Roswell’s Sealed Affidavit Is Now Part of the Official UFO Record. Here’s What It Actually Says—and Where It Was Hidden

The most quoted sentence in the Pentagon’s latest UFO document dump was written more than two decades ago by a man who has been dead since 2005.

“I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space,” Walter G. Haut declared in a sworn affidavit signed December 26, 2002. Haut was the Roswell Army Air Field public information officer in July 1947—the same officer who issued the original press release announcing that the military had recovered a “flying disc,” a claim the government retracted within a day and replaced with the weather-balloon explanation that has fueled conspiracy theories ever since.

The affidavit itself is not new. Its contents were published in 2007 by researchers Donald R. Schmitt and Tom Carey in their book Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government’s Biggest Cover-Up. What is new is its location: Appendix 2 of a 2008 project-management plan prepared by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS) for the Defense Intelligence Agency, now declassified and released on October 23, 2026, as part of the seventh tranche of the Pentagon’s PURSUE program.

That distinction matters more than the headline screaming about alien bodies. The Roswell affidavit did not “surface” from a dusty archive by accident. It was already sitting inside the files of a defense contractor that was paid to study anomalous phenomena for the U.S. government, and it took a presidential declassification order to move it into the public record.

The Hangar, the Tarp, and the Redactions

The version released by the Department of War is partially redacted. Haut’s name is blacked out, along with the names of other military officials, but the title preserved in the document—“Roswell Army Air Force Base Public Information Officer, 1947”—narrows the signatory to Haut, the only person who held that role at the time.

In the affidavit, Haut describes a military briefing on the morning of July 8, 1947, where wreckage samples were passed around a table. “It was unlike any material I had or have ever seen in my life,” he wrote. “No one was able to identify the crash debris”. Officials discussed two sites: a debris field in Lincoln County about 75 miles northwest of Roswell, and a second location roughly 40 miles north of town that allegedly contained an egg-shaped craft and several bodies.

Haut said he was later taken to a guarded hangar—Building 84, also called Hangar P-3—where he saw the craft under a canvas. He described it as metallic, approximately 12 to 15 feet long and six feet wide, with no windows, wings, tail, or landing gear. Near it, he said, were bodies under a tarpaulin:

“The heads did appear larger than normal and the contour of the canvas suggested the size of a ten year old child.”

He estimated the bodies were about four feet tall. The affidavit also claims that debris sent to Fort Worth was later swapped out for weather balloon and radar kite remains—an allegation of deliberate substitution that sits at the center of the Roswell cover-up narrative.

What the Record Actually Supports

The document’s inclusion in the PURSUE release does not verify its contents. The Air Force’s 1994 report on Roswell attributed the debris to a Project Mogul balloon train and found no evidence of extraterrestrial material or bodies. The affidavit is a late, uncorroborated account—powerful as human testimony, but not physical proof. Haut prepared it decades after the fact, and he died three years later. No contemporaneous 1947 records confirming his claims have been released alongside it.

That has not stopped the document from becoming the most consequential piece of paper in the seventh tranche. Former FBI agent and UFO Witness host Ben Hansen noted on NewsNation that the affidavit aligns with decades of independent research framing Roswell as two crash sites: a main debris field and a secondary location holding a compact craft that may have functioned as an escape pod. The same release also included a 2026 FBI report describing a silent, matte-black triangular object observed by federal agents over a sensitive western U.S. site—an object that climbed vertically, hovered for roughly 20 seconds, and then accelerated into a canyon with no detectable heat signature or sound.

The two accounts are separated by nearly eighty years and share no evident connection. But their coexistence in the same declassification package tells you something about the shape of the current disclosure effort: historical testimony and modern sensor data are being pushed into the public domain at the same time, without the government endorsing either as proof of anything.

Why the Redactions Matter

The Pentagon could have released Haut’s affidavit unredacted. His name has been public in connection with the document since 2007. Instead, the Department of War published a version with his identity and the identities of other officials removed, buried inside a contractor’s project-management plan rather than presented as a standalone Roswell record.

That choice is the real story for disclosure watchers. It suggests the affidavit entered the government’s UAP records not because the Pentagon decided to confirm Roswell testimony, but because BAASS attached it to a research proposal—a supporting exhibit in a contract file, not a finding. The redactions may reflect standard declassification review rather than a targeted cover-up, but they also mean the government has now formally absorbed a document it spent decades treating as folklore, while declining to attach its own name to the claims inside it.

Haut’s family has maintained that he kept his word to his commanders for as long as he was alive, then arranged for the affidavit to be opened after his death. Twenty-four years after he signed it, and twenty-one years after he died, the U.S. government has finally placed that statement in its own files. It has not explained what it thinks those files mean.

Also Read: Tim Gallaudet’s 80-Year UFO Cover-Up Claims Explained

For VVIPTimes, the Roswell mystery remains less a question of whether the truth is out there than of who controls the filing cabinet—and this week, the cabinet opened just wide enough to show that the government has been keeping a copy.