THE BOOK
In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science, by Ross Coulthart, HarperCollins Australia, first published 2021 as An Investigation into UFOs, revised and updated to cover events into early 2023. A Prologue and twenty-five chapters, from wartime foo fighters to the Navy videos and the UAP reporting law.
What the book is
In Plain Sight is an investigative journalist’s case file on the modern UFO question, a Prologue and twenty-five chapters running in a broadly chronological arc from Indigenous Australian sky stories and a 1930 “mystery aircraft” flap to the Navy videos, the February 2023 shootdowns over North America and the UAP reporting law that now sits inside the US defence budget. It is built around one carefully bounded claim: governments, above all the United States, are not telling the public the full truth about unidentified anomalous phenomena, and there is credible reason to believe some of these objects are real, physical, intelligently controlled and beyond known human technology.
Coulthart is explicit that he is presenting evidence rather than a verdict, and he stops short of calling anything extraterrestrial. The method is a prosecutor’s: case upon case, witness upon witness, document upon document, each weighed against the ordinary explanations. The book’s force comes less from any single revelation than from the accumulation.
This note treats the book the way the site treats any account that reaches the reader through a journalist, evidence tier 3. The tier rates the route, not the author: much of what the book assembles is checkable public record, and many of its key witnesses are named and speaking on the record. But everything in it has been selected, weighed and framed by one reporter, and its boldest claims arrive from sources only he can vouch for. The sections below separate those layers.
Who wrote it
Coulthart’s standing is central to how the book asks to be read. He is a five-time Walkley Award winner, including the Gold Walkley, Australia’s top honour in journalism, with a career across 60 Minutes, Sunday Night and the ABC’s Four Corners, and investigative books on organised crime behind him. He presents himself as a natural sceptic, a reporter raised on night-shift crank callers, who began reconsidering in the early 1990s when senior serving RAAF officers he trusted privately urged him to look again, telling him pilots stay silent because reporting a sighting can end a career.
That framing is a deliberate structure. The reader is invited to follow a professional doubter who changed his mind under the weight of sources, not a believer looking for confirmation. It is also the book’s load-bearing wager: because several of the biggest claims come from anonymous insiders, the reader is asked to accept Coulthart’s judgement of a source’s credibility in place of independently checkable proof. The book is open about this arrangement, and this note flags below which claims rest on it.
How it is built
The book opens not with Roswell but with a previously unreported Australian case: Exmouth, Western Australia, 1991, where Annie Farinaccio and two police officers watched a large diamond-shaped craft over the coast road beside the US naval communication station at North West Cape, and where, she says, American military police later interrogated her for hours and pressed a weather-balloon explanation she refused to sign. Declassified National Archives files record decades of anomalous sightings around the same base. The prologue sets the book’s frame: public ridicule on one side, a quietly serious official paper trail on the other.
Three habits define the structure. First, Coulthart internationalises the story, giving unusual weight to Australian, New Zealand, British, Belgian, Soviet and Japanese cases rather than treating the subject as an American saga, which broadens the evidence base and lets him write from first-hand local reporting. Second, he keeps his own process on the page, the letters to insiders, the phone calls, the dead ends, so the reader watches the investigation happen. Third, he repeatedly stages the sceptical case against his own material, naming debunkers such as Philip Klass, James Oberg, Mick West and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he dismantles some of ufology’s own relics himself: the “Art’s Parts” metal samples mailed to radio host Art Bell, a cherished exhibit in the field, get a full chapter of demolition, and the credibility problems of figures like Steven Greer and Gordon Novel are flagged rather than smoothed over.
The cases that carry the most weight
The evidentiary centre of the book is the pairing of trained observers with instruments. The 2004 USS Nimitz encounter gets the fullest treatment: the cruiser USS Princeton’s new SPY-1 radar, operated by Senior Chief Kevin Day, tracking objects that dropped from above 80,000 feet toward the sea in under a second; Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich finding a white, wingless “Tic Tac” that mirrored their movements before accelerating away; a third jet capturing the now famous infrared video; and the object reappearing at the pilots’ classified rendezvous point, which Coulthart reads as implying it knew the Navy’s plans. He pairs this with the 2014-15 encounters around the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where upgraded radar and infrared cameras agreed with pilots’ eyes, Lieutenant Ryan Graves relayed a near miss with a translucent sphere holding a black cube, and mishap reports were filed and, on the book’s account, ignored. In September 2019 the Navy formally conceded that the three videos in circulation showed “unidentified” objects.
Behind the modern set pieces the book stacks historical radar-visual cases: RAF Bentwaters and Lakenheath in 1956, where objects tracked at extreme speed were later assessed for the Condon study by physicist Gordon Thayer as a probable “mechanical device of unknown origin”; Kaikoura in 1978, where Wellington air traffic controller John Cordy tracked returns that paced a freight aircraft while a camera crew filmed from on board, and where the official explanations, squid boats, Venus, faulty radar, were issued without questioning him; the Belgian wave of 1989-90, where F-16s logged lock-ons at performance the air force said sat outside any known aircraft’s envelope and the United States formally assured Belgium the craft were not American; and Japan Airlines flight 1628 over Alaska in 1986, where FAA division chief John Callahan says he preserved radar and voice data while other agencies confiscated theirs. Alongside these sit the mass-witness Westall sighting of 1966, where more than a hundred Melbourne schoolchildren and teachers watched silver discs and researcher Shane Ryan later logged 122 witnesses, and the darkest Australian entry, Frederick Valentich, the young pilot who vanished over Bass Strait in 1978 while describing a hovering metallic craft to air traffic control.
The secrecy record it assembles
The book’s spine is the argument that official dismissal was a policy rather than a finding, and here it works mostly from documents. General Nathan Twining’s 1947 letter calls the discs “something real and not visionary or fictitious”. Project Sign’s classified “Estimate of the Situation” reportedly concluded the craft were interplanetary before the study was renamed and redirected. Project Blue Book logged 12,618 reports with a stubborn unexplained minority while its consultant, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, mocked the “It can’t be, therefore it isn’t” mindset he saw inside it. The CIA-commissioned Robertson Panel of 1953 recommended managing public perception; in Hynek’s words, in convening the panel the CIA was “fearful not of UFOs, but of UFO reports”. The Condon study that ended Blue Book is remembered here mostly for its project coordinator’s “trick” memo. And running underneath, the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, Project Moon Dust and Operation Blue Fly, tasked in the declassified record with recovering “descended foreign space vehicles”, show a collection apparatus operating while the public line was that there was nothing to collect.
Two threads sharpen the argument. One is Australian: nuclear physicist Harry Turner, working for the Directorate of Air Force Intelligence, argued in a declassified paper that US ridicule was deliberate, designed to allay public alarm and protect classified programmes, and his push for a scientific investigation was shut down. The other is the nuclear pattern: the book keeps finding sightings clustered over weapons sites, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge in early CIA documents, Woomera and Maralinga in Australian files, the North West Cape base during the 1973 DEFCON 3 alert, the Rendlesham weapons store in 1980, and Soviet nuclear facilities in files that surfaced after glasnost. On the book’s reading the phenomenon shows a specific interest in nuclear weapons and the incidents over such sites are the most tightly held.
The documents in this thread show official seriousness behind public dismissal. What they prove is concern, not craft, and the book is at its most careful when it keeps that distinction visible.
The boldest thread, recovered craft
The most provocative chapters concern the claim that a covert programme holds recovered non-human hardware, possibly inside private aerospace contractors and beyond the reach of presidents and the congressional Gang of Eight. Here the sourcing changes character, and Coulthart says so.
Senator Harry Reid, who created the Pentagon’s AAWSAP programme with $22 million in 2008, tells him he was “told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials” and could not get clearance to see them. Physicist Eric Davis asserts crash retrievals outright. Luis Elizondo, who ran the AATIP effort, says on the record that he believes the US holds “exotic material”. The most striking first-hand voice is Nat Kobitz, a former US Navy director of science and technology development, aged 92 and terminally ill when Coulthart reached him, who said he had been read into a programme and that the US had “recovered, several times, alien spacecraft. Or what was thought to be”, and described handling a titanium fragment at Wright-Patterson that appeared cast by no known process. Kobitz died in April 2020; his account rests on his word and Coulthart’s assessment of it.
The documentary centrepiece, the so-called Admiral Wilson memo, notes attributed to Eric Davis recording a 2002 conversation in which Admiral Thomas Wilson allegedly described being blocked from a contractor-run reverse-engineering programme, is handled with unusual restraint: Wilson denies the meeting categorically, calling the memo “pure fiction”, and Coulthart concludes it must be treated as a probable hoax until corroborated, while noting how many credentialed insiders decline to deny it. The Tom DeLonge arc gets similar treatment. The rock musician’s claims about briefings from generals would be easy to dismiss, except that the hacked Podesta emails, published by WikiLeaks and disputed by nobody, document DeLonge corresponding with two named USAF generals, a Lockheed Skunk Works executive and a presidential campaign chairman about exactly such meetings. Coulthart’s position is precise: the briefings clearly happened; whether the briefed content was true is another question entirely.
What gives this thread its charge is the civics argument underneath it. If a programme of this kind exists outside the knowledge of elected officials, then, in the words of Senate counsel Dick D’Amato, quoted in the book, “we are no longer in a democracy”. Coulthart presses that point against his own sources’ bravado, and it is the book’s deepest anxiety: not what the craft are, but what the secrecy machinery has done to accountability.
What the book documents
The programme history is checkable: the Twining letter, the Robertson Panel report, the Condon study and its internal memos, the Moon Dust and Blue Fly paperwork, the 1995 GAO finding that Roswell-era administrative records were destroyed without authority, and the AAWSAP and AATIP funding trail. So is the modern record: the three Navy videos and the Navy’s September 2019 concession that they show unidentified objects, the Pentagon’s formal release of the footage in 2020, the Podesta emails and their named participants, the February 2023 shootdowns, and Section 1673 of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, signed on 23 December 2022, which built a protected channel for programme insiders to bring UAP information to Congress. It is also documented that the named modern witnesses said what they said: Fravor, Graves, Day, Mellon, Elizondo, Reid and Kobitz spoke on the record, most of them directly to Coulthart.
What rests on testimony
The recovered-hardware claims rest on insider accounts without verifiable physical proof: Davis’s assertions, Elizondo’s carefully worded statements, Reid’s secondhand Lockheed claim, Kobitz’s deathbed testimony. The claim that ridicule was a deliberate, continuing doctrine is an inference built from documents that show concern and concealment, plus Turner’s reading of them. The content of DeLonge’s briefings, including “The General” and his Cold War lifeform story, rests entirely on what DeLonge says he was told. The Wilson memo is denied by its subject and held by the book itself at probable hoax. And the later chapters, Skinwalker Ranch, the consciousness-manipulation theories in Davis’s papers, Mitchell’s private Apollo 14 recollections relayed through a friend after his death, and the closing “crypto-terrestrial” speculation, move past the radar-visual standard the strongest chapters set, and the book acknowledges the shift without always slowing down for it.
One structural caution belongs to any secrecy thesis, this one included: where absence of proof can itself be read as evidence of concealment, the argument becomes hard to test from the outside. Matching insider accounts add weight only to the degree the accounts are independent, and from outside the compartments a reader cannot measure that. The book’s non-denials are suggestive; they are not documents.
What it establishes, and what it leaves open
As a single volume, this is one of the fullest maps of the modern UAP record yet assembled by a mainstream journalist: the multi-sensor military cases and their official concessions, seven decades of declassified paper showing private seriousness behind public dismissal, the nuclear-site pattern across three continents, and a chain of named, credentialed insiders now asserting on the record that recovered material exists. The reframing the book performs is its most durable move: it relocates the question from “are aliens real” to “why has a serious national-security question been managed out of public view”, a question that does not require any conclusion about the craft to matter.
What it leaves open is everything the testimony points at. Whether anything was ever recovered, whether the compartments hold hardware or only rumour, whether the phenomenon is technology, something stranger, or many things wearing one label: the book closes none of it, and mostly says so. Its final line leaves the mystery where the title put it, in plain sight.
Read the book. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science, Ross Coulthart, HarperCollins Australia, first published 2021, revised and updated edition
- “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program”, Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper, The New York Times, 16 December 2017
- US Navy statements confirming the FLIR1, Gimbal and GoFast videos show “unidentified aerial phenomena”, September 2019; Department of Defense formal release of the three videos, 27 April 2020
- ODNI, Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 25 June 2021
- Section 1673, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, signed 23 December 2022
- Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (the Condon Report), University of Colorado, 1968, including Gordon Thayer’s analysis of the 1956 Bentwaters and Lakenheath case
- GAO, Report on Roswell records, 1995
- UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, Leslie Kean, 2010
- Coulthart’s subsequent reporting for 7NEWS Spotlight and NewsNation, including the June 2023 David Grusch interview