June 21, 1947, approximately 2:00 PM: Harbor patrolman Harold A Dahl was cruising near Maury Island, three miles off the shore of Tacoma, Washington, along with two crewmen, his 15 year old son, and the family dog, when he spotted six doughnut-shaped objects overhead, hovering about 2,000 feet above the waters of Puget Sound.
He at first believed they were balloons, since they were completely silent and had no motors, propellers or other visible means of propulsion. But their surfaces appeared metallic, a glistening, seashell-like gold and silver color that reflected the sun with a dazzling, jagged brilliance. Each "doughnut" was fully 100 feet in diameter, with large portholes equally spaced around the outside rim. Dark, circular continuous windows lined the inside bottom of each object. Five of the strange constructions were circling slowly around the sixth, which held stationary at the center of the formation, but was losing altitude rapidly. Dahl guessed that the center object was experiencing technical difficulty, and the others had moved in to assist. The whole formation descended to about 500 feet overhead, then stopped abruptly.
Dahl ordered his crew to pull over to the beach, where he took several pictures. After five or six minutes, one of the assisting craft dropped down beside its ailing sister to almost within touching distance. The men on the beach heard a dull thud, like a boot being stomped on damp ground, and the crippled center disc suddenly began spewing out a rain of what Dahl at first thought were newspapers, but which he later identified as small bars of an extremely light white metal.
Almost immediately, a second rain began, this time a shower of near-molten, dark chunks of a metal resembling slag or pumice, which hissed and steamed as they hit the water. The shower was so heavy that, even under cover, Dahl's son was injured and the dog was killed. The hot rain ended and, relieved of its burden, the floundering craft and its companions rose slowly away until they disappeared into the afternoon sky.
The men moved cautiously back to where their patrol boat sat rocking in the still-agitated water. The wheelhouse had been smashed by the falling metal. All attempts to radio port authorities were thwarted by a wall of impenetrable static. After inspecting their crippled vessel for seaworthiness, the men loaded the boat with samples of the strange metal fragments, buried the dog at sea, and turned toward home.
Upon reaching the dock, Dahl related the crew's experience to his superior officer, Fred Lee Crisman. Crisman was clearly incredulous, but took charge of the debris samples and the camera for inspection. The developed film showed the strange aerial vehicles, but the negatives were covered with white splotches, as though the film had been exposed to intense radiation.
Early the next morning, Harold Dahl received a mysterious visitor at his home. Dressed all in black and driving a shiny, new 1947 Buick sedan, the stranger offered to buy him breakfast in town. Dahl was used to being courted by lumber executives out to purchase logs salvaged from harbor waters, so he accepted the offer gladly, and followed the sedan in his own car to an uptown cafe.
Over breakfast, however, the mysterious man in black proved he was no lumberman. He quickly and accurately de-scribed every detail of Dahl's saucer sighting, then finished with this warning:
"What I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe. Silence is the best thing for you and your family. You have seen what you ought not to have seen."
The stranger made it clear that, if Dahl loved his family and did not wish to see harm come to them or to himself, he would not tell anyone about his experience.
But he had already told Fred Lee Crisman, who was at that very moment on Maury Island, gathering further samples of debris and having his own encounter with the doughnut-shaped discs. Alone on the beach, a saucer fragment in each hand, Crisman watched a lone disc sweep down from a cloud, make a slow reconnoiter of the small bay as if searching for something, then circle off and vanish again into the clouds.
At the request of publisher Ray Palmer, world-famous saucer-sighter Kenneth Arnold was sent to investigate the story. He brought with him United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith, who, like Arnold, had been a witness to the flying disc phenomenon, and who Arnold trusted implicitly for his reason and objectivity.
From day one of the investigation, things went strange: Upon arriving in Tacoma, Arnold was unable to locate a vacant hotel room – until he called the Winthrop, the fanciest, most expensive establishment in town, to discover that a room had already been mysteriously reserved in his name.
After initial interviews with both Dahl and Crisman, the two investigators were shocked to receive a call from Ted Morello, head man for the Tacoma branch of United Press, informing them that an anonymous "crackpot" had been calling his office all evening with verbatim transcripts of every word being spoken in Arnold's room, including conversations held when no one but Smith and Arnold were present. A search for hidden listening devices turned up nothing.
The next morning, Dahl and Crisman brought samples of the saucer fragments for inspection. The pilots immediately recognized the "light white metal" as ordinary aluminum, likely scrap from a military salvage yard. The darker material they judged to be common slag, or at most, pieces of a large, insulated power tube which had been broken into curved pieces. When they asked to see the photographs, Dahl claimed to have given them to Crisman, who seemed to have misplaced them.
Smelling a hoax, Arnold called in two Military Intelligence friends, Lieutenant Frank Brown and Captain William Davidson, in hopes that their presence might shake the two witnesses up a little and settle the issue once and for all.
Dahl refused to meet with the military men, but Crisman gleefully retold the tale. Brown and Davidson listened intently while passing pieces of the debris back and forth without comment.
Once Crisman was gone, however, they seemed to lose interest altogether, and began to make excuses for their having to leave Tacoma before sundown. Arnold was sure they had determined the story a hoax, and were keeping silent so as not to embarrass Smith or himself. They showed no interest in the box of metal fragments, and had to be coaxed into taking it with them at all.
By morning, both Brown and Davidson were dead. Their B-25 bomber exploded in midair shortly after takeoff. Based on the anonymous tipster's calls, coupled with a survivor's report that a heavy box had come onto the plane with the officers, as well as official confirmation that "classified materials" had, indeed, been aboard, newspapers were already speculating that the flight had been sabotaged to prevent captured saucer pieces from being analyzed.
The Air Force disagreed, stating that the accident had been caused by a mechanical fault in the plane's left engine. The "classified materials" were merely reports which the officers had volunteered to escort to Hamilton Field.
In light of this tragedy, Arnold and Smith dropped their investigation. Arnold stopped by Dahl's home on his way out of town, to find it deserted. Crisman had vanished from the scene, as well.
Former Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt, in his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, writes that soon after the crash, both Dahl and Crisman admitted to perpetrating the hoax. He states that neither of the men were actually harbor patrolmen at all, but merely owned a small salvage boat. The "Man in Black" didn't really exist. The metal fragments were just slag from the Tacoma Smelting Company. The Air Force chose not to press charges because, despite the hoax, the two men could not in any way be tied to the crash of the B-25.
So the official verdict on Maury Island was hoax, and that's where things stood until 1968, when "hoaxter" Fred Lee Crisman emerged again into public view – this time appearing before a Grand Jury investigation led by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who claimed to have uncovered a pre-Dallas plot involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie and others to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in his city.
Crisman denied having "insider" knowledge of anything, but in a press release dated October 31, 1968, Garrison stated:
"Mr. Crisman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years... in connection with his undercover work for that part of the warfare industry engaged in the manufacture of what is termed, in military language, 'hardware' – meaning those weapons sold to the US government which are uniquely large and expensive."
Before the Grand Jury, Crisman swore he was not a government agent of any kind, in direct contradiction of CIA files subpoenaed for the investigation. The files named Crisman as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, where he served as a liaison officer with the British Royal Air Force. After the war, he entered a special OSS International Security School, from which he was later transferred to the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He operated there as an internal security specialist in "disruption" activities, and was connected with the highly classified Internal Security subsection Easy Section, whose very existence was denied by the CIA.
Was it all a hoax, perpetrated on a gullible public by a pair of two-bit salvage men? Was it a CIA plan designed to discredit Kenneth Arnold and his June 24, 1947 saucer sighting? Did Dahl have a genuine encounter with extraterrestrial or secret military flying discs, the investigation of which CIA agent Crisman "disrupted" by intimidating Dahl, and providing investigators with faked evidence and an inconsistent story? What cargo really went down with Lieutenant Brown and Captain Davidson on that ill-fated flight?
In the six decades that have passed since the Maury Island incident took place, none of these questions has been satis-factorily put to rest. What actually took place in the air over that isolated locale in the summer of 1947 remains to this day an unsolved mystery of the Golden Age of Flying Saucers.
He at first believed they were balloons, since they were completely silent and had no motors, propellers or other visible means of propulsion. But their surfaces appeared metallic, a glistening, seashell-like gold and silver color that reflected the sun with a dazzling, jagged brilliance. Each "doughnut" was fully 100 feet in diameter, with large portholes equally spaced around the outside rim. Dark, circular continuous windows lined the inside bottom of each object. Five of the strange constructions were circling slowly around the sixth, which held stationary at the center of the formation, but was losing altitude rapidly. Dahl guessed that the center object was experiencing technical difficulty, and the others had moved in to assist. The whole formation descended to about 500 feet overhead, then stopped abruptly.
Dahl ordered his crew to pull over to the beach, where he took several pictures. After five or six minutes, one of the assisting craft dropped down beside its ailing sister to almost within touching distance. The men on the beach heard a dull thud, like a boot being stomped on damp ground, and the crippled center disc suddenly began spewing out a rain of what Dahl at first thought were newspapers, but which he later identified as small bars of an extremely light white metal.
Almost immediately, a second rain began, this time a shower of near-molten, dark chunks of a metal resembling slag or pumice, which hissed and steamed as they hit the water. The shower was so heavy that, even under cover, Dahl's son was injured and the dog was killed. The hot rain ended and, relieved of its burden, the floundering craft and its companions rose slowly away until they disappeared into the afternoon sky.
The men moved cautiously back to where their patrol boat sat rocking in the still-agitated water. The wheelhouse had been smashed by the falling metal. All attempts to radio port authorities were thwarted by a wall of impenetrable static. After inspecting their crippled vessel for seaworthiness, the men loaded the boat with samples of the strange metal fragments, buried the dog at sea, and turned toward home.
Upon reaching the dock, Dahl related the crew's experience to his superior officer, Fred Lee Crisman. Crisman was clearly incredulous, but took charge of the debris samples and the camera for inspection. The developed film showed the strange aerial vehicles, but the negatives were covered with white splotches, as though the film had been exposed to intense radiation.
A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR
Early the next morning, Harold Dahl received a mysterious visitor at his home. Dressed all in black and driving a shiny, new 1947 Buick sedan, the stranger offered to buy him breakfast in town. Dahl was used to being courted by lumber executives out to purchase logs salvaged from harbor waters, so he accepted the offer gladly, and followed the sedan in his own car to an uptown cafe.
Over breakfast, however, the mysterious man in black proved he was no lumberman. He quickly and accurately de-scribed every detail of Dahl's saucer sighting, then finished with this warning:
"What I have said is proof to you that I know a great deal more about this experience of yours than you will want to believe. Silence is the best thing for you and your family. You have seen what you ought not to have seen."
The stranger made it clear that, if Dahl loved his family and did not wish to see harm come to them or to himself, he would not tell anyone about his experience.
But he had already told Fred Lee Crisman, who was at that very moment on Maury Island, gathering further samples of debris and having his own encounter with the doughnut-shaped discs. Alone on the beach, a saucer fragment in each hand, Crisman watched a lone disc sweep down from a cloud, make a slow reconnoiter of the small bay as if searching for something, then circle off and vanish again into the clouds.
HOAX!
At the request of publisher Ray Palmer, world-famous saucer-sighter Kenneth Arnold was sent to investigate the story. He brought with him United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith, who, like Arnold, had been a witness to the flying disc phenomenon, and who Arnold trusted implicitly for his reason and objectivity.
From day one of the investigation, things went strange: Upon arriving in Tacoma, Arnold was unable to locate a vacant hotel room – until he called the Winthrop, the fanciest, most expensive establishment in town, to discover that a room had already been mysteriously reserved in his name.
After initial interviews with both Dahl and Crisman, the two investigators were shocked to receive a call from Ted Morello, head man for the Tacoma branch of United Press, informing them that an anonymous "crackpot" had been calling his office all evening with verbatim transcripts of every word being spoken in Arnold's room, including conversations held when no one but Smith and Arnold were present. A search for hidden listening devices turned up nothing.
The next morning, Dahl and Crisman brought samples of the saucer fragments for inspection. The pilots immediately recognized the "light white metal" as ordinary aluminum, likely scrap from a military salvage yard. The darker material they judged to be common slag, or at most, pieces of a large, insulated power tube which had been broken into curved pieces. When they asked to see the photographs, Dahl claimed to have given them to Crisman, who seemed to have misplaced them.
Smelling a hoax, Arnold called in two Military Intelligence friends, Lieutenant Frank Brown and Captain William Davidson, in hopes that their presence might shake the two witnesses up a little and settle the issue once and for all.
Dahl refused to meet with the military men, but Crisman gleefully retold the tale. Brown and Davidson listened intently while passing pieces of the debris back and forth without comment.
Once Crisman was gone, however, they seemed to lose interest altogether, and began to make excuses for their having to leave Tacoma before sundown. Arnold was sure they had determined the story a hoax, and were keeping silent so as not to embarrass Smith or himself. They showed no interest in the box of metal fragments, and had to be coaxed into taking it with them at all.
TRAGEDY STRIKES
By morning, both Brown and Davidson were dead. Their B-25 bomber exploded in midair shortly after takeoff. Based on the anonymous tipster's calls, coupled with a survivor's report that a heavy box had come onto the plane with the officers, as well as official confirmation that "classified materials" had, indeed, been aboard, newspapers were already speculating that the flight had been sabotaged to prevent captured saucer pieces from being analyzed.
The Air Force disagreed, stating that the accident had been caused by a mechanical fault in the plane's left engine. The "classified materials" were merely reports which the officers had volunteered to escort to Hamilton Field.
In light of this tragedy, Arnold and Smith dropped their investigation. Arnold stopped by Dahl's home on his way out of town, to find it deserted. Crisman had vanished from the scene, as well.
Former Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt, in his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, writes that soon after the crash, both Dahl and Crisman admitted to perpetrating the hoax. He states that neither of the men were actually harbor patrolmen at all, but merely owned a small salvage boat. The "Man in Black" didn't really exist. The metal fragments were just slag from the Tacoma Smelting Company. The Air Force chose not to press charges because, despite the hoax, the two men could not in any way be tied to the crash of the B-25.
A FINAL TWIST
So the official verdict on Maury Island was hoax, and that's where things stood until 1968, when "hoaxter" Fred Lee Crisman emerged again into public view – this time appearing before a Grand Jury investigation led by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who claimed to have uncovered a pre-Dallas plot involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie and others to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in his city.
Crisman denied having "insider" knowledge of anything, but in a press release dated October 31, 1968, Garrison stated:
"Mr. Crisman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years... in connection with his undercover work for that part of the warfare industry engaged in the manufacture of what is termed, in military language, 'hardware' – meaning those weapons sold to the US government which are uniquely large and expensive."
Before the Grand Jury, Crisman swore he was not a government agent of any kind, in direct contradiction of CIA files subpoenaed for the investigation. The files named Crisman as a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, where he served as a liaison officer with the British Royal Air Force. After the war, he entered a special OSS International Security School, from which he was later transferred to the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He operated there as an internal security specialist in "disruption" activities, and was connected with the highly classified Internal Security subsection Easy Section, whose very existence was denied by the CIA.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
Was it all a hoax, perpetrated on a gullible public by a pair of two-bit salvage men? Was it a CIA plan designed to discredit Kenneth Arnold and his June 24, 1947 saucer sighting? Did Dahl have a genuine encounter with extraterrestrial or secret military flying discs, the investigation of which CIA agent Crisman "disrupted" by intimidating Dahl, and providing investigators with faked evidence and an inconsistent story? What cargo really went down with Lieutenant Brown and Captain Davidson on that ill-fated flight?
In the six decades that have passed since the Maury Island incident took place, none of these questions has been satis-factorily put to rest. What actually took place in the air over that isolated locale in the summer of 1947 remains to this day an unsolved mystery of the Golden Age of Flying Saucers.
