"In Plain Sight" by Ross Coulthart

In the first part of this book, the author goes through a large number of reported UAP (Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, the term he prefers to UFO) sightings; these come so thick and fast that it seems he wants to convince the sceptical by the sheer frequency of the sightings. However, he hardly ever goes into any single sighting in sufficient depth to convince me (and I am profoundly sceptical) that any particular sighting offers clear evidence of an alien spacecraft, in particular since almost all of the author's 'evidence' is anecdotal. 

He also relies a lot on hearsay: "It was reported" is a much-repeated phrase. When official sources doubt the reliability of the witness, the author assumes this provides evidence of an official cover-up. In Chapter 5, ironically entitled "Hard Evidence" he reports on the testimony of "United States researcher Budd Hopkins" who himself is reporting the testimony of an "air force sergeant" about a film supposedly of a UFO and some 'men in black'.

Almost every one of the sightings reported in this book happened near a US military base or US military exercises which might be due to the author's sampling techniques, though I suspect he would prefer to think that aliens have chosen to monitor the US military (though why, I can't imagine).

In the second part of the book, the author plunges into the world of claim and counter-claim, building up his case that the US military has conspired to hide the truth about UFOs from the world for years, and that they have recovered crashed alien spacecraft powered by Physics beyond our present-day understanding and reverse-engineered technologies of eg "anti-gravitics". He gets very excited when someone (for example a punk-rock star but more frequently someone who calls themselves by a scientific-sounding title like Doctor or Professor) makes sweeping and bizarre claims with minimal supporting evidence, suggesting repeatedly that even if a small part of the person's claims are true, this has huge implications. He doesn't seem to feel that if one part of a person's testimony is shown to be inaccurate (perhaps because the person is deluded or misguided or mendacious) that undermines everything else he says. He would rather give the benefit of the doubt ... until someone denies what the author so devoutly wishes to be true, in which case he nit-picks over their denial, often concluding, in a perfect example of heads I win, tails you lose, that the existence of the denial suggests that there must be some truth to the thing being denied. Another tactic is to take the absence of a response as tacit confirmation.

Another HIWTYL tactic is to claim that UFOs used mimicry so that they sometimes appear to be meteors, stars, or aircraft. Presumably the author believes that if it looks like a helicopter and moves like a helicopter it's a UFO masquerading as a helicopter.

Even so, the author sometimes appears to realise that some of his so-called sources are a little untrustworthy:

• “Greer bizarrely claims that the gatekeepers of what some call ‘The Big Secret’ then tried to kill him with a secret remote death ray. ... There is no evidence for such a claim.” (Greer survived the cancer he alleges was caused by the death ray because his golden retriever "took some of the “hit” from the EM weapon")
• One member of the team investigating cattle mutilations ate the Skinwalker Ranch is a Colonel in the oxymoronic 'military intellignece' who worked on the idea that psychics could use 'remote viewing' to learn Kremlin secrets. The team investigating this was led by another of the author's 'experts', Dr Hal Puthoff, whose credentials are later used to authenticate other wild claims about UAPs.
• A punk rocker called DeLonge who claims that one his tracks was "about aliens that come to Earth and ‘fly up your butt. And it’s true’” gets several chapters. "The idea that a punk-pop rock star could achieve what decades of UAP conspiracy whistleblowers have tried to do and failed – forcing the whole purported US government UAP conspiracy out into the open – is surely ridiculous." It may be, but the author is still enthralled by it. “DeLonge also claimed the US already knew the secrets of free energy, so-called zero-point energy. ‘One inch of air could power the US for hundreds of years,’” (Ch 16)

There are some inaccuracies. At one stage it is stated that "A 15-metre circumference is an 11-metre diameter." Actually 15m circumference is less than 5 m diameter. He also offers an "estimated" speed of 104,895 mph for a UAP, believing, as many non-scientists do, that you can convince by the accuracy of your numbers, without realising that this undermines the whole concept of an "estimate".

At one stage he name checks Chuck Zukowski who investigates cattle mutilations in The 37th Parallel by Ben Mezrich.

But the last word has to be left to the author: "If there is a kernel of reality in all this stuff, it is truly the most amazing story on the planet. And for me, at least, it’s passed the sniff test.” It is heartening to know that such a load of nonsense passes such a robust criterion.

Selected quotes

• “The biggest problem about the UAP phenomenon is that these strange sightings are not repeatable; they are not a replicable experiment,” (Ch 1)
• "Around the world, sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena escalated in the years immediately after the Second World War. Perhaps this was in part because aliens and flying saucers were increasingly popular fodder for movies, comic strips and science-fiction stories." (Ch 2)
• “Random personal observations, fuzzy photographers, and crop circles will never “prove” the existence of anything, especially since UFO appearances to humans are transitory and somewhat related to the observer’s state of mind. What needs to be collected and publicly disseminated is hard scientific data collected from instruments that are known to be accurate and reliable,” (Ch 8)

June 2022

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God