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Aug. 5, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:21:35

Edition 562 - Ross Coulthart

A specially extended Edition - Acclaimed Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart on his deep, first-hand UFO research including details of strange happenings around a military communications base in Australia's remote northwest... Ross's new book, "In Plain Sight", is out in the UK during August and about 6 weeks later in the US...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you so much for being with me on my journey for all of your lovely emails.
	Please keep those coming.
	You know the way to do that, please go to my website.
	If you want to communicate with me, it is theunexplained.tv and follow the link from there.
	Thanks to Adam for his work on the website.
	Now, I'm not going to hang about this time because we have a remarkable guest who deserves enormous success for a book that he has just written.
	And depending on which part of the world you are in, it will be out for you to purchase and enjoy quite soon.
	This man is very well known in his home country and now around the world.
	His name is Ross Coulthard.
	He's an Australian investigative journalist best known for his work on the Australian version of the documentary series 60 Minutes.
	Now, I have to say that the Australians are doing some fantastic work on the current UFO situation here.
	They are doing TV programs and investigations of a kind that I don't think we're really doing in the United Kingdom, and we should be.
	It seems America's doing well on this front.
	Australia's doing well on this front.
	Maybe not so much in the UK, and I don't quite understand why.
	Maybe it's because we're taken up here with politics and COVID and all the rest of it.
	But, you know, these issues are coming to the fore now.
	Ross Coulthard has a great book out.
	It is called In Plain Sight, and it deals with a lot of hot-button UFO topics.
	But this man has used shoe leather and done primary research.
	He's spoken to people, some of whom he cannot name in the book, and got their stories.
	He is a remarkable man, and we're in for a remarkable conversation.
	Now, the conversation that you're about to hear is a specially extended conversation of the conversation that ran on my radio show.
	There is 30 minutes more here, and 30 good minutes, I would say, from Ross Coultard.
	So if you do have the time, if you have an hour and a half spare, then I would recommend that you just get a cup of whatever you like to drink, sit down, and take all of this in.
	He is a remarkable man, and as I say, his book, In Plain Sight, is well worth reading.
	I'm lucky enough to have got a copy.
	It will be available for sale in the United Kingdom in the middle of August, and I believe October, we'll check it with him in the United States and Canada, but we'll find out about that.
	Not going to waste any more time then.
	Please sit back and enjoy Ross Koultard.
	Ross, thank you very much for coming on my show.
	It's my pleasure.
	Lovely to talk to you.
	Yeah, I'm not sure what it is exactly.
	I think there's a great big time gulf between the two of us.
	So it's morning time, literally breakfast for me here in London.
	And I think you've had your day there.
	I'm on my second glass of wine, so it's that time of the evening.
	Oh, well, I have quite some hours to go, depending on how this goes, to wait for the wine.
	As I said, and the little biography I did for you there doesn't really do you justice, but you are a respected and well-known face on Australian TV.
	You've done an awful lot of programmes about an awful lot of subjects.
	I guess the first question would be from me to you, and I am a journalist too, and I did all the mainstream stuff.
	I was there when Diana died and there at Crown Zero and stuff like that.
	But why have you found this topic now?
	I think it's important because it's a real story.
	For so long, as you would know, this has been stigmatized, this whole subject.
	We've been told in the media and discouraged essentially from investigating the whole issue of UFOs on the pretext, on the assumption that basically they're rubbish.
	I can remember editors of newspapers telling me, we don't do UFO stories, Ross.
	They're not stories.
	You know, they're not something we do.
	And interestingly enough, as I dug, I found that the evidence to support the notion that there is reality behind the phenomenon is building by the day.
	So much so that in April last year, when the, I mean, there was a turning point when the Pentagon formally admitted, the U.S. Department of Defense formally admitted that it couldn't explain the three anomalous videos of objects that were seen by U.S. Navy fighter pilots in 2004 and then again in 2014, 2015, and more recently off the Virginia coast.
	There's been a series of anomalous sightings by U.S. military that have been given such prominence by determined activism by UFO transparency people in Washington, like Christopher Millen, the former Assistant Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, senior people giving the issue credibility.
	And then as if that wasn't enough, you finally had the congressional push for an inquiry that came as a result of those revelations, both in the New York Times and also the Navy's admissions.
	And it led to a secret inquiry by the UAP Task Force, which essentially, as you know, delivered a report in late June, just a month ago, which essentially validated the reality of the UFO phenomenon.
	It basically agreed that, yes, out of 144 incidents that the UAP Task Force investigated since 2004, they couldn't explain 140.
	Could only explain one of these incidents.
	And for all the sceptics out there, and I've spoken to people who've been doing these investigations, for all the sceptics out there who say, look, it could still be a seagull, it could still be some misidentification of, say, a commercial aircraft, or maybe it was a weather balloon, I guess I could only reply to that by saying that the people I've spoken to tell me that they've looked at those prosaic explanations.
	They've looked at the possibilities that these can be easily explained away with mundane explanations, and they've come to the conclusion that they can't be.
	And so we're left with a genuine mystery.
	We're left with an acknowledgement by the most powerful military in the world that it cannot explain a phenomenon which appears, at least on the evidence of the witnesses, to be intelligently controlled.
	Many of them talk of vehicles, craft rather than objects.
	And these vehicles, craft are doing maneuvers and speeds that appear to be far beyond known terrestrial human technology.
	I think in one case, there was one chap I spoke to, Kevin Day, who was the radar operator on board the USS Nimitz.
	And he told me he watched as these objects that he'd been tracking for days that had been hovering at 80,000 plus feet, one of them suddenly hurtled instantaneously to sea level.
	That was a drop that was many hundreds of thousands of kilometers an hour.
	G-forces running, I think, to 12,000 g-forces.
	I mean, aircraft fall apart at 15 Gs.
	Men, female fighter pilots, humans can't take more than about nine or ten Gs.
	Otherwise, we black out.
	So whatever it was, it was a technology that appeared to be intelligently controlled that the U.S. Navy itself, the Defense Force of the United States, the most powerful military on the planet, cannot explain.
	That by any measure is a paradigm shift.
	Because as you know, for so long, we've been assured ever since Project Blue Book closed down investigations into UFOs or UAPs, as some politely call them, unidentified aerial phenomena,
	ever since Blue Book was closed down, we've been told it's not a national security issue, it's not a flight safety issue, that the bulk of these sightings can be prosaically explained with mundane explanations.
	Now, 50 years later, actually more than 50 years, Project Booble, it's nearly 60 years later, we now are being told that they can't explain these sightings.
	And as a journalist, I think that's important.
	It's significant.
	It takes a bit of application to realize the significance.
	But what's going on here is a paradigm shift, an incredible backflip, if you like, by the most powerful military on the planet that up till now, for most of your and my lifetime, has basically told us that there is no flight safety risk, that there is no national security risk.
	Now we're being told there is definitely a flight safety risk.
	That's what the UAP report to Congress said.
	And it also said there was a possible national security concern as well.
	So we are in a completely new world.
	It seems to me, Ross, that there are a couple of possibilities for what was said in that interim report and for the conclusions such as they were that it came to.
	One conclusion could be this is technology that a foreign power has somehow acquired, including, as you say, the ability to defy crushing G-forces that most people could not, well, everybody could not withstand as far as we know, and the ability to do handbreak turns in the sky and all the rest of it that we know.
	So that's one thing.
	That's very scary.
	Actually, we've reached a stage in 2021, haven't we, where it's less scary to contemplate and to at least consider, countenance the idea that this is coming from another dimension or another part of the universe.
	You know, I don't know which answer is right, but I certainly hope it's a non-human intelligence because frankly, if it's the Russians, if it's the Chinese, if it's some other power that we don't know yet that's been buzzing U.S. fighter aircraft and basically dragging off the best fighter aircraft in the world, I'm worried because Russia and China, sadly, are authoritarian regimes that don't have much respect for democracy.
	They treat political dissidents with contempt.
	And I dread to think what authoritarian regimes like those would do if they had the kind of technology that is represented by whatever these objects this technology is.
	So, yeah, I mean, I hope it's American.
	The ET explanation, I think, is perhaps the most benevolent and benign.
	Well, indeed, because if the ETs have been making contact in this way with us for as long as we suspect they might have been, if they've been malevolent in their intent, then they probably would have exhibited that malevolence, and they never really did.
	Okay, disabling nuclear missiles has been claimed over the years, but that's not arming them for launch or launching them at anybody.
	So I get what you say.
	You say that through your research, you have been able to speak with, and indeed there are a number of these people quoted in the book, a number of high-level people who've been willing to share their confidences with you.
	And you did this in a way that most of us wouldn't do.
	You actually physically wrote letters to people.
	Why did you do that when most of us, just as I contacted you, my producer contacted you, we use digital electronic means.
	Why did you invest in paper and stamps?
	Because I'm a journalist who's schooled in a knowledge that most people don't have, which is I'm aware of the extent of communications interception and tracking.
	The metadata that we leave as citizens when we make phone calls or send emails or indeed use any kind of communications electronic technology.
	It allows us to be tracked.
	It allows anybody who's investigating the leak of information to know the trail.
	And I've had this happen to me.
	I've been leaked by people in the federal government in Australia and unfortunately the federal public servants who've leaked me information have been tracked down and threatened with prosecution for engaging with me.
	And we live increasingly in an era where governments take no pity on people who, for public interest reasons, decide to leak information.
	Sadly, a lot of our governments in the democratic world are showing an increasing disdain for the media.
	But what I did was I sat back and I thought at the very beginning of all of this, I'm interested in the taboo of UFOs.
	I'm Fascinated by the fact that we're told in the media that we shouldn't look at this issue.
	I asked why.
	And then I thought, well, if I was a scientist, a Boffin, or a defense official, or an intelligence official, or somebody in aerospace who knows something about this phenomenon, I wouldn't want to be contacted electronically by Ross Coulthard because that would leave a trail.
	There'd be an email trail that could always be picked up.
	There'd be an SMS text trail.
	There'd be voice communications trails.
	And believe me, I know because I've done stories about how easy it is to track those technologies.
	So what I did was I went through scientific papers, I went through government phone directories, I looked at congressional evidence, and I looked at the kind of people whom I knew would be the kind of people who, if there was an awareness or a knowledge of the phenomenon somewhere inside America's military industrial complex, if you like, I would have their names.
	So I got their names and then because of the merits of openness and transparency in America, I was able to get their home addresses.
	And so I wrote people letters.
	And I literally sat down and wrote hundreds of letters that basically went to people's letter boxes and post office boxes and invited them to contact me on encrypted means, secure means, highly secure ways of communicating without compromising your identity.
	And as I discovered a couple of months later when people started replying, people respected that approach.
	They understood that what I was doing was trying to protect them from the get-go.
	Because as we've seen with prosecutions of people who, I think sometimes reprehensibly, have leaked important national security information in the United States, the state knows no pity, basically.
	It'll wreak vengeance on anybody who does leak official secrets.
	And if there's one secret of all, let's assume for a moment it's true that the U.S. is hiding dark secrets about UAPs.
	I'd be clinging on to that secret for dear life.
	And so people did start contacting me, and one of them who did was a guy called Nat Kovitz.
	And Nat very kindly reached out to me, and he blew me away because of all the people that reached out to me, I never expected he would because he was the former director of science and technology development for the entire US Navy.
	He was, if you like, their chief boffin, their chief geek.
	And he knew a lot.
	And we talked for weeks about all sorts of interesting jobs and projects that he'd worked on.
	And it slowly emerged that unfortunately Nat was dying.
	And that was one of the reasons, I think, why he felt so free and open to speak to me.
	And very close to his end, he said, ask me the question.
	And so I asked him the question.
	I said to him, and we discussed this before, we talked about how when you are brought into a special access program, one of the secrets in the black world, in the US military or intelligence establishment, they're called SAPs, special access programs.
	And there are unacknowledged SAPs, USAPs, and they're another even higher level of secret.
	And they're not above top secret.
	They're just a compartmentalization of top secret information.
	And then the most secret secrets of all are the WUSAPs that waived unacknowledged special access programs.
	And they're waived from the kind of oversight committees in Congress that you would ordinarily expect even for black projects.
	You know, it's important that bodies like the Senate Intelligence Committee have oversight.
	And so WUSAPs are only managed or oversighted by a gang of eight, eight people in the Congress who are allowed to know America's most closely held secrets.
	And what Nat told me, I assume, was a WOSAP or even probably even higher than a WOSAP.
	He told me that he was red into a crash retrieval program for UFOs.
	And when he told me that, I literally fell off my chair.
	I was just gobsmacked because I didn't honestly expect that he would be so willing to discuss this.
	And I'm still a little skeptical because it's always possible, I have to concede, it's always possible that he and the people he put me onto were feeding the disinformation in an apparent U.S. Defense Department attempt to try and get false information out there into the public domain.
	It wouldn't be the first time they've done that.
	But basically, he told me that he was read into the fact, he was told under a security oath that the United States had recovered extraterrestrial craft, exotic non-terrestrial technology.
	And I still find it confronting when I say that because I'm not in a position yet to be able to say that I believe for sure that is the case.
	I have a suspicion that it is so, but until I literally kick the tires of the ARV flux liner, I'm really not going to believe it.
	But it's mind-blowing to me if it's true, because it means that the United States has been lying to the public for decades, that the President of the United States, who put out a press release asserting this, has lied to the public.
	And when I asked people in the security establishment, the defense establishment, you know, would a government lie?
	They looked at me in surprise and they said, well, of course a government would lie to protect a secret like this.
	They wouldn't think twice about it.
	Governments lie all the time.
	I suppose the question around that is one thing to tell a lie, but as we've seen here in the United Kingdom in recent months, sometimes it's not possible to maintain the lie.
	If there is a big lie, and if Matt was indicating to you that indeed there had been a big lie, everything that he said seems to point that way, how has it been possible, you must have asked that question at some point, to maintain the lie for the long?
	Well, I don't think they did really.
	I mean, if you think about it, a lot of people in ufology have been running the allegation that there's been retrieved technology for many years.
	And this is where the ridicule and stigma and taboo came in.
	Because I really think we in the mainstream media have been played a pup.
	We really have.
	We allowed ourselves to be manipulated.
	Because when I went through the CIA's archives, which are online, they were declassified as a result of an FOI that was opened by Bill Clinton when he was president.
	The CIA's own files show that there was a deliberate policy conceived during the 1960s to disinform the public, to ridicule and stigmatise the subject of UAPs.
	Because if you think about it, why do we ridicule the subject?
	Why do people giggle?
	Why does an ironic smile come across the face of everybody whenever this subject is mentioned?
	Okay, there are some, few mentally ill people who make claims about being, you know, involved with UFOs, but does that discredit the entire phenomenon?
	And that indeed is a thought that has come to me a million times.
	But so many people have had revelations from Becky and Barney Hill all the way through history.
	All the way through the history of ecology.
	Could all of them be deranged or demented or confused or lying?
	I suspect not.
	I just want to take you back briefly to the guy who you spoke with, the guy who had been a very senior R ⁇ B guy for the Navy.
	How specific was he in describing the project that he was signed into?
	We told you we haven't been signed out of it.
	You know, this was the recovery of a craft.
	Did he tell you where it was, what it was, and what they did with the material?
	No, he was extremely vague.
	And the reason why he was extremely vague was because he thought it was important that the public know that the government's been lying, but he also thought it was important to protect national security by not revealing too much.
	And so it's really interesting.
	One of the things I often ask myself is why would a secret like this be being kept?
	And I sincerely hope it's out of a patriotic sense of protecting national security, that there are imperatives of national security that mean this must be kept secret.
	I don't understand what those would be, but I sure as hell hope that's the reason.
	I hope it's not because a bunch of generals and intelligence officials might be embarrassed that it's proven that they've been lying to the public all these years.
	But yeah, I mean, what Nat did tell me was very interesting.
	He told me he was told that there were multiple crash retrievals.
	He gave credibility to the Roswell crash, but I don't think he was speaking directly with knowledge that he'd been briefed about Roswell.
	I have to be careful there.
	I think he was talking generally about recoveries during the 1940s.
	But what he did tell me was very interesting because one of the things that Matt specialized in was a type of welding.
	He was very, very expert in a type of welding called electron beam welding, where it doesn't leave a bead like conventional welds.
	It's a very strong form of welding for bonding different types of metal and it leaves almost no trace of the connection, if you like.
	There's none of that sort of jagged scar you get from a normal weld.
	And he'd set up a company where he was specializing in doing that kind of welding and that kind of technology based on his experiences from his time in the military.
	And the U.S. Air Force sought him out after he'd left the Air Force and he was in private practice and invited him to come to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to the place that you and I would know as the Foreign Technology Division, which is where they test and analyze recovered aircraft, recovered aerospace material, and investigate whether they can back engineer it.
	And he knew it was special because it was under extraordinary security that he was taken underground and shown what he described to me as a large piece of metal that looked like a bulkhead.
	And he said it was clearly two different types of metal bonded together.
	And he wouldn't even tell me the types of metal that were involved.
	But what he would tell me was that he was allowed to look at the object under an electron microscope and with his naked eyes.
	And he was unable to determine the way in which it was bonded.
	He said it was bonded at a molecular level, at an atomic level, in a way that he'd never seen before.
	And that fascinated me.
	And he was as puzzled about it to this day as he was by what he saw back then.
	And it was really interesting because one of the things that I asked him was, are you aware of any attempt by the United States to develop anti-gravitic propulsion in the black?
	Is there a special access program that you're aware of where the US is actively trying to develop this technology?
	And he did volunteer that he was led into a propulsion system, which was an iron propulsion system.
	But he told me that he didn't think the United States had been able to crack the secrets of anti-gravity despite years of research.
	And he told me also that he thinks that if it had been happening, he would have been told about it because he was at such a high level in the Navy as the head essentially of R ⁇ D, he would have been read into it.
	And so that was interesting because it kind of made me question the veracity of claims that have been made by some people that the US is working on this stuff in the black.
	Or is it possible that even the head of R ⁇ D, the head of science and technology development for the US Navy, was kept out of the loop on this.
	And I guess there are precedents for this kind of secrecy.
	The Manhattan Project, even though it employed thousands of people, the project that developed the first nuclear bomb, the first atomic bomb, it was conceived and run in absolute secrecy.
	And okay, admittedly, it did leak a bit because the Russians were eventually able to procure the secrets of the atomic bomb from traitors within.
	But for much of the war, whilst the atomic bomb was conceived from theory and put through to reality, it was kept secret.
	And is it possible that such an incredible, awesome secret is being kept now?
	Yes, it is.
	I do think it is.
	And if I was the American government, frankly, I'd be keeping it secret too.
	I guess the question that is burning with me about Matt, and if we had Matt here now, and I'm sure you asked him this, but why was he taking there to see these things then if he wasn't actively involved in developing what might have flowed from them?
	Why did they ask him to go to Wright Pat?
	Because I think they were looking to re-engineer whatever this was.
	They wanted to know how to make it, because it was obviously very well made.
	And because he was an expert in that particular type of welding, that particular type of metal bonding, they wanted to know if it was a particular form of electron beam welding.
	And he was able to tell them that it wasn't, that it was something far beyond what he'd ever seen before.
	And as he told me with some alacrity, he didn't think it was anything that he'd ever seen anywhere on this planet.
	And was that the limit of his involvement?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	I mean, he didn't tell me a huge amount because he was a patriot.
	He was somebody who didn't think it was the public's right to know the full details of the programs that he'd been read into.
	And that's the enigma for me because one of the things he did do was he, I have to be careful here to protect sources, he put me on to people whom he knew, whom he knew were aware of what he called the program.
	And this was really interesting because this was another area entirely.
	It turned out that there were multiple people that he put me onto who were either invited into or were briefed into what they called the program.
	And each of them had been read into it, i.e.
	briefed for the security classification, in a very limited way, because it's all clearly heavily compartmented.
	But what I will say is, to protect the sources, I can't go into a lot of detail about what they know and who they are, obviously, but what I can say is I was left with the very strong impression that it is the case that the United States is attempting to re-engineer what it would call exotic technology, but what a lot of us would call technology not of this world.
	And that effort has been going on for many, many years, probably as long as 70 plus years.
	And I know that's a very confronting subject to raise because a lot of people think it's poppycock, a lot of people think it's an elaborate conspiracy theory, and I did too, until I started talking to people who told me it was real.
	And the interesting thing is in 2011, the Obama White House Science Advisor, in response to a petition asking for transparency and openness about UAPs, it put out a press release basically denying an extraterrestrial presence or engagement with humanity on planet Earth.
	And it flatly denied that there was any recovery program, any retrieval program of alleged alien spacecraft.
	So it poo-pooed the whole Roswell mythology.
	But you know what?
	After learning what I've learned, I'm not so quick to believe it because governments do lie.
	They have lied in the past.
	And I think it's entirely conceivable that they're lying even now.
	Does the dichotomy here strike you as odd, though, that one armature of the U.S. government and the military is having an interim report that will be followed by a longer report into what these things are, whereas another branch has actually been back engineering the technology for decades?
	Well, I think it's even more weird if you consider it that the U.S. Army was prepared to enter into a cooperative research agreement with Tom DeLong's to the Stars Academy.
	I mean, if you're talking about weird, weird conflicts in openness and transparency, you've got the U.S. military for years denying flatly that it has any retrieved alien technology, that it's basically been, you know, they've poo-pooed Roswell.
	The U.S. Air Force has given four different explanations for the Roswell crash of whatever it was.
	There was a crash.
	They've poo-pooed it for years.
	And yet the thing that I think is like a bear in the room is that Tom DeLong's to the Stars Academy creditably managed to negotiate a cooperative research agreement with the U.S. Army to investigate materials that scientists like Dr. Harl Putoff,
	Dr. Eric Davis, Lou Elizondo, Christopher Mellon have all acknowledged are alleged metamaterials that are purportedly or possibly from non-terrestrial origin, non-human technology.
	So how could the Army agree to a cooperative research agreement to investigate technology that it says is a complete lie?
	And the other thing that I point out in my book is that as part of the Krata, I'm a lawyer by training, so I like reading beady little documents, when you read the Karata, the Karata actually acknowledges that some of the metamaterials that were allegedly of non-terrestrial origin that were to be investigated as part of this cooperative research agreement came from the government, came from the military.
	So what the hell's going on?
	If indeed we're not being, you know, if indeed it's not true that the US has recovered extraterrestrial material, then why the hell did Army people have it in their closet?
	You know, what are we talking about here?
	And this is the thing that infuriates me is that a lot of the mainstream media is not asking these questions, and that we are so close to being able to get the impetus to actually push for congressional hearings into this matter to actually get some of these answers.
	And I know, because I'm talking to some of these people confidentially, there are military witnesses who desperately want to give evidence about what they know.
	And I can tell you, if they were given that opportunity to give that evidence, I reckon a lot of people's worldview would be rocked mightily.
	And I think we need answers as to how there can be that degree of compartmentalization.
	Can it really be the one armature of the services involved in engineering effectively or studying metamaterials?
	And on another level, all of that is being denied.
	It is just incongruous beyond belief.
	I want to move on just very quickly as we close this segment.
	Steve Battle from the Paradigm Research Group, who I've over 20 years, I'm sure you've spoken with him in the research that you've done, very well known in all of it.
	He is absolutely adamant and convinced that Hillary Clinton, had she been elected when Donald Trump was elected, was going to be the disclosure president.
	You addressed this in your book.
	I think he's right.
	I really do.
	I actually don't know what Hillary was going to disclose, but this is the thing.
	This is the absolute massive bear in the room where as a journalist, what you look for are solid bits of evidence that you can anchor yourself to when you're sifting through the circumstantial evidence.
	And one of the solid bits of evidence that I see as absolutely game-changing in this whole story is courtesy, funnily enough, of the Russian Military Intelligence Service, the GRU.
	Real bad guys, nasty buggers who basically gone around Europe killing people.
	And they were responsible for that dreadful Salisbury attack where a Soviet defector, a Russian defector was poisoned.
	But the GRU, obviously, in the view that it would help Donald Trump, broke into the Democratic National Congress's email system.
	And it was the email system also of the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, John Podesta.
	And Podesta is a really important character because he also worked at a senior level for Bill Clinton when he was president.
	And he was also, I think, chief of staff for Barack Obama when he was president.
	This is a guy who's been at the highest levels of the White House, the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. He's clearly got a high security classification.
	He's clearly somebody who's been briefed into the most secret of projects, aware of the most delicate operations within which the United States has been involved.
	And incredibly, WikiLeaks was given by the Russian GRU.
	That's Julian Assange's Wikileaks.
	My Australian colleague Julian Assange leaked these incredible emails, which are verified.
	They're real.
	And they show that John Podesta was in communication with, you couldn't write this as a fictional novel.
	He was in connection with Tom DeLong, the lead singer of the punk rock pop band Blink182.
	And Tom was very famous, very rich, and very, very interested in UFOs, UAPs.
	He'd been obsessed with them for years.
	And he'd been telling many radio shows.
	I don't know if he ever spoke to yours, but I've listened to many of his interviews in 2014, 2015, 2016.
	And he was telling people, I'm in touch with Pentagon generals.
	I'm talking to people at a very, very senior level who are telling me that the United States has recovered alien spacecraft.
	And people would giggle.
	You know, people would bring him on for a bit of a laugh.
	And I don't think anybody really took him seriously.
	But as it turns out, the emails show Tom DeLong was telling the truth.
	He was engaged in conversation with General Neil McCasland.
	I think he's a two-star Pentagon general at the time.
	He's now a former general, but still a very, very senior former military official.
	Michael Kerry, General Michael Kerry, I think another two-star who was very heavily linked into NORAD and Space Command.
	These guys are real super high people in the U.S. Air Force.
	And if Tom DeLong is to be believed in the accounts that he gives in both his podcast interviews and his interviews with numerous media before the Hillary election, or at least the unsuccessful Hillary election, he was being told by these generals that the United States was in possession of retrieved alien technology.
	And there's a breathtaking moment when General Neil McCasland, I suspect it was Neil McCasland, DeLong only ever refers to him as the general.
	They have a meeting, believe it or not, in a cafe in the middle of nowhere in America.
	Tom DeLong flies in in his jet, McCasland flies in at his jet.
	And McCasland leans across the table and says, or I should say the general leans across the table and says, it was the Cold War.
	You know, and every day we figured each day could be our last.
	And then we found a life form.
	And what DeLong was inferring or expressly stating was that he had been told by officials in the Pentagon that the United States government recovered not only an alien spacecraft, but an alien entity.
	No specificity about whether it was alive or dead.
	But it was very, very clear from the chain of emails, and I go into this analysis in my book because I think it's incredibly important.
	This chain of emails show that there was clearly A contemplation by a prospective Hillary Clinton presidency to make an announcement in 2017 when she became president about disclosure.
	And there's no secret that Hillary and Bill, her husband, who of course was the president of the United States, that they were very interested in UFOs.
	Well, indeed, didn't Bill go on the record and say one of the first things I did was I asked to know the truth about all of this.
	And from the interviews that he's given citing this, apparently he wasn't given that information.
	Yeah, well, he said that he asked his attorney, I think one of his White House legal advisors, I think Hubster Webble, a now discredited lawyer, sadly, but that he asked him to go and investigate.
	Actually, no, it wasn't he who said it, it was Hubster who said it, that he was asked to go and investigate whether or not there were, you know, any secrets hidden at Area 51.
	And the way Hubster's describing it, he says that he wasn't able to get to the bottom of it, that he wasn't able to get an answer.
	And certainly, I'm aware that privately the Clintons have expressed frustration that they were not able to get answers to what they wanted to know when Hill was president.
	Interesting.
	So here we get certainly strong circumstantial evidence that Hillary Clinton, had she won that election, which as history records she did not, she may have been in some form, we don't know what she might have said, but she may have been a kind of disclosure president.
	And that, I think, is dynamite, and it's in your book.
	And it's real.
	I mean, that's the thing that gets me about this, is that there is absolutely no doubt that this happened.
	It's real because it's recorded in emails that John Podesta had absolutely no intention of ever making public.
	You know, the best measure of, you know, the veracity of these emails is the fact that they were leaked.
	You know, they were stolen from the DNC without permission.
	And that's appalling in and of itself, of course, because it was a politically motivated leak by the Russian GRU to try and help Trump.
	But the people that were having these conversations included Robert Weiss, who was the CEO of Lockheed Martin.
	Interesting, eh?
	One of the world's biggest aerospace companies.
	If you were trying to hide technology, where would you hide it?
	Wouldn't it be a good idea to hide it inside an aerospace company?
	Another was General Neil McAsland, who'd run the Foreign Technology Division, as we colloquially call it now.
	It's now called NASIC N-A-S-I-C.
	But that's where all the retrieved technology from overseas countries and presumably from other places is taken for analysis.
	Ross Couthard is here.
	His book is called In Plain Sight.
	It is the culmination of a lot of great research here.
	And you were telling me, Ross, that you had a lot of contacts with a lot of important people who you can't name.
	You know, that is something that takes a lot of old-fashioned shoe leather to accomplish.
	You know, this must have taken you, I've never asked you, but this must have taken you a ton of time.
	It's probably about two and a half years' work, all told.
	I mean, I was doing it in conjunction with my day job as a reporter for Australia's 60 Minutes for a while.
	But yeah, I mean, one of the privileges that I had as a reporter for a major TV show in Australia was I traveled to the United States a lot.
	And that was great because it meant that I could literally, when I was in Washington, D.C. or in other parts of the States in California, I could literally take the time out to go and see people who wouldn't talk to me on the phone.
	I could have face-to-face meetings that, quite frankly, economically, it wouldn't have been possible for me without the support of a TV network.
	And it's interesting because one of the things that I was quite struck by was the preparedness of people when they realized that there was a serious insect investigative journalist looking at the issue.
	They were prepared to engage about it.
	I mean, there is something about this subject that to this day, it bewilders me how secretive it is, because penetrating the secrecy of what I've come to know as the program is incredibly hard.
	I mean, there was one guy I spoke to, and all he did was tell me the story of how he was invited onto the program.
	And because of his family and various family constraints, he decided not to do it.
	But the way he described it worked, he was told that he should turn up for an interesting job offer to the campus of a very, very large aerospace company at a particular time of day.
	He was met at the main reception, and rather than being taken inside, they took him into the gardens and sat under a tree on a bench.
	And there he was told that he would be offered a job.
	And the job would involve him attempting to assist in the re-engineering of an alien spacecraft.
	At the point that the bloke's telling me this, I have to admit, I started laughing.
	I just thought this was hilarious.
	And he actually got annoyed with me and told me off for laughing.
	And he said, this is serious.
	I'm telling you the truth.
	I was offered the opportunity to go on to what I came to know as the program.
	And he was fascinating about it because he was full of regret that he hadn't done it because he elected not to do it.
	And he was told that if he had done it, he would have been given an office in the building that he was sitting next to, that he would go to that office every day, but that in truth, whilst there was a secretary answering his calls, he would be based somewhere else in the United States and that the calls would be deflected to wherever he was where necessary.
	And he would be working on a program that was so secret that it was kept off the books for much of the United States government.
	Now, as a journal, that kind of story is tantalizing, all right?
	You know, I love to hear that.
	You know, it's fascinating.
	But it ain't evidence.
	It's hearsay, you know, really.
	I mean, he's being told something by somebody else about a purported program.
	And so its value to me was limited.
	And so then I started getting contact from people who had been working in the program, and one who was working in the program.
	And the one who was working in the program was extremely guarded, quite frightened, in fact, terrified.
	But they wanted me to know that as a journalist, I should investigate this.
	And they thought it was important that the public understand that this was happening.
	And interestingly enough, the person that I spoke to who was inside the program, they defended the secrecy attached to it, but they wouldn't explain to me why it was so important to keep it secret.
	Because that's something I struggle with.
	I really do struggle with the idea that you could have what must surely be a multi-billion dollar program, if it's been going since the 1940s, attempting to re-engineer alien spacecraft.
	I mean, if such a thing really is true, it's preposterous.
	But, you know, why?
	Why would this be kept secret to this day?
	You said that these people were afraid.
	And we come across this time and time again in ufology, where people are allegedly warned off or are made to sign documents or are just scared to speak.
	What do you think they were afraid of?
	Oh, look, I think anybody who's subject to a special access program security constraint knows that they can go to jail for a very long time.
	Look at what's happening to Julian Assange at the moment or Chelsea Manning or anybody who's leaked national security information.
	Whatever you think of it, it's obvious that the state takes an extremely dim view of people who do leak.
	And one of the things, there's a lawyer called Dan Sheehan who has worked a lot on investigating the phenomenon.
	And he told me at one stage he was briefed into a UAP investigation for President Jimmy Carter, where he actually saw classified files of Project Blue Book, which showed images of what he said was clearly a retrieved non-human flying saucer-shaped disc, metallic disc that was surrounded by U.S. soldiers in 1940s uniform.
	And as he said to me, he said, you know, never sign a security oath because I can't be prosecuted for revealing what I know because I never signed a security oath when I did this work for President Carter.
	Maybe I should have been asked to do that.
	But he said, you know, I've spoken about this many, many times over the years that I saw what I saw.
	And he says, I'm very, very sure that what I saw was an alien spacecraft.
	He says, there's nothing like that in human technology.
	And he said, the interesting thing is, if I'd signed a security oath, I can assure you, I would not be allowed to speak about it.
	And, you know, I can understand why.
	I mean, if I was the United States and I had possession of this kind of advanced technology, there is absolutely no way in the world I would want to reveal that I had it.
	Because then you're giving your Russian or Chinese potential adversaries an advantage.
	And at the same time, I'm told the Russians certainly have recovered technology and the Chinese may have recovered technology, but allegedly they haven't recovered craft.
	So we're left with this situation where at the moment, if what we are being told is correct, the United States still enjoys some dominance in the fact that it at least has possession of this technology.
	But I guess it's a bit like a mobile phone dropped into 1500 Elizabeth and England.
	You know, what the hell would you do with it if you were William Shakespeare and you found a mobile phone on the ground?
	You'd probably use it to prop up a door.
	I mean, the level of technology that would be represented by something as advanced as this is probably not replicable, not reproducible.
	And so we're in this kind of paralysis situation where potentially, I'm told, multiple nations around the world have recovered technology that they believe to be exotic.
	That's one of the words used.
	Not of this world is another of the words used or phrases.
	And the difficulty that we've got is no nation's been able to reproduce it.
	Or have they?
	I also speculate in my book about the possibility that the United States has been working in the black on a lot of these propulsion systems like anti-gravitic propulsion.
	And like your countryman, Nick Cook, who's been an invaluable help to me and a mentor over the years that I've been working on this story, his beautiful book, The Hunt for Zero Point, that was published, I think, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
	It basically broke the ground on the fact that the U.S. clearly was, in the 1950s and the 1960s, acknowledging that it was working on anti-gravitic propulsion systems and that we were allegedly close to a breakthrough in anti-gravitic propulsion way back then, 50 years ago.
	And he asked the question 20 years ago, what happened to that?
	What happened to that technology?
	And he wasn't 100% sure at the end of his book, but he suspected it had gone into the black world, that it was still going on.
	And I do too.
	I think the United States may indeed be close to a major breakthrough in anti-gravitic propulsion if it hasn't done so already.
	So all of this is the tip of an iceberg.
	There is so much to come out.
	And the point that you made there about this being an international phenomenon, I think is very valid here.
	I spoke with Jacques Vallée a couple of months ago, and he would like more international coordination than we have, because at the moment we have next to no international coordination that we know of.
	Maybe the Five Eyes, maybe the Allies, the nations like Australia, the UK, the US, Canada.
	Perhaps they are cooperating, but we don't get to hear about.
	But there certainly needs to be some form of international cooperation.
	Ross Cool Talk, can we just park it there for radio listeners?
	I just want to say thank you very much to them.
	Thank you to Technical Producer Mark.
	Thank you to John Chambers for doing the setup on the radio show.
	And above all, thank you to you.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been the Unexplained on the Radio.
	Please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	That's it for the radio listeners then, Ross.
	This is fascinating.
	And there is.
	And I just wanted quickly to get into this for podcast listeners with you.
	It's always seemed to me that there is a kind of international arrogance about this subject.
	It is assumed that the really good stuff happens in America, maybe over the Euros, perhaps in the Middle Eastern bloc.
	Mostly it's in America.
	Very occasionally it's in Europe.
	Sometimes we might get a report from Australia, but mostly it's an American phenomenon.
	I think what we've got to get our heads around, and your book helps this, is this is a truly international thing.
	There is something in your book that I haven't heard of and was fascinated by because I don't know the area.
	And I only know the area because I've flown over it.
	If you fly down the coast of Australia, you're going to Perth, Western Australia.
	You fly if you've ever done that, and I recommend that you do Perth is a lovely place on the FWA.
	You look down for hours, it seems, but in reality, it's a couple of hours.
	After you hit the coast, you've come down from Asia, you hit the coast of Australia, then you have a couple of hours of nothing before you hit Perth.
	Now, on the very northwestern tip of Australia, there is a military facility, a joint military facility that you talk about in the book, yeah?
	Yes, it's the Harold E. Holt Naval Communications Station.
	And from 1966 to 1991, it was actually run by the Americans.
	And there was a whole town that was created called Exmouth, which was largely American, but because there was an Australian service population, it shared a community with a small number of Australians.
	But until 1991, 1992, it was American-run and American-controlled.
	But what happened under Prime Minister Bob Hawke was Hawke had followed up on concerns raised by the former Labor Prime Minister in the 1970s, Gough Whitlam, that this base was an extremely controversial and largely overlooked nuclear weapons facility because whilst it didn't have nuclear weapons, it was absolutely integral to the deployment of nuclear weapons in the event of nuclear war.
	Because what it is, is a communications facility utilizing what's called VLF, very low frequency communications technology, with these gigantic masts that zoar hundreds of meters into the air and send signals way out into the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia.
	And these signals have the capacity to go about 80 to 100 feet underwater, where a nuclear submarine, back in those days, they would have been Polaris nuclear missile armed submarines back in the 1960s and 70s.
	And these submarines would be given an order by this VLF frequency to come to a shallower depth.
	And there they would receive the message, the codes from the President authorizing them to launch their missiles in the event of nuclear war.
	And I met Gough Whitlam once, the former Prime Minister, and interviewed him about this and other concerns that he had about the extent of Australia's Cold War relationship with the United States.
	And he was very concerned that this base was essentially fundamentally involved in nuclear deterrence.
	And as he said, it made that part of northwestern Australia, the town of Exmouth, a nuclear target in the event of nuclear war.
	And most Australians were unaware of this.
	And so I started digging into the Northwest Cape Base.
	And one of the first things I found was a document in the archives of the Defence Department, which had been released prior to the FOI laws, which basically showed that the deputy base commander of the Harold E. Holt base, an American, had reported seeing a UFO hovering over the base,
	a sphere, a charcoal-coloured sphere, hovering over the base, almost within hours of Henry Kissinger launching an escalation in the defense condition readiness for America's nuclear arsenal in response to the possibility of a Russian invasion of the Middle East in October of 1973.
	And this is recorded in the American archives, as well the fact that this DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3 escalation was ordered.
	And there in the archives of the Australian Defence Department are these documents that show that two people, the Deputy Base Commander and also an Australian fire commander, an Australian fire captain, both saw the same object within hours of this defence condition readiness being launched.
	As well as that, I also found numerous references by military who were based in the Northwest Cape area, especially around the RAF Liamont base, which is the airbase that supplies the American base.
	There were military personnel that reported seeing strange, unidentified aerial phenomena flying over the airbase and indeed over the Harold E. Holt base, and on occasion interfering with the electronic communications of the radios that the soldiers were using.
	One soldier even made a report to MUFON, the mutual UFO network in the United States, reporting that he and his patrol looked up and for 15 minutes watched as a black triangle hovered overhead.
	So armed with that information, I went to Exmouth and spoke to locals and I was quite surprised because after a few days of digging, I found plenty of locals who prepared to talk about the fact that this was essentially a UAP hotspot.
	People frequently had seen objects, particularly since that 1990s period when the Cold War was often getting at its hottest, and particularly black triangles.
	And there was one woman, Annie Farinaccio, who told me an extraordinary story about how she had been, she'd been a bit sweet on an American boy at the base, and the base was soon to close for the Americans.
	And so they were all saying farewell to the Americans before they went back home.
	And there was a bit of a party that finished quite late at night, around about 2.30 in the morning.
	And she was about to head home when she realised there were no cabs left.
	There was no way of getting back the five kilometres down the coast Road to Exmouth, the town where she lived and where a lot of the Americans were living as well.
	And fortuitously, two Australian federal police who were working as protective security for the base came by and they offered her illegally, of course, a lift home in their security vehicle.
	Otherwise, she would have had to have walked home five or six kilometers along this very lonely, empty coast road.
	And the way she describes it, as they were driving along, all of a sudden, like something out of close encounters of a third kind, this light lit up the road in front of them.
	The two officers driving the four-wheel drive both explained, it's back, because it turned out they'd seen it the previous night.
	And when she finally looked up through the windscreen as they were photographing whatever this object was with their camera, she could see a gigantic black triangular craft, as she calls it, which had lights running down its spine, lights in each corner, which did incredible maneuvers.
	It flitted up to 1,000 feet in the blink of an eye and then flitted down to the left-hand side of the car as they were driving along at 100 kilometers an hour and literally kept pace with them as they were driving along.
	And then it did it again, flitted up to 1,000 feet and came down on the other side of the car.
	And you might wonder, okay, what this was.
	Could this be an alien spacecraft or could it be American technology?
	And I attach some significance to the fact that this sighting that Annie had happened in 1991, which was literally within a year or so of my colleague George Knapp, the journalist from KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, who broke the extraordinary stories where it was alleged that Bob Lazar had worked at S4 Area 51 on supposedly retrieved alien spacecraft.
	Now, no matter what you think of Bob Lazar, and there are a lot of reasons to question his story, and there are a lot of reasons to believe his story, I did find the timing interesting that probably within a year or so of the whole Bob Lazar Area 51 allegations being raised and Area 51 suddenly becoming a magnet for UAP investigators with large camera lenses to start taking photographs of everything that was being flown there,
	all of this weird activity started up in Northwest Cape in a very remote part of Australia.
	I don't think it's a coincidence.
	And also what happened next to Annie is suggestive also that perhaps the Americans knew a lot more than they're currently letting on because two days after the sighting when Annie didn't see the object, she was dropped off by the two federal police on the edge of Exmouth and then they drove back with their camera to go and take photographs and she'd kind of forgotten about the incident.
	She was at her workplace in Exmouth and then these two military policemen from the base turned up at her workplace and asked if she would accompany them back to the base for a meeting.
	And she thought she didn't really think much of the UAP incident.
	She thought that her friends who she'd been carousing with the previous nights might have got into trouble and that she might have got into trouble for having a party on the base.
	So she basically went back with these guys to support them.
	But as they drove into the top secret section of the base and she was ushered into the room where a large amount of military brass was present, people who'd clearly flown in from other parts of the world and parts of Australia, she realized the two federal policemen that she'd been with that night were sitting on chairs in the middle of the room looking very, very dejected and hangdog.
	And she was then questioned about what she'd seen that night.
	And she told them she'd seen a UFO, a craft of some kind.
	And she was told that it wasn't a UFO, it was a weather balloon.
	And she laughed because she and her family have been involved in meteorology and they've launched weather balloons.
	They know what they look like.
	And she said, this was no weather balloon.
	This was a craft of some kind.
	You know, it was intelligently controlled.
	It was maneuvering around us.
	And it got quite aggressive and quite threatening and it went on for an hour or so.
	And then finally she got belligerent with them and basically told them she wasn't going to be bullied into saying that it was something that it wasn't.
	And that in and of itself was interesting because it says to me that the Americans had some reason to want to conceal whatever this was.
	And so I guess there's a question mark in my mind as a result of that story that just possibly the Americans were testing technology in what is really one of the most remote parts of the world.
	I mean, if you fly out from Northwest Cape, about the only place you're going to hit is Diego Garcia, which just so happens to be an American military base, slap bang in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
	And if you go north, okay, you'll fly past Indonesia, but you'll also get to Guam, which also happens to be an American military base.
	And there's this big empty triangle of ocean.
	And if you were looking for a place to test new technology without being detected, this is where you'd go.
	And it was really interesting because I was based in Exmouth for some time doing my research for my book because I thought it was a really interesting area.
	And one night when I was having a meal and a beer in a pub, a very big local dressed in a fluorescent jacket walked up to me and he went, are you that Jono that's looking at the UFOs?
	And I didn't quite know what to say because I thought he was going to throw a punch at me.
	And I said, well, yeah, I am, I guess.
	And he went, good, because we've all seen them.
	And then he turned and there were these guys on another table all wearing fluoro vests and they were road workers or tradeys of some kind.
	And they all told me that they'd seen really strange objects doing weird things in the skies over and around Exmouth and Northwest Cape while they were working often at night on patching roads to avoid the heat.
	And it was really interesting.
	It was a real eye-opener because then locals started telling me of a plethora of sightings that they'd seen.
	And I even interviewed a fisherman who told me that he'd seen, wait for it, tic-tac-shaped objects.
	You know, I put the proposition to him that it was a tic-tac, but essentially it was like a giant lolly was the way he described it to me.
	And I said like a big white tic-tac peppermint.
	And he went, yeah.
	And he described these objects literally watching from a fishing Boat with its lights off late at night as these objects came from, he believed, orbit and screaming at incredibly high speed, but with no noise, not even wind friction.
	And then, weirdly, hitting the ocean, but not hitting the ocean, the ocean kind of absorbing them.
	And then he looked with his colleagues over the side of the boat, and they could see whatever this object was lit from within, moving under the water at incredibly high speed.
	So I don't know what it was, but I am very sure that numerous witnesses in the Exmouth Northwest Cape Harold E. Holt Naval Communications Station area have definitely seen weird stuff.
	And we can only speculate about what this is all about.
	But, you know, I wonder, as we've heard in other reports through history, I wonder if it's the communication technology that is attracting whatever it might be, you know, the VLF.
	Well, it may be, or could it be that whatever it is, the intelligence that's operating these craft is concerned about a misuse or use of nuclear technology.
	That's certainly what some of the people that I've spoken to have told me.
	I mean, one of the people I interviewed in my documentary was Robert Salas, who in the 1960s was an ICBM nuclear missile silo launch commander.
	He had the authority to turn the key to launch the missiles in the event of nuclear war.
	And Robert told me that when his ICBM silo was disabled by what he clearly believes was a craft of some kind that hovered over his missile silo, he believes it was sending a message telling humanity that it doesn't approve of what we're doing.
	I just don't know.
	I mean, I can't make a judgment.
	I wasn't there.
	But it is very interesting to me that there's been some phenomenal work done by a guy called Robert Hastings, who wrote a book called UFOs and Nukes.
	And if you've never spoken to Robert, I really earnestly recommend that you do because he knows far more about this subject than I do or ever will.
	And what he's done is methodically investigate UFO sightings over nuclear facilities in the United States and around the world going back decades.
	And he's absolutely sure that there is a nexus between the phenomenon and UFOs.
	And whatever it is, it's intelligently controlled and it's taking a very active, close interest in our use or misuse of nuclear technology.
	I had Robert Hastings on the show and Robert Salas on the show some years ago, but it makes you wonder whether this stuff is still ongoing.
	I mean, I understand anecdotally that it is.
	But if it is.
	It is.
	No, I'm absolutely sure it is.
	I've spoken to people who've told me that nuclear facilities are still being monitored.
	And I know the TTSA Discovery Channel series, is it Unexplained?
	Forgive me if I've got the title wrong.
	But it revealed recent nuclear sightings by members of the U.S. military who'd seen weird, anomalous, intelligently controlled objects hovering over nuclear facilities containing nuclear weapons.
	And of course, you've got Rendlesham.
	I've told the Rendlesham, RAF Bentwaters story myself.
	I've interviewed Charles Holt and other witnesses to the Bentwaters story, and I do think there's great credibility to that story.
	I don't buy the sceptical argument that it was the Orford Nest lighthouse that was shining a light that somehow...
	And interesting again, we were being used as a repository for America's nuclear weapons, and there appeared to be some kind of interest from something that may have been intelligent in that.
	And it's what is it now?
	It's 1980.
	It's 41 years ago this year.
	I think we were expecting, though, Ross, we were expecting great revelations on the 40th anniversary.
	And apart from retelling the story, a couple of new interviews with people who were there at the time, there wasn't quite the flurry that I expected there might be.
	I expected there might be some deathbed confessions and all that sort of stuff, but we still wait.
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	I mean, I think it was significant that the radar operators at the base said that they saw these objects on radar.
	Yes, no, that was important.
	And I spoke with Laurie Rayfelt about that because she actually spoke to those people on the night.
	I don't know whether you spoke with Laurie Rayfeld, but she's definitely worth speaking with.
	It is a fascinating topic.
	And this Northwest Cape base, which I only heard about because of your book, it had passed me by.
	It's still a place of mystery, isn't it?
	Even this year, there was a newspaper story in Australia about it because somebody had spotted, I think on Google Earth, Google Maps, whatever, some kind of strange, I think, hexagonal object on that base.
	And apparently the explanation is it's some kind of cutting-edge 360-degree telescope or something like that.
	But it is still a mysterious place.
	Yeah, the photograph was a bit misconceived.
	Essentially, that hexagonal shape is actually the transmitter towers for the VLF communications station.
	But all the conspiracy theorists love it because it really does look like something out of a fantasy novel.
	It's a hexagon that complies with a lot of very interesting shapes that have significance to people who are interested in that kind of thing.
	And I don't know what to think.
	But certainly what I can attest to is on the basis of witness evidence, innumerable witnesses have told me there is something very, very strange and high strangeness is very prevalent in that part of the world.
	Just as we come to the end of this, and thank you for being so generous with your time, Ross.
	Westall School, 1966, has been for many people who read books about UFOs and watch documentaries, the most famous Australian case.
	This is a school near Melbourne.
	April 1966, students and a teacher experience something, you know, saucer-shaped craft and other strange phenomena.
	It's interesting, isn't it, that thanks to James Fox, some of those people have been speaking only recently.
	Yeah, well, I mean, I've had the privilege of getting some of these people to speak.
	And one of them that I got on camera identifying himself for the first time was the former teacher, Andrew Greenwood, Who was literally in his class on the 6th of April 1966 teaching kids science when all of a sudden a little girl, a 12-year-old girl, came running into the classroom and said, Mr. Greenwood, Mr. Greenwood, there are flying saucers hovering over the school field.
	And it was coming up to the recess, so he let the kids rush out to have a look and he followed them on.
	And when he got there, along with 200 other children and numerous other witnesses, local residents, market gardeners working nearby, I mean, the witness list is extraordinary who saw this.
	They looked up and they saw three elliptical metallic disc craft hovering overhead.
	No noise, but clearly intelligently controlled craft because as they watched, Cessna aircraft were clearly in pursuit and they were sort of chugging along at Cessna aircraft single engine speed.
	And as they got near, these objects would flit instantaneously across the sky.
	They'd literally jump to another part of the sky.
	And you couldn't see the movement.
	You'd just see that they were another part of the sky instantaneously is what the witnesses have told me.
	And this was seen by innumerable people.
	And to this day, I mean, I had a reunion of many of these witnesses in April this year where we brought, I think it was about 20 people back who were school kids at the time.
	And we interviewed them about what they'd seen.
	And all of them described independently seeing these metallic disc craft.
	And what's interesting, okay, that's the sighting, but what's more interesting often in journalism is the cover-up, because this is one of those rare occasions where as a journalist, I feel confident in saying there was a cover-up.
	Andrew Greenwood, the science teacher, who was then in his 20s, a young man in his 20s, just a trainee teacher starting out, he'd spoken to the local newspaper, the Dandenong News, and he told them what he'd seen.
	And this was an interview he did about two weeks after the incident.
	And clearly, somebody in our intelligence services and our military didn't want this told because that night he had a knock on his door and there on the doorstep were two men.
	One was a man dressed in the officer's uniform or of an officer of the Royal Australian Air Force and the other was a civilian, possibly somebody from an intelligence service from the way he conducted himself.
	But they didn't cut around at all.
	They just basically outright threatened him.
	And the way Andrew describes it, he was told, if you continue talking about what you saw, you will lose your job as a teacher.
	We will make sure of that.
	And we will tell the education department that you're a drunk and make sure that you lose your job.
	So he kept quiet about it for many, many years, many decades, in fact.
	And finally, in April this year, he agreed to go on camera with me.
	He'd spoken privately about it in the past, but he finally decided to identify himself because he thinks it's important the public understand that there really was a cover-up.
	And then while I was doing that filming, I came across another woman called Terry Peck, who is now a middle-aged woman in her 60s, still as sharp as a brass tack and extremely convincing in her account of what she says she saw, because she just didn't see the objects hovering overhead.
	She and other children saw one of the objects landing in a piece of nearby bushland called the Grange.
	And to get to it, she, against teachers' wishes, hopped over the school fence and ran into the Grange bushland.
	And she got there just behind two other girls, one of whom had fainted in shock.
	And what she saw, she describes as quite astonishing.
	She saw an elliptical, disc-shaped, metallic craft with lights underneath, purple lights, hovering just above the ground.
	And as she watched for a few minutes, it slowly rose and then it inclined, it took an angle of about 45 degrees and just instantaneously flitted across the sky.
	This wasn't a balloon.
	It wasn't a movement consistent with any known technology even today.
	And as she watched, she and over, well over 170 kids, I think Shane Ryan, who runs a Facebook page dedicated to investigating this event, has told me that he's interviewed over 172 witnesses.
	But there were well over 200 kids there that day, as well as adults in local shops and market gardens.
	And they all reported seeing the same objects.
	There's no doubt about what they saw.
	And it's very, very clear that there was a military operation to shut this whole thing down because the kids then saw that area of bushland in the Grange where this craft had landed being closed off by military.
	There was a huge cleanup operation where even a layer of dirt was removed and seen to be taken away on trucks.
	And children who sneaked into the bushland, God bless them, the little scamps, saw that before the dirt was taken away, they could see clear impressions in the grass that had been left by this object.
	And I heard that there'd been a report written into this event, but it's been formally denied by our National Archives who say that no such report exists.
	And of course, under our official secrecy laws, it should by right have been allowed to have been declassified by now because what could surely be secret 55 years later about a UFO sighting over a primary school in 1966.
	So if there was a report, then it's been disappeared.
	It's been lost.
	Well, it's either been lost or it's been deliberately disappeared, if you know what I mean.
	But the interesting thing was, because I'd published a flyer on Facebook saying I was interested in seeing or talking to any of these witnesses of this Westall event, I got a phone call from a longtime friend in the Federal Public Service who was a former very senior federal public servant of great repute.
	I can't name him because he's asked me not to.
	But he doesn't really care too much if the authorities know who he is.
	He just doesn't want to be hassled by UFO people, to be honest.
	But he told me his dad wrote the secret report into this whole event.
	And he is quite happy to testify to that fact to try and argue for the release of the document if it still exists in government archives, and that's something we're working on now.
	But what's really interesting is he left me with this thought.
	From what he heard of what his father said about it, he said his father was very rattled and very shocked by what he learned.
	And that in and of itself begs the question, just what was it that the Australian military and intelligence services went to great lengths to try to conceal 55 years ago?
	And why is it still such a secret even today?
	Because our government has never said jot about the entire incident.
	You can have a mass USO sighting by multiple, hundreds of school children and adults in a public school in broad daylight in suburban Melbourne.
	And the government of the day, not the state government, not the police, not the military, not the prime minister, not one person said shot.
	It's like it never happened.
	And the media coverage also diminished.
	And you know what?
	I suspect it was what we started talking about at the very beginning of this interview.
	I suspect the media allowed itself to be manipulated with the explanation that this was just a weather balloon, that, you know, these kids had got hysterical and seen something that they thought they saw.
	That's the conventional explanation.
	But I can tell you, after talking to these witnesses and hearing their adamancy after 55 years about what they saw, this wasn't any weather balloon.
	And indeed, it wasn't any known technology within any terrestrial technology that I'm aware of.
	Which is a continuing theme through ufology all the way back to Roswell.
	Congratulations on your deep and astonishing research.
	The book is well worth reading.
	There is material for once.
	There is material in this book that you won't find anywhere else.
	Ross Coulthard, congratulations.
	And I guess being a journalist, once we get a, we're like a dog with a bone.
	Once we get hold of a thing, we have to carry on.
	So are you going to be updating this book, continuing with this work?
	I've actually been in receipt of literally over 11,000 messages in the last few weeks since my documentary went to air and since my book was published.
	So yes, I will be following this story.
	And if there's new stories to tell, I will be telling them.
	Well, congratulations.
	I mean, it's a real pleasure to, and I've let you spell out your story your way.
	I've kept out of this because I've been amazed.
	It's wonderful to speak to a journalism, a journalist rather, of your dedication.
	That's the word.
	Complete dedication.
	So I wish you well around the world with the book.
	I think it's out in the middle of August, isn't it, in the UK and then towards the autumn, Northern Hemisphere, in the United States, yeah?
	That's correct, yes.
	Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you and your audience.
	Ross Coulthard, thank you very much indeed.
	The remarkable Ross Coulthard, as I have said during the interview, I wish him every success.
	Well-deserved success with his book in plain sight.
	Some remarkable stuff there and a lot of things that I had never heard before.
	How about you?
	If you want to communicate with me, you know how to do that.
	Go to my website theunexplained.tv.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained so until next we meet.
	Please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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