Caveats aside, Ross Coulthart's UFO documentary is worth every minute
by Dr. Piyush Mathur
Ross Coulthart—the author of The Lost Diggers (2013), among many other high-selling works of investigative journalism—came out with a documentary on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) earlier this year. Titled The UFO Phenomenon, the documentary has been made against the backdrop of the news that has intermittently come out of the United States since December 16, 2017. On that day, three video recordings of cockpit instrumentation displays from fighter jets belonging to aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt were reported on by The New York Times (NYT). This NYT report had also forced the Pentagon to acknowledge, on the same day, the existence since 2007 of the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIS): a programme dedicated to investigating UAP.
This is a copy of former US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s letter—dated April 26, 2021—-to NBC affirming Luis Elizondo’s directorship of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). The above image was posted on Twitter by NBC’s Gadi Schwartz. NBC’s receipt of this letter notwithstanding, the Pentagon had ended up refuting, to Schwartz, the claim that Elizondo had any ‘assigned responsibilities’ regarding AATIP (which, if not a lie, simply means that Elizondo had secretive responsibilities regarding the same—which would be an unarticulated acknowledgment of the redoutable Reid’s affirmation of Elizondo’s role. Schwart’s tweet (including Reid’s letter’s copy) could be accessed here.
These recordings—the Nimitz one dated to November 14, 2004; the remaining two to 2014-2015—were claimed to be those of the Navy jets’ encounters with UAP. These recordings would be authenticated by the Pentagon in late April 2020—even though the U.S. Navy had authenticated them to The Black Vault in September 2019 while also mentioning that their release had not been officially sanctioned. Along the way, there had been a small flood of public discussions, interviews, and opinion pieces relating to these footages and on the theme of UAP itself. As it happens, there is no stopping that flood even now—even though this theme is not the central focus of most mainstream media outlets at the moment.
Be that as it may, while lifelong UFO enthusiasts would have had little trouble putting these specific developments and most of the characters connected to them into a deep perspective, those casually interested in these matters (and especially the UFO-sceptics among them) would have struggled to conjure the larger story behind the same. This latter—by far the larger—group of people can be expected to have remained a bit lost as to the nature and depth of these developments’ significance. This same group of people can also be assumed to have been left wondering whether it should let these recently reported footages add to the credibility of the claim that these UAP actually exist (as opposed to being just delusions or illusions of one type or another)—as also whether it should now begin to entertain the hypothesis that extraterrestrial forces might be behind them.
Coulthart’s documentary not only helps out those casually interested in UAP make sense of the video footages reported on by NYT on December 16, 2016, but it also clues them into the broadest strokes of this theme itself without acting like some kind of a classroom. First telecast on May 30 on Australia’s Seven Network’s 7plus channel as part of its 7News Spotlight programme, this nearly 79 minutes long video also divulges plenty of fresh information and testimonies relating to some old UPA encounters; it additionally brings up some hitherto unreported cases and testimonies. As to whether the UAP are real (and not a delusion or an illusion), the documentary’s stance is clearly affirmative; as to whether they are the work of extraterrestrial forces, the documentary certainly nudges the viewer into being open to that possibility—but it does not proclaim that to be the only option.
The cast of characters
In the film, Coulthart secures fresh testimonies of several people who are well-known figures—qua first-hand witnesses, researchers and/or activists—to the followers of the UAP discourse. But aside from these UAP celebrities, if you will, the film also gets us to see, listen to, several other people—chiefly first-hand witnesses—that might be fresh faces to the UAP crowd. Now, inasmuch as Coulthart remains sympathetic throughout the film toward UFO believers, he mostly plays well the part of the sceptical reporter.
The UFO celebrities that provide their testimonies in the film are as follows:
Luis Elizondo, former director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which remained in operation through 2007-2012
Leslie Kean, the NYT reporter who, along with Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal, reported on the existence of the now-famous infrared video recordings of UAP
David Marler, UFO researcher and author of Triangular UFOs: an estimate of the situation (2013)
Christopher Mellon, the source of the videos for the NYT article mentioned above; a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations (1999-2002)
Robert (Bob) Salas (aerospace engineer, Ex-Captain, United States Air Force)
The USS Nimitz case
Via interviews with some of the main characters of interest to the Nimitz incident, Coulthart brings out some key parts of that story in the documentary. In one key interview with Coulthart, Kevin Day—who retired as a U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer—points out that UPA were observed during a ‘high-fidelity air defense training’ involving USS Princeton (CG-59) and USS Nimitz (14:31-14:33). As part of the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, Day was operating the radar inside Princeton’s Combat Information Center on November 14, 2004 when he noticed—as the documentary’s narrator tells us—‘a formation of unidentified flying objects’ (14:53-14:57).
Day points out that he initially thought that ‘it was civilian-related’ and the civilians ‘didn't even know we were out there’ (14:58-15:00). But then the captain of the air-defense exercise told him that they had been ‘tracking’ those objects for a few days—and that if they launched an aircraft and ‘hit one of these, someone's going to ask you and me both why we were so damn incurious' (15:03-15:14). Based upon that input, Commander David Fravor, who was airborne, was asked to intercept and visually identify any such flying objects.
But when Fravor began to get closer to one such object, that object—Elizondo tells Coulthart—‘recognized and began to react to his movement’ (15:30-15:33). For the sake of the viewer, Coulthart—using his hand movements (and based upon his overall review of the relevant material)—elaborates upon this dimension of Fravor’s encounter with the UAP as follows:
It sees him—and he recognizes, as a fighter pilot, that it is engaging with him. So, he’s spiralling down like this—it’s coming up to him—and he’s in a dogfight; and he screams out to his colleagues: I’m engaged! [15:34-15:50]
Moments later in the documentary, Elizondo stresses that the object was ‘absolutely intelligently responding to his actions’, pointing out that ‘it began to take evasive manoeuvres to counter, and maintain distance between, his aircraft that was closing in…and this thing had no problem keeping pace’ (15:53-15:56; 16:03-16:16). (The documentary does not make any statement regarding the difference between Fravor’s pursuit of one such object versus Day’s claim of having observed previously ‘a formation’ of such objects.)
“There were radical maneuvers that just are impossible for us to perform and to conceive of; I mean, we just don’t know how anybody can do that. I just don’t understand it.”
— Christopher Mellon, The UFO Phenomenon (2021), 18:32-18:51
While Fravor was having this aerial encounter, Day was tracking his aircraft and the object on his Princeton radar. Against the background apparently of a visual recording of that encounter, Day tells Coulthart: ‘I’m seeing him do the intercept—and, as soon as he is at the merge plot, that object went whoosh—from 28,000 feet to the surface of the ocean in 0.78 seconds’ (16:21-16:30). (Merge plot refers to the visual frame on a radar that a fighter aircraft shares with its target whereby it becomes impossible for the radar watcher to distinguish the target from the pursuer.) But ‘five seconds later’, Elizondo tells Coulthart, the object was reported, by a radar operator on Princeton, to be waiting for Fravor at the extremely secretive Combat Air Patrol (or CAP) point—which was also (as the documentary’s narrator tells us) ‘60 miles away’ (16:41; 16:58-16:59).
Here Coulthart fails to ask Day or Elizondo how anybody could be certain that it was the exact same object that had been detected at the CAP point. In any case, NYT had already told us that by the time Fravor (and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight, flying another aircraft) reached the CAP point, the UAP had disappeared. These specific bits of information are left out in the documentary, even as Coulthart claims—perhaps based upon the prior radioed claim, which Elizondo has also noted—that the object had been ‘waiting’ for its American pursuers at the CAP point (17:15).
Nevertheless, the Nimitz incident has enough details overall to compel Mellon to make the following admission to Coulthart: ‘The accelerations that were observed would destroy five or ten times over any craft that we can design or build today’ (18:15-18:22). Mellon adds the following:
There were radical manoeuvres that just are impossible for us to perform and to conceive of; I mean, we just don’t know how anybody can do that. I just don’t understand it. [18:32-18:51]
The documentary also pulls in here Elizondo’s input on the targeted flying object that had eluded the Americans: ‘No visible propulsion; no obvious signs of lift; no wings; no rudders, no control surfaces; no ailerons; no elevators; no cockpit; no rivets’ (18:23-18:32).
Coulthart highlights the strategic significance of all this to the American military establishment—and thus its significance to the humanity—by summing up this entire Nimitz-Princeton segment as follows:
…it is the fact that it was flagging to the most sophisticated, the most highly trained, weapon systems in the American military—it’s literally poking its tongue out at them; it is saying: I know you’re there; where you are coming; your technology is hopeless against mine; it was showing its superiority to the most powerful country on Earth—that was the most decisive turning point for the U.S. military. [17:39-18:02-18:06]
As far as that observation is concerned, Coulthart is indeed correct—in that his comment echoes the subtext of a leaked report produced on this incident presumably by the U.S. Navy; sans the implication of something extraterrestrial, American fear of these UAP is also expressed in the publicly available ‘Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Phenomena’: a report put out on June 25, 2021 by the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Exmouth, Western Australia
At 19:45, the documentary takes us to one of the remotest spots of Western Australia: Exmouth—a town established in 1967 to provide support to the very secretive, heavily guarded, U.S. Naval Communication Station North West Cape (which was commissioned on the 16th of September that year). The United States had set up this station to allow it ‘to radio nuclear attack orders directly to U.S. submarines in the even of all-out war’ (22:24-22:49). Coulthart interviews three key witnesses—residents of this town—each of whom saw UAP in vastly different years in the area: Adrian Arnold (1973); ‘Annie’ (1991); and Nikolai Gordevich (February 2015). But aside from these witnesses—whom Coulthart thoroughly vetted before putting them in front of the camera —many other residents of Exmouth told him informally that they had seen UAP in the area (34:08-34:10).
Annie’s testimony
The biggest chunk of this segment comprises a partially reenacted testimony of Annie—a woman who uses that pseudonym to protect her identity; throughout the footage, her face is also kept partially hidden per her wishes. Annie’s testimony deserves this longish treatment apparently because it involves several other individuals also; contains rich details, some of which could be verified; and because it has a clear security-cum-sovereignty angle in relation to Australia. In the testimony, Annie literally drives Coulthart to the approximate area where she saw the UAP—in 1991—when she was 25.
The upshot of her testimony is this: While being driven back home one night in 1991 by two members of the (Australian) Protective Service (which would later be part of the Australian federal police) from a party at the American naval base, she saw an aircraft that she didn’t believe was from our planet; and because she had happened to witness it, she was also interrogated later by the Americans. Her testimony is clear that the Australian police officials had seen that flying object previously—and were practically expecting to see it again while driving her back to her residence (24:35-24:43). It is in response to their chatter that she wondered with one of the two officers what they were talking about—and he pointed her to, as she describes it, 'a diamond-shaped craft hovering literally straight above the vehicle' (25:04-25:09).
The aircraft had 'lights on the bottom of it'; was 'two to three cars in length'; was completely silent; and had 'a deep grey' colour ((25:13-25:14; 25:17-25:20; 25:21; 25:26-25:27). Annie adds: 'Within seconds it shoots up—straight up in the sky, like faster than you could watch it, and then it comes down' back again and changes several spots in the blink of an eye (25:28-25:43). A few days later, 'two military police from the base show up' at her house, and insist that she come with them to the base (26:12-26:15). She was taken into the 'top security section of the base', where, Coulthart tells us, ‘those police officers and her were cross-examined, interrogated by American people' (26:41-26:43; 26:59-27:18).
Annie recollects the scene from the American interrogation room as follows: 'In the center of that room were sitting two federal officers. There's three chairs: The one in the middle was vacant; and the two federal officers were in the other two chairs' (27:20-27:29). She adds: 'Their heads were bowed; they looked like they were broken; they didn't even look up at me as I was escorted into the room and asked to sit down in the middle chair' (27:30: 27:39). Overwhelmingly vouching for Annie's testimony, Coulthart says to the camera: 'And I have multiple witnesses to what transpired. I'm in no doubt whatsoever that there was a secret investigation by the Americans into what Annie [blimp] says that she saw—and they didn't want her to talk about it' (27:41-27:57).
Coulthart also asks Annie to draw the craft she saw that night; while making her sketch, Annie says:
So, it was, sort of like, very elongated—front of it was very pointed—it come [sic] down almost like a diamond shape; but the end part was taken away from it. Had lighting like [she draws circles]—I would say spine of it, and then on each wing. So, when it come down to the left hand side of us and I looked over to it, what I saw was it was long but slowly come up to a shape like that and then back down; but in this, was all cut, almost like ridges in it..um...like a 3D effect almost. [28:50-29-37]
Here, the film slips in a segment from Coulthart’s interview with Marler in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the United States. He shows Annie's sketch to Marler for his remarks based upon his prior research on UAP. Marler finds the sketch to be consistent with the ‘triangular’ type of UAP that had previously been reported (31:07; 30:46-31:23).
While talking to Annie, Coulthart—knowing that the American stealth programme had taken off around 1991—dangles the possibility that what Annie had seen might have simply been a secretive American stealth technology by showing her on a laptop screen the picture of an aircraft that appears to match her description of what she had seen (but without telling her that what he was showing her was a terrestrial product). Upon seeing that aircraft, Annie exclaims, 'That looks exactly like what we saw except the top of it...had more cuts in a three-dimensional shape' and 'except the tail bit was cut off' (41:37-41:47; 41:51-41:53). In other words, what Annie had seen was not the same—even as Coulthart points out to her that the picture is that of a 'stealth craft called the “Hopeless Diamond”’ (41:57-42:01). But if it is nevertheless assumed that what Annie had seen was an American stealth aircraft, then one would have to heed Annie’s reaction, in retrospect, to that sort of a hypothetical prospect:
I feel angry. If that's the truth, then why would they have buzzed and followed that car—knowing damn well that we could see that—and then try to shut us up? That makes, for me, absolutely no sense and it is infuriating. (42:19-42:36)
Whichever way one looks at it, Annie’s testimony cannot be wished away as a delusion, illusion, or a lie (and Coulthart has done a lot of background research and vetting regarding the same).
A few minutes later in the video (43:20-43:24), Marler is seen telling Coulthart that in 1989 the US had F-117 (a stealth fighter) and B-2 (a stealth bomber), except that, as Maller points out, 'The stealth bomber doesn't hover' (43:27-43:28). Their conversation also stresses the point that there was no hypersonic boom—or even a 'noise of any propulsion system at all'—to what Annie had seen despite its 'instantaneous hypersonic velocity' (43:34-43:44). Maller adds: 'The vast majority of these triangular reports are silent’ (43:45-43:47).
Other testimonies
A much shorter testimony is provided by one Nikolai Gordevich. One early morning in February, 2015, Gordevich saw, above a hill, a ‘pure, bright white light’—something that seemed to him to be exceedingly out of the ordinary (32:57-33:26). The film’s dramatization of Gordevich’s testimony—parts of which are excluded from the documentary—gives the impression that he and his car were perfectly dazzled (as in focused upon) by this light. Another testimony, which is a bit longer than Gordevish’s—is presented by Adrian Arnold, another Exmouth local.
Arnold had his UAP experience in 1973, 'when he was 12 and watching a movie with friends at the local drive-in' (34:22-34:29). In his own words: ‘Between a break and film I just looked up—and when I looked up I saw three dots that were sort of moving in odd patterns; they moved directly one direction very quickly and then paused and then moved to another direction' (34:48-34:53). Responding to Coulthart’s sceptical questions, Arnold adds: 'Planes can't fly like that; there was no way a helicopter could move [at] the speed [at which] these three dots left'; he also affirms to Coulthart that the dots were in the shape of 'a triangle—and at times when they moved, the triangle distorted and changed shape but returned back to the flat' (34:56-35:01). Noting the similarity between Arnold’s description (of a UAP witnessed in 1973) and that of Annie’s (of another UAP witnessed in 1991), the documentary intersperses here Annie’s following statement: 'It was almost like a three-dimensional...um...triangle: a diamond. At the top of it was a three-dimensional [sic]—but no windows; just seemed to be a solid metal object' (Annie, 35:06-35:18).
The documentary also has in place here one of Maller’s statements—culled from his interview with Coulthart—that he has not yet come across even ‘one account of a triangle landing’ (36:03-36:05). But what gains significance shortly is Maller’s another statement, also interspersed here, mentioning ‘a strong correlation between nuclear weapons, nuclear storage sites, and UFOs’—and foreshadowing Salas’ upcoming testimony (36:54-37). Maller’s words here also underscore a political dimension to a prior statement of Coulthart’s—which is this: ‘We are still transmitting on behalf of the Americans from Northwest Cape—and what happens there is cloaked in secrecy’ (36:06-36:14).
Captain Robert Salas & the allegation concerning UAP’s association with nuclear weapons
Approximately through the minutes 37-41, the documentary lets Captain Robert Salas—a well-known person among UAP investigators—repeat his long-standing allegation that there is a clear connection between UAP sightings and nuclear armament. Salas’ allegation is rooted in his specific experience with his fellow air force officials’ UAP sighting on March 24, 1967—when he was a 27-year old U.S. Air Force Weapons Operator ‘in charge of launching nuclear warheads from Montana’ (38:27-38:28). The documentary’s narrator tells us that on that day, while being ‘underground on the weapons silo’, Salas was told by ‘a guard up top’ that ‘he had seen a menacing light in the airspace above the atomic warheads they were in charge of’ (38:41-39:06). The guard—Salas tells Coulthart—was
screaming into the phone. He's very frightened, extremely frightened. He's babbling, shouting...uh..uh...I finally calmed him down; and he says there's an orange-red light—a large light—hovering above the front gate; and it's a pulsating light. And h..he got all the guards out there with their weapons, and he wanted me to tell him what to do. It was of course crossing my mind that we were under some sort of an attack—and all of a sudden we get bells and whistles going off; klaxons are really loud horns, and that happens when a missile goes down for any reason. [39:07-39:46]
Salas adds that 'one by one across the board...boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom... Something ...uuh...shut down the system’ (39:48-39:57). The narrator tells us that Salas then ‘ordered the guards back underground,’ given that the arsenal had been ‘rendered inoperable’ (39:58-40:04). Salas reiterates that his fellow air force workers ‘saw UFOs’ (40:08-40:09). More important, Salas adds, ‘[T]hese objects knew, and know, exactly how our systems work—and they are able to interfere at any point' (40:16-40:25).
A problem with Salas’ viewpoint is that it does not include any reasoning why these aliens won’t simply destroy the entirety of the earth’s nuclear arsenal—or, for that matter, much other arsenal that has been destroying the planet via wars and so forth. Indeed, if the aliens are so paternalistically protective of Planet Earth, then their interventions would have been perceptible on a far more comprehensive scale of the humanity’s pressing challenges. In the documentary, Coulthart does not pose these types of questions to Salas; however, his facial expressions suggest that he is not persuaded by Salas’ reasoning even though he trusts his testimony itself regarding that incident (which is anyway well-known among those who care about UAP).
Salas, who owns and runs a very old-fashioned blog titled Spiral Galaxy, recently successfully raised funds and organized a full-scale press conference—which was streamed live on YouTube on October 19, 2021—titled The Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) and Nuclear Weapons. This conference brought out lots of other information—including UAP witness testimonies from other American military personnel—regarding an apparent connection between UAP and nuclear weapons storage facilities.
Westall High School, Melbourne, Victoria
The relatively longish (45:59-56:51) Westall High School segment is significant because it focuses on a UAP sighting that (1) had ‘over 200’ witnesses (according to an estimate by one of the witnesses, Colin Kelly); (2) was so closely guarded by the government of Australia that its official report on it had not been included in the national archives—at least not until the time of this documentary’s production (45:47-45:50); (3) led a teacher at the school to be interviewed by Professor James McDonald, from the United States, under the authority of the Executive Office of the President of the United States. The segment is presaged, so to say, by Coulthart’s telling the camera that what happened at Westall High, Melbourne, Australia on the fateful day of April 6, 1966 is ‘perhaps Australia’s greatest UFO mystery of all’ (45:59-46:03).
On that day, 'just before morning tea', a female pupil rushed into the classroom of Andrew Greenwood—a teacher of the natural sciences at the school—and told the class about 'a flying saucer' right outside the school building (46:33-46:53). The whole class came out—according to the eyewitness testimonies provided by several people who were pupils at the school at that time; these testimonies describe what they saw. Greenwood—a rather sombre, authoritative type of personality—himself says this: 'When I looked up I could see this object in the sky; it was directly over the far side of the oval' (47:16-47:25). Joy Clarke—one of the pupils from those times—says this: 'Never seen anything like it before in my life; haven't seen anything like it since...' (47:28-47:32). Greenwood further tells Coulthart the following (47:39-47:46): 'It was your classic cigar-shaped object that...looked like...uh...grey metal.'
Coulthart asks some of the pupils (more than 10, if the viewer were to count—who had witnessed the object) to draw it: They do it individually, albeit within a group setting and in front of the camera (48-48:56). Their drawings depict a similar object—which Coulthart correctly calls 'a classic flying saucer' (48:56). However, Greenwood himself describes it, again, this way: 'It was a grey, almost cylindrical, uh..or cigar-shaped, object, which moved with some degree of precision in the sky'; seconds later, though, he says: '[I]t was..uh..of the shape that you would see if you had saucer slightly tipped on its side' (48:57-49:09; 49:15-49:23). Unfortunately, the film does not show—which it could have attempted graphically—how a ‘saucer slightly tipped on its side’ could look like a cigar.
At any rate, the entire group of former pupils is loud in attesting to the truth of their collective experience on that day (49:59). Meanwhile, Greenwood goes on to tell Coulthart that many pupils ‘took off over the oval because’ the object ‘had moved, flown down apparently behind some pine trees’ (50:06-50:14). One of those pupils was Terry Peck, who tells Coulthart the following: 'I actually headed over to the corner of the school and jumped the fence and ran into a place called The Grange, which is an area where we used to do our cross-country exercises; and ran towards where we had seen one appear to come down and land' (50:15-50:29). Coulthart wonders with her whether she saw the object; she responds, quite carefully, as follows:
I didn't see it land but I did see it on the ground in front of me. I could feel a heat and hear this buzzing sound; and I could see purple lights all around it. I no sooner got there and within I'd say a minute it just raised up off the ground really slowly; just kept on rising to probably about 3 or 4 metres maybe a bit higher and then it turned on its side and almost just disappeared--just went straight up like that--and I looked up in the sky and I could see the other two; so, it appeared to just disappear. (50:32-51:09)
Another former pupil, Colin Kelly, tells Coulthart the following: 'Within 40 minutes of the sighting, Air Force and Army personnel [..] were there' (51:34-51:41). Kelly adds that later, when he sneaked into The Grange, he saw a 'circular...area...the trampled grass'—and 'guards around it, and there were people in there with...equipment' (52:14-52:20; 52:23-52:25).
As for Greenwood, he was visited by 'two men on official government business' fourteen days after that incident (52:39-52:47). He adds that out of these two men, one was ‘in plain clothes, and…the other one’ was ‘a senior Air Force' official in plain clothes’ (52:52-52:57). They told him that he was 'wrong' and that he 'had not seen anything' (53:02; 53:03). These two men threatened him that if he repeated his story again, then he would be reported as drunk on duty on that day to the education department and he might lose his job (53:18-53:23). 'I was threatened,' he affirms to Coulthart (53:25).
However, a year later, the Executive Office of the President of the United States ended up requesting Greenwood to narrate his experience to Professor James McDonald (53:40-54:10). Here, the film slips in a black-and-white video clip from an undated television interview that the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Brian King had taken (in Melbourne) from McDonald sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s. In this interview, McDonald is seen discussing his research into reports concerning UFO sightings in Australia and New Zealand versus their counterparts in the United States (54:12-55:03). McDonald’s own statement—as culled from that interview for this documentary—is compelling in its own right inasmuch as it strongly upholds the believability of these claims and underlines the similarities of the sighted objects’ physical features across the continents. But what follows it—an audio clip of the interaction that took place between Greenwood and McDonald when the latter visited him in Australia (55:15-55:57)—is compelling because it fully backs up Greenwood’s testimony regarding the school episode and what had followed it in his regard anyway.
Nevertheless, Coulthart ends this segment by stressing the fact that (unlike the United States, it is implied) his own nation-state, Australia, had never conducted ‘any official investigation’ into the Westall High incident—and that he sincerely believes that ‘there’s been a cover-up’ (56:10-56:17). All of this is, of course, against the backdrop of some of the testimonies in this segment that point up the fact that the Australian government had most certainly investigated this incident off the records; and prepared a report that (unlike many other such reports) it has continued to keep outside its National Archives: In other words, the Westall High UAP incident was among the most tantalizing, likelier super-embarrassing, even for the Australian government.
Claims concerning recovery of extraterrestrial, alien material on Earth: Scott & Susan Ramsey; Christa Caldwell
By this point of the documentary, Coulthart has earned the viewer’s trust to go further with him, even as we find him collecting himself a little bit while beginning to report his relatively sensational findings in this segment based upon his interviews with some very convincing sources; site visits; and secondary testimonies. On the whole, this part of the documentary follows upon claims made privately to Coulthart by highly placed American sources that the United States already possesses ‘alien, extraterrestrial technology—including spacecraft’ (57:42-57:48) as well as ‘alien bodies’ (57:53-57:55). However, with those sources’ choosing to remain anonymous, and with his lacking an access to any direct evidence backing their claim, Coulthart has had to turn to researchers that are closer to the ground; and he has had to depend on indirect evidence and indirect testimonies.
“Make of this what you will. I have been told, here in America, by multiple defence and intelligence sources (two former and one serving—senior officials) something quite amazing: that America has recovered alien, extraterrestrial technology, including spacecraft… And if that’s not enough, you are also talking about alien bodies!”
— Ross Coulthart, The UFO Phenomenon (57:26-57:55)
For these reasons, Coulthart reports this segment as investigatively and sincerely as possible while also declaring his inability to endorse or rule out a claim to its facticity; indeed, in regard to the information that he has collected for it, he declares that he does not know ‘what to make of it’ (57:23). The segment starts out with the statements of two researchers—a married couple—Scott & Susan Ramsey, who base their findings partly on the testimonies of local Navajo sources. The Ramseys’ claim—originally made for Coulthart’s audible audiobook In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science (HarperAudio: 2021) from Aztec, New Mexico—is that an alien aircraft with 16 dead aliens in it was found lying in Aztec’s desert in 1948. Scott Ramsey tells Coulthart that
on March 25th, 1948 oil workers discovered a lenticular craft laying [sic] up here after being called out because of brush fire. And they came up and found this large object—about 18 feet tall, just short of 100 feet across. [58:33-58:50]
As to the appearance of these dead aliens, Susan Scott adds the following:
They were between three-and-a-half feet to four feet tall; they were [sic] perfect teeth; they were childlike in appearance; they had jumpsuits on that were like a powder colored blue—they were charred…blue uniforms on. Nothing that would signify...uh...rank. [59:34-59:56]
But then Coulthart tells the camera that he had information that before this aircraft crashed, it had hit a ‘mesa on the way’ (1:00:1:06). On 'the top of a 7,500-foot mesa', he talks on camera to the woman—Christa Caldwell, an Aztec local—whose grandfather had witnessed the aircraft’s contact with the mesa (1:00:21-1:00:24). From this mesa, Caldwell ‘pointed out...the rock that in family folklore her grandfather said was the rock that the craft hit...and then kept on going after it hit...that rock' [1:00:29-1:00:42].
“The question is who or what exactly is it—and that is the big question. It could be something that's always been here—that's just as natural as you and me...”
—Luis Elizondo, The UFO Phenomenon (1:02:42-1:02:52)
Here are some of Caldwell’s own words on camera regarding her grandfather’s description of the contact between the aircraft and the mesa: 'He said that it was...wobbling...before it hit the rock' (1:00:43-1:00:53). On Coulthart’s questioning, she adds: 'It was out of control. Absolutely' (1:00:55-1:00:57). Nevertheless, Coultart attempts to cross-check her claim by sending out a drone, affixed with a camera, to the part of the mesa that Caldwell remembers her grandfather had claimed had been hit by the alien aircraft. The drone footage thus collected includes stills—and one of the stills shows apparent signs of a massive crash on the side of the mesa (1:01:15-1:01:47).
When Coulthart asks the Ramseys whether they had 'spoken directly to people who saw this object'—and whether they believed those people—they resoundingly assure him of all that (1:01:04-1:01:13). The Ramseys also tell the viewer that once the oil workers discovered the crashed aircraft, American military personnel showed up at the site around noon—and very likely took the craft, in David Ramsey's opinion, to the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory (1:01:53-1:01:59). The Ramseys further claim that they have interacted with people working for the U.S. government who claim that they have worked on an alien aircraft to understand the technology (1:02:02-1:02:18).
Toward the end of this segment, the reporter goes on to wonder with Kean, the NYT journalist, whether she believes if the United States is in possession of some 'alien materials'; she responds by saying that she considers it to be a 'strong possibility' (1:02:20-1:02:37). She adds: 'I've spoken to sources who have basically said that, yes; and I trust these sources' (1:02:31-1:02:37).
Former Sunrise weatherman Grant Denyer’s testimony
At 1:08:05, the documentary has the wild-card entry of 44-year old Grant Denyer—a commoner to most earthlings but a celebrity to the Australians. In 2018, Denyer—a media producer-cum-presenter as well as a car racer—was the recipient of a prestigious ‘Most Popular Personality on Australian Television’ award (popularly known as Gold Logie); he has been a presenter on Australia’s Seven Network and Network 10, among other outlets. In the following statement (and others that are produced further below), he claims on camera to have witnessed UAP in Melbourne when he was 19:
I was driving along the road at night—about 9 O'Clock at night—um..noticed a couple of very strange lights just, just hovering...low in the sky, and they were too bright to be stars or planets; about as bright as a plane but not moving...um...not moving at all. Just five dots just sort of sitting there in two groups… [1:09:14-1:09:37]
Responding to Coulthart’s sceptical queries, he insists that these lights were not satellites as 'a satellite wouldn't be that bright and it would be higher in the sky if you could see it at all.’ He adds:
[T]hese were bright, bright lights. But I was wondering and I was curious why they weren't moving—and a plane should be moving, a helicopter should be moving, [rather] than just sit there; and then one of the lights left its group—went from a standing star to a supersonic speed over to the other group and then just stopped dead on a dime. [1:09:54-1:10:12]
Here, the documentary interjects a comment from Coulthart, in which he reveals that 'a very senior federal politician' told him earlier in the week 'that he'd had an experience with his girlfriend where he had seen a flying saucer hover over him at a beach' (1:11:10-1:11:13; 1:11:15-1:11:23).
A few seconds later, Denyer stresses that what he saw was absolutely real—it was no delusion; he adds: ‘There were about five lights, and when one left the group and joined the others, they hovered there for probably another...10 seconds, and then they just all, both groups, just went...vhoom...together and just disappeared’ (1:11:53-1:12:05). Mentioning his background as a racecar driver—and his having learnt to fly planes since these sightings—Denyer suggests that he has a reasonable awareness of objects of what speeds are (terrestrially) available, implying that what he saw was something utterly extraordinary.
Cattle mutilations: The testimonies of Mick & Judy Cook
The documentary’s last segment (1:12:45-1:17:23) is a little over 5 minutes long; it brings up an unfolding sub-theme relating to the broader narrative of UAP. The segment starts out with a snippet from Coulthart’s interview with Marler, one of whose comments summarizes this sub-theme—and serves to prepare the viewer for what lies ahead up until the end of the documentary. Early on in the segment, in response to a prompting question from Coulthart, Marler says the following: 'There are unusual incisions and mutilations that have taken place with cattle, other animals, going back decades. Many people attribute this to UFOs’ (1:12:48-1:12:57).
The viewer is then taken to Queensland, Australia’s remote rural town of Eungella—which, per the 2016 census, had only 196 people. There, on a rather quiet, lonesome farmland, the camera faces a married couple, Mick & Judy Cook, who are lifelong (cattle) farmers. Mr. Cook tells the camera that sometime in 2018 he noticed a dead cow that had her abdomen 'surgically removed’; there was 'no blood or anything' around the wound or anywhere in the area, and nor was there any sign of a struggle (1:13:47-1:13:49; 1:13:50). The cow 'also had a part of her jaw removed and one ear' (1:13:59-1:14:04).
The Cooks claim that they knew nobody in the area who could have made those kinds of incisions. Mr. Cook’s photos of the cow are then shown to the camera (He had taken these to show to his wife back at home.) The Cooks go on to claim that '15 of their cattle’ had ‘died in similar ways' since that first case, with their most recent loss having occurred around only 'eight months ago' from the time of the filming of the documentary (1:14:28-1:14:32;1:14:34-35).
Coulthart inserts here some interview-generated feedback from Mellon on these mysterious cattle mutilations—as they had been playing out in the United States. Mellon states the following: 'I've talked to people that have investigated that, and...I've seen the photographs; and I know they've tested the blood, and it's really undeniable that there's something going on here' (1:15:01-1:15:14). Mellon adds: 'Yeah, it is not as though they were just...shot and have a bullet wound or something; they are lying on the ground and there's been some surgical cuts--and it's usually the same cuts over and over again, and often the blood is drained and its bizarre' (1:15:22-1:15:38).
Coulthart then tells the viewers that there had been 10, 000 such cases of cattle mutilations across the United States—and a federal investigation could determine the cause behind them. He claims that there had been many such cases across Australia, too, but they had not been reported (1:16:02). Apparently reinforcing a link between these cattle mutilations and UAP, Coulthart puts in a brief clip from his interview with Denyer. In this clip, Denyer claims that he himself comes from old farming families; knows how much (Australian) farmers care about their 'pride and reputation'; and that he thus also understands why they won't report or talk about such cases (1:17:28-1:17:29). He goes on to tell the story of one of his farming neighbours, who had 'the brightest of bright lights’ suddenly come ‘over the top of’ the tractor he was on—‘in the middle of nowhere—pitch black’; and this light hovered ‘there for a while' (1:17:42-1:17:52).
Conclusion
To the extent that the documentary makes no claim that the UAP witnessed by many of its interviewees are of extraterrestrial origins, it does not need to address the question how space agencies would have missed these phenomena through their presumed travels into and out of the terrestrial sphere. The documentary also does not attribute any specific purpose to why these UAP would take an interest in the regular planetary order of things (even though one of the interviewees—Salas—is clear in his mind about that part, as this review has noted in the section devoted to his testimony in the documentary). Both the questions of these UAP’s origins and purpose are retained fundamentally as an open-ended curiosity—and basically a mystery worth exploring—as far this documentary is concerned (and, in point of fact, that also remains the case with the majority of UAP investigators—never mind what their scoffers would like the rest of the world to believe).
As for the scoffers of UAP investigators, they exhibit an incredible level of naivete about how governments—and their elite researchers—work: the levels of secrecy they maintain as a matter of habit almost, owing to strategic interests (valid or otherwise). Regarding the Nimitz case, for instance, they need to ask why Harry Reid would feel the need to write a public letter to affirm Elizondo’s directorship of AATIP; or why Dr. James Lacatski—a co-author of Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders' Account of the Secret Government UFO Program (2021)—would highlight the peculiar difference ‘between AAWSAP with the nickname AATIP at DIA, and AATIP at the Pentagon’ in a recent interview he gave to Mystery Wire. There are many such questions that scoffers of UAP watchers typically fail to ask.
Off and on, scoffers of UAP investigators tend to proclaim that the simplest explanations (of mysteries) are the most reasonable ones. That type of a belief is, for the lack of a better word, simplistic—and it may work inside an ideally transparent or robotic world. The reality of the terrestrial world is often quite different: Simplest explanations are not the best or the truest ones for irregular happenstances within secretive, politically charged, situations. Probative rationalists—unlike the simple-minded rationalists that scoff at UAP investigators—feel compelled to pursue fact beyond the given, authority-sanctioned, parameters of observation and through the coercive mist of strategic secrecy and default suppression of truth.
A related factor, which applies to all humans and their professional organizations, is that it is difficult to come to terms with something that is apparently orders of magnitude more advanced technologically and epistemologically than one’s own individual or organizational capabilities. Scoffers of UAP believers appear to err in that they keep themselves bound to current levels of human knowledge while judging whether a specific UAP testimony is potentially realistic or fundamentally fantasy (including misperception); so, of course, they would always conclude bafflingly extraordinary experiences as fundamentally fantasy. In contrast from these scoffers of UAP believers, Elizondo, for instance, is able to speculate about alternatives to extraterrestrial origins of these UAP—alternatives that, howsoever incredible to us, could explain why space agencies won’t detect these entities’ interplanetary movements; in an interview to GQ, he speculates that maybe there are beings out there that could warp spacetime and/or are ‘interdimensional’ (whereby they may have been co-existing within the terrestrial spaces without being regularly perceptible to us).
These and similar other alternatives are suggested within UAP circles by some other UAP believers and investigators. As for the majority of UAP-believing investigators, they simply believe that there are phenomena out there that people have uniquely and physically experienced but cannot explain (based upon the knowledges, techniques available to them as well as the best experts that they trust)—and that deserve to be investigated until the truth about them is established based upon firm evidence. By now, Ross Coulthart is most certainly one such UAP-believing investigator—and his documentary deserves to be watched by those willing to give UAP experiencers and investigators their chance.
The UFO Phenomenon can be freely accessed on YouTube by clicking here; since being uploaded there on September 06, 2021, it has had 4,486,996 views (as of November 17, 2021).
Dr. Piyush Mathur is the author of Technological forms and ecological communication: a theoretical heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017)—and, relatively recently, ‘Understanding post-Covid-19 global politics: A tentative theoretical framework’ (TIGA Studies 3, 2020).
If you wish to get in touch with him, please send us a message here.
References & background material
Burton, Charlie (November 9, 2021) ‘This man ran the Pentagon's secretive UFO programme for a decade. We had some questions’ GQ (Downloaded from the following URL on November 15, 2021: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/luis-elizondo-interview-2021)
Cooper, Helen; Leslie Kean & Ralph Blumenthal (December 16, 2017) ‘2 Navy Airmen and an Object That “Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen”’ The New York Times (Downloaded from the following URL on November 11, 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-flying-object-navy.html)
Coulthart, Ross (May 30, 2021) The UFO phenomenon (Downloaded from the following URL on September 21, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm6AL5lA4Zc)
United States Navy (Undated) (Untitled Document) (Downloaded from the folllowing URL on November 21, 2021: https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/05/18/TIC%20TAC%20UFO%20EXECUTIVE%20REPORT_1526682843046_42960218_ver1.0.pdf)
Greenewald, John (September 10, 2019) ‘U.S. Navy confirms videos depict ‘“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”; not cleared for public release’ The Black Vault (Downloaded from the following URL on November 15, 2021: https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/u-s-navy-confirms-videos-depict-unidentified-aerial-phenomena-not-cleared-for-public-release/?fbclid=IwAR3L18F_eN0aPwb2WKXLr3Zj7j2-XVqJXjCeA8xuCtEeUIBOcSWNTLsCoLE)
Office of the Director of National Intelligence (United States) (June 25, 2021) ‘Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (Downloaded from the following URL on November 15, 2021: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625%281%29.pdf)
Reuters (December 17, 2017) ‘Does Pentagon still have a UFO program? The answer is a bit mysterious’ (Downloaded from the following URL on November 15, 2021: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-ufos/does-pentagon-still-have-a-ufo-program-the-answer-is-a-bit-mysterious-idUSKBN1EA0QP)
Schwartz, Gadi [@GadiNBC] (April 27, 2021) ‘UPDATE: Former Senator Harry Reid has sent us a letter confirming @LueElizondo ’s role at #AATIP.’ Twitter (Downloaded from the following URL on November 15, 2021: https://twitter.com/GadiNBC/status/1386872125835812864)