The Associated Press
December 19, 2005
ROSWELL — A U.S. Army lieutenant who issued a now-famous news release that sparked decades of speculation about whether aliens really crash-landed here in 1947 has died.
Walter Haut, a former spokesman for the now-defunct Roswell Army Air Field, died of natural causes Thursday in Roswell, his daughter Julie Shuster said Sunday. He was 83.
Haut listened closely on July 8, 1947, as base commander Col. William Blanchard dictated information about a recovered flying saucer and ordered Haut to issue it.
The Roswell Daily Record ran a bold headline July 9, 1947: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” The same day, an Army statement was released saying the recovered wreckage was only a weather balloon. “I guess they changed their mind,” Haut told The Associated Press in 1997. Haut said he never was told where the flying disc reported in his news release was found. Though he never saw a UFO, he remained a believer. “There must have been something in the skies at that time,” he said in 1997. “There’s just too much evidence.”
Haut, born June 3, 1922, in Chicago, is survived by his two daughters, Shuster and Marabeth Fields of Roswell, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
