The general public has been led to believe there are no UFOs (Video).

 RT chats with Ross Coulthart, the author of the new book “In Plain Sight,” which recounts officialdom’s unprecedented attempts to either ignore or cover up a number of inexplicable UFO encounters around the world.

The creation of the International Coalition for Extraterrestrial Research and the start of the Galileo Project are just two of the many UFO efforts that have exploded in the last 12 months. Then there was the ground-breaking Pentagon report, in which it was acknowledged that there had been instances of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) that had no known explanation.

However, one of the most intriguing developments so far may be the publication of Ross Coulthart’s latest book, “In Plain Sight,” an award-winning investigative journalist. Coulthart has no standing to uphold in the UFO community, but he has long harbored a desire to address the important issue of whether or not we are truly alone.

“I’ve always been curious by the topic, mostly because it has such a stigma associated to it. There is a significant stigma in journalism,” he remarked.

“Ross, we don’t do UFO stories,” editors reportedly said to me. I worked on numerous stories about defense and national security intelligence. I’ve devoted a significant portion of the last 30-plus years to reporting on wars, terrorist attacks, and all the suffering in the globe. And a lot of those connections [I made] wouldn’t deny the existence of UFOs when I brought it up to them.

Coulthart, a New Zealander by birth, was mesmerized by the 1978 occurrence in which a cameraman saw something flying next to a jet over the town of Kaikoura on the South Island. Weeks later, the officials said it was either a reflection from fishing boats or the planet Venus.

As a 16-year-old lad, he acknowledged, “I didn’t think much of it since it sounded plausible to me.” However, Coulthart got his first break at school by locating the witnesses, who confirmed that what they had seen was a real thing.

By the 1990s, he had made a name for himself as a journalist and was contributing to the Australian investigative TV program “Four Corners.” The crew was asked by their host to enjoy a drink in the on-site bar after a day of filming at an air force base. “After a while, he leaned forward and asked, ‘Can I ask you a question? ” recalled Coulthart. Why don’t you media outlets ever run UFO-related stories?

“I readily admit that I laughed and uttered the phrase “Because they’re bulls**t. “No, they are not,” he responded. I wish I could identify this man because, at the time, he was a very, very senior officer and one of the most powerful figures in our military.

He nonetheless persuaded his bosses to do a UAP story in 2011 despite being constrained by the requirements of the mainstream media, but only after they flew him to London to interview a rock musician who later canceled and left them with a gaping vacuum in their schedule.

Colonel Charles Halt, who claimed to have seen a flying object, was located after Coulthart looked into allegations of a 1980 sighting close to the air force base RAF Bentwaters. We gave it a half-hour for broadcast, and it absolutely went crazy, he said. The quantity of people contacting and offering information just astounded us. The public was tremendously interested.

“They were getting in touch with me from all around Australia, claiming to have seen a similar thing. They were astounded to see this subject finally covered by the media. The fact that we weren’t making fun of it and instead treated the topic with seriousness was excellent news for them.

In “In Plain Sight,” other sightings are thoroughly examined, including Coulthart’s personal favorite of a man watching a movie outdoors in the South Australian desert in a deckchair when a cylindrical object emerged. He claimed to have seen light coming through the windows as a moviegoer.

After going independent and releasing himself from the constraints of contemptuous editors, Coulthart started writing the book. He believes the Pentagon’s recent acknowledgement that something is out there has been a really beneficial move.

He said: “Any Five Eyes country [the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia] basically repeats the same position. They won’t respond when you inquire if UFOs are real. They claim that UAPs do not compromise flight safety or constitute a threat to national security. However, everything drastically altered in July of this year.

You can read that report anywhere. It states unequivocally that UFOs pose a risk to aviation security and may pose a risk to national security. It is a total 180 degree turn. The Pentagon hasn’t given an explanation for why they’ve taken this action, but I believe — and I’ve been informed — that it’s because they understand the game is over. At some point, they must be honest about what they know.

Coulthart delves deeply into the connection between UFOs and nuclear power plants in his book. The 1991 story of Annie Farinaccio, who attended a party on a US facility in the outlying North West Cape of Australia, opens “In Plain Sight.” Two police officers offered her a ride back into town, and she will never forget what she witnessed as they were driving.

“Annie was sitting there terrified,” Coulthart remarked. They were traveling down this road at 100 km/h when she shouted through the windscreen because there was a huge triangular UFO with lights flying directly above.

“In the space of a split second, it rose to a height of 1,000 feet before descending on the left side of the vehicle. She is now pleading with the police to drop her off back in town when the plane suddenly leaps to 1,000 feet and drops to the right side of the automobile.

Very low-frequency transmitters were located at the facility, and in the event of conflict, they would be used to communicate with US nuclear submarines. Despite the fact that the object in Annie’s sight bore no resemblance to a weather balloon, American officers visited her, took her back to the base, and claimed she had seen one.

In another episode described in the book, a nuclear silo in Russia had its missiles strangely loaded and prepared for launch without the officials’ knowledge.

They were in a panic, Coulthart said. The intelligence seemed to be proving that no matter how strong your security measures are, they can be broken. If it has intelligence of any type, it appears to be communicating something regarding the use or possible abuse of nuclear weapons.

The biography of Melbourne suburb of Clayton South teacher Andrew Greenwood is also included in the book. He witnessed the appearance of a metallic disc in a clear sky alongside his high school students.

Before being put on the spot, Greenwood spoke to the local media. This is when things start to get extremely scary, Coulthart declared. He receives a knock at his door at his personal residence two weeks after the incident. One of the men is a senior officer who is standing on the threshold, while the other is an official of some sort, most likely a police officer or an intelligence official.

Andrew remains enraged by what they did. They made a direct threat against [him], saying, “If you talk anymore about what you saw, we’ll make sure you lose your job – we’ll say you drank as a teacher.” Andrew has no reason to lie about this, and more significantly, what he claims to have seen is supported by 167 witnesses, all of whom have testified publicly as of the most recent count. It’s the most remarkable situation, in fact.

Coulthart has unearthed additional information, including claims of non-human craft that have been recovered. According to sources, these are stored in facilities in both the US and Russia, but Coulthart says he is normally wary of such claims because he hasn’t seen any supporting documentation.

“That’s the biggest issue I’m facing. Governments are very bad at maintaining secrets, and if the US government was holding secrets of that nature, I would’ve assumed they would have spilled by now, but they haven’t, he added.

“However, when you look through the US government’s records… that’s why I gave my book the title “In Plain Sight. There, in plain sight, is the proof. The CIA was collaborating with the US Defense Department to recover what was referred to in the documents as “flying saucers” from Nepal and Afghanistan, according to records from the agency.

In addition to the book, Coulthart also produced a UFO documentary, which has received good feedback from both the public and media peers. “The response has just been astounding. In my career, I’ve never received such a response as I have to this topic, said Coulthart.

It’s been too much to handle. Every day I wake up to literally 300 to 500 emails from people telling me about sightings or offering me information, which leaves me fatigued. It seems as though we have opened a wound, and everything about reality is spilling out.

But cutting through the mist is the book’s principal goal. Coulthart claims that it almost seems as if some media outlets are reluctant to acknowledge that they made mistakes.

“The media is failing here,” he continued. The media is stuck in the paradigm that, stupidly, the CIA and US Air Force pushed it to heed in the 1960s.

“I don’t know why, but it’s said that the CIA chose to suppress reports of UFOs because they were concerned that individuals reporting UFOs would prevent people from giving early notice of a Russian ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) landing on the US. The claim that they wished to prevent callers from flooding NORAD’s (North American Aerospace Defense Command) phones with sighting reports is ridiculous. Simply ridiculous.

For a guy skilled in language, Coulthart ends by concisely presenting this difficult subject. While he hasn’t been able to learn everything that governments and security agencies are aware of regarding UFOs, he can see why the topic has been labeled as a fool’s errand. We’ve been tricked, he declared. “We were duped,”