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Deathbed Confession Says Aliens Were at Roswell

xnuandax writes "The army's explanation of weather balloons in the Roswell, New Mexico incident 60 years ago has been dealt a serious public relations blow. Late Army Lt. Walter Haut had signed a sealed affidavit prior to his death last year asserting that he had witnessed the wreckage of an egg-shaped craft and its extraterrestrial crew while working at the Roswell Army Air Field. An article at News.com.au reviews how Haut had worked as public relations officer for the Roswell base and was involved in the original weather balloon explanation of events at the time. This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."

37 of 1,267 comments (clear)

  1. Ah! by McGiraf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    He probably died laughing behind his teethes.

  2. Not a trustworthy source by evildogeye · · Score: 5, Informative

    He was the founder of the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM. I think that makes it necessary to take his death bed statement with a grain of salt.

    1. Re:Not a trustworthy source by l0ungeb0y · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Ultimately why would a space craft be built out material resembling tin foil. "

      Because it's powered by hats?

  3. Re:Bombula by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico. And the chances of aliens being humanoid in appearance are close to zero.

    First off, it may be that the visitors have a limited budget, just like anything we do does. One allocates the risk based on this budget. Even though we may have the money to make or buy the Ultimate Safest Volvo, it does not mean we will.

    As far as appearence, here are some possibilities:

    1. They are interested in us *because* we look like them.

    2. They are us from the future.

    3. We are a degerate form of them.

    4. The human-like form is somewhat universal after all.

  4. follow the money or the little green men .. by abes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This was posted on digg, and as someone pointed out, Haut also ran a UFO museum. So .. yeah .. no ulterior motives ..

    A simple google search gives one of many such links:

    http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tw/07-20-95/cover.htm

    Not to say that's the only reason he did that .. who knows. It just a bit odd. Other military people have come forward, including a high ranking general (who released a book). The general claimed all our current technology came from UFOs. Such as the night-vision goggles. This is a fairly outrageous claim even for someone with a rudimentary understanding of electronics.

    It's not that I think aliens are impossible. I just am highly suspicious that they'd sneak about so much. Or that our government could keep anything a secret for so long. And crackpots coming out with books on UFOs does not count as the leaks.

  5. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not everyone who buys a car is smart enough to design one. Maybe they're just hick aliens crashing their society's equivalent of a mass-market SUV into some boring planet in the middle of nowhere.

  6. Re:Bombula by Fozzyuw · · Score: 5, Funny

    As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that [they] would crash in New Mexico.

    No kidding. New Mexico is soooo, yesterday. Kansas is where anybody who's anybody crashes.

    --
    "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
  7. Re:Maybe he just has a wicked sense of humor by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'd be laughing all the way to the mortuary, if it were me...

    And I'd be really creeped out if I were the coroner...

    --
    This guy's the limit!
  8. Speculated Where??? by DumbSwede · · Score: 5, Funny

    "This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."

    I'm curious just where this speculation was forwarded. Is there some UFO magazine with articles like "Egg Shape Saucers -- How Easy to Fly" or "Egg shaped versus conventional Plate shaped, which Flying Saucer is right for your intergalactic traveling needs?" or better yet is Consumer Reports planning a Fly Saucer Safety issue? "Flying Saucer Roll Over Crash Test Results -- Egg Shaped Models perform poorly"

  9. Re:Bombula by Jace+of+Fuse! · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes, but it wouldn't be hard to believe our military would shoot down an unidentified flying egg no matter how advanced or rare it's occupants might be.

    Not that I'm saying... uhm... yeah.

    --

    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

    Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
  10. Re:Bombula by martin-boundary · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, but think again: did you know that Dick Cheney just appeared one day in 1941 out of nowhere? The day before, nobody had heard of him, and then, poof! there he was. And ever since, he seems to appear for a while and disappear without a trace for long periods. Coincidence? I reserve judgement.

  11. Re:Bombula by Balthisar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't want to give credence to this, but for the sake of logic, I've got to say: maybe the crew didn't navigate four trillion miles. Consider that Navy aircraft carrier pilots have no idea how to navigate an aircraft carrier from Hawaii to the sea of Japan, but yet you're saying that it's inconceivable that a crashed F-14 pilot could pilot such a craft. I have to think that even an advanced society has some type of delegation of responsibilities that would permit a craft to crash on the Earth. Unless they employed eugenics at some point in their history, there's no guarantee that even an advanced society doesn't have "normal" people. That's something that always pissed me off about Star Trek (even as a fan): everyone was a super-genius, unless you dedicated yourself to raising grapes in France or you were a junior member of an away team. ;-)

    --
    --Jim (me)
  12. Government and Secrets - An Analysis by rueger · · Score: 5, Funny

    There is no way they could keep a secret of this magnitude and cover it up for 60 years.

    Ok, let me get this reasoning straight.

    a) There's no way that the government could keep a secret that long.
    b) How do we know that there's no way that the government could keep a secret that long?
    c) Because if the government tried to keep a secret that long we would have beard about it.

    Just for the sake of argument, what if the government managed to... um ... keep a secret secret? Is it possible that we wouldn't have heard about it?

    (especially if they used secret alien technology to keep it secret!)

  13. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    Yeah, I don't think they are quite as advanced as we make them out to be. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere online that they decoded the final transmission of the spacecraft.

    It was:

    You win again, gravity!
  14. Re:Bombula by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Even more amazing is that in such an advanced society as ours someone could think that tires are bolted to cars.

  15. I just don't buy P-51s shooting down a spaceship by tjstork · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The whole problem, in my mind, with the Roswell "conspiracy", is the part that has a flight of P-51 Mustangs shooting down a spacecraft capable of travelling at intersteller speeds. As good as the P-51 was back in its day, it would be almost miraculous for one of these planes to shoot down a modern jet aircraft such as the F-22 or the EF-2000. Obviously, the technology required for manned interstellar space flight is easily 50 - 100 years beyond what we have now, and so, the claim seems utterly foolish. In any case, if an interstellar ship could reach the earth once, why wouldn't they have sent a rescue party looking for their fallen comrades?

    --
    This is my sig.
  16. Re:Bombula by SageMusings · · Score: 5, Funny

    And let's not forget the debt we owe them for the anal probes that today's proctology enjoys. Most former alien abductees will testify to the genius of their probes.

    --
    -- Posted from my parent's basement
  17. Re:Bombula by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yea it actually is.
    1. At this time the P-80 shooting star was the top of the line fighter the US had. It would have a very hard time shooting down a 737 much less a space craft of any type.
    2. The US air defense network at that time was almost none existent.
    3. SAM sites? The US didn't have them yet.

    Also the US doesn't really have a history of shooting down aircraft over our air space.
    If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost you will see that the US really isn't that trigger happy.

    You don't know many people in our military do you?

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  18. 400 Government/Military Witnesses - On Record by Adeptus_Luminati · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Big deal 1 guy admits it, the video below shows 22 of 400 senior Government, NASA, Airfoce & other top Military personel admitting it on National/International television that aliens are real & Gov has been hiding it.

    The Disclosure Project:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk

    Yeah it's almost 2 hours long, but it will blow your mind!

    I wonder how much longer they can keep denying the more than obvious.

    Nuff said.

    Adeptus

    --
    No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
  19. Re:Bombula by click2005 · · Score: 5, Funny

    But how easy could it be to fly an egg?

    Mork was a moron and he could fly one just fine.

    --
    I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
  20. A Lieutenant? by EmagGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Suffice it to say that a Lieutenant is not exactly going to be high on the "need to know" list.

    This is a hoax.. no aliens at Roswell..

  21. Re:alien tech wouldn't defy laws of physics by illegalcortex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't quite understand why this is would be an outrageous claim Well, it's a bit like school. Remember how you always had to "show your work" to prove that you weren't cheating? No big jumps from problem to solution. Well, it's the same way with all this "current technology." Work on it has been incremental through the years. For every breakthrough you can trace the history leading up to it, and find people who almost but not quite got there. The breakthrough of silicon transistors was preceded by years of struggling with germanium transistors. That was preceded by years of trying to figure out how semiconductors worked and what they might be good for. That really picked up steam in the 1920s. And prior to the transistor, you can look at the history of vacuum tubes. They followed a parallel line of development and formed the bridge to the transistor era (early electronics and computers used vacuum tubes).

    So for such a claim to NOT be outrageous, you'd have to also claim a vast conspiracy of scientists all over the world through the decades, sitting on most of their findings while publishing just enough to give an incremental step for the next breakthroughs. Or you'd need the aliens to be directing this, handing out tiny little tidbits of information to the scientists, and either swearing them to secrecy or using some sort of mind control on them. So yes, it is quite outrageous.

    On the other hand, if next week some scientist produced working plans for a fusion generator that used a grand unified theory totally different than any proposed, now THAT would be what it would take to not be an outrageous claim of getting outside help.
  22. Re:Bombula by TapeCutter · · Score: 5, Funny

    "When they got near the touchy military types at Roswell, their lander copped an unexpected sidewinder up the clacker."

    Definitely "unexpected" since sidewinder's had not been invented.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  23. Re:Bombula by tylernt · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, it all boils down to who gets laid the most before dying.
    Doesn't bode well for /.ers, I'm afraid.
    --
    DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
  24. Re:Bombula by lawpoop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But you also have convergent evolution. Thus, the eye has arisen independently some 22 times in the tree of life, IIRC. You mention the head, which has been a reproductively successful adaptation. What I'm saying is not that the first successful body-plan that happen to evolve was the head and thorax, so that's what all descendants got. What I'm saying is that the environment selects body-plans that are beneficial, which is why we observe example of convergent evolution, such as legs and wings in chordates and insects.

    As an example, we have radially symmetrical animals, such as jellyfish, and bilaterally symmetrical animals, such as chordates. Stephen Pinker talks about how any animal navigating an environment with gravity would benefit from a bilaterally symmetrical body plan. Thus we might reasonably conclude that any life form on a planet that can randomly evolve a bilaterally symmetrical body would have reproductive success. Once you have bilaterally symmetry, I don't think it's too much of a leap to think they could evolve legs, useful on land and water, and heads with brains. Once you have legs, then you can evolve manipulative appendages, such as hands. If you have two legs, you might not do too much manipulation with them, because you benefit more from them being evolved more for walking than manipulation. But if you have an extra pair of legs ( if the animal is bilaterally symmetric, it probably wouldn't have 3 or 5 ), then you might start using the extra pair to manipulate objects all the time, instead of walking on them. Then the lineage would experience selection for better and better tool manipulation with its extra legs -- so they become 'hands'. Once you're walking on one pair of legs, and manipulating objects with the other, bingo! -- you've got a humanoid.

    So once you can accept that a body plan of a torso, which has all your organs for digesting food and eliminating waster, and a head, for sensing the environment and thinking about it, is a body-plan that was successful and therefore selected, rather than just a random body plan that was just passed on, it's not to much of a leap to say that one of those walking animals stood up and used two of those legs to manipulate objects instead of walk. And if convergent evolution can happen among independent lineages here on earth, why not in similar environments, like a rocky planet, somewhere else in space? Is it too much of a stretch to imagine wings or eyes evolving in extra-terrestrial animals? How about then legs or arms and hands?

    To describe a 'humanoid', all you need is an upright torso with a head, two legs for locomotion, and two manipulative hands. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that such a body plan for an intelligent, conscious, tool-making creature would be selected in a convergent evolution scenario.

    Then the question is, animals of what body-plan would be developing vehicles that can travel interstallar space? Elephants and dolphins might be as smart as we are, but without appendages to manipulate objects, they can't really build tools, buildings, or vehicles. Once you have manipulative appendages, then evolution might select animals who can better manipulate objects and their environment. That means they get smarter. Learning and technology develop. Then you get tools, buildings, and vehicles. So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.

    --
    Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
    -- Pablo Picasso
  25. Re:Bombula by Tatarize · · Score: 5, Funny

    What part of a signed and sealed affidavit on a death bed did you not understand? Not only does nobody ever lie on their death bed, he signed an affidavit (that you aren't allowed to see) and if he lied he can be prosecuted to the full extent of the law (considering he's dead this involves not being prosecuted at all).

    I mean, would you disbelieve the guy who on his deathbed said that he actually faked those Loch Ness pictures? How about the guy who after he died had his family expose how exactly he faked those nice big foot pictures and tracks?

    Well, I knew this guy and have a signed and sealed affidavit from him that their signed and sealed affidavit was acquired by threatening his family.

    --

    It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
  26. Re:Bombula by macdaddy357 · · Score: 5, Funny

    An egg shape craft? If they were shot down, it must have gone something like this... Shazbat! we've been shot. We're going down. They are gathering all around the ship. They may want to kill us! Perhaps a friendly greeting will appease them. Greetings! I am Mork from Ork. Nanu Nanu.

    --
    How ya like dat?
  27. Re:Bombula by jd · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Last I looked, space had fewer mountains. Before the advent of the artificial horizon (which would be a meaningless thing to have in deep space), pilots were forever crashing into lakes, snowy hilltops, etc. There's a canal in Europe that is packed full of World War II aircraft who mistook it for a runway or a road for emergency landings. The wrecks have lowered landing gear and seem to have largely made smooth but very unexpected and probably quite fatal splashdowns.

    Besides, USAF pilots can fly for tens of thousands of miles but one still crashed and died in Oregon recently. I can't remember if it was last year's airshow or the one before in Hillsboro, OR, that a veteran pilot in a veteran aircraft in better-than-new condition ploughed into the ground at high speed.

    Does this mean that the Roswell incident occurred? No. It is possible through the use of mathematics to prove that very long-range manned interstellar flight requires conflicting constraints, that no matter how good the technology of some pictured civilization, it will never be able to achieve such a goal. I believe such distances may be crossable, but they will never be crossed in that specific way. Because I believe the distances crossable, I believe that aliens could potentially visit Earth. Because I believe the method often described requires certain conditions to be simultaneously true and false, I do not believe that the observations attributed to aliens could possibly be so.

    Personally, my biggest interest in the question is not whether we have been visited, but whether we can draw inspiration and imagination enough from the claims for us to go there. NASA had a 50 Km solar sail design over two decades ago that, had it been built at that time, would have reached Alpha Centauri and returned with a rock or ice sample. (It had a predicted top speed of a quarter of the speed of light at the midway point. Allowing for acceleration/deceleration time, it would have been approaching Earth about now.)

    It was never built. The celebration of Columbus' voyage in the early 90s - by having a mini solar sail race - also never happened. The plans put forward for NASA in the present day lack, well, everything. Only now are people researching the effects of prolonged isolation on humans - long after the optimal point of launching a Mars mission. Because of cost? lluB. It costs virtually nothing to lock someone away in an isolation chamber. The CIA apparently has hundreds they're not using, and the CDC has many such chambers for isolating people with deadly, contageous diseases. You're going to be paying the person's salary anyway.

    If the Roswell story gets people fired up about space, gets people motivated to find some "get up and go" that hasn't already got up and gone, then I don't care if it's real, fake or purple. If it achieves for society what society won't achieve for itself, then by all means declare it true.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  28. Re:Bombula by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wow, that's the first time I've ever seen capitalism applied to justify the appearance of aliens.

    Well done.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  29. Re:Bombula by nametaken · · Score: 5, Funny

    You know what else I find totally unbelievable? That a civilization so advanced that it could send an orbiter all the way to other planets would manage to crash it when it got there... and over something as retarded as metric vs. standard. :)

  30. Re:So? by solios · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I call bullshit. On the ready bit, anyway. Just imagine the sheer force of the political shitstorm a First Contact would stir up. Anyone who could decode the garbage we eject into space would be smart enough to scope out the political situation - anywhere you put down, you're going to be politically validating whoever's collecting taxes on the ground you drop on.... and if you don't land in the US, you'll have the US military six feet up your ass muscling whoever else out of the way for first call on photo ops, resources, etc. Land in the middle east and you've not only brought that political shitstorm to a boil, you've also incited two of the world's major religions. Then there's the language thing.

    Personally, if I were an alien and I came across a planet like this, I'd stick a huge visible-from-earth goatse billboard out past the moon and leave. The effort it would take earth to pull that kind of an insult out of the sky might actually cause us to grow up a bit.

  31. Re:Bombula by E++99 · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, there may be a lot of different intelligent animals with weird body plans, such as a radially-symmetrical jelly-fish like creature. But without the manipulative structures, such as hands, we wouldn't expect them to be building space ships, and winding up landing or crash-landing on other planets.


    Or maybe that's why the crashed.
    "Turn the egg! Turn the egg!"
    "I can't, I don't have any hands!!!"
    "AHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
  32. Re:Bombula by Torvaun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That was my first thought on seeing this headline. If on my deathbed, I have the opportunity to fuck around with the minds of half as many people he just did, I would do so, and die a happy man.

    --
    I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
  33. Re:Bombula by Genda · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm sorry but this is just not a conversation that makes any sense. We haven't even got the vaguest idea of what the boundaries are for the conversation "What is Life?". The idea that a species evolving in a different environment, I mean really different, is going to in any way resemble human beings, is simply ludicrous. You gotta cut back on the Star Trek, the numerous humanoid aliens there are simply a function of make-up vs. CGI budget.

    We (human beings) are running around with DNA from an ancient ancestor that had 5 fold symmetry, 4 limbs + head, 5 fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, and five primary orifices in the skull (think inverted appendage.) Before that we inherited DNA from a worm... if you look at a human body morphologically we're worms that evolved better means of locomotion, and the ability to manipulate our local environment. Any alien you see owning a head with a face you can recognize, a spine, and limbs would have had to evolve on this planet. There are trillions of evolutionary paths that could have made life on earth wildly different, and to assume the path that produced us is the only path that could have produced sentient life with the ability to manipulate it's environment is not only myopic, it's homocentric to a fault.

    I won't argue that certain structures would prove useful on earth and evolve repeatedly given our enviornment. Even on earh, however there are vastly different organism operating in wildly different circumstances, no light, crushing pressure and heat, sulphur as an energy cycle, even organisms that exist in ultracold and environments lacking oxygen. That's just on this planet, using precisely the same DNA, and carbon based biology.

    I could easily imagine life based on completely different chemistry... carbon will usually be the most likely chemical backbone, though at higher temperatures sillicon and metals might combine in very interesting ways. Sensing is a vital characteristic of life, but organs of sense might be tremendously different for another species. They might sense any or all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and do so with organs very different from ours. How and what they consume and excrete might be very different than what we understand... even on earth what animals breath out, plants breath in... what might setient beings who move as slowly as plants occur to us like? Plants have powerful sensory capabilities, but they are very unlike humanoids.

    On earth the octopus is a prime example of a mollusk well on it's way to becoming a technological intelligence. Here's an animal with much in common with human beings but also very alien... communication through melenophores... that's way ourside our normal thinking, and this is an intelligent terrestrial species. How much more different might a being be that evolved in a cold methane lake, or whose fundamental chemisty is composed of complex sugars instead of proteins.

    You're going to have to stretch your head a whole lot more if you're goin to imagine life elsewhere. The chances of it being a lot like us is slim at best. Anyway you're going to have to sift through a lot of microoganisms before you find any larger than unicellular life out there. Of course, there's nothing preventing unicellular communities from becoming sentient. That's a kind of life we should be very careful not to miss, simply because it doesn't look like us.

  34. Re:Bombula by pugugly · · Score: 5, Funny

    The same reason *my* brain isn't stuck into my abdominal cavity where I keep all my other importan stuff - My brain is about 1% of my weight, but produces about 20% of my body heat.

    That's why I store my brains in a lower, dangling organ, where they can cool easily - that's the way most of us Bipedal aliens do it. -

    Pug

    --
    An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
  35. Re:Bombula by JoeKilner · · Score: 5, Funny
    Who is to say that _we_ shot it down?
    Weren't there nine of these things seen and then only one on the ground?
    If any of this is true (which, of course, it isn't) then the most credible conclusions are:
    • The aliens look human therefore they are human.
    • They are on earth therefore they came from earth.
    • Their technology is more advanced than ours therefore the crash was an accident or caused by someone of sufficiently advanced technology.
    So we have some theories:
    • At some point far in the future our descendents try out time travel and something goes wrong with one of the time travelling craft (they were probably visiting roswell to see if an alien really was found there - ah, the irony...)
    • Humanity in a parallel dimension was experimenting with cross dimensional travel and it went wrong.
    • At some point in the past a super intelligent branch of humanity separated from the rest of us and has been living in secret along side us for a while now. They were pissing around buzzing some country-folk and something wet wrong. Maybe a teenager stole the keys to their dad's flying-egg-car?
    • Any of the above except it was an escape attempt by some dissident / terrorist / freedom-fighter / messiah / anti-christ / "crack commando unit sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit" and they were shot down by pursuing craft.
    Anythying else is just pure speculation and fantasy.
  36. Re:Bombula by indifferent+children · · Score: 5, Funny

    No. He meant Rebel vs Imperial.

    --
    Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain