Ross Coulthart

We're essentially turning into an American armed camp.

And why are people in the press gallery not asking the question, are there now nuclear weapons based on Australian soil if we have nuclear weapon capable US bombers based at RAAF Tyndall?

These are the sort of questions that I'm instinctively programmed to ask as a journalist, and I don't see those kind of questions being asked when I look around the journalism that I see today.

It's almost like the media is obsessed with, frankly, stuff that I don't give a flying toot about.

I started out originally, Mark, with a journalistic bias and conceit.

When I started writing my book, and I was still at 60 Minutes, I was traveling to the States a lot, and I was really struck that I'd just been told by a then senior manager of

Nines editorial that I couldn't do a particular story that I wanted to do, which was an interview with a guy called Christopher Mellon, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security.

And Chris Mellon had told me he was prepared to go on camera and talk about the reality of UAPs, UFOs, unidentified anomalous phenomena, as they're called these days.

The old term is unidentified flying objects.

But

I was intrigued.

I was intrigued as to why there was such a stigma associated with UFOs.

I'd had a similar issue when I was at the Sydney Morning Herald as a younger reporter.

I remember I was working on a Sunday and if you were the young cub reporter, you were often put in charge of answering the phones in the newsroom.

And a lady rang me from Parramatta in Sydney, Western Sydney, and

And she said, I've just taken a photograph.

And that was, of course, a film camera back then in 85, 84, actually.

And she said, I've just taken a photograph with my camera of a UFO, a flying saucer hovering over my washing line.

And I said, you're kidding.

And she said no.