Following up on the idea that Coulthart does not seem to be skilled at assessing witnesses, which is a crucial aspect of investigative journalism -
especially in ufology where physical evidence is sparse - I'll cover some of what he's said about the Westall school sighting in SE Melbourne 1966. This case is really important to him:
As an investigative journalist who came into the subject of UFOs, UAPs, with a high degree of skepticism, I was brought around by this story. This is one of the foundation myths of Ross Coulthart’s conversion to the fact that the UFO phenomenon is real.
Source: Ross Coulthart on
Howard Hughes, The Unexplained, Mar 22, 2022 [8:00]
Coulthart interviewed witnesses in 2021 for a 7 News Spotlight special "Secrets of the UFOs" (not the Jim's ball one). Link at end. The problem with his approach here is that he relies on the generalized myth of the story (probably relayed by the main researcher Shane Ryan) and his own interviews with witnesses, instead of studying how the story evolved over time - which would tell him a lot about how reliable the witnesses are today.
Two witnesses told him things that contradicted their earlier testimony. How important the differences are is up for debate but the fact is he did not
investigate, just accepted their newer (more sensational, natch) versions without question.
Two girls Tanya and Terry jumped the fence and ran to the Grange (woodland ~300m away) where they'd seen the flying saucer apparently go down. Their stories diverge at this point, and each has an additional problem with their testimony that Coulthart let slide.
TANYA appeared for the first time on camera in this show, but she'd told Shane Ryan's producer Rosie Jones her story in 2011. She was one of two girls (the other was
not Terry) who claimed they were interrogated by men in suits - probably because they wanted to know what she'd seen at the Grange. She:
recalls being interviewed by two men, who she thought were police
Source:
Westall Flying Saucer Incident Facebook Page, 2016
The other girl interviewed was Jacquie (who had jumped the fence after Tanya):
The two men wore good quality suits they were dark in color. One spoke and one observed... A few years after the sighting I came to the conclusion these men were ASIO.
Source: Jacquie, Westall Yahoo Group, Sep 12, 2008, via archive from Keith Basterfield
Whether or not they were ASIO, they must have been Australian in order for Jacquie to think so. The "police" would also have been Australian - if they were American they would not have been identified by a 12-year-old as "police".
Yet Tanya told Coulthart in the 2021 show:
...there were two gentlemen waiting there and I was with them probably for about 15 minutes being questioned.
Coulthart: What nationality were they?
Definitely American.
C: Americans.
Yep. They didn’t want me to speak of the incident to absolutely anybody.
An investigative journalist would have asked her why she thought 5 years earlier they were police, and why Jacquie thought they were ASIO, i.e. Australian accents. It's suspicious to me that only in front of Coulthart does she change the story - did he suggest it and she went along with it? He then uses the (unlikely) fact of American officials bullying schoolgirls as evidence of an international conspiracy.
The thing that really comes home to me Tanya is the fact that you corroborate that American officials were there, trying to shut the story down.
The incident itself: Tanya remembers jumping the fence but "by the time I arrived
it [UFO] had gone." [Source:
Facebook, Nov 23, 2021]
Other witnesses over the years (before she was found around 2011) recall her being hysterical and possibly taken away in an ambulance (and to top it off, vanishing never to be seen again, which she later said was not true). This was the "myth" being passed around the witnesses for years.
TERRY has a version of this myth in her own testimony: she claims she jumped the fence, and at the Grange found Tanya was (depending on the year of retelling) dazed, passed out, awake and recovering from a faint, or hysterical. And the UFO was very much still there - which Tanya should have seen, but she did not.
What the UFO was doing presents a second inconsistency with Terry: this has varied wildly over the years, from the UFO being overhead and zooming off when she arrived, to it being landed on/near the ground for (up to) several minutes, and that she walked up and felt its heat before it took off. An investigative journalist would have asked why her story has changed given the later versions are embellished. [References for all Terry's testimony on my
website, scroll down to green box.]
Nobody at the school has corroborated Terry's story over the years (that is, she apparently told no one at the time that she was at the Grange, or saw a UFO, or almost touched it and felt its heat) - in fact Tanya's version contradicts it - and Terry was not interrogated by men in suits despite her extremely close encounter.
Coulthart was clearly taken with Terry - "this gorgeous girl who is now in her 60s, she’s as naughty now as she was back then" [
Howard Hughes, The Unexplained, Mar 22, 2022] - and felt no need to check her logically inconsistent testimony.
Secrets of the UFOs, 2021:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEczN_8Q380
.
