Two accounts posted the same scoop within a day of each other, both stamped BREAKING, both promising alien technology and alien writing in high quality photos. One ran a four-panel collage of lab sheets and a spiky craft. The other ran a TikTok clip of a man in a suit under a NewsNation logo, captioned so you would think a wall had just come down. Strip the sirens off both and you are left with a single thing: Ross Coulthart talking about the CARET documents.
I want to be clear about where I stand before I take this apart, because I am not the guy who walks into these stories looking to laugh at people. I think the phenomenon is real, I think governments have sat on more than they admit, and I think the reflex to explain every sighting away is itself a claim that deserves as much scrutiny as the sightings do. That is exactly why recycled material bothers me. When old hoax images get repackaged as new evidence, they do not help the case. They give the debunkers a free win and they bury the questions that actually matter under fan art.
What CARET actually is
The CARET story is not new, and it is not from a whistleblower. It comes from the summer of 2007, when photos of small, strange drones started appearing around California and Lake Tahoe. The first set reached the Coast to Coast AM website from someone calling himself Chad. Then, on June 26, 2007, an anonymous author using the name Isaac published an open letter and a batch of scanned documents. He said he had worked at a secret facility in Palo Alto, the Palo Alto CARET Laboratory, from 1984 to 1987. CARET, he wrote, stood for Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology, a program to reverse-engineer alien hardware. The craft, he claimed, became visible because their cloaking went wrong. The documents included a linguistic primer for the glyphs seen on the machines.
That is the origin. A named lab that has never been shown to exist, an anonymous source who vanished, and a set of pages that have circulated for almost two decades as one of the best-known UFO photo cases on the internet.
The debunk is not one weak argument, it is several strong ones
MUFON, which is not a skeptics club, sent its own investigator to look at the photos. VFX artists working with that investigation, including one who had done History Channel work, concluded the images were computer-generated. Other credentialed imaging people who examined the material said the Isaac documents were fully CGI and the drone shots were real photographs with rendered craft dropped in.
The glyphs have their own tell. The same symbol set showed up in a late-2007 Alienware promotion, a contest called Decipher the Alien Message and Win, tied to the company's Area-51 gaming laptops. The direction of the copying is genuinely disputed, and I will not pretend it is settled, but either way the alphabet is tangled up with a laptop marketing gimmick, not a black program.
Then, in 2023, the artist behind the glyph and hardware work came forward. She posts under the name icze4r and says she built the whole thing from odds and ends on her desk, that the man who uploaded it took her artwork and her 3D models to make money, and that he disappeared once a colleague threatened legal action. Her account has its own soft spots, which she admits, lost files and old memories, and I will hold it as a strong claim rather than a sealed verdict. But it lines up with everything the imaging people said years earlier.
The images in this week's post are worse than the originals
Here is the part that should stop anyone before they hit repost.
The authentic 2007 pages were flat black-and-white photocopies with stenciled lettering, labeled Q4-86 Research Report and Q3-85 Inventory Review in the material MUFON reproduced. The sheet in this collage reads Q4-85 Research Report. That is not a scanning artifact. It is the wrong number, the kind of small error that shows up when someone regenerates a look from memory rather than copying the source. The clean grayscale renders and the glossy, ray-traced turbine craft in the bottom-right panel do not read like 2007 photocopies at all. They read like modern image generation. So the honest description of this post is not leaked government files. It is an AI-flavored recreation of a hoax, presented as the hoax's smoking gun.
Coulthart, and how much his word should carry
Ross Coulthart is a serious journalist by his record. Five Walkley awards, including the Gold Walkley, work at Four Corners, 60 Minutes, and Spotlight. He is also the correspondent who put David Grusch on camera and has spent years arguing that governments hide knowledge of non-human craft. That commitment cuts both ways. Australia's ABC Media Watch has questioned the lack of evidence behind his UFO claims, and Australian Skeptics handed him their 2023 Bent Spoon for uncritical reporting on wreckage and bodies. Before his UFO turn he did PR for Ben Roberts-Smith, whom a court later found took part in the murder of four Afghans. None of that makes him wrong. It means his enthusiasm is not proof, and a clip of him calling documents intriguing is not a chain of custody.
The reported line that he is not ready to call it a hoax is worth flagging carefully. As far as I can trace, that quote and the framing around the segment live on the aggregator posts, not on a NewsNation transcript I can point to. A clip is circulating. What he said word for word, and in what context, should be checked against the actual broadcast before anyone builds on it.
Why this keeps happening
David Grusch's July 2023 testimony to Congress is the reason this old material has a second life. He told lawmakers the government ran a multi-decade retrieval and reverse-engineering program and had recovered non-human biologics. I take that testimony seriously as testimony, and I think the people demanding he be heard are right to demand it. But it is second-hand account, and no physical evidence or document has been put in public to back it. Into that gap, older cases get pulled forward and dressed up as corroboration. A hoax from 2007 becomes a stand-in for the proof that has not arrived.
If you believe, as I do, that something real is being withheld, the worst thing you can do is accept counterfeit receipts for it. The CARET material fails on its own terms: wrong labels, CGI conclusions from multiple independent examiners, an artist who says she drew the glyphs, and now a fresh batch of images that were not even part of the original file. Keep asking who ran the real programs and what they retrieved. Do not let a set of pretty renders answer the question for you.