Ross Douthat is an American conservative columnist and author who spent 17 years as an opinion columnist at The New York Times before joining CBS's 60 Minutes as a correspondent in 2026. Best known for writing on religion, politics and culture, he became one of the more prominent mainstream voices to treat UFOs as a serious subject, questioning scholars and lawmakers about what the government knows and what the phenomenon might mean for belief.

Douthat was born in San Francisco in 1979 and graduated from Harvard in 2002. He was a senior editor at The Atlantic and a longtime film critic for National Review before the Times named him an op-ed columnist in April 2009, when he was the youngest regular writer on its opinion page. A convert to Catholicism as a teenager, he has written books including Bad Religion (2012), To Change the Church (2018), The Decadent Society (2020), The Deep Places (2021), a memoir of chronic illness, and Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025). In 2025 he began hosting the Times Opinion podcast Interesting Times.

Douthat has said he had little interest in ufology until the Times published its late-2010s reporting on Navy pilots' footage. He has described some encounter stories as resembling the spiritual experiences catalogued by William James, and said his interest grew because officials who were not conspiracy theorists seemed to treat the subject as something more concrete. On Interesting Times he interviewed the religious studies scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka in July 2025 about religion, contact narratives and government secrecy. In June 2026 he questioned Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who told him "the phenomenon exists" and said to follow the money, pointing to Pentagon spending that goes unaccounted for.

After President Donald Trump promised in February 2026 to release government UFO files, Douthat wrote a Times column posing four questions for the White House. Journalist Ross Coulthart criticized it for, in his reading, prejudging the effort, quoting Douthat's line that he would bet against disclosure delivering more than heavily redacted teases. In May 2026 Douthat joined Pasulka for a Free Press conversation on UFOs as both a religious and a scientific question, saying he had no coherent theory of the phenomenon but found it striking that politicians as different as Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio seemed to suspect something was hidden inside the national security state.

In July 2026, 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton announced in a staff memo that Douthat would join the program as a correspondent. In a farewell conversation on The Ezra Klein Show, Klein asked whether the newsmagazine's resources would let him finally crack the UFO story. He arrived at network television as a rare figure in American opinion journalism: a religious writer who had pressed a leading scholar of UFO belief and a congressional disclosure advocate on the record about government secrecy.