Ross Coulthart: Adding Bunk to Ufology

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.

Fake facts

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. ​

He made the class wait until the recess bell before going outside, which was several minutes after the UFO was first seen. He was quite clear in his 1967 interview with James McDonald that he missed the entire first half of the sighting. He was not outside when the UFO was first seen. 

First thing I heard was - I was teaching and most unusual for another child to just run into the classroom without warning. That’s what happened. A girl raced in and said “Mr Greenwood, quick, quick, flying saucer outside,” etc. And I got rid of her because I wasn’t going to leave my class or anything...
She left and it was about recess, I suppose 5, 10 minutes later, and I thought, I’ll wander out and have a look.
- Andrew Greenwood to James McDonald, July 1967

What Greenwood saw was so high in the sky and so indistinct that it took him some time to find it in the sky. He told the Dandenong Journal (1966) it was a "beam of light", and he told McDonald it was cigar-shaped and a quarter-mile away at the closest. Certainly he was not "adamant" he saw disc-shaped objects. He saw one object and it was never disc-shaped - he merely speculated it might have been a disc edge-on:

It took me a while to see it - grey against the - coming up to Autumn - blue-grey sky. I couldn’t see it immediately. Everyone saying, “It’s there, are you blind?” I finally picked up what they were looking at...
​Now it was just at any stage to me cigar-shaped, cylindrical cigar-shaped except on occasions it appeared to bulge in the middle... Hold a plate on edge and... you can see the bulge in the middle, that type of effect. I can’t say that’s what was happening of course, but that’s what it appeared to be...
Half a mile, that would be when it was at its furthest distance from us. The closest it came would’ve been I suppose half that distance.
- Andrew Greenwood to James McDonald, July 1967

As I wrote about in my Westall case analysis, it's likely the first half of the sighting, which Greenwood saw none of, was a deflating Hibal scientific balloon that went down behind trees; and the second half of the sighting was a light plane dragging a drogue (wind sock) for target practice along with planes chasing it. Again, Greenwood did not see the first half of the event (the balloon that went down behind the trees). He assumed he was looking at the same object as the kids saw earlier, but his description of its shape and movement were completely different from their testimony.

Mr Greenwood first saw the object when it rose into the air from behind pine trees near the school. After about 20 minutes (at about the end of morning recess) Mr Greenwood looked away and when he looked back it had disappeared.
- Dandenong Journal, Apr 21, 1966

2. Add standard UFO tropes

Coulthart's next claim where he pulls info out of nowhere to make it conform better to the "standard" UFO case:

Coulthart: "[Greenwood] was quoted in the media, and the evening after the quote appeared in the press he told me how there was a knock on his door late at night. And I think it was one man was in uniform and the other was in a black suit and they said to him: if he kept on repeating this story they would make sure he never worked as a teacher again."

This "man in black" is entirely invented by Coulthart. Greenwood said the man wore plain clothes. Coulthart also added the creepy embellishment "late at night".

Two weeks later, a knock on the door and when I answered it there were two people there, one in plain clothes, and then the other one senior Air Force.
- Greenwood to Coulthart, Out of this World, 7News Spotlight, Aug 21, 2022

3. Toss logic aside

There's a huge problem with Greenwood's recollection of these threatening visitors - to the extent that I don't think there were any visitors, or if there were, he was not scared into silence. 

Coulthart: "...60 years later to have the courage to speak about something that he'd been threatened not to talk about all those decades ago, it was a huge decision for him to go public."

Coulthart wants us to think he was bullied into silence, yet Greenwood did speak about it, in great detail and without any fear - twice. And never mentioned any visit from officials threatening him not to.

After APRO published its May-Jun '66 issue, Greenwood spoke to UFO enthusiast James Kibel (the Balwyn Bell hoaxer) who relayed a detailed eyewitness account to James McDonald in an audio letter. Notably, Greenwood told Kibel it wasn't the military who shut down talk of the incident but the headmaster:

[Greenwood] read this report in the APRO Bulletin and said that most of the so-called facts mentioned in it were incorrect. There was no question of officials quashing the sighting, as it was put by APRO. The person behind the sort of close-down on this particular sighting was the headmaster, who was quite scared or disturbed by the whole thing. He refused to go outside into the school yard, even when told the object was in the sky. When the Air Force contacted the headmaster, he told them - and his exact words which were, “Go and jump in the lake.​”
- Kibel to McDonald, after the May-Jun '66 APRO Bulletin came out

In 1967 when McDonald visited Australia (and researched UFOs on his own time) he interviewed Greenwood - who again made no mention of being told never to talk about it, and no mention of being visited by the authorities even when given the perfect opening to do so:

McDonald: Then the Air Force came and did he [headmaster] reiterate these kinds of things?
Greenwood: Not to the school, not to the school. He just told me that an Air Force officer had been out to the school and I was teaching at the time and he told them that he wasn’t going to interrupt my class so that I could speak to them.
- Greenwood to McDonald, Jun 28, 1967

Greenwood would surely have added here that the Air Force came to his house, since they weren't permitted to talk to him at school, if indeed they had visited him. But he says nothing through the entire interview.

Earlier in the interview, Greenwood mentions the Air Force did come to the school but (as he also told Kibel) it was the headmaster who quashed the story when he called a special assembly. And note it was the headmaster who insinuated Greenwood was a drunk - apparently in public, which must have been mortifying:

Greenwood: [The headmaster] of his own volition, I know he had a special assembly at lunch time because lots of the children were back late from leaping the fence, going to look for it, and told them what a whole lot of rot the whole thing had been and some people will believe anything, words to this effect.
McDonald: Was the Air Force in before that recess?
Greenwood: Oh no no, they didn't come for two or three days. [This cannot be true, as the school broke up for Easter]
McDonald: So that couldn’t be blamed on the Air Force.
Greenwood: Oh no, no, I’m saying he had a special assembly at lunch time... where he spoke about this particular incident.
McDonald: Said it was a lot of nonsense?
Greenwood: Yes. I was accused of suffering from the effects of a hangover and a few things, which I wasn’t.
- Greenwood to McDonald, Jun 28, 1967

Given that Greenwood didn't mention this visit by the Air Force, or any pressure from them to stay quiet, in 1966 or in 1967, it's quite possible his memory invented such a visit in the intervening years based on "typical" UFO stories mashed up with the headmaster's slanderous accusation.

4. Mix n' match the witnesses

Coulthart's next mangling of the Westall story comes when he melds the stories of two witnesses whom he himself interviewed!

Coulthart: “There was a conspiracy theory that I was able to debunk about Westall. There's always been this story that there was one little girl who got really close to the craft and that she disappeared the day after she touched, or not touched, went very very close to the craft. I recently found her and interviewed her, and her parents had just moved schools, you know, there was no conspiracy theory She'd just left the school and there was this massive conspiracy theory and it's been there for probably 50-60 years that she'd been whisked away by dark men in black. But she did describe walking up to and holding her hand up and feeling the heat, the radiant heat from this solid metal hovering object that was probably no more than 10 or 11 feet from her, and it's a chilling story…”

Firstly, it was not Coulthart who "found" Tanya or who debunked this conspiracy theory, so I don't know why he's taking credit. It was filmmaker Rosie Jones (Westall '66 documentary) who found her, back in 2011 according to Shane Ryan (the researcher featured in the documentary) who reported to the Westall Yahoo Group that she was "alive and well".

In 2016 Shane again reported that Rosie had talked to Tanya (this was well before Coulthart was even interested in UFOs):

[Tanya] saw the flying saucers in the sky and recalls being interviewed by two men, who she thought were police.
- Shane Ryan, Westall Flying Saucer Incident Facebook Group, Apr 12, 2016

When Coulthart interviewed Tanya for his Secrets of the UFOs documentary in 2021, she described the UFO as "a shiny two-storey disc." That's it. That's all. She didn't say she saw it on the ground because that wasn't her story - it was Terry's story.

Tanya reports being questioned at school for 15 minutes by "two gentlemen" (she told Rosie Jones they were police, i.e. Australian, but now she contradicts herself and says - under Coulthart's prompting - that they were American). Note that while it's Terry who claims she got close enough to the UFO to feel its heat, it was two other girls who jumped the fence that day - Tanya and another witness Jacquie - who were interviewed by the authorities. Terry has never claimed this.

5. Ignore witness inconsistencies

Terry's sensational story was unknown until the 2010 documentary Westall '66. No other students have ever said that she told this story at the time. And her story has changed repeatedly since 2010, both in terms of Tanya's involvement (playing into the conspiracy that she was hysterical and vanished) and her own increasingly amazing interactions with the UFO - read my timeline of her statements.

6. Let your buddy spout more nonsense

Finally, Coulthart's co-host for this talk was Bryce Zabel who adds his own misleading bunk to the case:

Zabel: "I’ve seen the images from that case, the Westall case. And the craft that the children drew, and even I believe the teachers drew, looks very similar to the craft that John Lennon saw in 1974 in New York City. They look like identical to me."

No teachers drew anything from that sighting. There is only one adult witness who has given any testimony - Andrew Greenwood - who never drew it. There are only two contemporaneous sketches of the UFO, from the child witnesses Joy and Marilyn. Here are their drawings compared to John Lennon's. Identical!

Joy's drawing (from her sighting report), 1966

Marilyn's drawing (for the Dandenong Journal), 1966

John Lennon's drawing of his 1974 UFO sighting in Manhattan, “Walls and Bridges” album

Why does it matter?

Coulthart was speaking at a UFO conference where the audience view him as an authority on the subject. Yet he can barely speak a sentence about this case without exaggerating or introducing an outright falsehood.

Would his audience bother fact-checking? He's an award-winning investigative journalist! They trust him to present the truth.

Coulthart has the platform - he should use it responsibly. He makes money from ufology - he should be careful with the facts when talking to ufology enthusiasts who believe in him.

And let's not forget: Coulthart has the nerve to call skeptics "bleating debunkers" when he's the one adding bunk to ufology.