unjustifiable and had damaged the reputation of ASIS and Australia overseas. [3] : xx
In 2008, Coulthart wrote about an Australian medical scandal entitled The Butcher of Bega. [5]
In 2010, he reinvestigated the murder of two young Australian tourists by IRA terrorists 20 years earlier. [6]
In 2014, Coulthart worked as chief investigations reporter for Channel 7's Sunday Night news program, but resigned after he reportedly "stepped in to break up a physical fight" between two producers. [7] Coulthart worked as an investigative journalist for Australian news and current affairs program 60 Minutes on Channel Nine, but left in 2018 after his contract was not renewed. [8]
In 2018, Coulthart was employed by a public relations firm, where he managed the public relations for ex-soldier and accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, [9] who in 2023 was found by Justice Anthony Besanko to have participated in the murder of four Afghans. [10]
Coulthart returned to reporting, focusing on proving the existence of UFOs.
In 2021, Coulthart starred in The UFO Phenomenon, a special television series for Seven News in Australia that claimed to "unearth startling new evidence of UFOs from government officials and eyewitnesses that will change everything you thought you knew about the universe." [11]
In 2021, Coulthart authored a book titled In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science. Author Pippa Goldschmidt said "Coulthart provides a balanced historical and global summary of UFO sightings ... Fatally for his argument, however, he shows signs of wanting to believe it." [12] According to The Sydney Morning Herald , the book made Coulthart something of a cult hero in American UFO circles. [13] Maariv noted in 2023 that the book had received global media attention. [14]
In 2022, Coulthart and co-host Bryce Zabel began hosting Need To Know, a UFOlogy podcast promoted as "revealing the mysteries of the universe to the people of the earth". [15] [ better source needed ]
In June 2023, Coulthart conducted an interview for NewsNation with USAF officer David Grusch and joined Grusch in alleging that the U.S. federal government maintains a highly secretive UFO retrieval program and is in possession of both extraterrestrial spacecraft and the corpses of non-human pilots. [16] In August 2023, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's program Media Watch questioned the lack of evidence for Coulthart's claims that the United States government had covered up knowledge of aliens and the retrieval of alien spacecraft. [17] In December 2023, Australian Skeptics announced that Coulthart was their 2023 Bent Spoon Award winner for his uncritical journalism concerning his belief that governments are covering up "'wreckage of downed extraterrestrial spacecraft and the bodies of their pilots.'" [18]
In November 2023, NewsNation announced it had signed Coulthart as a special projects correspondent. [19] His first project, "Unsolved: The JFK Assassination" [20] was released during the week of the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. [21]
An unidentified flying object (UFO), or unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP), is any perceived airborne, submerged or transmedium phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. Upon investigation, most UFOs are identified as known objects or atmospheric phenomena, while a small number remain unexplained.
The Australian Secret Intelligence Service is the foreign intelligence agency of the Commonwealth of Australia, responsible for gathering, processing, and analysing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence. The service was formed in 1952, however its existence remained secret within much of the government and to the public until 1972. ASIS is a primary entity of the Australian Intelligence Community.
UFO conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracy theories which argue that various governments and politicians globally, in particular the United States government, are suppressing evidence that unidentified flying objects are controlled by a non-human intelligence or built using alien technology. Such conspiracy theories usually argue that Earth governments are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrial visitors despite public disclaimers, and further that some of these theories claim that the governments are explicitly allowing alien abduction. According to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry little or no evidence exists to support them despite significant research on the subject by non-governmental scientific agencies.
James Farrell Marrs Jr. was an American newspaper journalist and New York Times best-selling author of books and articles on a wide range of alleged cover-ups and conspiracies. Marrs was a prominent figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories community and his 1989 book Crossfire was a source for Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK. He subsequently wrote books asserting the existence of government conspiracies regarding aliens, 9/11, telepathy, and secret societies. He began his career as a news reporter in the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metroplex and taught a class on the assassination of John F. Kennedy at University of Texas at Arlington for 30 years. Marrs was a member of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
The Roswell incident is a conspiracy theory which alleges that the 1947 United States Army Air Forces balloon debris recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, was actually a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. Operated from the nearby Alamogordo Army Air Field and part of the top secret Project Mogul, the balloon was intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests. After metallic and rubber debris were recovered by Roswell Army Air Field personnel, the United States Army announced their possession of a "flying disc". This announcement made international headlines, but was retracted within a day. To obscure the purpose and source of the debris, the army reported that it was a conventional weather balloon.
Ufology, sometimes written UFOlogy, is the investigation of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) by people who believe that they may be of extraordinary origins. While there are instances of government, private, and fringe science investigations of UFOs, ufology is generally regarded by skeptics and science educators as an example of pseudoscience.
Robert Scott Lazar is an American conspiracy theorist. In 1989, Lazar claimed to have been part of a classified US government project concerned with the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology; he also purported to have read government briefing documents that described alien involvement in human affairs over the past 10,000 years. A self-proclaimed physicist, Lazar supposedly worked at a secret site near the United States Air Force facility popularly known as Area 51. His story brought additional public attention to the facility and spawned conspiracy theories regarding government knowledge of extraterrestrial life.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) proposes that some unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are best explained as being physical spacecraft occupied by extraterrestrial intelligence or non-human aliens, or non-occupied alien probes from other planets visiting Earth. In spite of ardent believers that various UFO sightings are verifiable evidence for the hypothesis, no rigorous analysis has ever concluded as much.
Stanton Terry Friedman was an American–Canadian nuclear physicist and professional ufologist who was based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
NewsNation is an American cable news network owned by Nexstar Media Group. Known for most of its history as Superstation WGN before becoming WGN America in 2008, it relaunched on March 1, 2021, as a cable news network named after its flagship news program. The channel's relaunch came as part of a planned expansion of its news programming. The channel continued to carry some entertainment programming held over from WGN America on weekends, but this was discontinued in July 2024. After their subsequent acquisitions by Nexstar, The Hill and broadcast network The CW have also collaborated with NewsNation on content.
Steven Macon Greer is an American ufologist and a retired physician. He founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI) and the Disclosure Project, which seeks the disclosure of alleged classified UFO information.
Linda Moulton Howe is an American investigative journalist and Regional Emmy award-winning documentary film maker best known for her work as a ufologist and advocate of a variety of conspiracy theories, including her investigation of cattle mutilations and conclusion that they are performed by extraterrestrials. She is also noted for her speculations that the U.S. government is working with aliens.
Nick Pope is an English media commentator and former civil servant. Whilst an employee at the British Government's Ministry of Defence (MoD), Pope was responsible, among other duties, for investigating UFO phenomena to determine if they had any defence significance.
The Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory claims that a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin is in near-polar orbit of the Earth, and that NASA is covering up its existence and origin. This conspiracy theory combines several unrelated stories into one narrative.
Leslie Kean is an American investigative journalist and author of books about UFOs and the afterlife.
Luis Elizondo is a media personality and author formerly employed by United States Army Counterintelligence and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. According to Elizondo, he was director of the now defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which was associated with the Pentagon UFO videos. Elizondo's statements about his Pentagon role with AATIP have been contested by Pentagon officials. Since 2017, he has claimed there is a government conspiracy to suppress evidence that UFOs are of "non human" origin.
David Grusch is a former United States Air Force (USAF) officer and intelligence official who has claimed that the U.S. federal government, in collaboration with private aerospace companies, has highly secretive special access programs involved in the recovery and reverse engineering of "non-human" spacecraft and their dead pilots, and that people have been threatened and killed in order to conceal these programs. Grusch further claims to have viewed documents reporting a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini's government in 1933 and procured by the U.S. in 1944 or 1945 with the assistance of the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance.
Ralph Blumenthal is an American journalist and author. He was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009.
Investigation and analysis of reported UFO incidents under the federal government of the United States has taken place under multiple branches and agencies, past and current, since 1947. In spite of decades of interest, there remains no evidence that there are any UFOs with extraordinary origins and, indeed, those identified all have been shown to be natural phenomena, human technology, misapprehensions, delusions, or hoaxes.
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