In Plain Sight: An investigation into UFOs and impossible science

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Most of the sources I spoke to insisted on talking anonymously but what they told me was illuminating because it suggests that many governments are taking the UAP issue a lot more seriously in private than they are prepared to admit publicly. But sceptics often say witnesses to UAPs should always be ignored because witness evidence is notoriously unreliable.

A cargo aircraft was flying along the north-east coast of New Zealand’s South Island near the Kaikoura mountain ranges, when multiple people onboard made dramatic claims of witnessing glowing UAP lights following the cargo plane. Across the world, declassified government reports and well-corroborated witness sightings show that military and intelligence services are well aware of a persistent pattern of strange unidentified objects seen at and around sensitive military facilities such as Australia’s North West Cape naval communication station. If it gets covered at all, invariably there is a quizzical raising of the eyebrows or a subtle turn of phrase, or a flourish of X-Files music, to suggest that this is a lighter story to be taken with a grain of salt. Early Australian newspapers carry intriguing accounts of odd lights and even craft or metallic airships in the sky.An enormous number of people believe there is a vast conspiracy at the highest levels of the US military-industrial complex, concealing recovered extra-terrestrial (ET) craft and perhaps even the existence of aliens. However, overwhelming evidence shows that many governments, including Australia’s, take such unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings very seriously indeed. This idea of scientific knowledge as distinct from mere belief, with unimpeachable authority because of its basis in evidence, is perhaps the most important development from the Enlightenment. Eventually I watched UFO videos on YouTube and I started to believe them without any critical thinking, and that’s when I started to get alarmed by my own thinking process. One of the privileges of being an investigative journalist is the opportunity to use the skillset to indulge a curiosity – to go down the rabbit hole of a mystery, to work the sources, to delve through the documents, and to reach conclusions based on the evidence.

Recorded sightings of strange objects in Antipodean skies can be found right back to the 19th-century period of early European settlement. Many believers in the extra-terrestrial (ET) hypothesis for UAPs speculate that alien spaceships were covertly monitoring the atomic bomb tests in New Mexico and that, when one crashed, it was secretly recovered by the US military with dead and live extra-terrestrial beings on board.

I would have to say, this is the best book on the subject I've had the pleasure of reading, more so, as this come s from the point of view of a serious journalist who covers multiple cases of the phenomenon, as well as interviewing countless members of the military and intelligence sectors.

After some initial excitement, like most people, I surmised the whole story was a flap about nothing much, that there would be some prosaic explanation. The Germans have thrown something new into the night skies over Germany – the weird, mysterious foo-fighter balls of fire that race alongside the wings of American Beaufighters flying intruder missions over the Reich,’ The New York Times reported in January 1945. One of the American secret divisions, sped to the crash site and removed the craft and occupants to a highly secret place and ever since, have completely denied all knowledge that the crash ever happened. I once reported a story in the Gulf of Carpentaria in Far North Queensland, interviewing a venerable Aboriginal elder known as Blue Bob, who knew the landscape like the back of his hand. In February 1947, there were three independent and well-verified sightings of a formation of five egg-shaped wingless and tailless craft flying over southern Australia, which defied official explanation.

Annie squeezed in between the two men on the bench seat of their four-wheel Toyota drive security vehicle and the three set off for town. I was unable to form a connection with any of the characters, or to even really figure out which one was which. Coulthart is forced to deal with this historical baggage of the topic, and he acknowledges the frustration. But when the number of sightings starts going up into the thousands, often by trained personnel, then clearly something strange is going on.