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In memoriam Walter HAUT

Here is what I wrote. STF
Walter G. Haut Obituary Stanton T. Friedman, January 06,2006

I wasn’t surprised when I heard of the death in Roswell, New Mexico, of Walter G. Haut on December 15, 2006.. Walter was 83 and his health had been deteriorating for some time. He had fought a long battle with diabetes as well. I was somewhat surprised that many of the comments in newspaper articles and on the internet mentioned only that he was the lieutenant who had issued the press release on July 8, 1947, noting that the Roswell Army Air Field had recovered a flying saucer found last week by a rancher North of Roswell. Walter was far more than just a base Public Information Officer. He had considerable stature in Roswell and not just because he was tall and broad shouldered.

I have known Walter for more than 26 years. He was generous of heart and spirit, had a fine sense of humor, spoke well of his fellow citizens and was very much respected by his fellow Roswellians, He was, as might be expected, also the target of nasty noisy negativists who have been attacking both the notion of flying saucers in general and the recovery of a crashed saucer near Roswell in particular for decades.

My first encounter with Walter caught me by surprise.In the early 1970s I had heard Lydia Sleppy’s story about working for an Albuquerque radio station when she took a call from a reporter at their Roswell Affiliate station and was asked to put a story on the news wire. The reporter said a saucer had crashed and the wreckage was being shipped to Wright Field when the transmission was interrupted by the FBI and she was told to stop transmitting. I tracked down some of the witnesses, but pretty much hit a stone wall until1978 when I was referred to Jesse Marcel by the manager of a TV station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I had already done 2 interviews there promoting my lecture that evening at Louisiana State University, but the 3rd reporter was nowhere to be found. The manager was giving me coffee, looking at his watch and obviously embarrassed when out of the blue he said “The guy you ought to talk to is Jesse Marcel. He lives over in Houma (LA) . He handled wreckage of one of those saucers you are interested in when he was in the military. We are old ham radio buddies.” The late reporter showed up in a few more minutes and I was busy the rest of the day. The next day from the airport I called information in Houma and talked to Jesse who told me his story, but didn’t have an exact date.

Months later I was at Bemidji State College in Bemidji , Minnesota . I was approached, after my lecture to a full house, by Vern and Jean Maltais who asked if I had ever heard anything about a crashed saucer in New Mexico. I said I had heard some stories. They told me about their friend Barney Barnett finding a crashed saucer and bodies in NM. I got their contact info and shared it the very next day with Bill Moore who was living in Minnesota at that time. He and I had met in Pittsburgh, PA, years before and after a lecture I gave at the University of Minnesota, Morris., where he was teaching English at the local High school.
Bill had a third story about an English actor, Hughie Green, driving across the USA from Los Angeles to Philadelphia when he heard on the radio about a crashed saucer in New Mexico. The story was finished by the time he got to Philadelphia. He could pin down the date (early July, 1947) as it wasn’t a trip he made often back then before the interstate highways.
Bill went to the University of Minnesota Library in the Twin Cities and was able to find the story in evening papers of July 8 and the balloon cover story of July 9. He shared copies with me. I checked Editor and Publisher and found the Roswell Daily Record newspaper listed.. I called asking for the editor from 1947. This was late 1978 so he was long gone. The woman on the phone asked if she could help. I said I had some stories about the base Public Information Officer a guy named Haut or Haught (his name was spelled at least 4 different ways in the press articles.). I was completely shocked when she said “His wife works here”!! I spoke with Lorraine Haut (everybody called her Pete) and then later with Walt.

I tell this story in some detail because the critics such as on the infamous and grossly inaccurate Peter Jennings TV Special of February 24, 2005, said the witnesses crawled out of the woodwork Others have said “Why did those guys go running to Stan Friedman?”. Bill and I spent a ton of money and time tracking down witnesses.. well before the internet. Monthly phone bills were running hundreds of dollars a month for each of us. No witnesses came running to us. We located 60 more by 1980 when “The Roswell Incident “ was published. And 92 by mid 1985.

Walter recalled the incident and the fact that he had been directed by his boss Colonel William Blanchard to issue the release that was pretty much dictated by Blanchard.The rest of the story is in the “Roswell Incident” and in the book by Don Berliner and myself “Crash at Corona”. Walter had a Roswell Army Air Field base yearbook for 1947. He had a copy made for me and was always helpful in commenting about the various people such as Blanchard and Marcel whom he knew well.

Walter, as with most other WW 2 veterans with whom I have spoken over the years, did not brag about his military exploits. He would answer questions. He was far more than just a PIO. He was born in the Chicago area June 3, 1922, went in the Army Air Corps in 1943 and became a navigator and then a bombardier as well. He was a crew member on more than 20 B-29 high altitude bombing missions over Japan for the 509th Bomb Group. This, remember, was the most elite military group in the world coming out of WW 2. They dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. They also tested 2 atomic bombs at Operation Crossroads in the Pacific in the summer of 1946 . Walter actually dropped the instrument package used to evaluate one of those tests. Because of the great importance of the instrument data, the best bombardiers were chosen for the task.

Blanchard had asked Walter to become the PIO in Roswell and the 2 became quite close, as I have verified with others. Here is one of the totally misleading arguments made against Roswell, by no less a “scientific authority”, than Dr. Joseph Nickell (3 degrees in English) of the self anointed Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (June 1977)
“The Roswell Incident” as it is popularly known was propelled into history on July 8, 1947, by an unauthorized press release from a young but eager public information officer at the Roswell Army Air Base. He reported that a flying disc “ had been retrieved from an area ranch where it had crashed. This came in the immediate wake of the first modern UFO sightings the famous string of “Flying Saucers” witnessed by private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. … Soon after the press release made headlines around the world, the young officer was reprimanded and new information was released. The unidentified flying object had really been a weather balloon.”. Nickell reiterated this nonsense a little later when he, in Los Angeles, and myself in Roswell were being interviewed by a TV station in LA. We could hear but not see each other. He claimed that some eager PIO just made up the story to get attention. I asked “Don’t you even know his name?” “No,” he replied. I said “ I do and have known him for years, been in his home, had meals with him. The notion that Walter Haut would have made up the story on his own when his group was the 509th , the most elite military group in the world, is completely absurd”..

Over the years I have checked with both Walter and Pete about the reprimand. It never happened. After all, the cover story came from the headquarters of the 8th Air Force in Fort Worth, Texas, from Blanchard’s boss, General Roger Ramey, not from Roswell. How could Walter have been reprimanded for following direct orders? In the two weeks between June 24 and July 8 there were over 1000 UFO sightings reported . Walter may indeed have been only 25. But his wartime and post war activities certainly indicate he was a very responsible individual. He received 4 air medals, a Distinguished Flying Cross, a purple heart and other medals. Blanchard certainly trusted him, Blanchard went on to be a 4 star General and was Vice Chief of the Staff of the USAF when he died of a massive heart attack at the Pentagon in 1966. Nickell certainly demonstrated the 4 basic rules of debunkers: What the public doesn’t know, I am not going to tell them; Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up; If you can’t attack the data, attack the people; Do your research by proclamation, investigation is too much trouble. The facts had all been presented years earlier in “The Roswell Incident”, in “Crash at Corona” and in several other books as well as in newspaper articles. Walter Haut had already done a lot of living, though only 25 at the time of the Roswell Incident.

That Walter was highly respected and trusted by the people of Roswell was clear to me when I started asking questions about him. He had been a successful insurance agent in town for many years. He then operated an Art Gallery. Both professions require integrity especially in a small town where word gets around very quickly. He was Charter President of the Roswell Optimist Club and lieutenant governor of Optimist District 19.He was a founding member and first president of the Roswell YMCA. Walter was Chairman of the Roswell Chamber of Commerce and Development Tourist and Recreation Committee and served three terms as Chairman of the Chamber Presidents Club Red Coats. He was secretary of the Local Air Force Association and the New Mexico Wing of
the Air Force Association. He earned Life time status on the Board of Directors of the Salvation Army. There were other community activities and he was inducted in to the New Mexico Tourism Hall of Fame in 2002. . He was certainly one of the founders of the non profit International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell . I was at the Virginia meeting arranged by the Fund for UFO research in 1990 to bring together witnesses and investigators as of course was Walter. The genesis of the Museum idea started there. The Museum has been so successful that is in its third location and is expected to be building a new facility on land right in the center of town.
Walter was President from 1991 until 1996. Over 2.5 million visitors from all over the world have visited. There has been no admission charge. Visitors are there because they want to be, as Roswell, though the business center of a large area, is not on the way to any place else. Walter served on the board, interfaced with City Council and did all he could to help attract visitors. Strange how there have been articles stating he was one of the owners of the museum and inferring he was making a big profit from the tourists.. So much poppycock.

It does seem odd that Walter was mentioned by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist William Broad in a 60 column inch article starting in the upper left hand corner of page one of the Sunday New York Times, Sept. 18, 1994 . He was noted as president of the Board of the museum. The article focused on the totally silly Mogul balloon explanation (USAF explanation Number 3) but never mentioned Walter’s role in issuing the press release. There is no better placement in American Journalism than this article had, but Broad didn’t talk to Walter or note his role.

I always got a kick out of the license plates on the Haut cars “MR UFO” and “MRS UFO”

Walter and Pete had been married for 56 years before her death in 1999. He leaves behind two daughters, 3 grandchildren and 4 great grand children He didn’t regret leaving the military in 1948 in order to stay in Roswell with his family. He will certainly be missed by many people. His daughter Julie Shuster is Director of the Museum. R.I.P.

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