Ross Coulthart

Coulthart began his career in Australian broadcast journalism in the 1980s, initially with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Across the decades that followed he reported as a foreign correspondent and as an investigative reporter for the ABC, for Channel Nine's 60 Minutes Australia, and for Channel Seven's Sunday Night programme. He has received multiple Walkley Awards across that period. The Walkley is Australia's most prestigious journalism prize, administered by the Walkley Foundation.

His investigative subjects across this period have included the Australian and international organised-crime record, intelligence-community accountability, and the broader documentary record of government secrecy. In 2017 he published Dead Man Running: A True Story of a Secret Agent's Escape from the Mafia and MI5 with Allen and Unwin, the documented account of the Tony Mokbel case.

From 2018 his investigative focus shifted increasingly towards Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and the institutional history of government engagement with the subject. The work culminated in his August 2021 publication of In Plain Sight with Penguin Random House Australia under the Bantam imprint, the first substantial Australian-authored investigative book on UAP in the post-2017 disclosure cycle.

The 5 June 2023 NewsNation interview with David Grusch brought the modern UAP whistleblower account to a global broadcast audience. The interview and Coulthart's continuing reporting on the Grusch material anchored the public-record shift the post-July-2023 cycle is built on. He co-hosts the Need to Know podcast with Bryce Zabel, which launched in 2023 as his primary platform for continuing investigative work on the post-Grusch cycle.

Coulthart has stated publicly that he came to the UAP subject sceptically and was persuaded by primary documentary material and on-the-record testimony. The In Plain Sight investigation drew on three years of work across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, with substantial attention to interviews with named witnesses, former intelligence officers, and aerospace personnel.

In Plain Sight: An Investigation Into UFOs and Impossible Science was published by Penguin Random House Australia under the Bantam imprint in August 2021. The book documents Coulthart's research into the post-2017 disclosure cycle, the institutional history of the US Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), the UAP Task Force, and the underlying material that preceded the New York Times 16 December 2017 article that opened the modern cycle. The book entered the Australian non-fiction bestseller list within its first weeks of publication.

Between 2021 and June 2023, Coulthart's reporting tracked the emergence of David Grusch, a former United States intelligence official and former co-lead of UAP analysis for the UAP Task Force, as a whistleblower with regard to a multi-decade US crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programme involving non-human craft. Grusch's account was first broadcast publicly on NewsNation on 5 June 2023 in an interview with Coulthart. The interview triggered weeks of US and international coverage and preceded Grusch's sworn testimony before the House Oversight Subcommittee on 26 July 2023.

Coulthart continued his reporting on the Grusch material and on the broader institutional response across 2023 and 2024. The Need to Know podcast with Bryce Zabel, launched in 2023, has become his primary platform for continuing investigative work on the post-Grusch cycle. The podcast has hosted on-record interviews with figures named in the modern disclosure record.

The Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Volume I Historical Record Report, released in March 2024, disputed substantive elements of the Grusch account that Coulthart's reporting brought to public attention. AARO concluded that no verifiable evidence supported the existence of the crash-retrieval programmes Grusch described. The dispute between the AARO findings and the Grusch testimony Coulthart reported remains the central documented disagreement on the public record. The archive documents both positions on the United States country page and on the AAWSAP-related biography pages.

• Coulthart, Ross. In Plain Sight: An Investigation Into UFOs and Impossible Science. Penguin Random House Australia (Bantam), August 2021.
• Coulthart, Ross. Dead Man Running: A True Story of a Secret Agent's Escape from the Mafia and MI5. Allen and Unwin, 2017.
• Need to Know podcast (with Bryce Zabel), 2023 to present.
• NewsNation broadcast archive, including the 5 June 2023 interview with David Grusch.
• Walkley Foundation public records.
• AARO Volume I Historical Record Report, released March 2024, for the documented institutional response to the Grusch account.