Walter Haut, the Air Force press officer who originally released a statement from the Roswell Army Air Field stating that the army had captured a flying disk, has died. Haut was 83. In 1989, he met with Whitley Strieber in Roswell, took Mr. Strieber to the old base and to the site of the original crash, and stated that the object that had crashed there had, without question, been something from another world. In a surprise phone call, Haut verified Whitley’s story of the Roswell crash when Strieber was on the Larry King Live TV show to promote his 1989 novel Majestic, which is about Roswell.
Haut's daugher Julie Shuster says that her father never doubted that the crash really happened and that extraterrestrials had visited the area. In 1991, he helped found the International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico, where the UFO crash occurred in July of 1947.
At that time, Haut was the press officer at the US Army Air Force Base in Roswell. On July 8, 1947, Haut, on instructions from base commander William Blanchard, put out a press release about the discovery of the remains of a crashed UFO on the Brazel ranch near the base. The Army immediately issued a press release contradicting this story, saying that the remains were from a crashed weather balloon. The Roswell base was home to the 509th bomb wing, which was the only atomic bomb group in existence at the time.
01-05-2006, 12:43 PM
Important UFO Figure Dies
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