Nobody can say that Ross Coulthart hasn’t had a stellar career in journalism; the dude has five Walkley awards, including a Gold Walkley as well as a Logie, a Prime Minister’s Award for Literature and a bunch of other prizes on the mantelpiece.
But the former 60 Minutes and Four Corners man picked up a piece of silverware on the weekend that we suspect won’t be going anywhere near the pool room. Coulthart is this year’s winner of the Australian Skeptics’ Bent Spoon, awarded to what the doubters dub “the perpetrator of the most preposterous piece of pseudoscientific or paranormal piffle.” Nice.
It’s the aliens, of course. Ross has been writing, broadcasting and podcasting claims these past few years, that governments across the world are secretly storing wreckage of downed extraterrestrial spacecraft and the bodies of their pilots.
Look, it’s a better way to make a living than spin-doctoring for war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, which was how Rossco was earning a crust before he got into the aliens caper, but the Skeptics are not impressed. Australian Skeptics chief executive Tim Mendham told us that Coulthart’s claims — he also reckons the Vatican is in on the cover-up — are “based on hearsay with no evidence, no bodies, no space junk.” “Coulthart’s award-winning career as an investigative journalist is obviously no defence against belief in unsubstantiated claims,” Mendham said.
Coulthart’s win puts him into exalted company with past winners of the Bent Spoon including former celebrity chef-turned-wellness-weirdo Pete Evans, the ABC, SBS, former MP Craig Kelly, the Australian Vaccination Network and apparently a psychic dentist. We didn’t have high hopes of getting a quote when we gave Ross a shout on Sunday to congratulate him on the win and ask if the Skeptics’ claims were fair since last time we spoke he told us that “CBD…belittles and takes the piss.”
We haven’t heard back.
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