Ross Coulthart

And John Westacott, who was then the head of news and current affairs for Nine, and he was the EP at the time, the executive producer of a current affair, he was way ill.

And I managed to sneak in a story that I was interested in.

where I got Jana to interview the deputy head of the Belgian Air Force, General de Brouwer, about these weird objects that were being seen over Germany, France, and Belgium, which was essentially a UFO wave.

And actually, he was the head of the Belgian Air Force.

And he told me how two F-16 pilots with the

an object moving at thousands of kilometers an hour, and they couldn't explain it.

They'd got images of it on their gun sight cameras.

And I thought, this is a great story.

I got Jana to do it.

And it was very funny because after we did that story, we got a bit of a spanking.

I got a bit of a spanking and I was told that we weren't to do UFO stories.

And I could never understand why.

I don't think it's a conspiracy.

I just think that there is a residual stigma attached, a taboo attached to the subject that the media has been so acculturated to the idea that UFOs are nonsense that they don't even think objectively about them.

So when I finished 60 Minutes, I was thinking, what's something I can do to be a bit of a mischief maker?

And I thought, I'm going to expose what is obviously a black world US aerospace program.

I'm really interested in aerospace.

And I've done a lot of stories about aircraft and military aviation.

And so I was interested in the likelihood in my mind, I had a firm bias in my mind that the UFO phenomenon was very probably US secret technology.

And because of that 1980s General de Brouwer Belgian UFO wave, I was convinced it was the Americans likely testing some of their own technology over Western Europe.