FigureRoss Coulthart (b. 1962)

Born Melbourne 1962. Career at 60 Minutes (Australia), Sunday Night, the Sydney Morning Herald, and Nine Network across nearly four decades. Six Walkley Awards (Australia’s top journalism prize) across investigative reporting on Cardinal George Pell, the trade in stolen-art antiquities, and the SAS allegations later examined in the Brereton Inquiry. Long-form investigative profile is unusually well-established for a journalist who has since pivoted to UAP coverage; his Walkley track record is the credential most cited by U.S. media partners.

In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science (HarperCollins Australia, 2021) was the result of a multi-year investigation that took Coulthart into the U.S. UAP disclosure community ahead of the December 2017 New York Times article. The book includes the first published profile of David Grusch as a named source (under the pseudonym “Steven Justice” in the U.S. edition), and is one of the principal early-public-record accounts of the post-AAWSAP whistleblower ecosystem. Coulthart’s June 2023 interview with Grusch on NewsNation (with reporter George Knapp as co-interviewer) was the first network-television appearance in which Grusch named the program-existence claim on the record. Coulthart subsequently became the lead UAP correspondent for NewsNation U.S. and a regular interlocutor for Karl Nell, Lue Elizondo, and other figures in the disclosure circuit.

His journalistic position is that the U.S. government has materially under-reported what is in its possession, that congressional oversight has been systematically frustrated by special-access program (SAP) compartmentalization, and that significant non-human or non-prosaic technology recoveries are concealed within USAP/SAP structures. He has stated this position on the public record while continuing to file accuracy-first reporting that has held up to network legal review. Among working journalists, he has the longest continuous track record on the contemporary disclosure beat.