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 and the Vatican 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 UAPs 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 Australia, tasked with the covert collection of information overseas through personal contacts and other means of human intelligence. It is part of the Australian Intelligence Community and is also responsible for counter-intelligence and liaising with the intelligence agencies of other countries such as the NZSIS. ASIS was formed in 1952 but its existence remained secret within much of the government until 1972. ASIS is comparable to the American CIA and the British MI6.
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.
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 who claims he was hired in the late 1980s to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial technology. This work supposedly occurred at a secret site called "S-4", a subsidiary installation allegedly located several kilometers south of the United States Air Force facility popularly known as Area 51.
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.
Stanton Terry Friedman was an American–Canadian nuclear physicist and professional ufologist who was based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
NewsNation is an American subscription television network owned by the Nexstar Media Group, and is the company's only wholly owned, national cable-originated television channel. The channel runs a straight-news format for 24 hours on weekdays and eight hours on weekends, as well as entertainment programming taking up almost the entire weekend schedule. 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.
Steven Macon Greer is an American ufologist and retired physician who 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.
60 Minutes is an Australian version of the United States television newsmagazine show of the same title, airing on the Nine Network since 1979 on Sunday nights. A New Zealand version uses segments of the show. The program is one of five inducted into Australia's television Logie Hall of Fame.
Nick Pope is a 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.
Nicholas Redfern is a British best-selling author, journalist, cryptozoologist and ufologist.
The interdimensional hypothesis is a proposal that unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings are the result of experiencing other "dimensions" that coexist separately alongside our own in contrast with either the extraterrestrial hypothesis that suggests UFO sightings are caused by visitations from outside the Earth or the psychosocial hypothesis that argues UFO sightings are best explained as psychological or social phenomenon.
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.
Garry P. Nolan is an American immunologist, academic, inventor, and business executive. He holds the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professor Endowed Chair in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Nolan founded biotechnology companies, wrote numerous medical research papers, and has been active in ufology.
In 2023, David Grusch, a United States Air Force (USAF) officer and former intelligence official, was interviewed by journalists and testified in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing. Grusch claimed that the U.S. federal government maintains a secretive UFO recovery and reverse engineering program and that it is in possession of "non-human" spacecraft along with their "dead pilots". In 2022, Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) to support his plan to share classified information with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He also filed a complaint alleging retaliation by his superiors over a similar complaint he made in 2021.
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 purported UFOs with extraordinary provenance and, indeed, those identified all have been shown to be natural phenomena, human technology, misapprehensions, delusions, or hoaxes.
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