In Plain Sight is a 2021 book by Ross Coulthart. According to the book’s author biography, Coulthart is an investigative journalist who has worked as a reporter for 60 Minutes and as chief investigations reporter for Sunday Night Seven Network Australia, and has won five Walkley Awards including the Gold Walkley.1 The book surveys reported unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) encounters, associated official secrecy and insider testimony, drawing on interviews the author conducted with witnesses, military officers, scientists and government officials.
Much of the book’s early material centres on Australia. It opens with an account, attributed to Annie Farinaccio, of a 1991 sighting of a diamond-shaped craft near the Harold Holt Naval Communications Station in Western Australia.2 Coulthart also traces earlier Royal Australian Air Force sighting reports, including a 1930 investigation into unexplained aircraft over the Victorian coast led by Squadron Leader George Jones.3 The book gives sustained attention to the Westall UFO Sighting of 6 April 1966, drawing on witnesses such as Joy Clarke, who according to her own account was a twelve-year-old pupil at Westall High School at the time,4 and to the North West Cape 1973 UAP Sighting, which Coulthart notes is documented in two Royal Australian Air Force sighting reports.5
On US material, the book gives extensive treatment to the Roswell UAP Crash near New Mexico Roswell, which Coulthart recounts began when ranch foreman Mac Brazel found crash debris on 5 July 1947 on a cattle ranch roughly 120 kilometres from the town.6 It also reconstructs the 2004 Nimitz UAP Encounter, also known as the Tic Tac Sighting, which, per Coulthart’s account, began while the USS Nimitz was conducting training with its carrier strike group off the California coast in November 2004,7 drawing on the author’s interview with radar operator Kevin Day, conducted on 22 and 23 March 2021.8 The book further examines investigations at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah undertaken for the National Institute for Discovery Science, which Coulthart writes was self-funded by Robert Bigelow in 1995,9 and where Eric Davis began working the following year.10
A recurring theme is the alleged history of official secrecy surrounding UAPs and attempts to bring it into public view. The book traces the founding of the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science by musician Tom DeLonge, which Coulthart records was announced on a Seattle stage on 11 October 2017.11 It also recounts, per Coulthart, how John Podesta’s Gmail account was hacked in 2016 by the Russian military intelligence unit Fancy Bear GRU Unit 26165,12 leaking emails that Coulthart writes revealed plans for a meeting between DeLonge, Podesta and Lockheed Martin executive Rob Weiss.13 The book gives close attention to the disputed Wilson Davis Memo, which Coulthart describes as purporting to record a meeting on 16 October 2002 between Eric Davis and retired Defense Intelligence Agency Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson in a Las Vegas car park,14 and examines the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, led by Luis Elizondo, who Coulthart writes resigned from the Department of Defense weeks before the TTSA launch in protest at excessive secrecy.15
On claims of physical evidence, the book documents that DeLonge sold six so-called Art’s Parts Samples - metal fragments purportedly linked to the Roswell crash - to TTSA for US$35,000 in 2019, according to a disclosure the company made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.16 It also examines patent applications filed by Salvatore Pais, an engineer at the US Navy’s Naval Air Warfare Centre Aircraft Division on the Patuxent River in Maryland,17 including one for a ‘Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device’ that Coulthart notes was filed in April 2016,18 within the book’s wider treatment of claimed Non-Human Craft Recovery Programs.