Saucer Talk (August 2021)

An Investigative Reporter Discovers UFOs

Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart has been all over the UAP media promoting his new book. We’ve had a read and have opinions.

Trail of the Saucers writers Bryce Zabel and David Bates read Ross Coulthart’s new book faster than a speeding Tic Tac (not quite, but it’s a metaphor), and are ready to dish on it now in our monthly feature, “Saucer Talk.”

Bryce: First off, to catch everyone up, Ross Coulthart is an Australian investigative journalist, but that doesn’t really do justice to what it means that he’s spent the last two years digging into the issue of UAP reality. He’s a big deal Down Under, having won all the top journalism awards they give out there — they have names like the Walkley and the Logie, but think Emmy or Peabody. He’s very serious, respected.

David: Like an Australian Carl Bernstein, or maybe a Seymour Hersh.

Bryce: Looks like Woodward, writes like Bernstein. Anyway, he’s gone after some big guns.

David: Yeah, he’s weighed in on IRA terrorist murder, medical scandals, Aboriginal rights, Indonesian militia killings, organized crime, and even outlaw motorcycle gangs.

Bryce: For that last one, Ross Coulthart should win a Hunter Thompson Fear and Loathing Award, a reference that no one under forty will get, but whatever. [He should also win an award for being able to pull off wearing a hat in a profile picture as we demonstrate here.]

David: Didn’t you almost have a close encounter with Coulthart yourself?

Bryce: I was actually going to meet Ross during the Christmas holidays in 2019 when he was working on his book and I was traveling in Australia with my family, which would have been a rare pleasure, but the terrible bush fires they had that month shattered our schedule and made it impossible.

David: Bush fires? You forgot the “r.”

Bryce: Here in Southern California, we call them brush fires but in Australia they’re bush fires. We spell them differently, but they destroy lives and property the same. We flew into an inferno that month.

David: So, looping back to the book Coulthart’s written that just dropped last week. It’s called In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science.

Bryce: An ironic sub-title because Ross makes it clear early on that he lands in the call-them-UAPs camp over the stick-with-UFOs camp, but his editors obviously had other ideas. In any case, he’s been all over the airwaves and podcasts for the past month on his promotional rounds. He’s an incredibly articulate interview, so good that I was worried that his book would suffer in comparison.

David: I’ve also heard him talk and had the same concern.

Bryce: So, I finished it last night and I’m ready to go. You?

David: Same. Here in the U.S. it’s only available digitally. It’s literally the first book I’ve read on a Kindle. I’m always mystified that my wife can lose herself in a “book” on her phone, but now I’m there.

Bryce: You and I were both reading it at the same time. I remember texting you after the first four chapters that — let me find it here on my iPhone — “It’s less of an investigative exercise so far as a very literate but selective and condensed historical review with an accent on Australia you don’t see too often here in the States.” Now I would qualify that to say there’s basically a first half that’s 80/20 history and a second half that’s 80/20 investigation. Almost like two different books which is not a bad thing. This author, by the way, seems to write the way I think. I loved that he also noted regarding Lue Elizondo’s ‘Five Observables’ that one of them is that something is ‘low observability.’ That always bugged me, too.

David: For those who follow ufology, there’s a lot of retread. But the cases out of Australia, which are incredibly well-documented, may be less known on our side of the pond, and they’re fascinating. The 1966 Westall case, for example. I mean, what the hell was that? It’s cases like these — broad daylight, lots of witnesses, airplanes giving chase, government heavies running around trying to shut it down, etc. — that debunkers don’t know what to do with.

Bryce: It might not be the investigative blockbuster it’s been promoted as, but I was still won over by Coulthart’s reach. He’s touched on almost everything there is to talk about in the UFO/UAP reality space. He lays out the history, the top cases, quotes the players, including witnesses and researchers, and isn’t afraid to go big. He does a deep dive into Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy (TTSA) which is important, but given that Lue Elizondo, Steve Justice and Chris Mellon all abandoned that ship late last year almost seems irrelevant to the larger issues we face in 2021. Still, Coulthart has basically given us the briefing document we all need to read going forward as we sort out this mystery.

David: It’s sort of thematically episodic. It’s way more interesting than the UAP Report from the U.S. government that dropped last month.

Bryce: I wonder which document [the government report or Coulthart’s book] is going to make the biggest impact in the study of UFO/UAP reality?

David: Well, I think we’ve pretty much seen all the impact we’re going to see from the UAP report, at least for now. The most important thing, obviously, is that it establishes a new baseline: UAPs are real, and the government is paying attention. They’re keeping a tight lid on it, of course, but things are happening behind the scenes. I’d argue Coulthart’s book is important, though perhaps not in the same way that one ordinarily thinks of books “making a difference.” But we can get into that.

Bryce: There’s no doubt that it’s a much more pleasurable read than the nine pages of tease offered up by the U.S. government. But at least that official document clarifies that, one, these UAP are real and no figment of anyone’s imagination, two, the U.S. is not likely to make them, and three, that China or Russia probably don’t make them either. That leaves, well, something else, and allows Coulthart’s book to fill in some blanks. Something I love about his book and his interviews is how he references that some of the people who have been maintaining this lie for over seven decades may likely be hauled out in chains for their crimes. Very evocative. In A.D., Richard Dolan and I talk about that, and concede that a future president may have to grant amnesty to witnesses and set up Truth Commissions. I digress…

David: It would be interesting to ask Coulthart about this, but my theory is that the significance of the book isn’t so much the impact it will have on the public as how it resonates with other journalists. Here you’ve got a book by a mainstream reporter whose credentials are impeccable and internationally known, and he’s basically saying: People, there’s a story here!

Bryce: That sounds right to me. We’re both journalists by training and experience and this has traditionally been a subject that serious journalists don’t talk about. Coulthart has broken that taboo. Good on him.

David: There’s another, smaller but potentially more important demographic: Witnesses and people who work in the government who know things but haven’t leaked to the press — yet. Coulthart has already shaken that tree hard and successfully.

Bryce: You should lay out how we know that.

David: Coulthart talks about this on podcasts. He’s quite clever and, I’d add, wonderfully old school. He reaches out to potential sources by snail mail — untraceable, or at least, much less so than phone calls and emails. These spooks and defense insiders get those, and they realize, “This guy has already taken steps to protect my identity.” He says it’s shaken loose some enormously interesting information, sources and leads.

Bryce: Excellent. I’ve got a collection of unused stamps waiting to become relevant again. Well, you know, he’s right, people are ready to talk. Many have been doing just that, many more are doing it now, more will follow. The witness and insider thing is true by my own experience with Dark Skies. As soon as people heard I was doing a TV show about UFOs they came to me with their stories because they knew I wouldn’t laugh at them.

David: Or maybe that you’d put them on TV?

Bryce: Ha. There’s always some of that. But I’m speaking about people like the plumber who had a schoolyard sighting like Westall right here on Wilshire Boulevard in LA in the mid-60s with all his school mates and teachers. Or the guys who said they were from ONI who crashed our series premier party. Stuff like that. Grist for another time.

David: What jumped out at you the most from the book?

Bryce: Roswell. You know I’ve made the case a central part of my NBC series Dark Skies, I wrote about it in A.D. After Disclosure, I have two books about it under option as the backbone of a feature script I’ve written, and I’ve done two articles here at Medium on the subject: “Yes, We Have UFO Crash Wreckage” and “Roswell is on the Fast Track to Disclosure.” So I was heartened, thrilled, and vindicated to read Ross Coulthart say flat-out that his witnesses and much evidence supports it being crash wreckage of extraordinary material, as in probably a vehicle and even bodies.

David: With Roswell, the “Plain Sight” title couldn’t be more applicable. On top of the voluminous original reporting and testimony that’s been gathered by DIY researchers, the New York Times now has quoted knowledgeable, reputable, on-the-record sources as saying, quite matter-of-factly, that the government has crash wreckage. I mean, say those words aloud. I know many have a hard time believing that. The only thing I have a hard time believing is that it hasn’t riveted the attention of the entire White House Press Corps. But anyway. Anything you didn’t love about the book?

Bryce: Not much. I might have liked it to be told more as a personal narrative of his investigation because I find the process itself fascinating. Maybe less TTSA, more MJ-12 because I want to know if it’s real or not. But that’s quibbling. I enjoyed it very much. Let me just say this. The bar has been raised and the battle has been joined. If Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal ever thought the New York Times could have a free run on this story, those days are over. It’s what Trail of the Saucers predicted in our “Cosmic Watergate” post — in the same way that Woodward and Bernstein broke Watergate, almost as soon as they thought they owned the story, they had lots of competition. That’s going to happen now on UFO/UAP reality. Okay, off my soapbox. How about you?

David: It’s a very easy read, like UFOs 101. The cast of characters we ran through is like a Who’s Who of ufology. The stuff on anti-gravity research the Navy is apparently neck-deep in lost me a bit, and then the last 100-plus pages are footnotes and a bibliography, which I love. Fantastic resource.

Bryce: I don’t read the footnotes. I’m just damn glad they’re there.

David: I hope this book ends up on every reporter’s desk next to their Associated Press Stylebook. So, I sort of have a criticism, but … it’s complicated.

Bryce: We’re almost out of time here. Let’s do complicated simplified.

David: Well, it’s solid reporting, but at surface level. Literally the surface. The book is concerned primarily with what people can see, the technology. The saucers, Tic Tac, the black triangles, etc. With few nods to John Mack’s work on abductee experiences, it doesn’t really address the intelligence that appears to guide them. There’s allusions to bodies in there, but it mostly skirts around the experiencer/contact aspect. And if UAPs are the rabbit hole, the contact experience is the exotic and even more mind-bending wonderland at the bottom.

Bryce: Maybe he’s already started the sequel, ‘Hidden from Plain Sight.’

David: I mean, it’s sort of the elephant in the UAP living room — we seem to really not be alone, and what does that actually mean? — but I suppose it’s a smart move to take it one step at a time. That’s one thing Disclosure activist Stephen Bassett is adamant about. He doesn’t even want to talk about aliens and contact. Too exotic, too weird — for the general public, anyway.

Bryce: I don’t buy that incremental bit at all. If these things aren’t ours, then some other intelligence is interacting with us. There’s no real way to parse that. It absolutely is exotic and weird. That’s the deal. You can’t be a little bit pregnant and you can’t tell people here’s a bit of disclosure but don’t ask any big questions until we’re ready. Once this train gets out of the station, it’s not stopping. I’m looking forward to talking to Ross Coulthart, either privately or in a public forum like this, and taking the conversation to that next level. I bet he has some highly developed ideas on the subject, and I’d like to compare notes.

David: But on the other hand, maybe he was wise to not go there in his first book.

Bryce: All I know is that his conclusion to this one is awesome. That he strongly suspects from his sources that tech not made by human hands has ended up in US possession, and probably also by Russia and China. He says the quest to unravel this mystery is soon going to have the beginnings of an answer.

David: And in his book and from listening to him, Coulthart really seems pretty sure that we’re heading quickly to some type of “admission,” which is the word he used.

Bryce: That’s mind-blowing, right? Disclosure, confirmation, admission. They can call it whatever they want, just do it already. I am most definitely not getting any younger and I am losing my patience big-time.

David: But the most encouraging thing of all?

Bryce: Oh, I do love an optimist. What?

David: Coulthart is staying on the UFO beat. He told Spaced Out Radio’s Dave Scott the other night, “In journo parlance, it’s a bloody good story and I’m going to chase it like a dog on a bone.”

Bryce: Go, Ross, go!

The following Trail of the Saucers articles discuss issues raised in the above conversation —