Gold Walkley winning 60 Minutes star Ross Coulthart stakes his reputation on UFO book with important new interviews

Let me get a quick product endorsement out of the way first.

If you are already down The Rabbit Hole (like me), you will not find a better appraisal of the "mainstream" story of UFOs than this book, which takes the reader, more or less chronologically, from the 1947 crash at Roswell through to the very latest happenings based around the various military videos of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) recently confirmed as authentic in the unclassified version of the June 25 "Preliminary Assessment" mentioned above.

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If you know little about UFO lore - or better still, if you're sceptical - then I urge you to read this book.

Because not only has Coulthart - of 60 Minutes fame - done a great journalistic job of marshalling an unwieldy seven decade story into a coherent 300-page (plus references) book, he's secured interviews with key players - active as well as retired - including some of whom have never spoken publicly before.

Coulthart occasionally weaves into the narrative his own responses to the things he's being told. He knows, to use his term, that a lot of it is "batshit crazy".

Even so, the evidence, amassed over the years, of US government interest in the subject - highly classified and officially denied - renders inadequate all other explanations beyond the obvious (and for some, the unpalatable).

At the end of In Plain Sight, Coulthart writes: "Irrefutably, there is technology operating in our oceans, atmosphere and orbit that is far beyond known human science.

IAN KIRKWOOD's UFO sightings including one at Williamtown RAAF

Intelligently controlled craft are flying around with impunity doing things way beyond human imagining, and they ain't ours."

If this is true, then UFOs - or UAPs to give them their new term - are at once the most important story imaginable, while being also widely ridiculed, discredited.

I didn't keep the reference, but the other day I read someone bemoaning a decline in Australian journalism who noted, as an example, that the gold Walkey winning Coulthart was "reduced to writing about UFOs".

That just about sums things up.

Despite numerous polls around the world showing widespread acceptance of at least the possibility of UFOs, the mainstream media has by and large refused to treat the subject seriously.

There are some exceptions. The now famous Las Vegas TV reporter George Knapp - who broke the stories on Bob Lazar and his claims about Area 51 - is one of them.

Knapp features in the book.

But it's the unknowns who've spoken to Coulthart who provide some of the most compelling testimonies, and who in doing so have helped cement Coulthart's acceptance of the reality of UAPs.

I can't tell the full story in this space, obviously, but I see the UFO timeline in two arcs.

One starts with the Roswell crash of 1947, and the US military's "seeding" of captured technology into American industry, a disturbing story told by retired US Army Colonel Philip J. Corso in his 1997 memoir, The Day After Roswell.

That task, including an attempt to develop "anti-gravity" flight, is ongoing, with Coulthart listing some of the somewhat surprising patents registered by US researchers in recent years.

The other arc is the interaction between UAPs and various nuclear and military installations.

Before reading Coulthart, I had taken the proliferation of such stories as "selection bias".

In other words, there may be just as many UFOs flying above Tasmanian salmon farms, but with no-one watching for them, they are not being seen.

I had also dismissed footage of small UFOs zapping around missiles - and sometimes shooting beams of light at them - as fakes.

At least some, it seems, are not.

This is where the UAP phenomena intersects with reality.

Since the 1960s, when early investigations such as Project Blue Book were wound up saying "nothing to see here", the standard military response has been to say we don't worry about UFOs because they pose no threat to national security.

The people Coulthart interviews say the real record means that "no threat" stance can no longer be maintained.

Coulthart interviews a retired US Air Force lieutenant, Dr Robert Jacobs, who in 1964 filmed the test of a dummy nuclear warhead launched from an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile.

His commanding officer, a major, had the film in a projector.

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"What it showed was amazing.

"Shortly after the warhead separated from the upper stage of the ICBM, the UFO suddenly appeared, chasing the warhead as it travelled downrange at thousands of miles an hour.

"At huge speed, it circled the warhead and, at four different points, it shot a beam of light. Then I clearly saw the warhead tumble, falling away.

"The UFO had just knocked it out. I was just astonished."

The book is full of moments like this.

And some of them, including Skinwalker Ranch, are even weirder.

Like others before him, Coulthart is convinced there "is a reckoning coming".

"Disclosure", in other words.

It's the most tantalising prospect I can imagine.

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