| Ross Coulthart | |
| Citizenship: | Australian |
| Education: | Victoria University of Wellington |
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] 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, they observed that the information published in the Four Corners program was "skewed towards the false", that "the level of factual accuracy about operational matters was not high", and, quoting an aphorism, that "what was disturbing was not true and what was true was not disturbing". They concluded that the disclosure of the information was unnecessary and unjustifiable and had damaged the reputation of ASIS and Australia overseas.
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]
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]