For those of us intimately familiar with the details of the UFO Phenomenon, it has been exciting to see both our elected officials, some of them anyway, and the public at large, some of it anyway, finally beginning to take the entire matter seriously. To us, the notion that the human race is not only not the only truly intelligence species in the cosmic neighborhood, but perhaps playing second fiddle to intelligences so advanced that they run circles around both our most state of the art aircraft, and, seemingly, around our very ability to perceive and discern the reality around us, should be the story of the century.

Add in the fact that a close and exhaustive reading of our distant lore suggests that human beings may have been interacting with these intelligences since, basically, the very beginning of the beginning, and that perhaps the very meaning models we look to to make sense of the world – here I speak of our religious traditions – may have been spawned by these very Others, that this quickly becomes not just the story of the century, but of all time. Who wouldn’t want to delve into the very depths of this subject – investigating every nook and cranny?

Well, as I say, while the public and our elected officials have a long way to go in really becoming familiar with the nuanced history of this topic, the conversation has begun – undoubtedly so, largely spurned by revelations that emerged in 2017, and have been rolling out in a fairly steady manner ever since.

This past week marks another important milestone in that march towards growing public awareness that, one hopes, might lead – eventually – to the disclosure many of us have been waiting for. Here I speak of the publication of the book In Plain Sight: An investigation into UFOs and impossible science by award-winning, veteran investigative Australian journalist, Ross Coulthart. In the line of books by American journalists such as Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, this book seeks to take a nuanced, historically-rich discussion about the UFO Phenomenon right to the town square of public conversation.

While there may have been more books written about UFOs and alien contact than grains of sands on your local beach, this new release by Coulthart is special because it has the opportunity to reach a much more mainstream audience – not the least of which includes Coulthart’s professional colleagues in the, up until now, notoriously dismissive field of journalism. In other words, this book has the potential to take a subject that has been gaining steam over the last few years, and elevate it into the stratosphere of public conversation. And that is something to be excited about, to be sure.

Furthermore, what gives this book even more teeth, one might say, is that Ross Coulthart has done his homework. He’s taken years to carefully, meticulously craft a book that not only accurately depicts UFO events throughout the course of history, including events from his native Australia that many American audiences will have never heard about, but he has done so with a depth of penetrating analysis that makes apparent to even a naive reader, just how shocking, preposterous and disturbing the government treatment and coverup of this essential topic has been over the course of the last eight decades or so.