Ross Coulthart

And that was a tipping point for me because I'd been guilty of the very thing I was just decrying a lot of the media for, which was adopting essentially a subjective bias instinctively to a story.

I was assuming the outcome and I was wrong.

Because as I started digging, I didn't find it very hard at all, to be perfectly honest.

I found a really willing army of people in the military and intelligence community in the US who were only too willing to share information with me about what they'd seen or what they knew.

And I couldn't believe it because I was friends at the time with very senior people on the New York Times, the Washington Post.

I'm part of a group called ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is based out of Washington, D.C.

And I've met a lot of my heroes there, Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh, a lot of the greats of American investigative journalism.

And

I've got phone numbers.

And so I'd ring people and I'd say, what about UFOs?

And I'd realize I was the only one that was actually looking at this issue as a journalist should be looking at this issue.

And every time I spoke to somebody, I'd say, have you ever spoken to a journalist before?

And nine times out of 10, they hadn't.

There'd been no footwork done by anybody in the New York Times or the Washington Post at that time to investigate.

Nobody had asked the question.

And so around about the time that I started writing my book, the New York Times published a story by a now very good friend of mine called Leslie Kane.

And that was co-written with a guy called Ralph Blumenthal.

And Leslie's story wasn't hugely dramatic.

It just revealed in October, December of 2017 that the Pentagon had been investigating UFOs.

contrary to what they'd said they'd been doing for the last 30 years.