Walter G. Haut

Early life and background

Walter Haut was born on June 3, 1922, in Chicago, Illinois. Public sources say little about his childhood or schooling; the record picks up with the Second World War, when he trained as a bombardier in the Army Air Forces and flew 35 missions against Japan. In the summer of 1946 he took part in Operation Crossroads, the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll, where he dropped instrument packages to record data from the blasts. It was a modest but telling credential: by the end of the war he was a trusted airman inside the small, intensely secret community built around the atomic bomb.

That community is the key to understanding why Haut ended up at the centre of the most famous UFO story in history. In 1947 he was a first lieutenant assigned as public information officer (PIO) to the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico, the only unit in the world then equipped and trained to deliver atomic weapons. His commander, Colonel William H. Blanchard, was by most accounts a close personal friend as well as a superior. A PIO at an ordinary airfield might have gone his whole career without making news; at Roswell, in the first summer of the nuclear age, Haut was placed one telephone call away from a national sensation.

The Roswell press release

In early July 1947 rancher W. W. “Mac” Brazel brought strange debris from the Foster ranch to the Chaves County sheriff, who passed word to the base. Intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel went out to examine the field. On the morning of July 8, Blanchard directed Haut to write and distribute a short statement saying that the 509th had recovered a “flying disc.” Haut took it to the local radio stations and newspapers (according to his own later recollection, in part by reading it over the telephone), and the story spread worldwide within hours. The Roswell Daily Record ran it under a banner headline that afternoon.

The retraction came almost immediately. Brigadier General Roger Ramey of Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth displayed shredded foil, sticks and rubber to the press and declared the object a weather balloon with a radar target. For the next three decades Roswell was a footnote. Haut, for his part, went back to civilian life.

What is striking, and central to everything that followed, is how consistently Haut disclaimed any firsthand knowledge in the first half-century of his account. The Wikipedia summary of his statements traces the pattern: in a 1979 interview he said Blanchard told him to put out the release but that he could not see the object, and when he asked to see it was told the request was “impossible”; in a March 1989 interview he said he knew “nothing” about what was recovered. In a 1979 filmed interview summarized by researcher Patrick Gross, he described a base under tight secrecy in which he was the courier of an announcement, not a witness to its subject.

Rediscovery and the 1993 affidavit

The modern Roswell legend began in 1978, when Marcel spoke to Stanton Friedman, and expanded through the 1980 book The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. Haut was among the surviving base personnel sought out by researchers, and as the story grew through the 1980s he cooperated with them. Ufologist Kevin Randle later recalled that in 1989 Haut gave terse, one-word answers and held to his standard account.

On May 14, 1993, as the Air Force was preparing its own reports and as Roswell was becoming a commercial attraction, Haut signed a notarized affidavit. In it he repeated that he had written the press release at Blanchard’s order, said he believed Blanchard had seen the material and would not have mistaken a balloon for something remarkable, and said the same of Marcel. Notably, as Wikipedia and Randle both observe, the 1993 document says nothing about bodies, multiple crash sites, or Haut seeing anything himself. It is the last sworn statement made in his lifetime that is widely accepted as his own composition.

The International UFO Museum and Research Center

In 1991 Haut helped found the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, with Glenn Dennis, the mortician whose own Roswell account has been controversial, and realtor Max Littell, who were associated with the project by 1993. Haut served as its president until 1996. The museum, housed in a former movie theatre on North Main Street, began with a handful of displays and a research library and grew into the centrepiece of Roswell’s tourist economy and its annual UFO festival. His daughter, Julie Shuster, later became its director. Critics have noted that the family’s livelihood is tied to the museum, a fact that proponents of the later affidavit find irrelevant and sceptics find worth mentioning.

The museum matters to Haut’s biography for two reasons. It gave a retired press officer a public platform on which he could be introduced, again and again, as the man who issued the release. And it created a context in which visiting researchers and filmmakers were constantly asking him to say more.

The shifting testimony

Around 2000, according to Kevin Randle, Haut began to “radically alter his tale.” In interviews and on film he said that Blanchard had taken him to a hangar at the base on the afternoon of July 8, 1947, where he saw part of a craft, described as egg-shaped and roughly fifteen feet long, and a number of small bodies about four feet tall with large heads. He also said Marcel had told him the debris was something he had never seen and did not believe was of this earth. Randle, who is no debunker, wrote that these post-2000 accounts were sometimes contradicted by Haut “within a single paragraph and sometimes in a single sentence.”

The formal expression of the new account is the “sealed affidavit.” Researcher Donald Schmitt interviewed Haut about material Haut wanted kept confidential during his lifetime, then drafted a statement and emailed it to the family. Haut signed it at the museum in 2002 (secondary sources differ on the exact date, giving both July 31 and December 26) in the presence of his daughter, a museum notary named Beverlee Morgan, and a visitor. Schmitt and the family agreed that it would not be released until Haut’s death. Schmitt has acknowledged that Haut did not write the text himself; Randle’s view is that drafting a statement for another person’s signature is “not uncommon” and that Haut and Julie Shuster read it carefully, though he also called Schmitt “biased in his thinking.” Shuster explained the document’s origins in a 2007 article in the MUFON Journal.

Haut died on December 15, 2005, at the age of 83. The affidavit surfaced in 2007 in Witness to Roswell by Donald Schmitt and Thomas Carey, and was widely reported as a “deathbed confession.” The New York Sun obituary recorded him primarily as the man who informed the press of the Roswell UFO, a framing that notes how thoroughly the event defined his public identity.

Reception and criticism

The case against taking the affidavit at face value rests on a short list of facts. First, it contradicts Haut’s own 1979, 1989 and 1993 statements, the last of which was sworn. Second, it was drafted by an advocate, not by Haut. Third, it was withheld until Haut could no longer be questioned about it. Fourth, the sequence of events it describes, with Haut being led to a hangar on the afternoon of July 8, sits uneasily with earlier statements that he was refused any view of the material. Reviewers of Witness to Roswell criticized the book for lacking supporting evidence, for contradicting previous accounts, and for presenting the 2002 text as Haut’s own affidavit; one concluded that the affidavit “turns out to be just another dead end.”

Schmitt’s credibility is itself a complicating factor. His former co-author Randle publicly broke with him over what Randle regarded as fabricated credentials and embellished witnesses, and has since argued that the Haut affidavit is of limited value. Randle goes further than most sceptics in suggesting that Haut himself contributed substantially to the shaping of the modern Roswell myth, telling the story, in changing forms, to dozens of researchers, reporters and documentary producers. He also offers a possible source for one of Haut’s later details: a July 9, 1947 newspaper line quoting an unnamed public relations officer saying a balloon was “in his office” and would “probably stay right there,” which Randle thinks may have been echoed in Haut’s later claim of debris in his office. That reading is disputed, since the wire story’s dateline was Fort Worth, which would make the office General Ramey’s.

The case for the affidavit is that it came from a man with no obvious motive to lie about something he had been quietly asked about for decades, that Haut expressly asked for its release only after his death, and that his daughter was present at the signing. Supporters also note that Haut was a witness to Blanchard’s own behaviour, and that the abrupt nature of the 1947 reversal (a base commander announcing a “flying disc” then retracting it within hours) is itself unusual and has never been fully explained to everyone’s satisfaction. These are real points, but they establish only that Haut’s motives were sincere, not that his memory of events 55 years earlier was accurate.

The official explanation, set out in the Air Force’s 1994 report and its 1997 sequel, is that the debris came from Project Mogul, a classified programme to detect Soviet nuclear tests with high-altitude balloon trains. A Mogul explanation would also account for why the base might have reacted with such secrecy in July 1947, while Haut, a PIO unaware of Mogul, might have honestly reported an unexplained object.

Legacy

Haut’s significance is double. As a historical figure, he is one of the few named participants in the first few hours of the Roswell story: without a signed press release from a credible office, there is no modern Roswell. The July 8 release is a genuine, datable artifact and is the closest thing to a primary document that the case possesses. As a witness, he is the cautionary example in the debate over how much weight to place on elderly recollections that grow over time, are collected by committed researchers, and are published after the witness can no longer be examined.

The International UFO Museum remains his most tangible legacy, drawing visitors from around the world each year and cementing Roswell in the public imagination as the capital of the UFO phenomenon. For readers and researchers, a sensible reading of Haut is the one his earlier statements invite: as a reliable witness to what he did (he wrote and distributed the release) and a much less reliable witness to what he later said he saw. His own 1979 words, that he was told to put out the release but could not see the object, remain the most sober entry in the record.

Current status

The affidavit remains a staple of Roswell books and documentaries, and the museum continues to operate in Roswell under his family’s involvement. No independent evidence has emerged to corroborate the hangar scene, and no document from 1947 places Haut in such a hangar. Mainstream historians treat the incident as a Mogul recovery, while committed advocates treat the affidavit as one of several late confirmations. The question of when and why Haut changed his story is likely to remain unresolved.