r/UFOs

HI there, I'm Ross Coulthart. I'm a multi-award-winning investigative journalist with over three decades experience in newspapers and television, including reporting for Australia's Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, public broadcaster ABC TV's Four Corners, the Nine Network Sunday program and Australia's 60 Minutes & the Seven Network's Sunday Night. I am a best-selling author of numerous books including the widely acclaimed "In Plain Sight: An investigation into UFOs and impossible science". I also aired the first TV , and brought to the world the former Air Force intelligence officer’s claims that the U.S. government is covering up a UFO retrieval program.

In partnership with NewsNation, I have recently launched a new program called "Reality Check", in which I dig into stories the media is supposedly not meant to tell, taking a fact-based approach to tackle everything from unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) to other mysteries often missing from the headlines. You can find and watch the current Reality Check episodes .

Pleased to be joining you today. ASK ME ANYTHING!

In February, 2023 we added a new post flair titled . The only difference between this post type and ‘Witness/Sighting’ is we began experimenting with code which could automatically enforce the on posts flaired this way. Our bot removed posts which did not include a reference to the location and time in which a sighting occurred.

It took us this long to acquire sufficient developer help (thank you ) to get this up and running for each of the various post types (link posts with submission statements, link posts with post text, and text posts). We’re happy to announce this is now fully working and our bot is successfully enforcing the requirement of a location and time for Sighting Report posts. We would now like to propose we:

1. Make a new flair simply called ‘Sighting’ and have it be the only flair associated with these types of posts. This would ensure sighting posts are more consistent, descriptive, and reduce the amount of moderation required for them.

2. Apply the automated requirement of location and time of the sighting via our bot to these posts. This information is already required per our posting guidelines for sightings, but previously was only enforced manually.

Additionally, we are experimenting with having our bot automatically add parts of the data from these posts into a , which would be possible now that parts of these posts would be consistently formatted. We’d like to hear your thoughts on this approach and these proposed changes first before we proceed any further. Let us know your feedback or questions in the comments below.