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Ross Coulthart's Claim That the U.S. Is Shooting Down UAP Over White Sands (10 August 2026)

White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico  ·  10 August 2026  ·  Disclosure and Policy · United States

A PAC-3 missile launch during a stockpile reliability test at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, photographed on 16 July 2018. NO IMAGERY OF THE OBJECTS DESCRIBED IN THIS REPORTING EXISTS. This photograph shows the range that the reporting names, an active U.S. Army test range where missile and directed-energy testing is routine. It does not show any reported UAP or any claimed engagement.
A PAC-3 missile launch during a stockpile reliability test at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, photographed on 16 July 2018. NO IMAGERY OF THE OBJECTS DESCRIBED IN THIS REPORTING EXISTS. This photograph shows the range that the reporting names, an active U.S. Army test range where missile and directed-energy testing is routine. It does not show any reported UAP or any claimed engagement. (U.S. Army photo by John Drew Hamilton, released to DVIDS as public domain (Photo ID 6509162, VIRIN 180716-A-UY615-256).)

On 10 August 2026 the NewsNation investigative journalist Ross Coulthart reported that President Trump had personally authorised a covert Department of War operation to summon, intercept and shoot down UAP over White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, in order to recover suspected non-human technology. Every load-bearing detail rests on unnamed sources. No document, no photograph, no named witness and no official confirmation has been produced. This page records the claim and its provenance, not a confirmed event.

What did witnesses see at White Sands Missile Range?

This is not a sighting. It is a reporting claim, and the job of this page is to record exactly what was claimed, by whom, and on what evidence. The pin marks the range named in the reporting, not a confirmed incident site.

On 10 August 2026 NewsNation published a Reality Check column by its special correspondent Ross Coulthart headlined "Is the Trump administration running a covert UFO program?", timestamped 2026-08-10T16:14:52Z in the page metadata. The archive could not read the live page: newsnationnow.com sits behind a PerimeterX bot wall and returns HTTP 403 even to a Firefox user agent with a Google referrer. Everything quoted below was read in full from the Wayback Machine capture of the article's AMP version taken on 10 August 2026 at 21:49:50 UTC. A companion video, "Ross Coulthart Q and A: Skywatcher didn't disappear, it went government," sits on NewsNation's own YouTube channel as ID IOZdVCoZ51Q, verified through the YouTube oEmbed endpoint.

The central assertion is that from November 2025 to the present "the U.S. government, in a joint operation with multiple intelligence and Department of War agencies, has been using these airspace shutdowns, these TFRs, to do its own UAP intercept operations: summoning, detecting and, yes, shooting down what some call drones, others call UAPs." Coulthart writes that the Department of War "has quite literally taken on running its own covert operation to intercept these mystery objects. And I'm told they have recently successfully downed craft both in the U.S. and just across the border near Juarez in Mexico." He adds that "I am also told by White House sources that Trump has personally authorized this operation," that it is "run out of the White House by Trump's most senior intelligence advisers," that "Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been tasked with identifying these objects and capturing them for the president, according to sources," and that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence "is also said to be involved." On the objects: "Sources say the objects being targeted over White Sands, whatever they are, show anomalous properties conforming to the observables that define UAPs: No visible means of propulsion, instantaneous maneuvers, hypersonic speeds and stealth mode."

The detail that has travelled furthest is not in that column at all, and the distinction matters. The written piece contains no occurrence of the words "directed energy" or "microwave" anywhere in its text. That element comes from Coulthart's video message, and the fullest verbatim transcription the archive could find is the passage quoted by the astrophysicist Avi Loeb: "Sources have told me that one of the directed energy weapon systems used at White Sands, in an attempt to shoot down these mystery craft, is what's called high pulse microwave. It shuts down an aircraft by emitting an intense burst of electromagnetic energy that travels at the speed of light, penetrates the aircraft, and fries its electronic systems." The two versions also list the five observables differently: the column gives no visible means of propulsion, instantaneous manoeuvres, hypersonic speeds and stealth mode, while the video gives instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity, low observability, and trans-medium travel or anti-gravity.

Coulthart puts a caveat on the record himself. Sources, he writes, "also told NewsNation that Trump may not be getting the full story about what is being recovered, with concerns among some that he is being told the objects are simply foreign spy drones," possibly "Chinese or other foreign adversary drones doing surveillance on one of America's most sensitive test ranges." He then argues against that reading, saying what is detected is "without a doubt, far beyond any known conventional human technology." The surrounding narrative concerns Skywatcher, the private UAP group co-founded by Jake Barber, James Fowler and financier Alex Klokus, which worked at Sierra Blanca in west Texas until its airspace was closed; Coulthart says the Department of War now uses "the same so-called dog-whistle, electromechanical signaling, and psionic summoners" and suspects former Skywatcher staff are at White Sands.

What is the official explanation?

There is no official record of this programme and no official response to the claim. The archive searched for any on-record statement from the White House, the Department of War, the Department of the Army, White Sands Missile Range public affairs, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or U.S. Northern Command, and found none. war.gov and aaro.mil both return HTTP 403 to non-browser clients, a standing quirk rather than evidence of anything, but no mirrored release, wire story or briefing transcript carrying such a statement surfaced either. Cybernews, in the earliest mainstream writeup on 10 August 2026, records only that "at the time of publishing, the White House has yet to comment on these claims." Silence is neither denial nor confirmation.

What is officially documented is the setting, and it matters enormously. White Sands Missile Range's own U.S. Army page calls it "the premier military test range in America" and the "Birthplace of America's Missile and Space Activity," running more than 3,000 tests a year after more than 42,000 rocket and missile tests since the Trinity atomic test of 1945. It covers 3,421 square miles of restricted Department of Defense airspace which it "controls 24 hours a day from zero to infinity (ground to space)," expandable to 7,569 contiguous square miles, the largest restricted Department of Defense airspace in the country. That page lists the six Army modernisation priorities the range is aligned to, and the second item is Directed Energy.

So a claim that directed-energy weapons are being fired at fast unidentified objects over White Sands describes, in its physical particulars, the range's advertised day job. High-power microwave weapons are neither exotic nor hypothetical. On the same day Coulthart's column ran, DefenseScoop reported an 11 million dollar Marine Corps award to Epirus for a vehicle-mounted high-power microwave counter-drone system, noting that "the high-powered microwave family of directed energy weapons uses electromagnetic pulses to fry internal drone components," close to a word-for-word match with Coulthart's own description of the weapon's effect.

The same borderland airspace also has a documented, entirely terrestrial recent history of shootdowns. On 11 February 2026 DefenseScoop reported that Customs and Border Protection personnel, not service members, "shot down an object with a military laser earlier this week near El Paso, Texas," using a system whose transfer to CBP had been approved by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, causing interagency turmoil and a ten-day FAA flight restriction that lasted only hours. On 27 February 2026 the same outlet reported a second engagement near Fort Hancock in which troops downed a CBP drone they mistakenly believed was a threat, and the Pentagon, CBP and the FAA jointly confirmed the "reported engagement occurred" when the Defense Department used a counter-drone system "to mitigate a seemingly threatening unmanned aerial system operating within military airspace." These are officially acknowledged shootdowns in the exact airspace this story concerns, with nothing non-human in any of them.

There is a federal precedent for downing unidentified objects too. After the Chinese surveillance balloon was destroyed off South Carolina on 4 February 2023, U.S. fighters downed three further unidentified objects over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron on 10, 11 and 12 February 2023. As the Associated Press reported through PBS NewsHour on 14 February 2023, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said the objects were unmanned and low enough to endanger civil aviation, and that "because we have not been able to definitively assess what these most recent objects are, we acted out of an abundance of caution." Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre added that "there is no, again, no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns." The United States shooting down unidentified objects is therefore not an extraordinary claim at all. What is extraordinary in the new reporting is the stated motive, recovery of non-human technology, and the stated means, directed-energy weapons at a named range.

The year is also on the record. The Department of War has published declassified UAP files at war.gov/UFO under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters in tranches on 8 May, 22 May, 12 June, 10 July and 7 August 2026, the fifth carrying 41 records under a statement from Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell issued three days before Coulthart's column. A January 2026 executive order on UAP records, the presidential directive of 21 July 2026 waiving UAP nondisclosure agreements, and ODNI memorandum ES 2026-00818 of 31 July 2026 sit in the same year, and UAP Globe carries case files on each. None mentions White Sands, an intercept programme, or a shootdown authority.

What did the witnesses think it was?

There is no witness in the ordinary sense. There is a journalist, his unnamed sources, and a scientist commenting on the journalist.

Ross Coulthart's credentials are a matter of record. Nexstar Media Group's announcement of his hiring, dated 14 November 2023, describes three decades at the Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC's Four Corners, Nine Network's Sunday and 60 Minutes and Seven Network's Spotlight, five Walkley journalism awards including the Gold Walkley, a Logie for broadcast investigative journalism, and a 2015 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History. His UAP book is "In Plain Sight: An Investigation Into UFOs and Impossible Science," and his largest scoop on this beat is the first television interview with intelligence officer David Grusch in June 2023, whose allegations later reached a congressional hearing. That record is why this claim gets a serious hearing rather than a dismissal.

His record is also contested, and both halves get stated. The long-running Metabunk thread on Coulthart catalogues criticisms from named posters: NorCal Dave on an Area 51 patch traced to an eBay seller, Charlie Wiser on an Australian outback case whose footage was later reproduced with a torch behind a camera lens, Duke on his initial mischaracterisation of Grusch's court-obtained police records, and Mendel on his use of "verified as credible" in place of "verified as true." Those are forum criticisms, not published analyses, and they are weighed as such. They are not a reason to discount this story. They are a reason to insist that anonymous sourcing be labelled as anonymous sourcing.

The scientist is Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist, director of the Galileo Project and, by his own description in the essays, chair of the UAP Science Advisory Council to the White House, Pentagon, FBI and intelligence agencies. On 10 August 2026 he published "Materials from Recently Downed Orbs Near White Sands Could be Key for Testing the Conjecture of Alien Tech" on Medium. His hedges must be reproduced exactly, because this is where the tiering turns. Having quoted Coulthart at length he writes: "As of now, this report had not been corroborated by administration officials. It could be either fact or fiction. We do not know whether it is real or not." Everything after that is conditional: "If, as Ross Coulthart claims, the Department of War was authorized by President Trump to engage with unidentified orbs over White Sands Missile Range, then the scientific analysis of their materials or digital data is key for progress." He argues that "the solid-state structure, chemical and isotopic composition of the orb materials, as well as their flight characteristics and response to human activities, would shed light on their nature and origin."

He followed it on 11 August 2026 with "What Does Downing of UAP Imply About Their Nature?", conditional in the same way. He calls his subject "an unconfirmed news report," writes "if, as reported, UAP were or will ever be downed," and notes that "so far, the publicly available data on UAP is not good enough to unambiguously associate UAP with alien (non-human made) technologies." His argument there is deflationary rather than sensational: "physical vulnerability to directed energy rules out pure atmospheric phenomena," downing "implies a control system which is vulnerable to conventional physics," and that "poses a significant constraint on how exotic the underlying technology really is."

This has to be said plainly, because downstream coverage has blurred it. Loeb is not a second source. He has no independent knowledge of any downed orb. He is a scientist reasoning about what would follow if a journalist's anonymously sourced report were true, and he says so in his own opening sentences. Treating Coulthart and Loeb as two sources is the commonest error being made about this story. Nor is the wider coverage corroboration: Cybernews on 10 August 2026 rewrote a viral X post by the aggregator account @UAPJames of 9 August 2026, which itself summarised Coulthart. Aggregation is not corroboration. The archive found no outlet that did its own reporting, no named person on the record about the programme, and no second journalist with independent sources.

Is the Ross Coulthart's Claim That the U.S. Is Shooting Down UAP Over White Sands (10 August 2026) real? The two-pass assessment

Pass one, the deflationary read, and it is strong.

Everything here traces through a single journalist to sources who are not named and whose positions are given only as "White House sources" and "defense sources." No document has been produced. No photograph, video or sensor return of any targeted object exists. No debris, material sample or chain of custody has been offered. No named official, serving or retired, has gone on record, and no second newsroom has confirmed any element. The claim that the president "may not be getting the full story" is itself sourced to anonymous people and is unfalsifiable by construction: it turns the absence of confirmation into evidence of a deeper deception, which is the shape of an argument that cannot lose.

The physical particulars, meanwhile, describe a place where all of this is routine. White Sands is the Army's largest instrumented open-air test range, it controls the largest block of restricted Department of Defense airspace in the country from the ground to space, and Directed Energy is one of the six Army modernisation priorities it exists to test. Fast, unlit, strange-looking objects over a missile range are the range's stock in trade. High-power microwave weapons that fry a drone's electronics are a live, funded, publicly reported American procurement line, described in the trade press in almost the same words Coulthart used, on the same day. And in this exact borderland airspace in February 2026 the Pentagon, Customs and Border Protection and the FAA confirmed on the record that a counter-drone system had been fired at an unidentified aircraft, that a laser transferred to CBP had been used near El Paso, and that in a separate incident the thing shot down turned out to be a government drone, with a party balloon featuring in the initial account. A programme of summoning, detecting and shooting at unidentified objects over southern New Mexico can be assembled entirely out of documented, budgeted, mundane American activity with nothing non-human anywhere in it. And a scientist reasoning about what downed material would imply is not evidence that any material exists.

Pass two, and it should not be waved away either.

The claim is specific where a fabrication usually is not. It names a range, a weapon class, a cabinet official tasked with the mission, an agency, a start month, and a second location near Juarez. Specific claims are falsifiable claims, and a single credible denial or a single document could break this one. It comes from a journalist with five Walkley awards and a Gold Walkley whose largest previous scoop on this subject led to a congressional hearing, and it was carried by a national broadcaster rather than a fringe site. It also arrives in the most active year of official American UAP record release yet, with five PURSUE tranches published between May and August 2026, a presidential directive waiving UAP nondisclosure agreements, and an ODNI memorandum implementing it. In a year like that a real adjacent programme is meaningfully less implausible than it would have been in an ordinary year. The absence of a denial proves nothing, but an administration that has spent 2026 publishing UAP files has said nothing at all about a claim that it is shooting at them.

Weigh both honestly and the answer is that this archive does not know, and neither does anyone outside the reporting chain. The tier is Unknown. That is neither a hedge nor an endorsement. It records that a named, credentialed journalist has made a specific claim on anonymous sourcing, that a named scientist has publicly reasoned from it while stating outright that it may be fiction, that no imagery or document exists, that no official body has confirmed or denied it, and that no independent reporting has corroborated it. If a document surfaces, or a named person goes on the record, or the Department of War answers the question, this page changes. Until then what exists is the claim, and the claim is what the archive is recording.

Sources

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