Ross Coulthart

Ross Coulthart is an Australian investigative journalist with three decades of experience across the Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC's flagship program Four Corners, and Nine Network's 60 Minutes Australia, whose established mainstream credentials, including a 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Award for a biography of war historian Charles Bean, lent significant weight to his later UAP reporting. Since around 2017 Coulthart has focused heavily on UAP investigation, publishing In Plain Sight: An Investigation Into UFOs and Impossible Science (2021) and, as special correspondent for the U.S. cable network NewsNation, breaking several of the era's most consequential stories. Most significantly, Coulthart was the journalist to whom David Grusch first revealed his crash-retrieval whistleblower allegations in June 2023, and Coulthart's subsequent reporting helped drive those claims toward the formal congressional testimony that followed weeks later. He co-hosts the Need to Know podcast with author and producer Bryce Zabel, continuing to cover developments across the U.S. congressional UAP oversight process, AARO's investigations, and whistleblower claims. Coulthart's international, mainstream-journalism background has given him a degree of credibility with audiences skeptical of U.S. UFO-subculture media, positioning him as a bridge figure between traditional investigative journalism and the UAP disclosure beat.