Energy Department custody claim (2022)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 8
| Claimant | Ross Coulthart, investigative journalist |
|---|---|
| Venue | Interview on the YouTube channel Generation Zed, January 2022 |
| Claim | Sources told him the U.S. Department of Energy held most of the non-human technology the government is alleged to possess |
| Also discussed | John Ramirez, "deadlines", the USAF, a "DRACO drive" and Hangar 18 |
| Evidence | Anonymous sources; no documents produced |
| Official position | AARO (March 2024): no evidence of any hidden reverse-engineering program in government or industry |
| Date | 13 January 2022 |
| Topics | Beings & bodies (topic) |
| People | Ross Coulthart, Eric W. Davis, Tim McMillan |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 204 |
| Year | 2022 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 2022 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 6 |
In January 2022 the investigative journalist Ross Coulthart said in an online interview that his sources had told him the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) held much of the non-human technology the government was alleged to possess. He said material had passed between government departments and private aerospace companies.[1][2] The claim rests on unnamed sources. The Energy Department has not commented on it, and the Pentagon's UFO office later reported that it had found no evidence of any such holdings.[4]
The interview
The interview was posted by the YouTube channel Generation Zed under the title "Ross Coulthart | DoE Holds MOST E.T Tech? John Ramirez, 'Deadlines', USAF, 'DRACO Drive' & Hangar 18". The question mark in the title is the channel's.[1] As the title indicates, the Energy Department was one of several topics. Others were the former CIA analyst John Ramirez, unspecified "deadlines", the U.S. Air Force, a "DRACO drive" and Hangar 18.[1] A timestamped link marks a passage about 31 minutes in (1,855 seconds).[6] No transcript has been published, so Coulthart's exact words could not be quoted here.[1][6]
The claim
As summarized, Coulthart's account had two parts:[1][6]
- Custody. The Energy Department, not the Pentagon, held most of the recovered material.
- Movement. Material had moved between government departments and private aerospace companies.
The claim has been tied to two older stories. One is the physicist Eric Davis's statements that Energy Department laboratories analysed material for other agencies. The other is reports that the Atomic Energy Commission, the DoE's predecessor, handled UFO-related material in the late 1940s.[1][3] Neither link is documented in the published record of the interview or of the Grusch case. Without a transcript, it could not be confirmed whether Coulthart made them himself.[1][3]
Coulthart
.jpg)
Coulthart, born in 1962 in the United Kingdom, grew up in New Zealand and studied law at Victoria University of Wellington. He spent decades in Australian television, at A Current Affair, Four Corners, Nine's Sunday, Seven's Sunday Night and 60 Minutes. He won a Gold Walkley in 2008.[2] After a period at a public relations firm he turned mainly to UFOs:[2][5]
- 2021. He fronted the Seven News series The UFO Phenomenon. He also published In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science (HarperCollins, first published 1 August 2021, 471 pages in the Kindle edition). The writer Pippa Goldschmidt found it balanced but said he "shows signs of wanting to believe". Jason Colavito called it "less a serious analysis" than a book report.
- 2022. He began co-hosting the podcast Need To Know with Bryce Zabel.
- 2023. In June he interviewed the whistleblower David Grusch for NewsNation, which signed him as a special projects correspondent that November. That August the ABC's Media Watch questioned the lack of evidence for his claims. In December Australian Skeptics gave him their Bent Spoon award.
The Grusch claims
The idea that recovered material sits partly with contractors resurfaced in 2023. Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer who had represented the National Reconnaissance Office on the UAP Task Force, alleged that the government ran crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs "in collaboration with private aerospace companies".[3] In June 2023 he told Le Parisien that the government had transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor. At a congressional hearing on 26 July 2023 he testified that he had been "informed in the course of my official duties" of a multi-decade program to which he was denied access.[3] The Defense Department and NASA denied his claims, and no supporting evidence has been presented.[3]
Assessment
The claim rests on anonymous sources and has not been verified. The Energy Department has not commented on UAP material.[1][2] In March 2024 the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) released the first volume of its historical review. It found no evidence that the government holds crashed or reverse-engineered alien technology, or that hidden "UAP reverse-engineering programs" exist, either in the U.S. government or in private industry.[4] AARO judged claims about specific people, places, tests and documents "inaccurate", attributing them mostly to "circular reporting" within a group of believers.[4] Its former director, Sean Kirkpatrick, wrote that critics of the office had offered no verifiable evidence.[4]
People and topics
- Ross Coulthart — Australian journalist who reported David Grusch's claims.
- Non-human intelligence — A term for intelligent beings of non-human origin, used in UAP legislation.
- Department of Energy — The U.S. department that runs the nuclear weapons laboratories.
- Eric W. Davis — Physicist who worked on AAWSAP and has said the U.S. holds recovered craft.
- Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
- Tim McMillan — Journalist and co-founder of The Debrief.
- Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
On the Timeline
- Coulthart's sources go quiet (2021) (17 December 2021) — Coulthart says his sources have gone quiet amid an intense security effort.
- John Ramirez finds no CIA program (2022) (30 January 2022) — A former CIA analyst says he never found an official UAP program.
See every 2022 event on the UAP Timeline →
References
- "Ross Coulthart: DoE holds most ET tech?", Generation Zed (YouTube, Jan 2022) · youtu.be · archived copy
- Ross Coulthart — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- "Pentagon UFO office finds 'no empirical evidence' for alien technology in new report", Space.com (Mar 2024) · space.com · archived copy
- In Plain Sight (Ross Coulthart, 2021) — Goodreads · goodreads.com · archived copy
- youtu.be · youtu.be · archived copy
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Ross Coulthart”, “David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
No discussion yet.