Ross Coulthart is a veteran Australian reporter who became a leading UFO disclosure journalist.1 He has conducted a year-long investigation into Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), documenting it in a book and on camera.2
Coulthart has said the Westall school incident remains Australia’s, and one of the world’s, most witnessed unexplained UAP sighting.3 Ahead of the 55th anniversary of the 1966 event, he arranged for a flier to be sent to Westall witnesses in April 2021 inviting them to attend and be interviewed by him.4 He said a long-time friend, a senior figure in the Australian federal public service, told him that his own father - a Defence scientist - had investigated the Westall event in its wake and written a secret report on it,5 and that a black Humber car had arrived each morning in the days afterwards to take his father back to the school.6 No document on the incident has ever surfaced from any Australian government archive, despite researchers’ efforts,7 but Coulthart said he is in no doubt a secret report was written, based on his assessment of his source’s credibility.8 He has noted that researcher Shane Ryan, who works at Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra,9 has interviewed 122 witnesses who he says clearly saw a “flying saucer” at Westall.10
Coulthart also travelled to Western Australia Exmouth to investigate reported strange aerial activity above the town, which is described as Australia’s own Roswell.11 There he reported on the case of a woman named Annie: Coulthart said a craft hovered next to her car while it was travelling at 100 kilometres per hour near the Harold Holt Naval Communications Station in 1991.12 The two Australian Federal Police officers who were with her were then cross-examined and interrogated by Americans at the base in the days following the incident,13 which Coulthart considers to have been a secret investigation intended to keep her quiet.14 He has said her account has been consistent throughout, with excellent recall, and that he finds her credible,15 and that, according to files he has seen, the anomaly at Harold Holt has been witnessed by numerous people, including members of Australia’s Defence Department, on multiple occasions.16 When his crew attempted to film around the base, Australia’s Defence Department stopped them,17 and they were required to pull back to a hill approximately 10 kilometres away.18
Coulthart has argued that official inquiries into UAP have historically served to suppress rather than resolve public interest: he considers Project Blue Book to have been largely for public show,19 and regards the United States Air Force (USAF)’s 1985 summary statement that nothing indicated a need to resume investigating UFOs as a blatant deceit.20 His research into the Majestic 12 (MJ-12) files, which allegedly established Majestic 12 as the group responsible for the retrieval of non-human craft,21 intensified through his collaboration with King’s Counsel barrister Jonathan Caplan, who has researched UAP for over 50 years22 and authored the 2026 book Not For Disclosure: UFOs, the World’s Best Kept Secret.23 Caplan examined the typography, printing, format, watermarks and terminology of the Majestic 12 documents, together with corroboration from other diaries, to verify their provenance,24 including the diaries of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.25 Coulthart considers the files authentic beyond doubt,26 though he said he is not fully convinced that some subsequent MJ-12 documents were not deliberately planted disinformation,27 and their provenance is officially disputed by the FBI and the US military.28 The Roswell wreckage was allegedly taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where Arthur Ernest Exon had been a former commanding general.29 Researcher John Audette, co-founder of Edgar Mitchell’s Quantrek research organisation, told Coulthart, “Yes, Ed shared with me details about the Admiral Wilson meeting” - a reference to Admiral Thomas Wilson.30
Coulthart has reported on renewed US government disclosure efforts alongside more speculative claims circulating within the UAP research community. He said David Grusch, a whistleblower from inside the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community,31 revealed the existence of a Legacy Program said to involve the retrieval and reverse engineering of non-human technology.32 Coulthart reported that at a cabinet meeting on 2026-08-11, with Marco Rubio seated on one side of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth on the other,33 Trump said the administration was releasing a lot of information having to do with extraterrestrial things and that people are totally fascinated by it,34 and that it was trending as the public’s number one interest.35 Coulthart has said he does not consider the material released to date on the war.gov UFO files website to be evidence of extraterrestrials,36 but he has described Trump’s declassification initiative as a positive sign to be applauded.37 Coulthart has also reported and tested more speculative claims: citing Jason Reza Jorjani’s November 2025 interview, he said a retired US Army remote viewer had told Jorjani that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has backdoor access to consumer DNA databases such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe,38 allegedly to screen for genetic markers of so-called Nordic aliens.39 Paul H. Smith, a former US Army major and one of the principals of the Army’s Stargate Project,40 emailed Coulthart to call the story “balderdash”, saying he had served in Stargate for seven years and had been its official unit historian.41 Coulthart has said he has no idea about the veracity of the claims and states only that they are disputed.42
Coulthart’s reporting has also explored the intersection of the UAP phenomenon with human consciousness. He interviewed Whitley Strieber, whose book Communion, about being taken by non-human sentient beings Strieber calls “the visitors”,43 was a New York Times bestseller,44 and whom Coulthart regards as a controversial and leading figure in the study of alleged experiencer close encounters.45 Coulthart attended a consciousness conference in Barcelona in 2025,46 where scientists including Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose discussed nonlocal consciousness and the idea that the human brain acts as an attenuator, transmitter and receiver rather than a computer.47 He has also discussed Steven Spielberg’s treatment of the subject, saying Spielberg has a long and illustrious history of covering non-human intelligence in an intelligent and provocative way,48 while taking issue with what he considers Spielberg’s consistent portrayal of non-human beings as benevolent and never a threat.49