Ross Coulthart is not easy to dismiss. The Australian investigative journalist broke some of the most consequential UAP reporting of the past several years, and his sourcing has held up under scrutiny that would have collapsed lesser work. So when Coulthart declined, on camera, to call the leaked CARET documents fraudulent, it landed differently than the usual UFO-community hedging. Cristina Gomez covered the exchange in a July 21 video roundup on her Intelligent Disclosure channel — framing it alongside Coulthart's separate statements about a directed-energy weapon allegedly linked to downed craft, and a figure described as a "denied-then-confirmed UFO insider at the center of the cover-up." None of those claims have been independently verified. But the pattern of what credible people are and aren't willing to say on the record is itself a story.
The MJ-12 documents — purporting to describe a secret Truman-era committee managing UFO crash retrievals — have circulated since the 1980s. The FBI investigated them and concluded they were bogus. The Air Force dismissed them. Multiple document examiners flagged anachronistic typefaces, incorrect date formats, and signature anomalies. Stanton Friedman, the nuclear physicist who spent decades as the documents' most serious champion, laid out his defense in a 2004 essay now archived at John Greenewald's Black Vault, arguing that critics had not conclusively proven forgery and that certain details could only have come from classified sources. Friedman died in 2019 with the question unresolved, at least to his own satisfaction. What's changed since then isn't the documents — it's the environment around them.
That environment shifted dramatically after David Grusch's 2023 congressional testimony, and it has kept shifting. In late June 2026, Jonathan Caplan KC — a veteran British King's Counsel who has spent fifty years applying courtroom evidentiary standards to the UAP question — sat down with Ross Coulthart on Reality Check to discuss his new book, Not For Disclosure. Caplan told Coulthart he considers key MJ-12 papers authentic, addressed forgery claims directly, and examined documents tied to Timothy Cooper, Ryan Wood, and the 1953 effort to debunk the subject. A week later, in a separate conversation published July 20 on exopolitics.org, Caplan and Dr. Michael Salla discussed the alleged 1933 UFO crash in Italy, secret crash-retrieval procedures, and reverse-engineering programs. Caplan's conclusion, attributed directly in that episode's summary: full government disclosure is unlikely, and the truth may have to come from researchers, witnesses, and the public instead.
That framing — accountability migrating away from governments and toward a distributed network of researchers — runs through almost everything happening in this space right now, and it deserves scrutiny on its own terms.
The Documents Keep Coming, But Not the Evidence
On July 10, CBS News reported that the Pentagon had released its fourth group of UFO files, including 40 more videos and documents under what the Defense Department calls its PURSUE process. Cristina Gomez's review of that release, published July 14, catalogued the contents: new UAP videos, a six-pointed star observed over the Yellow Sea, an incident at the Pantex nuclear plant in Texas, a CIA debunking document, and material related to an AI-altered UAP video that had gone viral. The Pantex incident was separately reported by CNN, lending it at least a second tier of sourcing.
What the release did not include, by all available accounts, was anything that resolves the foundational questions about crash retrieval programs or reverse engineering — the claims at the center of Grusch's testimony and the MJ-12 tradition before it. Richard Dolan, in a video published on his Intelligent Disclosure channel and redistributed by UFOs-Disclosure.blogspot.com, put the tension plainly: why does the government continually provide massive document dumps rather than direct evidence? Dolan called it "managed ambiguity" and pointed to the historical record — including the 2008 attempt by Robert Bigelow to gain access to an anomalous vehicle allegedly held by Lockheed Martin, and rumors of Lue Elizondo interacting with a craft — as evidence that the real architecture of the program exists behind the paperwork, not within it.
That claim — document dumps as a deliberate strategy rather than genuine transparency — sits in direct tension with the administration's public posture. UNILAD Tech reported July 22 that Trump had forced disclosure of a "long-hidden" government UFO information center, framing it as a transparency breakthrough. Whether those two things can both be true simultaneously — a government releasing records while strategically withholding the evidence that would actually answer the question — is the central unresolved tension in UAP politics right now, and nobody in an official capacity has been asked to address it directly.
Representative Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican and UAP Caucus member, is trying to force exactly that confrontation. In a Reality Check episode published July 1, Burlison told Coulthart he had been shown material inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — footage of plasma-like orbs moving with what he described as apparent intelligence and instantaneous acceleration, objects the intelligence community itself cannot explain. He said FBI field agents had reported seeing similar objects at residential locations and a western military facility the previous December. He described sending formal interrogatories to MITRE, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the CIA, and the FBI. He said MIT Lincoln Laboratory is now in the process of declassifying a reel-to-reel recording of a U.S. Air Force general questioning MIT scientists about the 1952 Washington flyover. And he argued that the Manhattan Project taught the government how to bury a program inside federally funded research centers — a structural claim that, if accurate, would explain exactly why document releases keep producing more paperwork instead of answers.
Burlison did not hedge on the stakes. He told Coulthart that revealing what is behind this would be, in his words, "the greatest revelation since Jesus Christ." That is either the statement of a man who has genuinely seen something extraordinary, or of one who has been successfully briefed into a program designed to make recipients believe they have. The distinction matters enormously and is currently impossible to verify from outside the SCIF.
"the greatest revelation since Jesus Christ."
The Verification Problem Nobody Wants to Name
Here is what the current moment actually looks like from a sourcing perspective. The most significant claims — crash retrievals, reverse-engineering programs, non-human biologics, MJ-12-style control groups — trace back to a handful of interconnected figures: Grusch (whose claims remain under congressional investigation with no independent documentary confirmation), Clifford Stone (a self-described retired recovery specialist whose specific operational claims have never been corroborated by official records), and now Dr. Bob McGwier, a scientist with CIA connections who told podcast host Michael Phillip on Third Eye Drops that he had been shown advanced materials and circuitry he believes could not have been made by human technology. McGwier's claim, like the others, sits entirely on personal testimony with no documentary trail.
Meanwhile, the analytical tier has been expanding. Hal Puthoff, the physicist who has been involved in U.S. government UAP research programs for decades, gave an interview on the Diary of a CEO channel in which, according to Richard Dolan's analysis, he stated explicitly that the evidence for advanced non-human technology is "absolutely clear." Puthoff is in his late eighties, and Dolan — who has known him for over twenty-five years — described seeing him speak so openly as "profoundly significant." That framing is telling: the significance Dolan identifies is not new evidence, but a longtime insider's willingness to say something explicit. The absence of that willingness, for all these years, is itself being read as confirmatory.
Theoretical physicist Maaneli Derakhshani brought a different kind of rigor to the conversation in a July 16 Reality Check episode, applying fractal analysis to anomalous formations on Mars, Phobos, and the Moon — the same methodology, he argued, that NASA and the Department of Defense use to distinguish natural terrain from engineered structures. Grounding his approach in Carl Sagan's own standards for evaluating evidence of past life, Derakhshani stopped well short of claiming proof, instead making the case that certain features deserve to be treated as genuine open questions rather than pareidolia. That is a defensible scientific position. It is also very different from the MJ-12 tradition, and the fact that both conversations are happening simultaneously, on the same platform, with the same host, is worth noting.
The document that would change this picture most directly is the reel-to-reel recording that MIT Lincoln Laboratory is reportedly in the process of declassifying — a U.S. Air Force general, questioning MIT scientists about the 1952 Washington flyover, captured on tape. Burlison named it. If it surfaces, its contents would either corroborate the argument that the government has known something definitive since the 1950s, or they would show officials asking the same confused questions the public has been asking ever since. Either answer would be more useful than another document dump.