Australia’s Department of Defence has no current policy governing the reporting or investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena. The Royal Australian Air Force investigated what it then called “Unusual Aerial Sightings” until the 1990s, when the files were closed and transferred to the National Archives. The government stopped looking. The documentary record survived because individual researchers kept it.
In 2023, biotech entrepreneur Anton Uvarov founded the Non-Human Intelligence Research Institute to fund the preservation and expansion of that record. Ross Coulthart, an investigative journalist with over thirty years of experience (including work for A Current Affair, Four Corners, and the Nine Network, and author of “In Plain Sight”), was appointed Head of Projects. The institute’s research arm, Advena Research, operates the programme.
The flagship project is the digitisation of the archives of Bill Chalker and Keith Basterfield, two Australian researchers with over fifty years of accumulated case files, correspondence, and investigative records. Chalker, a mathematician and chemist, had secured official RAAF UAP documents from Defence Department archives in 1982, many of which are not available on the National Archives website. Basterfield has contributed to UAP documentation for over five decades. The combined archives have been digitised and made searchable using AI technology, creating the first comprehensive, searchable Australian UAP documentary record. Notable cases in the archive include a 1973 sighting at the North West Cape Harold E. Holt Naval Communications Station, a US nuclear communications facility on Australian soil.
Basterfield, reflecting on the broader record, noted that “only about 5 per cent of all the sightings that come in can’t be explained mundanely.”
NHIRI has also funded an expedition to Brazil and plans to build observation facilities with multi-modal sensor networks. The institute has registered US lobbying activity, and has launched an Emerging Technologies Interparliamentary Caucus to bring together parliamentarians from multiple countries for open dialogue on UAP. Coulthart stated at the time of the institute’s public announcement: “It’s time for individual private investigations to take place, to do the research that government is not doing.”
Related: CUFOS | The Black Vault | GEIPAN
