Bryce Zabel released on his YouTube channel Stellar Productions the video of his and Ross Coulthart's talk at Contact in the Desert (June 2025). There was nothing stellar about their retelling of the Westall case. Coulthart called this 1966 Australian school sighting "one of the foundation myths of Ross Coulthart’s conversion to the fact that the UFO phenomenon is real" [Howard Hughes The Unexplained, Mar 22, 2022] yet he doesn't seem too familiar with it.

Coulthart made several exaggerations and errors in discussing Westall. Let's look at them one by one, to demonstrate how he added bunk to this story - bunk that the audience probably took as facts of the case.

1. Invent a new testimony

Coulthart: "There's a science teacher called Andrew Greenwood standing with them watching the kids as they play and he looks up along with all the other kids and they all start screaming because there are either two or perhaps three elliptical metal discs hovering in the air just above the kids and Andrew is adamant that what he saw were disc-shaped objects."

As anyone with even a passing interest in this case knows, Greenwood was inside teaching his science class when a student rushed in yelling about a flying saucer. ​

Ross Coulthart has a problem. As a key voice in ufology, that means he is a problem.

Looking over the stories Coulthart has reported on in the UFO space over the past couple of years, his credulity, poor sources, overhyping of weak evidence, and failure to issue retractions, are adding up to severely impact his credibility.

This is a rundown of some of his UFO work that I find problematic - cases that I personally find interesting. Unfortunately, this shoddy work casts doubt on all his reporting, especially when he often uses unnamed sources and is cagey about providing evidence - even while hinting he has it.

​“Investigative journalist” Ross Coulthart (see: Jim’s ball) recently told a story on his Need To Know podcast (Aug 4, 2023) about an egg-shaped craft discovered in the 1980s that was analyzed in a UFO reverse engineering (RE) program at Area 51 in the 1990s. The story comes from a new source (let’s call him Bill) who sent Coulthart a photo of his uncle's patch that Coulthart is claiming comes from a RE program, along with a photo of his team, and sufficient evidence to convince Coulthart that Bill’s great uncle (let's call him Gruncle) worked at Area 51 for contractor EG&G from 1997-2014 and that Bill has talked to AARO about it for 45 minutes (with what amounts to a third-hand story).

Gruncle never saw the egg-shaped craft for himself. According to Bill, Gruncle's job was putting data from human tech into storage vaults. He never saw UFOs or aliens or even data about UFOs or aliens. Gruncle was told about an alien reverse engineering program by the senior engineer in charge of that program, when he started work in 1997. The senior engineer described an egg-shaped craft, silverish-grey, featureless, and the size of an SUV. It was never cracked open, was impenetrable to X-rays, but was nevertheless concluded to be a “probe craft from another planet”. He retired the next year and Gruncle died last year, so we'll just have to take Bill's word for all this.

Later, Gruncle saw hanging on the wall of a secure data storage room at Area 51 a “close-up crystal-clear” “huge image” of “the same exact object” (i.e. a featureless silver egg he'd never seen in person). 

Coulthart was sent the one and only photo that Bill sneakily took of Gruncle's insignia patch from the program (he took it while Gruncle was sleeping).