Roswell Officer's Sealed Statement Surfaces in Pentagon's Newest UFO Files

ROSWELL, N.M. — The Pentagon on Friday, October 23rd, posted its seventh release of UFO files since May under a program it calls PURSUE, and among the pages, according to International Business Times UK, is a statement attributed to Walter Haut, the Roswell press officer of 1947. His name is blacked out in the government's copy; outlets link it to him by wording matching a version published in 2007.

In the statement, signed on December 26th, 2002, Haut describes being taken by Colonel William Blanchard to a guarded hangar, Building 84. From a distance he says he saw an egg-shaped object and what appeared to be bodies under a canvas tarpaulin, and he writes that he was convinced it was a craft and crew from outer space. The text was to stay sealed until his death. Haut died in 2005, and it was published in the book Witness to Roswell.

The source offers a good deal of complicating context. Co-author Donald Schmitt says he drafted the text from things Haut had told him in confidence, and Haut's daughter, Julie Shuster, said in an interview that she and her father reviewed it word by word. Yet none of Haut's earlier accounts mention bodies, and on Larry King Live in 2003 he answered "No, sir" when asked whether he had ever seen any of the wreckage.

The Air Force's 1994 report named a Project Mogul balloon train as the likely source of the debris, and its 1997 report suggested the reported aliens were probably test dummies. The Pentagon's UFO office said in 2024 it had found no evidence of alien bodies at Roswell. Spokesman Sean Parnell says more files will follow on a rolling basis.

The same release figures in a second story. Gary Medicine Cloud, a hunter from the Wind River Reservation, told Cowboy State Daily that in 2003 he and a friend watched a silent black triangle pass twice over a Wyoming mountain pass, then climb away. Cowboy State Daily set his account beside an FBI-reported sighting by two federal agents. Officials have drawn no conclusion about what either object was.