Maury Island Incident
What really happened in an east bay off Maury Island, over Puget Sound, near Tacoma, Washington? For most of the UFO researchers it was nothing more than a hoax story arranged for money and fame.Then next question is WHY so many people, related to the Maury Island Incident, died soon after...? Kenn Thomas, the conspiracy theorist and author of the book "The Crisman Conspiracy" (Illuminet Press 1999), said once about the Maury Island incident of June 1947:
Maury Island UFO - It was the first UFO sighting of the modern era, predating Kenneth Arnold's famous 1947 event by three days. Often dismissed as a hoax, the Maury Island case involved figures who later re-merged as part of Jim Garrison's 1968 investigation of the JFK assassination, and in between had a long, peculiar history. It involved the earliest Men In Black experiences, the sudden deaths of Air Force investigators, a weird interaction between the covert intelligence world and the ufological community, and conspiracy connections that lead to the present day.
Summer of 1947...
Just before the famous Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting and the Roswell Crash something strange happened to Harold A. Dahl, a harbor patrolman, his teenage son Charles, two other crew members and the family dog while boating near Maury Island.
Here is his story he later told to Kenneth Arnold on July 30. This is the original story and all, word for word, what he had to say to Kenneth Arnold that day.
On June 21, 1947 in the afternoon about two o'clock I was patrolling the East Bay of Maury Island close in to the shore. This practically uninhabited island lies directly opposite Tacoma about three miles from mainland. This day the sea was rather rough and there were numerous low hanging clouds. I, as captain, was steering my patrol boat close to the shore of a bay on Maury Island. On board were two crewmen, my fifteen-year-old son and his dog.
As I looked up from the wheel on my boat I noticed six very large doughnut-shaped aircraft. I would judge they were at about 2,000 feet the water and almost directly overhead. At first glance I thought them to be balloons as they seemed to be stationary. However, upon further observance, five of these strange aircraft were circling very slowly around the sixth one which was stationary in the center of the formation. It appeared to me that the center aircraft was in some kind of trouble as it was losing altitude fairly rapidly. The other aircraft stayed at a distance of about two hundred feet above the center one as if they were following the center one down. The center aircraft came to rest almost directly overhead at about five hundred feet above the water.
All on board our boat were watching these aircraft with a great deal of interest as they apparently had no motors, propellers , or any visible signs of propulsion, and to the best of our hearing they made no sound. In describing the aircraft I would say they were at least one hundred feet in diameter. Each had a hole in the center, approximately twenty-five feet in diameter. They were all a sort shell-like gold and silver color. Their surface seemed of metal and appeared to be burled because when the light shone on them through the clouds they were brilliant, not all one brilliance, but many brilliance's, something like a Buick dashboard. All of the aircraft seemed to have large portholes equally spaced around the outside of their doughnut exterior. These portholes were from five to six feet in diameter and were round. They also appeared to have a dark, circular, continuous window on the inside and bottom of their doughnut shape as though it were an observation window.
All of us aboard the boat were afraid this center balloon was going to crash in the bay, and just a little while before it stopped lowering, we had pulled our boat over to the beach and got out with our harbor patrol camera. I took three or four photographs of these balloons.
The center balloon-like aircraft remained stationary at about five hundred feet from the water while the other five aircraft kept circling over it. After about five or six minutes one of the aircraft from the circling formation left its place in the formation and lowered itself down right next to the stationary aircraft. In fact, it appeared to touch it and stayed stationary next to the center aircraft as if it were giving some kind of assistance for about three or four minutes.
It was then we heard a dull thud, like an underground explosion or a thud similar to a man stamping his heel on damp ground. Immediately following this sound the center aircraft began spewing forth what seemed like thousands of newspapers from somewhere on the inside of its center. These newspapers, which turned out to be a white type of very light metal, fluttered to earth, most of them lighting in the bay. Then it seemed to hail on us, in the bay and over the beach, black or darker type of metal which looked similar to lava rock. We did not know if this metal was coming from the aircraft but assumed it was, as it fell at the same time the white type metal was falling. However, since these fragments were of a darker color, we did not observe them until they started hitting the beach and the bay. All of these latter fragments seemed hot, almost molten. When they hit the bay, steam rose from the water.
We ran for shelter under a cliff on the beach and behind logs to protect ourselves from the falling debris. In spite of our protection, my son's arm was injured by one of the falling fragments and our dog was hit and killed. We buried the dog at sea on our return trip to Tacoma.
After this rain of metal seemed over, all of these strange aircraft lifted slowly and drifted out to the westward, which is out to sea. They rose and disappeared at a tremendous height. The center aircraft, which had spewed the debris, did not seem to be hindered in its flight and still remained in the center of the formation as they all rose and disappeared out to sea.
We tried to pick up several pieces of the metal or fragments and found them very hot -- in fact, I almost burned my fingers -- but after some of them had cooled we loaded a considerable number of the pieces aboard the boat. We also picked up some of the metal which had looked like falling newspapers.
My crew and I discussed this observance for awhile and I attempted to radio from my patrol boat back to my base. The static was so great it was impossible for me to reach my radio station. This I attributed to the presence of these aircraft, as my radio had been in perfect operating order and the weather would not have caused this amount of interference.
The wheelhouse on our boat had been hit by falling debris and damaged. We immediately started our engines and went directly to Tacoma, where my boy was given first aid at the hospital there. Upon reaching the dock I had to tell my superior officer how the boat had been damaged and why the dog had not returned with us. I related our experience to Fred L. Crisman, my superior officer. I could plainly see that he did not believe it and I guess I don't blame him, but we gave him the camera with its film and fragments of metal we had loaded aboard as proof of our story. Fred L. Crisman decided he would at least go and investigate the beach where I judged at least twenty tons of debris had fallen. I might add that these strange aircraft appeared completely round, but seemed a little squashed on the top and on the bottom as if you placed a large board on an inner tube and squashed it slightly. The film from our camera, developed showed these strange aircraft, but the negatives were covered with spots similar to a negative that has been close to an X-ray room before it was exposed except that the spots printed white instead of black as in the usual case.
This was the story that Harold A. Dahl related to me (Arnold) the evening of July 29, 1947 in Room 502 in the Winthrop Hotel in Tacoma, Washington."
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Men in Black
the first documented case was in the Northwest
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The first instance of the mysterious Men In Black appearing in the history and lore of UFOs happened in the Puget Sound region as part of a sighting known as the Maury island case. Three days before Kenneth Arnold's famous 1947 saucer sighting on Mount Rainier, a Washingtonian named Harold Dahl watched five flying saucers come to the aid of a sixth wobbling in the sky. The saucers spewed hot ash and slag that wounded Dahl's son and killed his dog. Shortly after Dahl began telling others about what had happened, he was visited by a "Man In Black", who advised him not to say anything more to anyone. Dahl did not heed the warning. Soon, his logging business began to fail, his wife fell ill and his son disappeared, only to reappear in a distant state, waiting tables, with no memory of how his life circumstances had changed. After that, Dahl vowed to never again tell the tale of the Maury Island UFO and, if asked, he would claim henceforth that it was a hoax. These events preceded by five years the claims of UFO writer Al Bender, generally regarded as the first claim for the existence of Men in Black. Bender, the head of a group called the International Flying Saucer Bureau in Bridgeport, Connecticut, became physically ill after receiving a visit from three MIBs in 1952, who told him to remain quiet about his knowledge of UFOs.
The man wore a black suit, however, and drove a black 1947 Buick sedan when he arrived the day after Dahl's encounter with the flying doughnuts [Maury Island UFO Incident]. After he accepted the strange man's invitation to breakfast, Dahl drove himself to a small cafe in downtown Tacoma followed by the black-suited man in the black Buick....
~Maury Island UFO Incident by Kenn Thomas, Illuminet Press
Thus, historically, the Northwest was the first documented encounter of "Men in Black" shortly after the "Maury Island UFO incident"- the "Roswell of the Northwest" and just three days before Kenneth Arnolds sighting of nine discs seen over Mt. Rainier in 1947 and when the media coined the term "flying saucer".
The mystery even though well documented and numerous people were involved including military, has never been solved.
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The object in the sky was certainly a UFO at the time, but there is no evidence to conclude it was an extraterrestrial one. The slag fragments dropped by the ‘UFO’ were identified by experts as smelter refuse. Arnold also confirmed the light metal material was only aircraft alloy, however one detail puzzled him. "There was only one unusual thing about this white metal that made us stop and wonder. On one piece that Crisman handed us we could plainly see that two parts of it had been riveted. I had never seen that type of rivet used in aircraft manufacture." The rivet in question was square. All aircraft rivets were round.
Yet at the time, scientists from Germany were entering the US as part of a relocation programme bringing with them alternative advanced aircraft designs and technology. The US Navy was at the forefront of developing these craft with the German scientists, craft that appeared to resemble the popular conception of UFOs.
And the Navy certainly had a presence in the area, with a Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island, another station at Everett, a submarine base at Bangor and a Naval shipyard at Puget Sound.
Originally established in 1891 as a Naval Station, this base at Puget Sound built new ships during WWI and following WWII the shipyard was engaged in an extensive programme of modernising carriers. The shipyard itself is located on the west side of Puget Sound, thirty miles from Tacoma and within miles of the McChord Air Force Base.
By 1965, the shipyard had been confirmed as having a nuclear capability. It is likely, however, that it had this capability much earlier, for history also records that in Washington State there is one of the oldest nuclear processing facilities in the world. In fact, just one month after Enrico and his team conducted the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, the leaders of the top secret ‘Manhattan Project’ chose to build the world’s first, fullscale plutonium production plants near the farming village of Hanford in Southeast Washington.
Thirty months later, Hanford produced the plutonium used for the world’s first nuclear detonation. At this Hanford Plant plutonium was manufactured for the Nagasaki ‘Fat man’ bomb and for many years during the Cold War weapons-grade material was produced there for America’s nuclear arsenal.
It is not improbable that the military had been dumping illegal radioactive waste from Hanford facility on Maury Island. (This would also account for Dahl’s film being foggy; as radioactivity has this effect on photographic materials) and the burn’s on Dahl’s son’s arm.
It is also now known that Fred Crisman himself was no lowly harbour master nor salvage collector. As Anthony Kimery, publisher and former organised crime investigator in Washington DC commented, Crisman "knew a lot more about the aircraft [witnesses] saw than he admitted – aircraft some intelligence sources believe were hybrids of those designed early that decade by Nazi engineers who were brought to the US under Project Paperclip."
In fact, Crisman both had strong CIA connections and was later indicted for the assassination of President Kennedy.
This mixture of German scientists, CIA, FBI, UFOs, sabotage, deception, fantasy and fact make for the delicious but lethal cocktail known as the post-war UFO phenomenon. What is known without doubt, however, is that no-one really had any idea what was going on.
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(Excerpts from Kenneth Arnolds book "The Coming of the Saucer" (which he and Raymond Palmer published themselves)
[To interview Dahl, Kenneth Arnold used one of the first portable recorders available. He also took movies of everything as he investigated.]
The next day, early in the morning, Dahl was visited and interrogated by a stranger who was driving a black Buick car to his house. Dressed in a dark suit, he was around 40 years old and Harold Dahl described him as "an insurance agent".
Dahl got out his own car and drove downtown - with the stranger following him. Over breakfast in a hotel, Dahl was asked some curious 'personal' questions: Stranger: "Are you happy at your job, and in your family?" Dahl: "What the blazes are you getting at?"
Then the stranger proceeded to tell Dahl of the events that occurred on Maury Island the day before.
"Mr Dahl," said the stranger, still smiling, "you had better forget what you have seen, and stop talking. Silence is the best thing for you and your family. You have seen what you ought not to have seen!"
The stranger then abruptly got up and left the hotel.
The next day, June 23, Crisman as promised, visited Maury Island Beach. He found debris in form of glassy, dark material and some kind of shiny foil strewn along the beach.
(This of course is similar to the debris that what was found in the Roswell Crash, when an usual aerial object crashed on the J.B.Foster Ranch, south-east of Corona and about 75 miles north-west of Roswell, New Mexico in the first week of July 1947.
"Most of it was a kind of double sided material, foil-like on one side...the foil more silvery.." in this way described the debris pieces, Bessie, Mac Brazel's daughter, who helped her father collect some of the debris. "...foil-like metal always returned to its original shape.." - Beyond Top Secret - Timothy Good)
A few weeks after incident, Ray Palmer (editor of "Amazing Stories") was contacted by Fred Lee Crisman, who together with Harold Dahl delivered him the Maury Island story.
Palmer contacted Kenneth Arnold, who just experienced the UFO sighting over Mount Rainier, and asked if he would investigate the Maury Island affair and write an article about it for Palmer. He advanced Arnold $200 expense money.
Arnold accepted Palmer's proposition and flew to Tacoma, Washington in his private plane, on July 29.
In Tacoma he tried to find a room in one of the town's hotels but without any lack. So finally he went to the best Tacoma's place - the Winthrop Hotel and surprisingly noticed that there was already a room reserved for his name and nobody could say who made this reservation. He phoned Harold Dahl and found him unwilling to talk about the Maury Island events. It could be caused by Dahl's experience with the stranger in black who visited him and threatened.
Dahl said that he wanted to forget the whole thing, he had been having problems at work, he had almost lost his job, he nearly lost his son, and his wife was sick. He had also lost a log boom that meant a lot of money to him. Even if everything was just a coincidence, nothing more, but all his problems had started after June 21 when the saw the unidentified flying objects. Simply Harold Dahl was thinking his really bad luck was somehow related to the UFO sighting.
Finally he agreed to be interviewed by Kenneth Arnold and it took place on July 30. (Dahl's story above)
He also provided Arnold with samples of debris that - as he said - was found on the beach. But Arnold was not particularly impressed as the material presented by Dahl looked like volcanic rock nothing more.
Then Arnold also met Fred Lee Crisman who told him about finding tons of metal and slag on the beach at Maury Island, and assured Arnold he had a garage full of this material.
Suspicious and dissatisfied with Crisman's version of the story, Arnold wanted to get some advice and help with the case that seemed to be a plot of some kind or a hoax.
Arnold was an experienced, private pilot from Boise, Idaho and part time Search and Rescue Mercy Flyer. He certainly tried to do his best in the case but he was not an investigator and he did not know much about the military or intelligence.
Therefore he contacted a friend, United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith and asked for help in the investigation that was not any easy piece of work.
Strange things began to happen….
The local newspapermen began to contact Arnold at the Winthrop Hotel. It was obvious that someone was watching Arnold and Smith and knew about every step they made. However searching in their rooms for eventual bugs, gave nothing.
Arnold made a quick decision. He wanted military intelligence to be involved in the case. On the advice of Smith, he called an Air Force A-2 (Intelligence) officer Lieutenant Frank M. Brown. He met him once after reporting his own sighting.
In less than an hour after telephone conversation the two Air Force officers (Brown took with him another officer Captain William Davidson) flew in a B-25 bomber from Hamilton Field, California to McChord Field, Washington. Nothing could be kept as a secret… Soon Tacoma's UPI chief Ted Morello called Arnold and asked him why the Air Force officers were on their way to meet him. Obviously Morello already knew about the planned arriving of the officers. No doubt, somebody was all the time listening and watching the progress of Arnold's and Smith's investigation.
But the only people Arnold told about calling Lt. Brown were Harold Dahl and Fred L.Crisman.
Brown and Davidson arrived on the afternoon of July 31. Dahl and Crisman were invited to the arranged meeting and should be present. But only Crisman came and talked about the case like a very important first witness.
He also showed Brown and Davidson some of the debris.
After looking at the debris and hearing the story, Brown and Davidson were not specially impressed and for them it was only a hoax.
Kenneth Arnold wrote later:
…When we offered them pieces of the fragments…. They were just not interested.
But earlier Crisman promised to return home and pack a box full of fragments for the Air Force officers to take with them back to California.
Just before the two officers left at 11:30 p.m Crisman returned and Davidson helped him load the carton in the military car that had come from McChord Field. Then they departed.
Kenneth Arnold said later about things inside the carton:
We assumed it was the fragments…..looked similar to the fragments we had in our room...but somehow...looked more rocky and less metallic.
But what if the carton was full of something completely different?...
The next day Arnold and Smith learned something terrible. The Air Force B-25 had crashed twenty minutes after takeoff. Lt. Brown and Captain Davidson were killed. The other crewmen and another person, an Army officer managed to survive. This man was Master Sergeant Elmer Taff, who was only accidental passenger on this plane. He just hopped a ride home on B-25.
Kenneth Arnold invited to Tacoma's UPI chief Ted Morello took the opportunity to listen a recorded earlier interview with Sergeant Elmer Taff who saw the officers Brown and Davidson load a large carton into the plane just before takeoff. According to Taff about twenty minutes after takeoff, the left engine of the plane caught fire. It was almost nothing left to do. One of the crewmen made an effort to activate the emergency fire-fighting equipment, but it was out of function.
Lt. Brown, co-pilot of B-25, ordered the enlisted men to jump so Sgt. Taff and the flight engineer, Tech-4 Woodrow D. Mathews, promptly did it. Neither Brown nor Davidson made it out. The B-25 crashed near Kelso, Washington.
Tech-4 Mathews later told investigators that from his parachute he saw "something" lift off the top of the plane. At the time he thought it was the parachute of Brown or Davidson, but neither man ever got out. The military secured the crash site and did not allow civil aviation investigators come closer to the wreck. The reason given was, the B-25 had been carrying classified material at the time of the crash.
After the crash of the B-25 Major Sanders from McCord Air Force Base met Kenneth Arnold met and took him to the Tacoma Smelting Company trying to convince him that the UFO debris was just slag taken from this place. Arnold said they weren't quite the same. They didn't feel alike.
Sanders wanted every piece of the material be turned over to him. Why? He earlier stated the whole this Maury Island story was nothing but a hoax….
"… We don't want to overlook even one piece…" he said.
Arnold and Smith turned over to him all pieces they had. Sanders put them in the back of his car and it was the last place they could see the debris.
It looked like the incident and the debris related to it was extremely important for Sanders after all.
One original cigar box of fragments was mailed by Dahl to Ray Palmer. This box was stolen from Palmers office in Chicago.
However before it happened, Palmer sent it out for analysis. The results indicated it was neither slag nor natural rock.
Additional analysis showed that the metal was an usual alloy of calcium, iron, zinc, and titanium. Other metals were also present like magnesium, aluminum, manganese, copper, nickel, lead, silicon, strontium and chromium with traces of silver, tin and cadmium.
On August 2, Kenneth Arnold decided to leave Tacoma in his plane to fly back to Idaho. Before his departure he wanted last time to meet Dahl and Crisman. Unfortunately, it turned out that both men were simply … not available. They disappeared.
Arnold's plane lifted but less than 200 feet off the ground, its engine suddenly quit. He managed to land in order to check the engine and found that the fuel line valve was turned off….
The incident occurred somewhere in the vicinity of Maury Island.
Dahl said to Kenneth Arnold the following :
"On June 21, 1947 in the afternoon about two o'clock I was patrolling the east bay of Maury Island close in to the shore."
Then he also said to Brown and Davidson: "..."south of Maury Island" but still in the east bay. The map does not show any east bay, but there are two bays on Maury/Vashon: one is Quartermaster Harbor and the other is Tramp Harbor. Tramp Harbor is midway up the island(s) and Quartermaster is between them on the south.
It must be somewhere between Point Robinson and Piner Point. Two gravel pits exist in that area.
The incident was not officially investigated until three weeks after the Roswell crash.
The FBI investigated Dahl and Crisman. The reports they sent back had two basic stories, the one above and one in which Dahl and his son found the strange debris in a gravel pit on Maury Island. The FBI investigated the whole story as told by Arnold including the "mystery phone calls" to the local papers and the crash of the B-25 with the A-2 agents aboard.
Two weeks later, Tacoma reporter Paul Lance, who'd covered the story of the Maury Island sighting and the deaths of two Air Force officers Lt. Brown and Captain Davidson, died suddenly … and the cause of his death was not clear... ...he lay on a slab in the morgue for about thirty-six hours while the pathologists apparently hemmed and hawed."
Although already sitting in wheelchair, he had seemed to be in good health…
A short time later, Ted Morello, The United Press UPI chief at Tacoma, also died.
Ray Palmer, Editor of eight Ziff Davis Publications, and who had increased circulation of Amazing Stories from 80,000 to 130,000 and initiated the Maury Island investigation was fired.
The Tacoma Times, a newspaper in business over 40 years went out of business.
The Army Air Corps intelligence officer at Hamilton Field made the following recommendation in regard to Fred Crisman:
That in view of the reported statements made by Mr.Crisman that consideration be given to revoke his Air Reserve commission and flying status as an undesirable and unreliable officer....
~Lt. Colonel Donald Springer, Report of 18 August 1947
There is more about Crisman:
According to CIA files, Crisman too was a member of the OSS during World War II, serving as a liaison officer with the British Royal Air Force. At the end of the war, Crisman, supposedly discharged from the military, entered a special OSS Internal Security School and was quietly transferred to the newly formed CIA (the CIA was chartered in 1947), where he operated as an "extended agent", primarily as an internal security specialist in "disruption" activities.
The files show Crisman was involved in a highly classified subsection of Internal Security known as 1Sece, Easy Section, a disruption planning unit whose very existence was denied by the CIA The CIA documents detailed Crisman's activities over the years---including secret reports to the agency on military officers during the Korean War and company officials while working for Boeing in Seattle--but no mention of the Maury Island affair.
~"Alien Agenda" by Jim Marrs
..Fred Crisman was flying fighters in the Pacific until the end. Somehow he seems to have been connected with the OSS in World War II also; it may have been in his Air Commando group. In a link to Palmer he sent a letter to his magazine saying he was hit by a Ray Gun in a cave in Burma. Somehow this was linked to the "Shaver Mystery" and the underground world of the Deros. This does seem very strange and some would say Fred is a few bricks shy of a load but in my investigations I found the Japanese were working on a Ray Gun in World War II. It was in development for a long time and tested on animals. The microwave energy caused numerous problems for the researchers. Offically it was never used but offically the A-bomb didn't exist unitil it exploded above Hiroshima. When he got home they made him a liaison for Veteran Affairs. Fred ran for county coroner in 1945 but never won the seat..
~John Covington
Not everyone believed it was a hoax.
J. Edgar Hoover didn't believe it was a hoax.
Teletype dated August 14, 1947, Hoover stated, "It would also appear that Dahl and Crisman did not admit the hoax to the army officers..." and FBI special agent in charge from Seattle George Wilcox answered, "Please be advised that Dahl did not admit to Brown that his story was a hoax but only stated that if questioned by authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter." Fred Crisman not only didn't admit it was a hoax but in the January 1950 issue of FATE he called those accusations a "bald-faced lie."
Ray Palmer (editor of Amazing Stories), didn't believe it was hoax. Ray published the case in FATE, vol 1, No. 1, 1948; "The Coming of the Saucers, 1952; and in The Real UFO Invasion, 1967.
Kenneth Arnold didn't believe it was a hoax and at the First International UFO Congress in Chicago, discussed the Maury Island incident.
Harold A. Dahl died on Saturday, January 30, 1982
There are still people who believe the Maury Island Case was not a hoax.
The Maury Island UFO Mystery
The Maury Island Incident is nothing more than a hoax; here are the facts. In July, 1947, Kenneth Arnold received a letter from Raymond Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories . Palmer wrote Arnold that he had received a letter from a man named Fred Lee Crsman. In the letter, Crisman claimed that he was a Harbor Patrolman at Tacoma, Washington and that he and an employee of his named Harold Dahl had seen several UFOs near Maury Island in Puget Sound. The story that Dahl told was this: On June 21, 1947, Dahl, his son, his dog, and two crewmen were on a boat near Maury Island when suddenly six large metallic objects appeared silently overhead. They were doughnut-shaped, with a hole in the center and rows of windows around the outside. Five of the UFOs were circling the sixth, which seemed to be having problems. Dahl beached the boat on Maury Island in order to take photos.
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Shaver Mystery Magazine
No.1
1948
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The UFOs hovered about 500 feet over them and one of the circling UFOs moved in and touched the ailing one in the center. When it did so, the center object began spitting out hot metallic material from its center hole. A lot of the stuff fell on the boat, damaging it, and some fell on the dog, killing it. One piece even burned Dahl's son's arm. This regurgitation seemed to "fix" the ailing UFO, and all six objects headed off toward the ocean. Dahl picked up some of the debris and put it into the boat and then headed back to Tacoma. He took his son to the emergency room and then reported to his superior, Fred Lee Crisman. Crisman did not believe Dahl, and was in fact angry about the boat being damaged. The next morning, Dahl received a visit from a "man in a dark suit", who told him that he had seen something he wasn't supposed to and warned him not to discuss it with anyone.
Crisman, meanwhile, had taken a boat out to the spot on Maury Island to investigate. He found tons of debris scattered about, and, as he was examining the debris, he saw one of the objects appear overhead. After hearing the story and being shown a lump of the material, Arnold decided he needed some help, so he called his friend and fellow UFO witness, United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith. Smith said he would be glad to help, so Arnold flew up to Seattle and brought him back to Tacoma. The two examined the debris that Dahl and Crisman brought them, and heard the story over several times. Dahl claimed the pictures had come out spotted, as if exposed to some sort of radiation. Somehow, the two men could never seem to actually produce any of the pictures, spotted or not. The local United Press representative called and said that he was receiving anonymous phone calls from someone who apparently knew everything that Arnold and Smith were doing and saying.
After seeing the debris and hearing the story, Brown and Davidson decided that it was a hoax. They took a box of the debris and told Arnold they had to leave. They drove to McChord Field and told the intelligence officer there that they felt it was a hoax. They hadn't told Arnold because they didn't want to embarrass him, he was so taken in by Dahl and Crisman. The next morning, August 1, they boarded a B-25 back to Hamilton Field. A few hours later, they were killed when the B-25 crashed. The newspapers hinted that the plane had been sabotaged because they were carrying classified material about flying saucers. They made much of the fact that the crew chief and a passenger were able to bail out, but that Brown and Davidson were not. The official explanation was that the only classified material they were carrying was a file of reports that had nothing to do with flying saucers.
The plane crashed because an engine caught fire. Brown and Davidson couldn't bail out in time because a wing broke loose and tore off the tail section. Under questioning, Dahl and Crisman later admitted that the "debris" was only worthless slag from a local smelter. There had been no UFOs. They had only been telling publisher Raymond Palmer what he wanted to hear. The Air Force considered prosecuting the two men, but decided that they hadn't actually meant to cause any harm. Arnold packed up and flew home in disgust. On the way home, however, he crashed his plane at Pendleton because somehow the fuel valve had gotten turned off... He wasn't hurt. Crisman and Dahl seem to have vanished. No one could find them. According to Jenny Randles, two intelligence analysts who studied the case in 1980 said it had all the earmarks of an intelligence operation intended, perhaps, to discredit Arnold's original UFO sighting.
Fred Crisman
In the summer of 1968, when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested prominent city socialite Clay Shaw, he may or may not have been on the trail of the assassins he believed were responsible for killing John F. Kennedy. But what Garrison did undeniably get close to exposing were the identities and activities of intelligence agents who not only harbored a deep hatred of Kennedy, but were willing participants in one of the government's more shameful episodes.
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Dawn
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Era
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Had these men been exposed, Garrison would have unsealed the Pandora's Box on flying saucers, which, if it had occurred, would have forever ripped away the then nearly 20-year-old mythic fabric wrapping the UFO mystery--a veil since used to great benefit by the military to conceal the testing of classified aircraft.
As bizarre as it sounds, Kennedy's assassination and "flying saucers" share common ground.
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'UFO' Magazine, edited by Vicki Cooper (no relation to William Cooper -- who insists that Vicki has admitted that 'her' magazine was being funded by the CIA), carried an article in its Vol.6, No.5 issue, titled THE SECRET LIFE OF FRED L. CRISMAN, by veteran writer on financial conspiracy, Anthony L. Kimory
The article dealt with Fred Crisman's connection with PROJECT PAPERCLIP -- a top-secret operation which brought Nazi scientists to America as part of a program to duplicate Nazi flying discs, and to develop other revolutionary technologies. This operation was not actually carried out by the U.S. Constitutional government as we know it, but by a branch of Bavarian Intelligence which had INFILTRATED American Intelligence and later took control of the government through an internal fascist coup d'etat which involved the death of President John F. Kennedy.
James Garrison, the Louisiana attorney depicted in the movie 'JFK' -- who investigated the John F. Kennedy assassination -- reportedly discovered the connection between Crisman and PAPERCLIP. The Project reportedly sent elite teams of scientists and investigators, known as 'T-Forces', into Europe to confiscate all documents, files, hardware in German labs, and even scientific personnel who were involved in the Nazi aerospace research, an operation which led to the great European 'brain drain' following WWII. The plan was to develop UFO-type craft similar to those which the Nazis had experimented with. The Army, Navy, Army Air Force, CIA and OSS reportedly assisted in the 'T-Forces' and 'Paperclip' Projects, according to Kimory.
Several high-ranking Nazis who assisted in the 'atrocities' were brought to America also, and their crimes suppressed. Many of these worked at the Peenemünde Aerodynamics Institute, which built the V-2 rockets, German fighter jets, etc., using forced slave labor from the Karlshagen concentration camp. Peenemünde scientists, under PROJECT PAPERCLIP, according to Kimory, have controlled the U.S. rocketry, aerospace and space projects for over 20 years, with the majority of those at NASA being oblivious of the fact. Kimory claims that Wernher von Braun and Kurt Davis, heads of Marshall Space Flight Center and Kennedy Space center were both Nazi S.S. agents brought into America with the help of Nazi infiltrators or sympathizers in U.S. Intelligence.
Garrison arrested Clay Shaw on conspiracy to murder JFK, linking him with the CIA. However, when Garrison's star witness David Ferrie was found dead only a few days before Clay Shaw's trial, Garrison did not have enough against Shaw to make a convict ion. It was later discovered in a FOIA document in 1977 that Clay Shaw HAD BEEN in the CIA since 1949. Garrison also linked Crisman to Shaw, and in fact sources indicate that Crisman was the first one Clay Shaw called when Shaw learned that he was in trouble. Is was discovered that Shaw was in business with European Nazis and fascists who were involved in covert operations sponsored by the CIA, according to the article. Shaw was also allegedly tied-in with the O.S.S. Crisman, who worked as a go-between in the Military-Industrial establishment (especially the aerospace companies which were the major beneficiaries of Project Paperclip) was believed by Garrison to be a 'middle man' within a deep-level intelligence network, working in-between those who gave the orders (which included assassinations) and those who carried them out.
Garrison also believed that Crisman was involved with the men who carried out the JFK assassination, and Crisman had also made several trips to Dallas just prior to JFK's death, which is why Garrison subpoenaed him. Crisman was also involved with a government program to 'help gypsies', was tied-in with the O.S.S., and was a member of a secret fraternity of former Intelligence officers, and was also involved with organized crime, according to Garrison's investigations. Of course the strangest aspect of the Crisman connection was that it was Fred L. Crisman himself who handed over 'metal-slag' samples that were reportedly found after a UFO dropped the sub- stance over the Maury Island area near Tacoma, Washington in 1947. Crisman handed the samples to two Army G-2 Intelligence officers, Capt. William L. Davidson and Lt. Frank M. Brown. On their way to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio (where several German Peenemünde scientists reportedly worked) with the 'classified' material their plane crashed and both were killed. News reports of the time mentioned that the plane MAY have been sabotaged. Frank Brown's widow did in fact state her conviction that her husband was murdered. In addition to this, a particularly persistent reporter into the Maury Island episode died shortly after the investigation, and Kenneth Arnold (who had his Mt. Rainier sighting and almost fatal engine failure only a few days later) reported that his room, where he often discussed the Maury Island case with United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith, had been bugged. Kimory suggests that the Maurey Island UFO may have been a 'hybrid' of the Nazi UFO designs developed by the Military-Industrial Establishment and PROJECT PAPERCLIP, which might explain the mystery (for more information on 'Project Paperclip', see also: SECRET AGENDA, by Linda Hunt. St. Martins Press. 1991).
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