Washington State, the Maury Island Incident and the Origin of the Men in Black Mythos

Before I begin, it may be prudent to provide a little geography lesson before I start. Vashon Island as the name suggests, is a large Island to the south-west of Seattle in the Puget sound. From there, there is a little islet connected from Vashon called Maury Island. They are so closely connected with one another that there is a small road that crosses the thin strand of land keeping them together. The 1947 Maury Island incident is one of the lesser known UFO account, but from personal opinion, it is one that should be better known for several reasons. This is the first time a witness claimed that a “man in black” intimidated them into silence, and although it took place before the famed UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, there were many similarities between the two. Moreover, both of the military intelligence officer investigating the sighting died in a tragic air crash before they could complete their investigation. Unfortunately, the two principal witnesses, Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman, became objects of controversy, as the investigation continued. 

In 1947, logs floating on the water’s surface were a common hazard in the Puget Sound. They escaped from “jams” waiting to be turned into lumber at nearby mills on the shore. Several men worked as an informal harbor patrol, snagging these logs and taking them to the mills for a salvage fee. Harold Dahl worked on one of the patrol boats, and his supervisor on shore was Fred Crisman. Dahl reported that on June 21st, he was on his boat with two men, his son, and their dog. Around two in the afternoon, Dahl’s boat approached the east shore of Maury Island, about six miles west of Des Moines.Dahl looked in the sky and saw six objects floating around a couple thousand feet above his trawler. The objects were made out of reflective metal, and doughnut-shaped; he estimated that each was one hundred feet in diameter. Dahl also noted that he saw round portholes on the sides of the ship to what he thought were observation windows. Five of the crafts circled over a sixth, which dropped slowly in altitude, where it stopped and hovered  just a few hundred feet above the water. Dahl put his boat to shore out of fear that the center flying object was going to crash into him. Once on land, he took several pictures of the UFO's with his camera. The lower ship stayed in position for a brief amount of time, with the others still circling above. Eventually, one of the ships would leave the formation and move down, touching the lower ship. The two kept contact for several minutes, until Dahl said he heard a thud. Suddenly thousands of pieces of what he thought were newspaper dropped from inside the center ship. Most of the debris landed in the bay, though some of it managed to reach the beach shore. Dahl had managed to recover a few pieces, finding that the material was lightweight and white comprised of some unknown metal. Along with that metal, the ship dropped about a massive quantity of dark metal, to which he said looked akin to lava rock. When this material hit the water, it was so hot that steam erupted from the ares where they made contact. He and the  other men ran to take cover after noticing that several pieces landed on his boat, damaging it. Some debris hit his son on the arm, burning him, and another piece hit and killed his dog. After the rain of metal, the craft rose back into the air and, and together with the other ships, headed west out to sea. Dahl went to his boat and tried to call for help, but the radio had been damaged in the fallout. With great difficulty, Dahl managed sailed back towards his dock, dropping the dog over the side on the way back as an informa; burial at sea. Dahl   then took his son to the hospital for treatment and then told his boss, Fred Crisman, what had happened.

When the prints from Dahl’s camera were developed, they showed the strange airships. However, the negatives had spots on them, which Dahl postulated that it might have been caused by exposure to radiation. Crisman did not believe Dahl’s story, but he nevertheless went back to Maury Island, where he gathered some samples of the rocks that had been dropped. He said that while he was gathering the rocks, one of the airships appeared overhead, as if it was watching him. Dahl told investigators that the next morning, a man wearing a black suit visited him and offered that they go to breakfast together. Dahl drove his own car, following the stranger’s new black Buick to a restaurant. While they ate, the stranger asked no questions; instead he gave a detailed account of what had happened to Dahl the day before. The man in black warned Dahl that bad things would happen to him and his family if he would continue to go on telling anyone about the incident. Disregarding this ominous advice, Dahl and Crisman contacted publisher Ray Palmer (a year or two later Palmer founded FATE magazine) in Chicago and sent him a package containing the box of metal fragments and statements about the strange happenings on July 21st and 22nd, Palmer got in touch with Kenneth Arnold, who had begun investigating UFOs. Arnold arrived in Tacoma in late July with airline pilot E. Smith, examined Dahl’s boat, and interviewed both Dahl and Crisman. At this point, however their story began to get a little vague. They didn’t produce the pictures Dahl had supposedly taken of the even and Dahl told Arnold that his son had disappeared. (He said later that his son was found waiting tabled in Montana but couldn’t remember how he got there.) Then, on the afternoon of July 31st,  Captain Lee Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank Brown of the U.S. Army Air Force flew up to Tacoma from Hamilton Field, California.
In addition to being pilots, the two men were intelligence specialists. They met with Arnold, Smith, and Crisman for several hours. One of the officers said that he thought there might have been something to the story but they couldn’t stick around to investigate further. They had to leave around midnight, in a hurry to be at Hamilton Field on August 1st, the day when the air force was to split from the army. The two officers flew out of McChord Air Field around two o’clock in the morning on a B-25 bomber, with a crew of two enlisted men. About twenty minutes later the airplane crashed in new Centralia. The two crew members managed to parachute to safety, but Davidson and Brown were both killed, making them the air force’s first casualties. Dahl and Crisman said that the air force officers took with them some of the strange metal that the airship had dropped. Local Newspapers and the FBI received anonymous phone calls stating that the plane was shot down to cover up the information that Brown and Davidson had found. Because of the loss of life, the air force broadened its investigation and the FBI launched its own. The Air Force investigators determined that the crash had been an accident, caused by one of the engines catching fire. When another air force investigator visited Dahl’s boat, he said that the damage he saw did not match the damage that he described. There were no piles of metal on Maury Island, and the existing samples looked only like slag from a metal smelter. His conclusion matched that of the FBI investigator: that Dahl and Crisman had faked the incident solely to gain publicity for a magazine article. The FBI warned the men that their hoax had not succeeded but said that if they dropped the matter, the government would not prosecute them for fraud. A fraud which had gone so far, and caused so much stir and intrigue as to ultimately result in the deaths of the two air force officers. A suspiciously generous offer, considering the damage that had been done.
At first, Dahl and Crisman went along with the warning. They recanted the story, said it was fake, and refused to give any further interviews on the matter. But a few years later in the January 1950 issue of FATE magazine, Crisman stated that the incident HAD happened, and Kenneth Arnold included Maury Island in his 1952 book The Coming of the Saucers. Today most people believe that Crisman and Dahl faked the incident, perpetuating the hoax that got out of control. Other people believe that the U.S. government was behind a conspiracy that may have involved anything from UFOs to dumping nuclear waste in the Puget Sound. They believe a shadow government agency sabotaged the B-25 bomber in order to eliminate the investigators and to label Dahl and Crisman as frauds. Even sixty years after the incident,  investigators to this day visit the now infamous crash site, hoping to find some of the strange rocks or metal to prove things one way or another, but so far, no evidence nor answers have been found.