Ross Coulthart

Australian investigative journalist and author

Ross Coulthart is an Australian investigative journalist, author, and documentary producer who, since approximately 2021, has become one of the most prominent mainstream journalistic voices covering UAP disclosure. A Walkley Award winner and joint recipient of the 2015 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History, he is best known for his 2021 book In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science, for the Need to Know podcast co-hosted with screenwriter Bryce Zabel, and for breaking the David Grusch disclosure story in June 2023 for NewsNation.

Early life and education

Coulthart was born in the United Kingdom and later moved with his family to New Zealand. He graduated with a law degree from the Victoria University of Wellington and joined the New Zealand Herald as a journalist in 1982.

Journalism career

A Current Affair and Four Corners (1989–1995)

From 1989 to 1992, Coulthart worked for the Mike Willesee- and Jana Wendt-hosted A Current Affair on the Nine Network, where his investigative journalism won a Penguin Award for revealing that Queensland businessman Sir Leslie Thiess had paid bribes to Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

In 1992, he joined Four Corners, the public affairs program produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), where he remained for four years. One of his investigations examined corruption within professional football in Australia, contributing to the establishment of the Soccer Royal Commission of Inquiry.

On 21 February 1994, Four Corners broadcast Coulthart's allegation that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) "secretly holds tens of thousands of files on Australian citizens, a database completely outside privacy laws". The allegations prompted Foreign Minister Gareth Evans to commission a "root and branch" review of ASIS led by Justice Gordon Samuels and Mike Codd. In their 1995 Report on the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Samuels and Codd investigated and denied the central allegation, while according to Evans, "ASIS does have some files, as one would expect in an organisation of that nature... They are essentially of an administrative nature." The inquiry concluded that Four Corners reporting was "skewed towards the false", that "the level of factual accuracy about operational matters was not high", and that "what was disturbing was not true and what was true was not disturbing". Coulthart has subsequently said that Australian spies went on national television with him to describe favors covertly rendered for British and American partners during the Cold War.

Sunday, Channel 7, and 60 Minutes (1995–2018)

In 1995, Coulthart joined the Sunday public affairs program on the Nine Network, where he worked for fourteen years. A 1996 investigation into CARE Australia prompted reforms within Australia's AusAid agency, and his report The Prisoners Who Waited — examining corruption in government-funded Aboriginal legal services — won the 1996 Logie Award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs. He also received the inaugural Law Council of Australia Law Journalist Award for The Justice System on Trial.

In 2002, together with filmmaker Max Stahl, Coulthart produced an investigative report on crimes committed during the East Timor conflict, identifying members of the Indonesian military and militia who had gone unpunished; the report won the Gold Medal at the New York Film Festival for Best International Report. In 2006, his Black & White Justice report on hit-and-run deaths of Aboriginal people in Townsville presented evidence that at least one victim — Errol Wyles — may have died in a racially motivated incident. In 2007, Dead Man Running revealed the involvement of outlaw motorcycle gangs in extensive illicit drug dealing across Australia; the book of the same name, co-authored with Duncan McNab, was published in 2009.

In 2008, Coulthart, with Nick Farrow, won the Gold Walkley for the report Butcher of Bega, investigating medical malpractice by Graeme Stephen Reeves in Template:NSWcity. In 2010, he reinvestigated the murder of two young Australian tourists by IRA members twenty years earlier.

In 2014, Coulthart served as chief investigations reporter for Channel 7's Sunday Night program but resigned after reportedly intervening to break up a fight between two producers. He subsequently worked for 60 Minutes Australia on the Nine Network until 2018, when his contract was not renewed.

Ben Roberts-Smith public relations (2018)

In 2018, Coulthart was briefly employed by a public relations firm that managed media for ex-soldier Ben Roberts-Smith, who was later found by Justice Anthony Besanko in 2023 to have participated in the murder of four Afghans during his military service.

UAP reporting

Origins of interest

Coulthart's interest in the UAP subject began in the late 1980s when, as a law student and aspiring journalist in New Zealand, he sat down with Captain Bill Startup, pilot of the aircraft at the center of the 1978 Kaikoura incident, who described what he had seen that night. His systematic research into UAPs began roughly seven to eight years before 2023, during extended stays in Washington, D.C. while working for 60 Minutes, when he began building a network of sources inside US defense and intelligence agencies.

The UFO Phenomenon and In Plain Sight (2021)

Main articles:

In Plain Sight (book)

and

Wilson-Davis memo

In 2021, Coulthart starred in The UFO Phenomenon, a television special for Seven News in Australia that promised to "unearth startling new evidence of UFOs from government officials and eyewitnesses". The documentary accumulated several million views on YouTube across multiple uploads.

In the same year, HarperCollins published In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science, which documents his investigation into crash retrieval programs, government suppression of the phenomenon, and witness testimony from military and intelligence personnel. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the book made Coulthart something of a cult hero in American UFO circles, and Maariv reported in 2023 that the book had received global media attention. Reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, author Pippa Goldschmidt wrote that Coulthart "provides a balanced historical and global summary of UFO sightings", but added that "fatally for his argument, however, he shows signs of wanting to believe it". Skeptic author Jason Colavito characterized the book as "less a serious analysis and more of a book report on the last works of the leaders of the faith".

The book includes an extensive analysis of the Wilson–Davis memo, regarding which Coulthart concludes that while the provenance — originating from Edgar Mitchell's private UAP archives — is strong, he is not prepared to assert the memo records actual events absent on-record confirmation from Eric Davis or Admiral Tom Wilson. The document had allegedly been placed into circulation online around 2018 by Australian researcher James Rigby, who passed it to Grant Cameron and Richard Dolan.

The book's title reflects a central argument of Coulthart's reporting: that evidence for the UAP phenomenon had long been available in government archives and declassified documents, but was systematically ignored by mainstream journalists due to stigma and institutional conditioning.

Need to Know podcast (2022–present)

Main article:

Need to Know (podcast)

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".

David Grusch disclosure (2023)

Main article:

David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims

In June 2023, Coulthart — by then working for NewsNation — broke the story of David Grusch, a former senior official of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who alleged the existence of a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program hidden from Congress and the President. Coulthart had maintained Grusch as a confidential source for some time before his public disclosure, describing him as having been cleared to top-secret compartmented intelligence across more than 2,000 special access programs.

Coulthart argued that Grusch's credentials — combined with the absence of any Pentagon challenge to his credibility in the weeks after he went public — constituted a significant indicator of the story's substance. He separately described having additional witnesses allegedly prepared to corroborate Grusch's description of a legacy crash retrieval program, including individuals who had reportedly testified to Congressional intelligence committees.

Coulthart has described concerns for Grusch's safety, stating that while he himself has not been threatened, he lies awake worrying about Grusch and other sources — and that people have committed crimes in concealing the UAP secret that could motivate violence against witnesses.

Media Watch and Bent Spoon Award (2023)

In August 2023, the ABC's 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. In December 2023, Australian Skeptics announced that Coulthart was their 2023 Bent Spoon Award winner for "uncritical journalism" concerning his belief that governments were covering up "wreckage of downed extraterrestrial spacecraft and the bodies of their pilots".

NewsNation special correspondent (2023–present)

In November 2023, NewsNation announced it had signed Coulthart as a special projects correspondent. His first project with the network, Unsolved: The JFK Assassination, was released during the week of the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In January 2025, Coulthart conducted a televised interview with former U.S. intelligence operative Jake Barber on Reality Check. Barber alleged firsthand knowledge of a covert program involving the retrieval of non-human intelligence technology, reportedly conducted by elements of the U.S. military and intelligence community in collaboration with private aerospace contractors, and described himself as a former elite military operative operating under "non-official cover" status who had personally participated in the recovery of unidentified craft at a classified government location.

Reporting methodology and position

Coulthart consistently describes his approach as evidence-based rather than belief-based, and has articulated a position he distinguishes sharply from the general UFO community. He has reportedly concluded, based on source conversations, that the U.S. government recovered what it considers to be non-human technology and has actively worked to keep that fact from Congress and the public through unacknowledged special access programs outside the normal oversight structure.

Coulthart has recounted that Australian, British, French, and New Zealand defense and intelligence officials, when pressed privately, allegedly acknowledge the reality of the phenomenon but profess ignorance of its nature, generally assuming that the United States holds more detailed knowledge. He has also relayed accounts of UAP activity around sensitive Australian installations including Pine Gap.

A central argument in his reporting is that the primary driver of UAP secrecy is not a sinister active suppression campaign but rather institutional embarrassment, Cold War inertia, and the existence of a small group with a close hold on highly classified material. He remains skeptical of specific claims — including alleged extraterrestrial origins of consumer technology — while simultaneously maintaining that the U.S. allegedly possesses recovered craft of non-human manufacture.

On the question of media suppression, Coulthart has described a mechanism by which national security reporters allegedly self-censor on UAP: reporters who publish stories the Pentagon dislikes lose access to future classified briefings, creating a structural disincentive to cover the topic. He has further described accounts from Hollywood sources of the Department of Defense reportedly conditioning film-production support on the inclusion of specific narrative lines — a form of managed cultural preparation for eventual UAP disclosure.

Sources and substantive claims

Coulthart's sources have reportedly included Nat Kobitz, described as a former head of science and technology development for the United States Navy, who allegedly confirmed to Coulthart before his death that the U.S. had recovered multiple non-human craft. Kobitz described being shown material from a craft's bulkhead at a deep underground facility — material he assessed, as an expert in electron beam welding, as bonded atom by atom using methods beyond any known human capability.

In the months following the Grusch disclosure, Coulthart gave a public lecture at the Victorian State Library in Melbourne on 12 August 2023, describing himself as emotionally and mentally exhausted and receiving hundreds of emails daily in the aftermath. At the Victorian State Library Q&A session he described a "sixth observable" beyond the five standard UAP observables: a capability allegedly described to him via a classified Pentagon briefing slide — "slide nine" — in which the phenomenon is characterized as capable of remotely disassembling machinery and of psychic manipulation that alters human perception. He has noted that some sources purportedly describe the technology as consciousness-derived rather than mechanical — suggesting the difficulty of reverse-engineering may stem from the fact that it operates through or as consciousness rather than as a conventional artifact.

Coulthart has also relayed intelligence community speculation about the future human hypothesis — the idea that part of the UAP phenomenon may involve time-traveling human descendants who appear as the so-called Grays — though he has stated he received contradictory information about timelines and could not draw a firm conclusion.

Coulthart has described the case of congressional representatives — including members of the House Oversight Committee Anna Paulina Luna, Matt Gaetz, and Tim Burchett — allegedly being physically denied access to Eglin Air Force Base to interview pilots who had requested to show them UAP footage filmed on personal phones inside cockpits. He has also noted that General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated publicly he had never been read into any crash retrieval or reverse-engineering program — a statement Coulthart found credible and used to illustrate the degree to which the program had allegedly been compartmentalized away from even the most senior military leadership. He has described the national security implications as severe: UAP operating in shared airspace at speeds that could be mistaken for incoming ICBMs, with protocols governing exactly this contingency reportedly written into international treaties between the United States and Russia. He continued reporting on legislative developments including Senator Gillibrand's UAP amnesty legislation requiring holders of non-Earth-origin material to make it available to the Pentagon's UAP office. The lecture Q&A addressed UAP consciousness, possible disclosure timelines, the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast (which he characterized as a myth invented by tabloid competitors of CBS), and suggestions that he might himself be an intelligence asset — a suggestion he rejected while acknowledging his prior investigations into the CIA-linked Nugan Hand Bank.

Awards and honours

• 1996 Logie Award for Most Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs, for an exposé of corruption in Australian Aboriginal legal services.
• 2002 New York Film Festival Gold Medal for best international report (with Max Stahl) for an investigation into violence in East Timor.
• 2008 Gold Walkley (with Nick Farrow) for Butcher of Bega. Four additional non-gold Walkleys.
• 2015 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History (joint winner), for Charles Bean.
• 2023 Australian Skeptics Bent Spoon Award.

Books

• Coulthart, Ross; McNab, Duncan (2008). Dead Man Running: An insider's story on one of the world's most feared outlaw motorcycle gangs... The Bandidos. Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-1-74176-482-6. ＋
• Coulthart, Ross; McNab, Duncan (2011). Above the Law: How Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs Became the World's Biggest Criminal Empire. Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978-1-74237-900-5. ＋
• Coulthart, Ross (2016). The Lost Diggers. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-1-4607-5208-1. ＋
• Coulthart, Ross (2016). The Lost Tommies. William Collins. ISBN 978-0-00-810331-6. ＋
• Coulthart, Ross (2021). Charles Bean. HarperCollins Australia. ISBN 978-0-7322-9788-6. ＋
• Coulthart, Ross (2021). In Plain Sight: An Investigation Into UFOs and Impossible Science. HarperCollins Australia. ISBN 978-1-4607-5906-6. ＋ (reprinted 2023)

See also

• Bryce Zabel
• David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims
• Jake Barber
• Wilson–Davis memo
• Kaikoura lights

References

External links

• Official website
• Template:Imdbname

This article incorporates material from the Wikipedia article "Ross Coulthart", as of 2026-04-26, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.