Harald Bernard Malmgren (1935–2025) was an American economist and trade negotiator who served as deputy special representative for trade negotiations, with the rank of ambassador, from 1972 to 1975. Late in life he said he had been briefed on UFOs and had handled debris from an object brought down by a 1962 nuclear test. He passed away on February 13, 2025, in Warrenton, Virginia, aged 89.

Born in Boston, Malmgren studied economics at Yale, earned an Oxford doctorate in 1962 and taught at Cornell before moving to Washington in mid-1962 as an economist at the Institute for Defense Analyses. In 1964, under President Lyndon Johnson, he joined the trade negotiator's office, working on the Kennedy Round tariff talks and rising to director of operations before leaving in 1969. He founded a lobbying firm, Malmgren, Inc., in 1971 and returned as deputy in 1972, during the Nixon administration, working on the Tokyo Round and the Trade Act of 1974. He was acting trade representative under Gerald Ford until resigning in February 1975, then worked as a staff analyst for Senator Abraham Ribicoff of the Finance Committee and spent decades as a consultant and lobbyist, with many Japanese clients.

In 2024 he said publicly that CIA officer Richard Bissell had once briefed him on "otherworld technologies." In an interview with Jesse Michels recorded shortly before his passing, Malmgren said he had held an Atomic Energy Commission Q clearance, had investigated for President Kennedy an object knocked down during a nuclear test in October 1962, and had been briefed on it at Los Alamos that November by commission official Lawrence Preston Gise. He also said he had faced down General Curtis LeMay during the Cuban Missile Crisis; Michels has billed him as a presidential adviser to Kennedy, Nixon and Ford. His quoted remarks do not name the test; researchers link his account to Bluegill Triple Prime, the October 26, 1962 shot over Johnston Island at the center of a theory by Australian researcher Geoff Cruickshank.

Journalist Douglas Dean Johnson's May 2025 investigation, based on declassified FBI background reports and his 1963 and 1964 federal job applications, found that he joined the Institute for Defense Analyses on July 23, 1962, to do economic and strategic analysis, and that the records listed no Atomic Energy Commission clearance. In an August 2026 update, Johnson reported that the National Nuclear Security Administration said Malmgren never held a Department of Energy access authorization. His applications listed no White House role, and former Kennedy Library historian Sheldon Stern found no trace of him in the recordings of Kennedy's crisis committee. Johnson argued that Malmgren had inserted himself into Cruickshank's Bluegill story because it fitted the timeline of his own account.

In August 2026 Michels presented retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet's reading of the test's deck logs as backing Malmgren's testimony, and in October he reported that former Energy Secretary John Herrington vaguely remembered meeting Malmgren, his first guess being an Energy Department briefing. Malmgren's documented legacy lies in trade policy, from the Kennedy Round to the Trade Act of 1974. His late account made him the best-known named witness in the Bluegill Triple Prime story, and the archival checks it prompted made his career one of the most closely examined in recent UFO debate.