Roswell Testimony Part 10

File: UFO114

5.3 Walter Haut [Second Lieutenant Walter Haut was a public information officer at Roswell AAF in 1947. Colonel Blanchard ordered Haut to issue a press release telling the country that the Army had found a flying saucer. Here is the text of Haut's press release.]

The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the Intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County.

The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was able to contact the sheriff's office, who in turn notified Maj. Jesse A. Marcel of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.

Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher's home. It was inspected at Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.

[Here is what Haut said on the American television program "Unsolved Mysteries".]

I took the release into town. And that was one of the things that Colonel Blanchard told me to do, take it into town, because if there was any validity to this, he didn't want the news media to feel that we had jumped over their heads and were not cooperating with them.

[Here is what Haut said in an interview for an article in "Air and Space/Smithsonian" magazine, Sep-Oct 1992, when asked what he thought really happened back in 1947.]

I feel there was a crash of an extra-terrestrial vehicle near Corona.

5.4 Bill Rickett [Bill Rickett was a Counter Intelligence Corps officer based in Roswell. He had an opportunity to examine some of the wreckage recovered from the Foster Ranch. He escorted Dr Lincoln LaPaz, a meteor expert from the New Mexico Institute of Meteoritics, on a tour of the crash site and the surrounding area.]

[The material] was very strong and very light. You could bend it but couldn't crease it. As far as I know, no one ever figured out what it was made of....

It was LaPaz's job to try to find out what the speed and trajectory of the thing was. LaPaz was a world-renowned expert on trajectories of objects in the sky, especially meteors, and I was told to give him all the help I could. At one point LaPaz interviewed the farmer [Mac Brazel]. I remember something coming up during their conversation about this fellow thinking that some of his animals had acted strangely after this thing happened. Dr LaPaz seemed very interested in this for some reason.

LaPaz wanted to fly over the area, and this was arranged. He found one other spot where he felt this thing had touched down and then taken off again. The sand at this spot had been turned into a glass-like substance. We collected a boxful of samples of this material. As I recall, there were some metal samples here, too, of that same sort of thin foil stuff. LaPaz sent this box off somewhere for study; I don't know or recall where, but I never saw it again. This place was some miles from the other one.

LaPaz was very good at talking to people, especially some of the local ranch hands who didn't speak a lot of English. LaPaz spoke Spanish. I remember he found a couple of people who had seen two -- I don't know what to call them, UFOs I suppose -- anyway, had seen two of these things fly over very slowly at a very low altitude on a date, in the evening, that he determined had been a day or two after the other one had blown up. These people said something about animals being affected, too....

Before he went back to Albuquerque, he told me that he was certain that this thing had gotten into trouble, that it had touched down for repairs, taken off again, and then exploded. He also felt certain there were more than one of these devices, and that the others had been looking for it. At least that's what he said. He was positive the thing had malfunctioned.

The Air Force's explanation that it was a balloon was totally untrue. It was not a balloon. I never did know for sure what its purpose was, but it wasn't ours. I remember speculating with LaPaz that it might have been some higher civilization checking on us. LaPaz wasn't against the idea, but he was going to leave speculations out of his report.

End of part 10