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| The public has been led to believe UFOs don’t exist. But they do |
There’s been an explosion of UFO
initiatives over the past 12 months, including the formation of the
International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research and the launch of
the Galileo
Project. And then there was the groundbreaking report by the Pentagon, in which it
admitted there were incidents of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) that
couldn’t be explained.
Yet a new book, ‘In Plain Sight’, by award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart could be one of the most interesting developments yet. Coulthart has no reputation to uphold in the UFO community, but has long held a desire to tackle the big question: are we really alone?
“I’ve always been intrigued by the subject
matter, mainly because there’s such a taboo attached to it. In journalism,
there’s a real stigma,” he said.
“I can remember editors telling me, ‘Ross,
we don’t do UFO stories.’ I did a lot of national security and defense
intelligence-related stories. I’ve spent a large part of the past 30-something
years covering wars, terrorist acts, and all the miseries of the world. And a
lot of those contacts [I made]… when I asked them about UFOs, they wouldn’t
dismiss it [ie, the idea they existed].”
Born in New Zealand, Coulthart was
fascinated by the 1978 incident in which a cameraman captured footage of an
object flying alongside a plane above the town of Kaikoura on the country’s
South Island. Weeks later, the authorities attributed it to either the planet
Venus or a reflection from fishing boats.
“As a 16-year-old boy, it sounded
plausible to me, so I didn’t think much of it,” he admitted. But, at university, Coulthart
secured his first scoop by tracking down those involved, who assured him what
they saw was a solid object.
Fast-forward
to the 90s and he’d established himself as a journalist and was working on the
Australian investigative TV show ‘Four Corners’. Following the conclusion of a day’s filming
at an air force base, the crew was invited by their host to have a drink in
the on-site bar. Recalled Coulthart, “After a while, he leaned forward
and said, ‘Can I ask you a question? Why don’t you media ever do stories about
UFOs?”
“I freely
admit I laughed, and I said, ‘Because they’re bulls**t’. And he went, ‘No, they
are not. I wish I could say who this chap was – he was a very, very senior
official, one of the highest people in our military at the time.”
Hampered
by the parameters of the mainstream media, he still managed to convince his
bosses to do a UAP story in 2011 – but it was only because they’d sent him to
London to interview a rock star who canceled and they were left with a hole to
fill.
Coulthart
dug into reports of a 1980 sighting near the air force base RAF Bentwaters and
tracked down Colonel Charles Halt, who claimed to have seen a flying
object. He recalled, “We gave it half an hour for broadcast and it just
went nuts. The public was very interested, and, more importantly, what blew us
away was the number of people calling and offering information.”
“They were
contacting me from all over Australia, saying they’d seen a similar object.
They were stunned that the media was finally reporting on this story. The good
thing for them was we weren’t ridiculing it – we were treating the subject with
respect.”
‘In Plain Sight’ contains a detailed analysis of many sightings, including Coulthart’s personal favorite of a man sitting in a deckchair at an outdoor cinema in the South Australian desert when a cylindrical craft appeared. The moviegoer claimed he could see light inside its windows.
Coulthart embarked on the book after going
freelance and casting off the shackles of dismissive editors and says the
Pentagon’s recent admission that something is out there has been a really
positive development.
He explained: “There is
essentially a single line that is parroted by any Five Eyes nation [the UK, US,
Canada, New Zealand, and Australia]. If you ask, ‘Are UFOs real?’, they don’t
answer the question. They say there’s no national security issue with UAPs and
they don’t pose a threat to flight safety. But, in July this year, that all
changed dramatically.”
“Anyone can read that report. It says
very, very clearly that UFOs are a threat to flight safety and that they are a
possible threat to national security. It’s a complete reversal. Nobody in the
Pentagon is explaining why they’ve done this, but I think – and I’ve been told
– it’s because they realize the game is up. They’ve got to come clean
eventually about what they know.”
Said Coulthart, “Annie was sitting
there petrified. She looked up through the windscreen and screamed, as there
was this gigantic triangular craft with lights hovering right above as they
were driving along at 100km/h down this road.”
“In the blink of an eye, it went to 1,000
feet, and then it dropped down to the left-hand side of the car. By this time,
she’s pleading [with the police] to drop her back in town, and then it jumps to
1,000 feet instantaneously again and drops down to the right-hand side of the
car.”
The base housed very low-frequency transmitters, which, in the event of war, would send signals to US nuclear
submarines. Annie was visited by American officials, taken back to the base, and
told she had seen a weather balloon – even though the craft didn’t resemble one
in any way.
The book records another incident, in
Russia, in which the weapons in a nuclear silo had been mysteriously armed,
ready for launch, without any input from the officers.
Said Coulthart, “They were
panicking. The intelligence appeared to be demonstrating, that whatever your
security systems, they can be breached. If it is some intelligence of some
kind, it seems to be sending a message – it seems to be expressing something
about the use or potential misuse of nuclear weapons.”
Also featured in the book is the story of teacher Andrew Greenwood, from Clayton South, a suburb of Melbourne. Along with his high-school students, he saw a metallic disc appear in a cloudless sky.
Greenwood spoke to the local media before
being silenced. Said Coulthart, “This is where things get very
sinister. Two weeks after the incident, he gets a knock on the door at his
private home. There on the doorstep is a man dressed in uniform – a
senior officer – and the other gentleman is an official of some kind, perhaps a
police officer or an intelligence official, more likely.”
“Andrew’s still angry at what they did.
They flatly threatened [him] and said, ‘If you talk any more about what you saw,
we’ll make sure you lose your job – we’ll say you drank as a teacher.’ Andrew’s
got no reason to lie about this and, more importantly, what he says he saw is
backed up by 167 witnesses, all on the record, at the last count. It really is
the most extraordinary case.”
More revelations have been dug up by
Coulthart, including suggestions of recovered non-human craft. Sources claim
the US and Russia each have facilities in which these are stored, but Coulthart
says he is generally skeptical about such claims without having seen
proof. “That’s the biggest problem I have. Governments are bloody
hopeless at keeping secrets and I would’ve thought if the United States
government was sitting on secrets like that, then it would have been leaked by
now, and it hasn’t been,” he said. “But, when you look in the
archives of the US government… that’s why I called my book ‘In Plain Sight’.
The evidence is right there, in plain sight. There are archives from the CIA
that show it was working with the US Defense Department to recover what the
documents refer to as ‘flying saucers’ from Nepal and Afghanistan.”
Along with the book, Coulthart has
produced a UFO documentary and has been met with an encouraging level of
support from media colleagues and the public alike. “The response has
just been mind-blowing. I’ve never in my career had a response like I’ve had to
this subject matter,” explained Coulthart. “It has been
overwhelming. I’m exhausted every day – I wake up and there are literally 300
to 500 emails, people telling me about their sightings, people offering me
information. It’s like we’ve opened a wound and all of the reality is pouring
out.”
The main
purpose of the book, though, is to cut through the fog. According to Coulthart,
it’s almost as if sections of the media don’t want to admit they’ve been asleep
at the wheel.
He
continued, “The media is failing here. The media is locked into the
paradigm that, absurdly, it was encouraged to heed by the CIA and the US Air
Force back in the 1960s.”
“The CIA
decided to suppress the stories of UFOs – I don’t know why, but it’s claimed it
was because they were worried that people reporting UFOs would get in the way
of people providing early warning of a Russian ICBM [intercontinental ballistic
missile] landing on the US. It’s an absurd argument that they wanted to stop
people from jamming up the phones at NORAD [the North American Aerospace
Defense Command] with sightings. It’s just ridiculous.”
For a man
adept with words, Coulthart concludes by describing this complex subject
appropriately and succinctly. While he’s been unable so far to find out all that’s
known by governments and security agencies about UFOs, he’s clear why the
subject has been judged to be the pastime of fools. “We’ve been
manipulated,” he said. “We’ve been had.”
Written by :
Chris Sweeney
Chris Sweeney is an author and columnist who has
written for newspapers such as The Times, Daily Express, The Sun, and the Daily
Record, along with several international-selling magazines.
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