Concerning Coulthart

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.

Patchgate

In August 2023 Coulthart excitedly showed off this Area 51 patch and the evidence-free story that came with it. He described the patch as coming from a UFO crash retrieval reverse engineering program. The witness (the nephew of a now-deceased man who gave him the patch and claimed to have seen a photo of an egg-shaped craft on the wall at work) described it that way in his ebay ads when selling the patch.

The patch was quickly debunked - it comes from an Electronic Warfare & Radar Cross Section program at Area 51 that has nothing to do with reverse engineering or aliens. The witness Eric Taber, when he came forward in Dec 2023 with his real name for the Daily Mail UK, told a story that conformed to the debunk and contradicted his original story (as reported by Coulthart) as well as the descriptions in his ebay ads.

​In a brazen yet telling move, Coulthart tweeted out the article without addressing the errors he'd made in sensationalizing the story.

I covered this disaster last August, with updates.

Blue balls

Jim Marlin's 10-inch metal ball was featured in 7News Spotlight's 2022 documentary Out of This World and shows appalling judgment on Coulthart's part. The story is ridiculous in the context of being "out of this world" or in any way UFO-related. The evidence for the overhyped claim of "solid testable evidence of alien tech" is zero. The evidence in fact points to a manmade object, given that it weighs, with Earthly precision, exactly 50 pounds and matches the features of a common industrial ball check valve. The ball did nothing remarkable for Coulthart's film crew, and in 40 years Jim has apparently not managed to film its remarkable behavior either. Garry Nolan, immunologist, was asked to do a metallurgy analysis on shavings hacked from the ball using a rusty screwdriver and trashed his credibility by stating the ball might be a "UFO scout vehicle".

Coulthart: "[Jim] believes that it might be extraterrestrial technology, and I think it's important to at least investigate that." [UAP Society podcast, 8/22/22]

The only extraordinary thing here is Coulthart's credulous reporting. Jim Marlin claims his ball was deposited with similar balls in ~1980, by a UFO passing over the house of Dennis Hopper's bodyguard in New Mexico. Is Jim's conviction in his ball a valid reason to spend time on this "important" investigation and put it out to an international audience, given no evidence of unusual properties? Surely a journalist's time is better spent chasing a solid lead than a magical tale.

Jim: "I have since seen videos on the internet of spheres just like this one flying in the air, doing all kinds of things, and apparently they're all over the world."

This leads to a segment on sphere-shaped UFOs (mention of Patrick Jackson who thinks specks on old photos are orb UFOs) and Jim's ball watching TV footage of the Betz sphere from the 1970s. In probably the most damning mistake of the entire show when it comes to investigative journalism, we are shown widely used vintage-looking footage of the Betz sphere rolling around on its own.

The footage was a re-creation for the History Channel. The original footage even has "RE-CREATION" on it.

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Coulthart made an unsuccessful attempt to debunk Jim's ball: "Obviously I've spent a fair bit of time ringing engineering shops trying to find a 50-pound ball bearing and, um, there aren't many, I can tell you." [Project Unity podcast, 8/22/22]

There aren't many? There only has to be one. Here's one:

[Source: Flomatic Valves (a manufacturer)]

An armchair researcher (me), one of Coulthart's "bleating debunkers", found that in a few minutes on Google. On the show we see Coulthart measure Jim's ball as having a circumference of 32", or diameter 10.2", and it weighs exactly 50.0 lbs. This manufacturer's ball check valves are covered in rubber, which would explain the slightly larger diameter and heavier weight.

Nolan said he'd have a result about the alien-ness or otherwise of Jim's ball in one month. It's almost 2 years later and we're still waiting. Yet the ET origin of the ball remains an intriguing open question - at least in the way Coulthart talks about it. More recently he again linked Jim's ball to the worldwide orb sightings mentioned by Sean Kirkpatrick and:

"A lot of people are impatiently demanding that we sort of account to them for what we've been able to dig up on the metallic spheres. And all in good time, when I'm good and ready, will report... I've been approached from all over the world, after having the piss taken out of me last year for doing that story and giving credit to a guy in Texas, clearly, I knew a lot more than I was letting on. And clearly a lot of people now are coming forward to me with information. And I think at some stage we'll be able to reveal what we know." [The Good Trouble Show, 6/30/23]

Almost a year later and Coulthart hasn't yet told us more than he was letting on.

Let's examine Coulthart's opinion of how science works:

"[Jim] believes that it might be extraterrestrial technology, and I think it's important to at least investigate that. And what fascinates me is - I mean obviously 99% of the messages that I'm getting are very supportive, but there's always those acid debunkers who come in and go: This can't possibly be true, you know, so for that reason you shouldn't even be giving it any kind of air time and what are you doing as a journalist even considering this? And I think, if anything, what that demonstrates to me is unscientific dogmaticism [sic]. It demonstrates the very kind of behavior that is unscientific. Any scientist should consider possibilities. Essentially, all good science is fundamentally based on observation and then deriving a hypothesis from that observation and testing that hypothesis. [Project Unity podcast, 8/22/22]

A reminder that Jim's ball was not observed to do anything.

Plasma piffle

In April 2023, Coulthart was part of the team investigating an Australian witness with amazing footage of a "plasma orb" UFO taken while camping in outback Queensland. He interviewed "Michael" by phone, at the request of Chris Lehto.

Coulthart's conclusions: "I cannot find any good reason to disbelieve him... I detect no guile or lying in his demeanour... He knows how to use a computer but he's not a hacker with the capability to render a CGI video on a home computer. If this is a fake, he had help."

Coulthart verified the witness's truthfulness based on: he sounded truthful, volunteered a minor criminal past, and couldn't have faked it (with CGI) because he said so. (Coulthart doesn't seem to understand or consider that practical effects could be used to fake it.)

Lehto's second podcast on the footage was titled "Mysterious UFO Caught on Camera: Alien Ship or Just a Flashlight?" which suggests he was considering a flashlight explanation, but he dismissed that quite thoroughly with theories that became irrelevant given I recreated the footage with a flashlight behind a 35mm camera lens, as suggested by X-user TechNFighter who also showed how Lehto doctored the image for his YouTube thumbnail to remove the details that reveal it's a camera lens. This outright dishonesty would, one hopes, give Coulthart pause if he was ever asked to work with Lehto again.

It's not debatable that Michael was lying and that Coulthart was fooled. Who else is fooling him? I've not seen Coulthart revisiting his favorable impression of Michael's honesty since the debunk. The way cases are dropped rather than the promoter admitting a debunking solution is valid and then reassessing how & why they were fooled is a constant frustration to me and no doubt others in search of truth instead of story.

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Flying saucer fable

The Westall high school flying saucer sighting in SE Melbourne, 1966, is of crucial importance to Coulthart:

"As an investigative journalist who came into the subject of UFOs, UAPs, with a high degree of skepticism, I was brought around by this story. This is one of the foundation myths of Ross Coulthart’s conversion to the fact that the UFO phenomenon is real."  [Ross Coulthart on Howard Hughes, The Unexplained, Mar 22, 2022 [8:00]]

Coulthart interviewed witnesses in 2021 for his 7News Spotlight documentary Secrets of the UFOs (currently at 4.1 million views). He relies on the generalized myth of the story (probably relayed by the main researcher Shane Ryan) and his own interviews with witnesses, instead of studying how the story evolved over time - which would tell him a lot about how reliable the witnesses are today. (I wrote extensively about Westall, including a likely explanation, on my website.)

Two witnesses gave Coulthart versions of events that contradicted their earlier testimony. How important the differences are is up for debate but the fact is he did not investigate, just platformed their newer (more sensational) versions without querying the changes.

After the flying saucer(s) was seen over the school, two girls Tanya and Terry jumped the fence and ran to the Grange (a woodland area about 300m away) where it had apparently gone down. Their stories diverge at this point, and each has an additional problem with their testimony that Coulthart let slide.

Coulthart with Westall witness Tanya

TANYA appeared for the first time on camera in this show, but she'd told Shane Ryan's producer Rosie Jones her story in 2011. She was one of two girls (the other was not Terry) who claimed they were interrogated by men in suits who wanted to know what they'd seen at the Grange. Tanya: "recalls being interviewed by two men, who she thought were police". [Westall Flying Saucer Incident Facebook Page, 2016]

The other girl interviewed was Jacquie (who had jumped the fence after Tanya): "The two men wore good quality suits, they were dark in color. One spoke and one observed... A few years after the sighting I came to the conclusion these men were ASIO." [Jacquie, Westall Yahoo Group, Sep 12, 2008, via archive from Keith Basterfield]

Whether or not they were ASIO, they must have been Australian in order for Jacquie to think so. Tanya's "police" would also have been Australian - if they were American they would not have been identified by a 12-year-old as "police".

Yet Tanya told Coulthart in the 2021 show:
...there were two gentlemen waiting there and I was with them probably for about 15 minutes being questioned.
Coulthart: What nationality were they?
Definitely American.
Coulthart: Americans.
Yep. They didn’t want me to speak of the incident to absolutely anybody.

An investigative journalist would have asked Tanya why she thought 5 years earlier they were police, and why Jacquie thought they were ASIO, i.e. Australian accents. It's suspicious to me that only in front of Coulthart does she change the story - did he suggest it and she went along with it? He then latches on to the (unlikely) fact of American officials bullying schoolgirls as evidence of an international conspiracy:

"The thing that really comes home to me, Tanya, is the fact that you corroborate that American officials were there, trying to shut the story down."

As for the incident itself, Tanya remembers jumping the fence but "by the time I arrived it [UFO] had gone." [Facebook, Nov 23, 2021]

Other witnesses recall (before Tanya was found in 2011) Tanya being hysterical and carted off in an ambulance (and to top it off, vanishing never to be seen again, which she says is not true). This was the "myth" being passed around the witnesses for years.

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Westall witness Terry, who is either confabulating or has a really really bad memory. Either way: a terrible witness.

TERRY has a version of this myth in her own testimony: she claims she jumped the fence, and at the Grange found Tanya was (depending on the year of retelling) dazed, passed out, awake and recovering from a faint, or hysterical. And the UFO was very much still there - which Tanya should surely have seen but did not.

What the UFO was doing presents a second inconsistency with Terry: this has varied wildly over the years, from the UFO being overhead and zooming off when she arrived, to it being landed on/near the ground for (up to) several minutes, to her walking up and feeling its heat before it took off. 

Nobody at the school has corroborated Terry's story (that is, she apparently told no one at the time that she was at the Grange, or saw a UFO, or almost touched it and felt its heat) - in fact Tanya's version contradicts it - and Terry was not interrogated by men in suits despite her extremely close encounter.

An investigative journalist would have asked Terry why her story has changed given the later versions are embellished. A possible clue to Coulthart's uncritical acceptance of Terry's story is below. [References for all Terry's testimony on my website, scroll down to green box.]

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Melbourne mum(bo jumbo)

On a personal note, Ross Coulthart is not happy (as noted above) to have the piss taken out of him, to have his reporting failures pointed out (not only by me, of course). At some point he concluded he knew my real identity, and then, throwing integrity to the wind given the power imbalance between us, tweeted personal information about this person. Not enough to identify her, which means his only purpose was an attempt to intimidate me.

I've included here a reply from Anjali. A month later she would be spreading a disgusting lie about me, backdated almost two years, so apparently I was soon to be on her radar again... but that's a story for another day.

The point of bringing this up, other than the ethical implications, is that Coulthart's sources are shite.

Witness woes

"When it comes to the evidence, nothing beats a good witness."

This quote from Coulthart in Out of This World provides what turns out to be a damning insight into his approach. There are thousands of experiencers he could have profiled with claims of magic paperweights or whatever, but Jim Marlin (with the metal ball, above) had a career in the music industry, including as a promoter for Willie Nelson. Jane Fonda touched his ball. I'm left with the impression that a friendly guy who's had an interesting life qualifies him as a good witness in Coulthart's book - because actual evidence sure doesn't.

To further explore this pattern of believing witnesses he personally likes, here's what Coulthart has said about other witnesses he's platformed uncritically:

"I may not necessarily agree with [Tim Burchett] politically… but he is a good human being. God bless him, he’s an amiable congenial Southerner who passionately believes that there has been a coverup." [UAP Society podcast, 8/22/22]

"I was shocked when this beautiful man [Nat Kobitz] rang me out of the blue." [Project Unity podcast, 6/30/21]

"Nat Kobitz was a warm, generous and hugely intelligent patriot, who was fiercely proud of the work he did for the US Navy. I loved our chats." [Coulthart, In Plain Sight, 2021, Chapter 22]

"this gorgeous girl [Terry, Westall witness] who is now in her 60s, she’s as naughty now as she was back then" [Howard Hughes, The Unexplained, Mar 22, 2022]

Coulthart's forte is not rational analysis or well-sourced, fact-based reporting. His forte is platforming human interest stories and that's what he's been doing in the UFO space. Such stories are one-sided by design, which is not what ufology needs but perhaps what it wants and deserves.

Coulthart has shown himself to be incapable of acknowledging his own credulity, or at least of doing anything about it. Combined with this penchant for sensationalist exclusives, it's hard to trust his reporting. Sometimes he might be right, sometimes his witnesses might be properly vetted and truthful, but who can tell anymore?

So what can he do about his pathological credulity that's led to him presenting so many silly stories?

He could join a skeptics' forum. Instead of chasing the exclusive, he could hash out the mundane possibilities before going public.

​But then, of course, there would be no story.