Art Bell is going wild with the following as I type:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/a...sit/article.do

This one ought to keep the woos-woos going for a long time. Let's see, the 50th anniversary is coming up, and this is timed just perfectly, no?

-Richard

actually, the 50th anniversary was a full decade ago.
we are going on 60 years..

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So where is this deathbed confession? Online anywhere?

If it is genuine, then it would be interesting... but somehow I think it is going to turn out to be a hoax of some description.

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

I get the feeling it's going to be based on the sworn testimony of one person who was at the bedside. Kind of like Darwin's "deathbed confession".

You know, instead of hallucinating, that person might have been hearing the voice of Bender

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

Supposedly it's a 'sworn affidavit' that he made to be opened after his death.

Took a while, considering he died last year (according to the article).

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

Haut changed his mind over and over again during his lifetime; see this page
The many stories of Lt Haut.

He was also involved in the establishment of the International UFO Museum in Roswell; so he was as deeply involved in the commercialisation of the Roswell myth as anyone. I say good luck; any town which has a bit of mythology associated with it has a right to try to capitalise on that.

In actual fact Haut more or less started the whole Roswell phenomenon by himself, by sending out a badly worded and sensationalist public announcement of the non-event, and may well have been involved in the efforts to minimise the damage after the event. So not exactly an innocent and disinterested witness.

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It just so happens that I have "Roswell - 50 years of coverups & close encounters" in the VCR.

One thing that did seem to me to be interesting - if accurate - was the FOIA request by Stanton Freidman against the CIA. When they went to court, the CIA admitted that it had about 900 pages of UFO documents, but wouldn't release them on 'National Security' grounds.

They asked that the judge determine if the cause was justified. The judge didn't see the material, but a 21-page justification for the National Security clause being invoked. The judge agreed, and ruled against the UFO people. They then used the FOIA to get a copy of the justification, which was classified Top Secret. The copy they got had 75% of it blacked out.

Why do that for the justification? That one does make me wonder.

On a slightly different note, the article made reference to claims that reverse engineering alien technology is responsible for much of our technological advances (yawn!). Pretty much everything I am familiar with has a good solid history of development, no unexplainable leaps or bounds.

I'm interested in a hypothetical, though:

IF - hypothetically - the claims of reverse engineering were correct, what do you think would be the most likely candidate technology for "Made in ET"?

(I thought about putting that question in another thread, but I think there are enough Roswell / UFO threads already)

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

Shouldn't have eaten that space honey.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
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"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

One spoonful lets you relax...
Two spoofuls lets you sleep...

I would expect that some, many or most of those '900 pages' would be released under this provision;
Hundreds of millions of pages of U.S. government secrets to be revealed
Be a heck of a job to find them, though.

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These were later released thanks to the efforts of Philip Klass. Nothing but a bunch of intercepted traffic with descriptions of the typical "UFO" sightings. No great revelations at all. Friedman loves to waive that blacked out document around but the fact remains there is no proof for the great cosmic watergate.

In 1947, there were reports of Haut being reprimanded in the media after the press release. He denied this in the 1980s. However, Jesse Marcel Sr and radio station reporter George Walsh said he was reprimanded. In his interviews, Haut pretty much stated that he had no direct knowledge of anything happening at RAAF other than Marcel coming back with some debris and issuing the press release (which he stated Blanchard told him to send). However, he did tell UFO researchers to talk to Frank Kaufmann and Glenn Dennis. He also endorsed their stories referring to Kaufmann's tale as "Golden". Both are now considered liars/hoaxers. Now he alters his story before he dies and does not want it released until he dies. This story sounds a lot like an indirect endorsement of the Kaufmann/Dennis tale.

It makes one wonder about Haut. Was he just a guy who goofed up in 1947? Or was he a guy who goofed up in 1947 and spent a lifetime trying to cover it up by presenting hoaxers/liars to create a scenario that deflected attention from something that may have cost him his military career?

Well, the most obvious answer I can think of is that the justification document contained sensitive information - i don't see how they could justify not granting the original request without at least hinting at what it is they were trying to hide.

Combine with the UFO crowd's history of making a huge deal out of any tiny scrap of information they get - if I were working for the CIA, I'd be extremely reluctant to give anything to UFO believers. There probably aren't many more efficient ways to tell the whole world something you didn't want them to know than handing it to them so they can work day and night to get it on as many TV specials and into as many books as possible. These guys have to live in a culture of paranoia, they probably consider the city in which a piece of information was gathered to be sensitive information if it was acquired using covert means.

The CIA not wanting to say anything supports the "this was a secret military project" (say, Project Mogul) explanation just as well. That explanation has the added advantage of having Occam's Razor on its side.

It's the politics of tautology. If nothing you can say changes the outcome, and if saying nothing does not change the outcome, then say nothing -- the outcome will have to be endured no matter what, but least it saves you the effort of trying to change it.

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Before jumping on this, as some will do as usual, everyone should read the actual affidavit (and yes, it is a notarized affidavit to be opened only after death). Haut died of old age last year, so no, it was not "timed" for the next Roswell anniversary (60th, not 50th now). A copy is here:

http://roswellproof.homestead.com/Haut.html

Basically, he says he saw everything (including bodies), that the weather balloon explanation was indeed a cover story and the other base commanders all handled the wreckage and couldn't identify any of it.

He never mentioned a lot of the details in the affidavit while he was alive, so I don't know why he would lie in the affidavit which was only to be opened after he died, as he had nothing to gain, and never profited from the story during his life. So he was involved with the museum, so what? He could have written books or gone on talk show circuits, but never did. He was just one of many witnesses, and a respected military officer, and his affidavit testimony backs up what many others had said all along.

Whether actually alien or not, it was certainly no weather or Mogul balloon, which is a lie that has continued to be perpetuated by the military.

That's interesting, that Haut was involved with that Roswell museum and others. Last night, Art and the character he had on were presenting Haut as having totally denied and poo-pooed the entire alien crash thing while alive.

I went to sleep sometime during the broadcast, and was sort of listening half-way in and half-way out. Art read what was supposed to the the Haut afadavit -- but I don't see anything about the afadavit itself on their website. Keeping in mind I was in and out of sleep and may have misheard, that statement was supposedly drafted by Haut in 2002, with a signed witness and notarized, with instructions to be released after his death.

Art then read the whole thing. On "D-day" (what was it July 7th, 1947?), Haut says he went in to a meeting with the honchos, which he names, including Col. Blanchard. They are passing around pieces of wreckage from the crash site. It's about the same description as Marcell's.

There were two sites, one at that ranch near Corona, and a second one. The second one was the most "sensitive", with the bodies. He says Blanchard directs him to put out the original "flying disc" press release, mentioning the first site. The idea, Haut says, was misdirection. They knew "civillians" were already away of the first site, but not the second. So, by putting out the first press release, they will direct public attention to the ranch and away from the second one, where the bodies and other "good stuff" were.

Blanchard then tells him to "go hide" after the first press release, to let it build. Then they put out the second one denying the first later.

Then he says Blanchard took to him a hangar where they were temporarilly storing what they were recovering from that second site, and says he say an an egg-shaped metallic looking "pod" about 12' or so primary dimension. He said there were two bodies there about the size of a 10 year old child, but with large heads lying under a tarp with heads exposed.

Then he swears that was the truth and nothing but the truth and the statement ends.

-Richard

Haut's NEW affidavit has problems:

1. The morning meeting of July 8th was held with Roger Ramey and Thomas Dubose in attendance from 8th AF. This is quite amusing since both are on record as being in Fort Worth at the time. There are no records of any flights going from Fort Worth to Roswell that AM and not one eyewitness ever reported seeing Ramey and Dubose at Roswell on that morning.

2. The Blanchard story is also interesting. Blanchard went on leave and left the base that evening or that morning. The purpose was not to be "out of the way" but to go on vacation in Colorado and meet with the governor for Armed forces day in Sante Fe. Blanchard apparently had the ability to be in various locations

3. Haut mentions, "I would return to the base with some of the wreckage which I would display in my office." Exactly what was that for? He was the base PIO. What was he "displaying" a piece of super ultra fantastic top secret material in the open for?

4. He states they released the press anouncement because the media was already aware of rumors about a crashed spaceship. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There was nothing in the morning papers about any crashed spaceship. In fact, some in the media already knew that Mack Brazel had come into town about recovering debris one or two days before. Apparently, Brazel's story was not very interesting because there was no mention of it in the papers until Haut's press release.

5. He mentions bodies. However, Major Jesse Marcel Sr. specifically told interviewers in the 1980s that no bodies had been recovered and he would have known about it.

6. There is no location for the second crash site. You would think one of the most momentous events in history would have some mention of the EXACT location during this morning meeting. Not even a rough longitude and latitude. Apparently the three stooges were involved in the recovery operation.

You can read both of Haut's affidavits and some pro-roswell crash spin at http://roswellproof.homestead.com/Haut.html.

Looks like Haut was quite the writer.

Was he a reader, too? Anyone know if he relished the science fiction genre?

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All notarization does is say a "professional witness" vouches that the person named says he is the owner/author of the document. It says nothing about the truthfulness of the claims made in the document.

Again, having the document notarized doesn't make it factual.

It's interesting that many people - even the US judicial system - consider a "death bed confession" (which this bascially is) more trustworthy than any other such statement. "He has nothing to gain" or "He has nothing to lose" are the arguments put forth.

And, they're good arguments. But they don't guarantee that the truth was told.

Haut could have been making one last bid to protect his reputation by restating claims he made before, and embellishing them. And why wouldn't he? After all, he won't have to answer any questions or provide any evidence.

This document is no more or less special than any other such claims. It should not be accepted as factual simply because it was notarized or a "dying declaration." Where is the corroborating evidence?

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I didn't know this until I was Googling on "deathbed confession", but E. Howard Hunt's son put out an audio tape of his father claiming he was a part of the JFK assasination. Hunt apparently claims LBJ was the one behind it.

So there's another wild deathbed confession.

-Richard

Well, we need to be a bit careful regarding deathbed confessions as one of the counters often given to Apollo HB is the lack of confessions from at least one of the thousands of people who worked on the project. (although this is the least of the arguments against Apollo HB's. Look at the rocks, man!)

Lest we be accused of moving goalposts it would be useful to lay out guidelines under which we would accept a deathbed confession as possibly valid. Among these I would suggest:

* It agrees with other observed facts (people said to be present at an event were actually present and not elsewhere).

* It explains some previously unexplained observation.

* It doesn't leave open more questions than it answers.

Any other ideas on this?

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"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

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Jim's comment got me sort of interested in the legal weight of "deathbed confessions". The actual legal term is "dying declaration". This statement of Haut would not be any such thing actually, legally speaking. A dying declation is a statement made by a person who is dying, or thinks he is dying. Some jurisdictions require only the person think he is, others require that he must be dead, Jim (Kirk).

The reasoning is the "solemnity" of dying, one realizing he's about to meet his maker, will soon be standing before a much higher court where the facts are not in question and answer for what he's done on this earth, etc, impel that person to tell the truth.

The dying declaration is one of the five common law exceptions to the rule against hearsay evidence. A jury is free to give a dying declaration as much or as little weight as they see fit. However, there are fairly involved rules about admitting such declarations that a judge must consider. All the circumstances of the death come into it. And generally, dying declarations will be allowed only in the most serious cases, such as murder trials. But once it's admitted, the jury can make of it what they will.

Because it can have such weight, the other side is given a lot of leeway in challenging the witnesses testifying about the dying statement. They will "rip you a new one" indeed, and tear apart every word you utter on the stand.

The most common type of dying declaration is that of murder victim identifying his attacker, or giving other statements used to help identify the murderer. Interestingly, the rules and the cross examination of a "dying declaration" exception is so brutal, that the prosecution generally doesn't even use it, but admits it under another hearsay exception, called the "excited utterance" rule.

The theory there is it takes planning and consideration to tell a lie, but the truth comes out easily, and so a spontaneous statement made under stress, such as when you've just been shot, is truthful.

And so this Haut statement in no way would be legally considered a "dying declaration". He made it in 2002, and certainly was dying nor thought he was dying at the time. And the dying declaration is a way to get hearsay evidence, what one party heard another say that cannot be cross examined.

A court would consider the signing and notarizing to be proof that Haut indeed said what he said, but that would be it. Haut could not be cross-examined. Whether something like that would be admitted (assuming some similiar statement had some bearing on some case, of course) would depend on a lot of things. But suffice it to say, a judge would not allow such a statement to be used to convict someone of murder. Now, he might or he might not let the defense use such a statement to defend against a murder charge.

There is something about "under penalty of perjury". Just making a statement and swearing it's true does not have the weight it does when one could go to jail for lying. Haut was not under penalty of perjury.

It's still a very interesting thing of course, but not a "dying declaration" by the legal standards of that term.

-Richard

Just let me be clear that with the above I'm not attacking Haut. I just got interested in what true, legal "deathbed confession" was. Haut's statement does not meet that standard. A true dying declaration can convict someone of murder and sent him to the chair (it's all up to the jury). This type of statement falls far short of that.

-Richard

Hmm, so basicially it's a religious assumption? Didn't know that. Do agnostics and athiests still get that legal benefit, or is it for believers in afterlives only?

HA! And HA! again, I say. Known far too many people to whom lying is the first reflexive impulse whenever they're in trouble or something goes wrong to believe that.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

The way I worded it would be a common religious way of putting it, but that has nothing to do with it. The religious beliefs or lack of them have no bearing on whether a dying declaration will be admitted. If you want a
non-religious way of putting the "solemnity of death", when one is dying, the jig is up, the game is over. All the petty concerns of life, and even the not-so petty concerns, such as saving one's skin, are no longer important.

Is this a legal principle that a dying person cannot tell a lie? No, absolutely not. But it is a legal principle that the dying words of a person are to be given more weight and consideration that what you overheard someone saying at a bar somewhere.

That is not what the "excited utterance" rule is about. It is not that if someone is excited or under high stress he cannot lie about something that happened before he. It is about statements made in the heat of passion when then passion just happened.

The reasoning is it takes time to come up with a lie, and requires planning. If you just get shot out of the blue, and say "John Doe just shot me!", you haven't had time to consider some reason to lie, such as you don't have a clue who shot you, but hate John Doe's guts and decide to frame him for your murder.

Investigators use the principle all the time. When something happens, they are very interested in getting statements about what happened as soon as possible, before anyone has had time to make something up that sounds good. If a witness changes his story, they are more likely to believe what he said right then and there, rather than what he said after he has had time to think about things.

-Richard

When something happens, they are very interested in getting statements about what happened as soon as possible, before anyone has had time to make something up that sounds good.

This happens unconsciously and innocently too, which is another reason why early statements are important. The human mind has a tendency to reconcile observations and memories into coherent storyline even if it has to adjust some of the facts to do it.

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Forgive me for going off on these legal tangents -- they are really of no relevance to what Haut is claiming, but nonetheless interesting to me, and I hope the readers of this thread, too.

They(in the link above to the "Haut affidavits") are presenting these statements as affidavits. An affidavit is a *sworn* statement. Penalty of perjury does indeed apply to an affidavit. Notary publics can do affidavits too, but I gather it's all complicated.

If Haut's statement is a true affidavit, then the notary public who notarized it would have had to take an oath from Haut that the statements therein were true, and of course, notaries in the state in which it was executed would have to be authorized by law as official takers of oath and all that good stuff.

No court will accept a mere notarized statement. They want statements to be under oath, and penalty of perjury. Now, will an affidavit, a real affidavit be accepted? Not generally. The rule is generally that if you have something to say, your little butt is going to sit in the hot seat, sworn under the glare of the judge, and subject to cross examination.

Exceptions are if you are dead, or in a coma, or in less weighty matters, if you're out of the country and so forth. But, in all cases, a court will not accept an affidavit alone without other evidence.

So, apparently, if John Doe, deceased, swore out an affadivit that he saw Mary Sue Kerplunck kill Fred Smith with own eyes, but the state has charged Richard Roe with the murder, Richard Roe could not use that affidavit without other evidence backing up what John Doe said.

-Richard

Ah, danke! Now it makes sense.

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"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

A dying declation is a statement made by a person who is dying, or thinks he is dying. Some jurisdictions require only the person think he is, others require that he must be dead, Jim (Kirk).

I remember seeing this on Adam-12 when I was a kid, and assuming, when the sergeant told the dying suspect that if he "suddenly remember[ed] how to live," his dying declaration couldn't be used against him, that this was because of the suspect's right against self-incrimination. It occurs to me, now that you mention it, that another purpose might well be to encourage people to make such statements without fear of consequences in case they "remember how to live." An additional reason would obviously be that the person in question would in fact be available to give testimony and be cross-examined, thus theoretically eliminating the need to rely on the declaration.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

I don't want to take this thread OT, but something very similar happened recently with a "confession" from E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative long believed by conspiracists to have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Here is an article from Rolling Stone magazine that discusses Hunt's writings and recordings, made a few years before his death. The short version is that Hunt's son, a convicted drug dealer and admitted long-term drug addict, has been attempting to sell the story of his father's "confession" for a large amount of money, thus raising the strong suspicion that the statements may have been "coached" out of a semi-lucid old man. I have to wonder whether something similar might be going on in the case of Walter Haut.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor