The Pentagon’s New UFO Files Include The Roswell Officer’s 2002 Statement — In Print Since 2007

The Department of War on Friday posted Release 07 of PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — at war.gov/UFO. The release program runs under President Trump’s February 19, 2026 directive, with support from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; the first tranche was posted May 8, 2026, and spokesman Sean Parnell has said more releases will follow on a rolling basis. The archive is presented on war.gov as unresolved cases in which, in the site’s words, the government is unable to make a definitive determination.

Among the documents is a copy of the affidavit Walter G. Haut signed on December 26, 2002. It sits at page 46 of file D168 — a historical report package from BAASS, the research arm of Bigelow Aerospace, alongside a 2008 project plan and a 2009 monthly report — not as a standalone Roswell document, and the release does not highlight it.

Who Haut was. In 1947 Haut was the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field, serving under the base commander, Col. William Blanchard. On July 8, 1947, Blanchard dictated a press release by phone announcing that the base had recovered a “flying disc,” and Haut delivered it to radio stations KGFL and KSWS and to the Roswell Daily Record and the Morning Dispatch. The Daily Record’s front page that afternoon is the photograph at the top of this story. The same day, at Fort Worth, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey identified the recovered material as a weather balloon and radar target and posed with the debris — the position the Army took from that day on.

What the affidavit says. In the statement, Haut says a staff meeting was held at 7:30 a.m. on July 8, 1947, where he learned of two sites: a debris field in Lincoln County, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell, and a second site about 40 miles north of town holding a craft and bodies. He says samples of foil passed around the meeting were “paper thin yet extremely strong.” He says Blanchard then took him to Building 84 — Hangar P-3 — where he saw an egg-shaped object about 12 to 15 feet long and about six feet high, with a metallic surface and no windows, portholes, wings, tail section or landing gear, and a couple of bodies lying under a canvas tarpaulin, their heads out: larger than normal, the canvas contour suggesting the size of a 10-year-old child. Blanchard, he says, later indicated the bodies were about four feet tall. The affidavit closes: “I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space.”

What is not new. Haut had the affidavit sealed until after his death; he died on December 15, 2005. It was first published in full in June 2007, in Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt’s book Witness to Roswell, and its full text has been on public websites for years. Release 07 contains no new Roswell evidence, makes no finding about the affidavit, and does not endorse it. What is new is only the affidavit’s placement: a redacted copy now sits inside an official government release.

The caveat on the document itself. Haut did not write the affidavit. Schmitt composed it from statements Haut had made over the years; Haut reviewed it, changed nothing, and signed it before witnesses, among them his daughter Julie Shuster. His earlier sworn statement, a 1993 affidavit, describes only the press release — it claims none of this — and in earlier interviews Haut said he had not seen the object or the bodies.

The government’s standing position. The Pentagon’s AARO office, in its Historical Record Report Volume 1 (March 2024), found no verifiable evidence that the government has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology or bodies; it assessed the Roswell material as consistent with a balloon from the then-classified Project Mogul, and attributed the “alien bodies” reports to 1950s anthropomorphic test dummies, the 1956 KC-97 aircraft crash, and a 1959 balloon mishap. Nothing in Release 07 changes that position.

The batch’s newest item is not Roswell. The release’s most recent document is an AARO memorandum on a June 2026 sighting in which three federal agents at a sensitive site in the western United States watched a matte-black triangle, 13 to 15 feet across, hover and then bank into a canyon at high speed — a witness estimate, with no instrument measurement. No debris was found, and AARO reached no conclusion. The New York Post led its coverage of the release with that memo.

Sources: Department of War (war.gov/UFO, PURSUE Release 07, incl. file D168); the affidavit of Walter G. Haut, signed December 26, 2002, first published in Witness to Roswell (2007); AARO, Historical Record Report Vol. 1 (2024); the Daily Mail; Alien News; the New York Post.