Straight Talk with Mark Bouris
““It’s Been Kept from the Public”: TV Journalist Ross Coulthart Didn’t Believe in UFO's until…
14 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What led Ross Coulthart to investigate UFOs?
Ross Coulthard. Good to be here, Mark.
Now, where are you living, Ross?
I live in the Southern Highlands, two hours south of Sydney, in the rolling green hills of the Highlands. And what about in terms of your work, your investigative work? I work as a special international correspondent for an American news network called News Nation, which is a rising national cable news network in the United States that is taking on the CNNs and the Fox News.
It's a bit like CNN was in its early days, about 30 years ago. And it's great fun being on the shop floor because they're really interested in challenging accepted truisms and they like long-form investigative journalism, which is how I've made a large part of my career.
Actually, when I look at you, and I have seen you before. We haven't spoken before, I don't think, but I have seen you before. And when I look at you, especially when I do it through Riverside, so you're not actually sitting in front of me, I've just got your face framed, and I can see your broad shoulders and your shirt, and you look like a detective. You've got that look in your eye, right?
I've always been naturally curious and inquisitive. And I actually trained as a commercial lawyer. I was a lawyer very briefly and complete failure at that. And I realized I was far too nosy and more interested in following leads where they took me. And I drifted into journalism largely because I was always interested in the other story.
I loved, as a boy, I didn't have the, I don't know, Bay City Rollers or Suzy Quatro on my wall. Yeah. I had the Sunday Times of London's Insight team investigations and the Guardian investigative team. I was a huge fan of probing long-form investigative journalism that revealed scandals like the
The thalidomide scandal, the DC-10 door scandal, the Dimona nuclear reactor, how Israeli got the bomb. All of these amazing stories that were done with essentially good old-fashioned foot leather, digging journalism.
Yeah, that's very interesting. So what do you put that down to? Because, I mean, we are going to talk a little bit in a moment about aliens and UFOs and all those sorts of wonderful things, which I'm so intrigued about. And not just in a theoretical sense, but more as an investigator. I want to talk to you about it. You're going to talk to me about it, I hope.
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Chapter 2: How does Ross Coulthart view the role of curiosity in journalism?
They said, Ross, the testing for COVID-19 vaccines is woeful and we should be very, very skeptical of these mRNA vaccines. Now, I'm a doctor's son. I do what, you know, you're told with vaccines. And I dutifully accepted that I should have the vaccine. And my wife and I suffered extraordinary negative results as a result of taking AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines.
And it's now come out, of course, that AstraZeneca has been withdrawn from the market, and there's big question marks over the mRNA vaccines, which have got real darts about not only their efficacy, but also their safety. I've got friends who suffered, um...
Heart constrictions, pericardial constrictions, as a result, super fit people, as a result of taking vaccines that we were assured by the government were completely safe. Now, the media, particularly the ABC through Norman Swan, played a key role in promoting the idea that these vaccines were completely safe.
And the credibility of reputable journalists were used to reinforce the idea with the public that the vaccines were things that had to be taken. Now we know there is a huge body of evidence beginning to emerge suggesting that there were huge problems with the vaccines.
And more importantly, what we were told about the origins of COVID, notably that it came from a wild animal market in China, there's serious doubts about that.
And senior people in the intelligence community in the United States and indeed a congressional investigation have found precisely to the contrary, that it probably came from what we always suspected it was, a Chinese weapons laboratory that was probably funded by the U.S.,
And the thing that really gets me is there's still people in the media, notably the ABC, our public broadcaster, that continue to promote untruths about COVID, which frankly, I don't think as media organizations they should be doing. I think they should be questioning. It's not our job to meekly roll over and let our tummies be tickled by whatever experts there are of the day.
Yes, we should accept solid science when it's there, but we should always be sceptical. We should always question and worry about why we're being told certain things. And I think the public, frankly, was very badly let down during COVID.
And it worried me that some of the most auspicious and reputable programs associated with investigative journalism in Australia essentially became cheerleaders for government programs that were frankly deceptive and misleading.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does investigative journalism face today?
We're quite meek. We rolled over and let the cops and the military tickle our tummy. I know. To be honest with you, on an international basis, it's very embarrassing. You're a laughingstock. I mean, I have American friends who constantly cite to me what happened in Victoria under Dan Andrews' premiership.
It was absolutely extraordinary that a state allowed itself to essentially criminalize the questioning of vaccines. And this is really important, Mark, because the current government actually came close to passing laws that would have allowed them to regulate social media.
And we have a situation at the moment where Elon Musk, who obviously owns Twitter, has been fined by the EU because essentially he denies didn't agree with a whole lot of ideas that they had about how they should be allowed to essentially control what is allowed to be said on his social media platform.
Why the hell in an age of declining media mastheads and the diminution of influence in major television networks, why would we want to allow government to have any kind of control over over what are now the rising media brands of our age. We should essentially revere freedom of speech and sometimes that may mean that people say things which are offensive. So be it.
Do you feel as though it's as opposed to our lack of anti-authority sentiment that we've always been typically recognized for do you think it's more apathy in other words we live in such a great country everything's good don't worry if they don't want me to go to work I don't care I won't go to work because I'm going to get the government payout
Look, I think there might be something to that. I mean, one of the things that really strikes me about a certain generation of Americans, they've stopped doing it now, but they used to teach civics in American schools. And so people were taught about the importance of approving media. They were taught about their freedoms, their rights under the constitution. And we don't do that in Australia.
We don't teach people how to complain. And in fact, we have a culture where that essentially berates people who complain. They're called tall poppies. You know, they're whacked down because they stick their heads up. And yet some of the most interesting work that is done in Australia is when people have the courage to stand up against authority and question.
And there were people who were questioning the vaccines as they were in the United States. And those people are now being proven true. I have got an enormous amount of respect for Shari Markson from the Australian Sky News.
Shari did a series of stories for The Australian, which essentially revealed the appalling situation where it was very likely that the COVID vaccine, sorry, the COVID virus came from the government laboratory in China, in Wuhan. And there was an enormous attempt by people on the ABC, notably the Media Watch program under Paul Barry, to try and shout down Shari.
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Chapter 4: How do government and media interact regarding UFO phenomena?
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.
Officially, since the end of Project Blue Book at the end of the 1960s, the whole idea of investigating UFOs was shut down because the Pentagon, the Defense Department, had made the decision that it really wasn't worthwhile, that it was all nonsense, and that we should just get on with our lives and spend our money on other things.
And instead, what was revealed was that there'd been this covert UAP investigation program going on in secret inside the Pentagon. Wow. And that's very much the beginning of my journey because I slowly began realizing I had it completely wrong that –
There were officials who were telling me that there is a secret UAP retrieval and reverse engineering program that we humans, not just the Americans, Russians, Chinese, have secretly been in a cold war for much of the last 70, 80 years trying to retrieve, believe it or not, drumroll, alien non-human technology.
And it's been kept secret from the public. You mean the spacecraft or the individuals who, whatever they are, flying the spacecraft?
There's a polite euphemism that's used for the bodies called biologics. But essentially, in 2023, I had a huge breakthrough. I'd been talking to a guy from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency by the name of David Grush. David was a major in the US Air Force. He was one of the most highly cleared officials in the US military and intelligence community.
He was read in, briefed to be cleared to know about more than 2,000 special access programs, which are the darkest secrets of all in the US. He was also cleared for what are called unacknowledged special access programs, USAPs, And the biggest secrets of all, believe it or not, WUSAPs, Waved Unacknowledged Special Access Programs.
And it turned out David had been working for the UAP task force, which was, again, a secret investigative body that operated inside the Pentagon that investigated UAPs. And David had been tasked by his boss at the time, a guy called Jay Stratton, who I also know, to investigate whether or not it was true that there was this secret UAP retrieval and reverse engineering program.
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Chapter 5: What evidence suggests the existence of non-human intelligences?
And David discovered, to his shock... It was real.
Can I ask you this, Ross? When you say retrieval, I'm presuming me by that, they're actually somehow got their hands on these particular UAPs or UFOs, however we want to call them, physically sort of brought it down or somehow it's crashed or whatever the case may be. They've retrieved it. Do they have someone inside it or something biologic?
Yeah. I do know of other incidents, but this is the one that David Grush has acknowledged to me publicly, and that involved the retrieval of a craft by the then-fascist Mussolini regime, which was handed over, I'm told – and I've learned this from multiple sources – It was given at the organization of the Vatican.
It was handed over to American intelligence in 1944 or thereabouts and taken into the possession of the United States in the early 1940s. And that was the beginning of a series of retrievals of non-human alien craft running from the 40s right through the 50s, 60s, 70s and right up to the present day. My understanding from direct firsthand witnesses is that the U.S.
is currently involved in operations where they are literally attempting to attract non-human craft and to shoot them down using high pulse microwaves. And that this operation has been going on for many years. I know this sounds crazy.
But there are people on the record now, credible people, including David Grush, Jay Stratton, who's the former head of the UAP task force inside the Pentagon, a man who had the status of a vice admiral inside the Defense Department as a civilian. Wow. You know, these are senior people. You've just recently had James Clapper, who's the former office of director of national intelligence.
You know, he's the former DNI, the head intelligence guy in the entire US intelligence community. He went public in a documentary called Age of Disclosure, which has just started to air on Prime, on Amazon Prime. And I really recommend people watch it.
He went public with the fact that he became aware, as Director of National Intelligence, of a secret Air Force program that was investigating UAPs that's completely separate from the one that the New York Times has revealed. It turns out, yet again, believe it or not, we've been lied to. The public has been misled.
For so many decades, we've been told that UFOs, UAPs are a nonsense, that they're something to be mocked and ridiculed and treated with taboo and stigma.
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