Walter Haut’s sealed Roswell affidavit turns up in the Pentagon’s UFO files, with the names boxed out
The Department of War’s seventh PURSUE release on October 23 included a 2008 Bigelow Aerospace plan for the Defense Intelligence Agency whose appendix is the 2002 statement in which Roswell’s press officer swore he saw an egg-shaped craft and bodies under a tarpaulin. Headlines treated it as new. It has been in print since 2007, the government copy redacts even the names of officers dead for decades, and the plan it rides in never mentions Roswell.
Published
Twenty-eight PDFs and a page numbered 10
On Friday, October 23, 2026, the Department of War posted the seventh tranche of its Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, PURSUE: twenty-eight PDFs, no video, bringing the archive at war.gov/ufo to 478 files. Item DOW-UAP-D168, “BAASS Project Management Plan, December 2008,” is a 49-page redacted scan of a Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies paper for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and neither its official description nor the press release mentions Roswell. But on pages 45 and 46, after a list of three exhibits and a photocopy of the first of them, sits a typed page headed “APPENDIX 2,” then “2002 SEALED AFFIDAVIT OF” a ruled white box, “(ROSWELL ARMY AIR FORCE BASE PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICER, 1947),” and “DATE: December 26, 2002.” The Department’s own highlights for the release did not include it; the press found it. By Friday morning the Daily Mail was describing an eyewitness account “kept secret by the Pentagon,” The Sun had “4ft tall alien corpses” in its headline, and by Monday the Australian site SMBtech was announcing a “Sealed Roswell Affidavit Describing Alien Craft And Bodies Released By Department of War.” NewsNation and IBTimes noted it had been in print since 2007. The name is redacted. The date and every surviving word match the affidavit of Walter G. Haut, the lieutenant who delivered the base’s “flying disc” press release on July 8, 1947, as Thomas Carey and Donald Schmitt printed it in Witness to Roswell in 2007.
Sources: PURSUE Release 07: the seventh tranche of UAP filesDepartment of War Publishes Seventh Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFODOW-UAP-D168: BAASS Project Management Plan (Overview Paper), December 2, 2008Pentagon releases new UFO files detailing non-human bodies and mysterious egg-shaped craft inside guarded hangarNew Pentagon UFO files reveal bombshell Roswell testimony with ‘4ft tall alien corpses & mystery egg-shaped spaceship’Sealed Roswell Affidavit Describing Alien Craft And Bodies Released By Department of WarUFO eyewitness account of Roswell Army official surfaces in latest UAP file drop‘Crew From Outer Space’: Pentagon Releases Files Detailing Alleged Non-Human Bodies at Roswell CrashWalter Haut’s 1993 and 2002 affidavits, with the story of how the sealed statement was made
What the lieutenant swore
The statement runs to twenty numbered paragraphs. Haut describes a 7:30 a.m. staff meeting on July 8, 1947, attended, in the published text, by Colonel William Blanchard, Major Jesse Marcel and, down from Fort Worth, Brigadier General Roger Ramey. “Samples of wreckage were passed around the table. It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life.” At 9:30 Blanchard phoned and dictated the press release. Before sending him home to “hide out,” Blanchard walked him into Building 84, a B-29 hangar under heavy guard. “It was approx. 12 to 15 feet in length, not quite as wide, about 6 feet high, and more of an egg shape.” The Mail and The Sun made that six feet wide. Under a canvas tarpaulin lay “a couple of bodies.” “Only the heads extended beyond the covering, and I was not able to make out any features. The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a 10 year old child.” Paragraph 19: “I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space.” Schmitt drafted the text from years of private conversations; Haut’s daughter Julie Shuster, who ran the International UFO Museum he had co-founded, went over it with him sentence by sentence, and on December 26, 2002 he signed it at the museum before her, its notary and a visitor, to be opened only after his death. He died in December 2005, aged 83.
Sources: DOW-UAP-D168: BAASS Project Management Plan (Overview Paper), December 2, 2008Walter Haut’s 1993 and 2002 affidavits, with the story of how the sealed statement was madeHaut’s Daughter Tells How Affidavit Came to BeLt. Walter Haut, Spokesman Who Announced Wreckage of Flying Saucer in Roswell, Died at 83Pentagon releases new UFO files detailing non-human bodies and mysterious egg-shaped craft inside guarded hangarNew Pentagon UFO files reveal bombshell Roswell testimony with ‘4ft tall alien corpses & mystery egg-shaped spaceship’
Boxes over dead men’s names
What the Pentagon published is not a scan of the signed document but a typeset transcript, with no seal or notary’s jurat and printed page numbers 10 and 11 at the foot. Twenty-two redactions cover the affiant’s name, birth date, address, witness and notary, and every officer he names, Blanchard, who died in 1966, and Ramey, who died in 1963, among them. The boxes carry the codes 1843(a)(2) and 1843(a)(1)(B), the postponement grounds in section 1843 of the UAP records provisions Congress wrote into the fiscal 2024 defense bill: a record whose release “would violate” the Privacy Act of 1974, and “an intelligence source or method which is currently utilized, or reasonably expected to be utilized, by the Federal Government.” The portal says redactions exist “to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP.” Every boxed-out name but the museum visitor’s surname, which the book masked too, has been in print for nineteen years. The Roswell tour operator and researcher Paul Semones told The Epoch Times, “That’s not new.”
Sources: DOW-UAP-D168: BAASS Project Management Plan (Overview Paper), December 2, 2008Walter Haut’s 1993 and 2002 affidavits, with the story of how the sealed statement was madeSection 1843, Grounds for Postponement of Public Disclosure of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena RecordsPresidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)Roswell UFO Witness Describes Alien Bodies, Egg-Shaped Craft in Newly Released FilesBlanchard, William Hugh Papers (1916–1966)Ramey, Roger M. (Roger Maxwell), 1903–1963
Why Bigelow’s team kept it
The plan was BAASS’s overview paper for the DIA contract it had won the previous September, the $22 million program later reported as AATIP. Dated December 2, 2008 and marked proprietary and confidential on every page of the plan itself, it lays out ten recommendations to the agency and nine projects. Project Oral History “will contact and record interviews with dozens of highly placed individuals from industry and the military who have had direct knowledge of film evidence, physical material evidence, hardware itself, biological tissue and other material” relating to advanced aerial technology over the past several decades. One recommendation asks DIA, “under the premise that biological material of potentially non-human origin has been recovered,” to lobby for access to medical samples. The concluding comments are blunt: “It is imperative that physical access be obtained to actual hardware of the anomalous spacecraft that appear to be many decades or centuries beyond anything we have.” The three exhibits read like that premise in miniature: the 1947 Twining memo, its author’s name boxed out too, calling the phenomenon “something real and not visionary or fictitious” while noting “the lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered exhibits”; Haut’s craft and crew in a hangar; and a 1957 scramble from RAF Manston in which an American F-86D pilot was ordered to fire a full salvo of rockets at a radar target. The body of the plan never cites any of the three and never uses the word Roswell. The Pentagon’s 2024 historical review found that the DIA “did not seek, nor specifically authorize” the contractor’s UFO work.
Sources: DOW-UAP-D168: BAASS Project Management Plan (Overview Paper), December 2, 2008The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) DocumentationReport on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume IU.S. pilot was ordered to shoot down UFO
A sworn statement, and the record around it
The affidavit has always been a late and contested document, and its republication changes none of that. Haut’s 1993 affidavit had Blanchard phoning him to write the release and ended with the same conviction, “that the material recovered was some type of craft from outer space,” but mentioned no staff meeting, second site, hangar or bodies. Asked in 1992 whether he had ever seen the wreckage: “No, and I feel like an idiot every time somebody asks me that.” On Larry King Live on July 1, 2003, six months after signing the sealed statement, the question came again. “No, sir.” Haut first described the hangar on a videotape Dennis Balthaser made with him in November 2000, on which he also said, “I didn’t even see one. I just wrote a press release.” Balthaser, who believes in the crash, wrote that Haut “did not write the affidavit he signed” and that the tape “shows a man that couldn’t remember where he took basic training.” Kevin Randle later called the affidavit “just too perfect given how those statements have been gathered after 2000,” and, answering a reader, “I don’t reject Haut, but I do question the reliability of his second affidavit given his history of denying that he had seen anything.” Shuster answered in 2007 that she and her father had discussed “each and every sentence,” and that three years between signing and death make “an affidavit of information, not a ‘deathbed confession.’” Ross Coulthart of NewsNation, quoted by IBTimes on Monday, called the account “extremely credible”: “I think he’s for real.” The official position has not moved: a Project Mogul balloon in 1994, anthropomorphic test dummies and two 1950s accidents in 1997, and in 2024 the Pentagon’s review repeated that “no records showed any evidence that the USG recovered aliens or extraterrestrial material.” The PURSUE portal calls its entire holdings “unresolved cases, meaning the government is unable to make a definitive determination,” and Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell’s statement promises more “on a rolling basis,” with no date for an eighth.
Sources: Walter Haut’s 1993 and 2002 affidavits, with the story of how the sealed statement was madeAliens in the BasementLarry King Live, July 1, 2003: the Roswell witnessesWalter Haut’s AffidavitRoswell Update: Fading Star?Walter Haut – Lost in the Roswell MinutaeHaut’s Daughter Tells How Affidavit Came to Be‘I Think We’re Being Played’: Ross Coulthart Warns Pentagon UFO Files Reveal Potential ThreatThe Roswell Report: Case ClosedGovernment Records: Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New MexicoReport on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume IPresidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)Department of War Publishes Seventh Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFO
Sources & documents
PURSUE Release 07: the seventh tranche of UAP filesDepartment of War · war.gov/ufo · October 23, 2026 · File list with official descriptionsDOW-UAP-D168: BAASS Project Management Plan (Overview Paper), December 2, 2008Department of War · PURSUE Release 07 · 49-page redacted scan · The affidavit is Appendix 2 on pages 45–46 · PDFDepartment of War Publishes Seventh Release of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Files on WAR.GOV/UFODepartment of War · Statement attributable to Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell · October 23, 2026Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE)Department of War · war.gov/ufo · Program statement and redaction policySealed Roswell Affidavit Describing Alien Craft And Bodies Released By Department of WarSMBtech · October 26, 2026‘Crew From Outer Space’: Pentagon Releases Files Detailing Alleged Non-Human Bodies at Roswell CrashBriane Nebria · IBTimes UK · October 24, 2026UFO eyewitness account of Roswell Army official surfaces in latest UAP file dropBlake Burman, Michael Ramsey and Jesse Weber · NewsNation · October 23, 2026‘I Think We’re Being Played’: Ross Coulthart Warns Pentagon UFO Files Reveal Potential ThreatBgie Areña · IBTimes UK · October 26, 2026Roswell UFO Witness Describes Alien Bodies, Egg-Shaped Craft in Newly Released FilesJill McLaughlin · The Epoch Times · October 24, 2026 · With Paul Semones’s remarksPentagon releases new UFO files detailing non-human bodies and mysterious egg-shaped craft inside guarded hangarChris Melore · Daily Mail · October 23, 2026New Pentagon UFO files reveal bombshell Roswell testimony with ‘4ft tall alien corpses & mystery egg-shaped spaceship’Joe Mannion · The U.S. Sun · October 23, 2026Roswell Revisited: Pentagon Releases Testimony Describing Non-Human BodiesZakiya Lathan · Unknown Country · October 27, 2026Walter Haut’s 1993 and 2002 affidavits, with the story of how the sealed statement was madeDavid Rudiak · Roswell Proof · The 2002 text as published in Witness to Roswell (2007)Haut’s Daughter Tells How Affidavit Came to BeJulie Shuster · MUFON UFO Journal · September 2007 · Reproduced by David RudiakLt. Walter Haut, Spokesman Who Announced Wreckage of Flying Saucer in Roswell, Died at 83Associated Press · December 2005 · Reprinted by The UFO ChroniclesWalter Haut’s AffidavitKevin Randle · A Different Perspective · December 15, 2007 · With the wording of the 2000 videotapeWalter Haut – Lost in the Roswell MinutaeKevin Randle · A Different Perspective · March 11, 2016 · With his reply in the commentsRoswell Update: Fading Star?Dave Thomas · Skeptical Inquirer · January/February 2009 · Quoting Dennis Balthaser’s October 2007 essay · PDFAliens in the BasementFrank Kuznik · Air & Space/Smithsonian · August/September 1992 · Mirrored textLarry King Live, July 1, 2003: the Roswell witnessesCNN · Transcript · Walter Haut, Glenn Dennis, Julie Shuster and Donald Schmitt among the guestsSection 1843, Grounds for Postponement of Public Disclosure of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena RecordsPublic Law 118-31, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 · December 22, 2023 · GovInfoBlanchard, William Hugh Papers (1916–1966)Air Force Historical Research Agency · Fact sheetRamey, Roger M. (Roger Maxwell), 1903–1963Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) · Authority recordThe Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) DocumentationJohn Greenewald Jr. · The Black Vault · DIA contract records released under FOIAReport on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, Volume IAll-domain Anomaly Resolution Office · Released March 8, 2024 · PDFThe Roswell Report: Case ClosedCapt. James McAndrew · Headquarters United States Air Force · 1997 · Project GutenbergGovernment Records: Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New MexicoU.S. General Accounting Office · GAO/NSIAD-95-187 · July 28, 1995U.S. pilot was ordered to shoot down UFORaphael G. Satter · Associated Press via NBC News · October 20, 2008 · On the British files behind the third exhibitSpotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun.
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