Maury Island Incident  

Men in Black  the first documented case was in the Northwest 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. 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.

(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?...

Most UFO cases are pretty simple. The witness, or witnesses, see an aerial object they cannot explain. They report it, and no mundane explanation is found. The result, to put it rather redundantly, is an unidentified Unidentified Flying Object. These sort of reports constitute the bulk of UFO data, and they don't really prove much one way or another.

Rarely a UFO case comes along that has too much data, too many entanglements, and far too many weird associations to be easily categorized or digested. Such is the case with the Maury Island affair, which occurred very early in the modern UFO era, on June 21, 1947.

Two men described as 'harbor patrolmen,' Fred L. Crisman and Harold A. Dahl, operated a boat in Puget Sound. On June 21, Dahl was cruising near Maury Island. With him were two crewmen, Dahl's 15-year old son, and his son's dog. Around 2 p.m., six very large objects appeared overhead. They were identical round objects, with a hole in the center like an inner tube or donut. The outer rim seemed to be lined with large portholes. Five of the objects circled the sixth, which apparently was experiencing difficulty in staying aloft. It sank toward the boat.

Understandably excited, Dahl ran the motorboat ashore on Maury Island and started snapping photos of the UFOs. One of the objects descended and touched rims with the ailing object in the center of the formation. The men reported hearing a loud thud, after which the distressed object began spewing hot debris over a wide area. The ejecta was of two types: lightweight shards of white metal, and darker, rock-like slag. The stuff was very hot, and the cabin of the boat was damaged by it. Dahl's son was hit on the arm and burned, and the dog was killed by falling debris.

Once the object had relieved itself of several tons of slag, it rejoined its comrades and all six objects flew away west, out to sea. Dahl tried to use his radio to call for help, but while the objects were overhead, the radio would not work. With considerable debris on his boat, Dahl went back to Tacoma, where his son was treated for burns. Dahl reported the incident to his boss, Fred L. Crisman. Crisman did not at first believe the fantastic tale.

The next day, Dahl had a visitor. A man knocked on his door and asked if he could talk to Dahl about the UFO incident. Dahl described the man as very imposing, six foot two and 200 pounds, and wearing the not-yet stereotypical black suit... He drove a brand new 1947 Buick sedan. They went to breakfast together. While dining at a waterfront cafe, Dahl and the Man in Black had a strange conversation. The stranger described the events at Maury Island as if he'd been a witness himself, then told Dahl "if he loved his family and didn't want anything to happen to his general welfare, he would not discuss his experience with anyone."

Even stranger, when Dahl had his photos developed, they were useless. The film was fogged beyond recognition, as if it had been exposed to radioactivity.

That same day, Fred Crisman decided to check out Dahl's story by visiting the scene of the sighting. He found the beach on Maury Island strewn with slag -- he estimated there was twenty tons of the stuff -- and while he was puzzling over this confirmation of Dahl's story, a round, donut-shaped object swooped out of the clouds. Needless to say, Crisman became a firm believer in Dahl's story.

This was still two days before Kenneth Arnold had his seminal sighting of crescent shaped objects near Mount Ranier, which newspapers would christen "flying saucers." Crisman and Dahl did not notify the authorities. In July, Crisman wrote to Ray Palmer, then editor of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and told him the story. Palmer, who had previously made contact with Kenneth Arnold regarding his sighting, asked Arnold if he would investigate the Maury Island affair and write an article about for Palmer. He advanced Arnold $200 expense money, and Arnold flew to Washington on July 29 in his private plane. En route he had another UFO sighting, this time spotting a formation of small, brass colored objects while flying over LaGrande valley. Arnold gamely tried to chase the mini-saucers (he described them as being only about four feet in diameter), but his light plane could not keep up with the speedy UFOs. He eventually reached Tacoma without further incident and took a room at the Winthrop Hotel. He phoned Harold Dahl and found him reluctant to talk about the Maury Island incident. When Arnold explained he was the man everyone was talking about who'd spotted UFOs over the Cascades, Dahl relented.

Arnold described Dahl as "a great big burly lumberjack type," six foot six and 230 pounds. He recounted his experience to Arnold, explaining first that he was really a kind of marine junkman. He and Crisman salvaged floating lumber and other detritus of the sea from Puget Sound, keeping the waterways clear and earning a modest living by selling the salvaged materials. Dahl complained bitterly that since the sighting he'd had nothing but bad luck -- family illness, loss of a considerable quantity of salvaged lumber, engine trouble with his boat. He made Arnold think his bad luck was somehow related to the UFO sighting.

Fred Crisman also met with Arnold. He described Crisman as "short, stocky... dark-complexioned, with a happy-go-lucky, cheerful nature... he wanted to dominate the conversation." He told Arnold about finding tons of metal and slag on the beach at Maury Island, and assured Arnold he had a garage full of the stuff he'd collected.

As Arnold continued to investigate, odd things kept happening. Local newspapermen began calling him at the Winthrop, despite the fact he'd not told anyone but Dahl, Crisman, and airline pilot E. J. Smith he was in Tacoma. Arnold began to suspect something big was going on, and on the advice of his friend Smith, he called an Air Force A-2 (Intelligence) officer he'd met after reporting his own sighting, Lieutenant Frank M. Brown. Brown was stationed at Hamilton Field, California.

Arnold's sincerity impressed Brown, and he made immediate plans to fly to Tacoma with another officer, Captain William Davidson. Arnold says in less than an hour after calling Brown the two Air Force officers were on their way to McChord Field, Washington, in a B-25 bomber. Soon after that, UP wire service reporter Ted Morello called Arnold to ask him why the Air Force was coming to see him. Somebody was talking about the Maury Island case, and the leaks were constant. Morello would only said that he received a steady stream of mysterious tips by phone about the progress of Arnold's investigation. The only people Arnold told about calling Lt. Brown were Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman.

Brown and Davidson arrived at the Winthrop Hotel late on the afternoon of July 31. Dahl balked at meeting the Air Force men and did not show up for the arranged meeting. Crisman did come, and talked at length about the case. He also showed Brown and Davidson some of the metal and slag he'd collected, allegedly ejected from the malfunctioning UFO. He promised to return home and put together a box full of fragments for the Air Force men to take with them back to California.

When Crisman was gone, Arnold told Brown and Davidson he'd been to see Dahl's boat and found that while it was old and battered, it didn't really display the kind of damage from the falling slag Dahl claimed. That fact, and all the leaks to the press, made Arnold doubt the whole story. The Air Force officers were doubtful as well. The light metal fragments seemed to be ordinary aircraft aluminium. As Brown and Davidson prepared to leave at 11:30 p.m., they left Arnold with the distinct impression they thought the whole affair was a hoax.

Crisman returned just as Brown and Davidson were leaving. He put a large carton in the trunk of the military staff car that had come from McChord Field. Arnold said later: "We assumed it was the fragments." Davidson helped Crisman load the carton, and they departed.

The next day Arnold learned, to his horror, that the Air Force B-25 had crashed twenty minutes after takeoff. Lt. Brown and Captain Davidson were killed. The other crewmen and another passenger, an Army enlisted man, bailed out and survived. This man, Master Sergeant Elmer Taff, later told Kenneth Arnold he saw the pilot and co-pilot load a large carton into the plane. Fifteen minutes into the otherwise trouble-free flight, the left engine caught fire. Lt. Brown, acting as co-pilot, ordered the enlisted men to jump after an attempt to put out the fire with on-board extinguishers failed. Sgt. Taff and the flight engineer, Tech-4 Woodrow D. Mathews, promptly jumped. 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 cordoned off the site (Arnold says they secured an area of 150 acres around the point of impact) and did not allow civil aviation investigators near the wreck. The reason given was, the B-25 had been carrying classified material at the time of the crash.

Two weeks later, Tacoma reporter Paul Lance, who'd covered the story of the Maury Island sighting and the deaths of Lt. Brown and Captain Davidson, died suddenly of meningitis. He was already confined to wheelchair, but had seemed in good health otherwise.

On August 2, Arnold climbed back into his plane to fly back to Idaho. He was heartily sick of the Maury Island affair, and felt personally responsible for involving Davidson and Brown in an investigation which, one way or another, caused their deaths. Less than 200 feet off the ground, Arnold's engine suddenly quit, and only through skill and luck he set his dead-engined plane back down. When he checked the motor, he found the fuel line valve was closed. For years he insisted only he himself could have closed it.

As it stands, the Maury Island case has all the hallmarks of a good X Files episode, complete with men in black, evidence going astray, and people being silenced to preserve a secret too heinous for the public to know. But things were not that simple, and the whole case began to come apart like a cheap wristwatch.

Neither Dahl nor Crisman were who they pretended to be. Rather than 'harbor patrolmen,' with quasi-official status, they were scroungers who made their living salvaging junk floating in the sound. Crisman had written to Ray Palmer before with a wild story to tell. In the June 1946 issue of Amazing Stories (which was then deeply into the "true" hollow earth stories of Richard S. Shaver) Crisman wrote this letter, printed in the letters-to-the-editor column:

Sirs:

I flew my last combat mission on May 26 [1945] when I was shot up over Bassein and ditched my ship in Ramaree Roads off Chedubs Island. I was missing for five days. I requested leave at Kashmere. I and Capt. ---------- [deleted by request] left Srinagar and went to Rudok then through the Khese pass to the northern foothills of Karakoram. We found what we were searching for.

For heaven's sake, drop the whole thing! You are playing with dynamite. My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9" scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don't know. My friend had a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside. How we don't know. But we both believe we know more about the Shaver Mystery than any other pair.

You can imagine my fright when I picked up my first copy of Amazing Stories and see you splashing words about on the subject.

The "whole thing" Crisman is raving about is the Shaver Mystery, an outlandish literary fraud perpetrated by Ray Palmer in the mid-1940s. Shaver, a welder who'd spent time in a mental hospital because he heard voices coming out of his welding machine, wrote rambling letters to Palmer about his ideas about underground supercivilizations of deros ('detrimental robots') who plague mankind with weird rays. Palmer puffed up and polished Shaver's aberrant ramblings into the now-infamous Shaver Mystery. Though wildly popular for a time, Palmer's obsession with Shaver subjects would eventually cost him his job as editor of Amazing Stories. He went on, in 1948, to found FATE magazine with Curtis Fuller, and published some of the earliest accounts of UFO sightings, including Kenneth Arnold's "I Did See the Flying Disks!" in 1948.

In 1956, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt published his account of the early days of the Air Force's investigation of UFOs, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt says Dahl and Crisman confessed to Air Force investigators that the whole Maury Island story was a hoax:

"Both [Dahl and Crisman] admitted the that the rock fragments had nothing to do with flying saucers. The whole thing was a hoax. They had sent in the rock fragments [to Ray Palmer] as a joke. One of the patrolmen wrote to [Palmer] stating that the rock could have been part of a flying saucer. He said the rock came from a flying saucer because that's what [Palmer] wanted him to say."

Ruppelt added that the publisher who wanted Dahl and Crisman to say the rock came from a flying saucer was "the same one who paid [Kenneth Arnold] $200 to investigate the case."

Confused yet? Wait -- it gets even murkier.

The slag fragments were identified by experts as smelter refuse, simple furnace clinkers. The white metal was aircraft aluminum. Claims by Arnold and others that the slag returned by government analysts was not the same as the slag they sent were ignored. Ruppelt, quoting official Air Force reports, said Brown and Davidson were convinced when they left Tacoma that the whole thing was a fraud. The 'classified material' on the plane were files being sent to Hamilton Field, not the Maury Island slag.

The U.S. government apparently considered prosecuting Dahl and Crisman for the hoax that led to the death of two Air Force officers, but in the end, they decided the B-25 crash was just an accident, and no one would convict Dahl and Crisman in connection with it. The story faded as more sensational UFO reports surfaced, and a consensus verdict of fraud settled over the whole affair. Most UFO books of the 1950s and 60s either ignored Maury Island, or dismissed it as a hoax perpetrated for money.

The strangeness continued, however. Fred Crisman had served in the Army Air Force in World War II, and in 1947 found himself recalled to active duty. The story is, he was assigned first to Alaska, then to Greenland. Harold Dahl dropped out of sight. Efforts to find him by civilian UFO investigators in the 50s failed. In the meantime, Fred Crisman moved on to new adventures.

Jim Garrison, Distract Attorney of New Orleans, began his controversial inquiry into the death of President John F. Kennedy. In 1968, during his investigation, he issued a subpoena to Fred Lee Crisman of Tacoma, Washington. What did the old dero-fighter and UFO sighter have to do with the death of JFK?

The 1968 subpoena identified Crisman as a radio announcer in Tacoma, apparently with stated right-wing sympathies. Garrison's sources felt that Crisman might be one of the three "tramps" arrested on that November morning 1963 in Dallas, and Garrison called him before the grand jury to testify. Garrison's investigators further claimed that Crisman was either a member of the CIA, or was "engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex." He allegedly worked under the cover occupation of preacher, and "was engaged in work to help Gypsies."(?) Because of the erratic nature of the Garrison investigation, many DAs and police authorities around the country tacitly refused to honor his subpoenas. In 1978, Garrison told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that his staff had once spent four hours interviewing Fred Crisman, but as far as I know, he was never compelled to travel to New Orleans or testify on the record. His alleged role in the JFK assassination, like his alleged dero and UFO sightings, remains purely speculative.

One last item. One of the oldest nuclear processing facilities in the country was the Hanford plant, located in Washington state. Here plutonium was manufactured for the Nagasaki "Fat Man" bomb, and for many years during the Cold War weapons-grade material was produced here for America's nuclear arsenal. When the plant was closed it was found to be in wretchedly contaminated condition.

Remember the slag and white metal Dahl and Crisman claimed fell from a UFO? Kenneth Arnold handled a piece of material supplied by the two men and described it thus:

Someone suggested that these fragments could have been the lining of some kind of power tube. When we lined up all the pieces, following the curve of the smooth surface, we saw that they could have been a lining of a tube of some kind about six feet in diameter.

Of the other metal, Arnold and his friend Smith decided it was nothing but aircraft alloy, but one detail puzzled them:

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, and I don't think Smithy had either.

The rivet in question was square. All aircraft rivets are round.

Here is what may have happened in 1947: Dahl and Crisman found a dump of unusual looking metal and slag on Maury Island. There were an estimated 20 tons of the stuff lying around, far too much for just two men to have planted there. They concocted the flying donut UFO story for the benefit of Ray Palmer, thinking they could sell him their account of the sighting. The metal debris was a good circumstantial touch.

But there was a problem with the slag. It was radioactive. Remember Dahl's complaint that his pictures were fogged? Radiation does that. If Dahl took some phony UFO pictures, or even contemplated such a ploy, he was foiled when his film came out ruined. His son was burned on the arm and the boy's dog died -- from radiation? Maybe Dahl realized later what he and Crisman were fooling with, and this accounted for his reluctance to talk to Kenneth Arnold.

Arnold called in the Air Force. Brown and Davidson were curious about the report, then abruptly seemed to decide it was a hoax and hastily left Tacoma. They accepted a carton of fragments from Crisman; their plane crashed and the site was heavily cordoned off by the military. Because of secret files? Because of UFO debris? Or was it because the military was afraid of disclosing the fact that illegal radioactive waste from the Hanford Nuclear Plant had been dumped on Maury Island?

Dahl disappeared. Crisman was recalled to the Air Force and sent away to Greenland. Later, in a totally unrelated matter (Jim Garrison's JFK investigation), he's identified as a CIA agent or CIA asset. Was this his reward for dropping the Maury Island UFO story -- a lifelong stipend from the U.S. government?

All that remains of the Maury Island story is a lot of peculiar testimony and shady dealings. The affair reeks of fraud and cover-up, but not the usual sort of cover-up associated with UFO tales. Therein lies the cautionary part of our story: just because a UFO case is shrouded in secrecy and duplicity doesn't mean aliens are underfoot. It may just be some other nasty little secret someone doesn't want us to know.

References:

Paris Flammonde, UFO Exist! Ballantine, 1976.
Curtis Fuller, Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress, Warner, 1980.
John A. Keel, Our Haunted Planet, Fawcett, 1971.
Curtis Peebles, Watch the Skies! Berkley, 1995.
Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Doubleday, 1956.
Ted Schutlz, ed., The Fringes of Reason, Harmony Books, 1989.