Maury Island had the UFO mess before Roswell

On June 21, 1947, around two in the afternoon, Harold Dahl was steering his patrol boat close to the east bay of Maury Island in Puget Sound. He had his son, two crew, and a dog aboard. Six very large doughnut-shaped aircraft came over the water. Dahl said one of them began "spewing forth what seemed like thousands of newspapers" from the inside of its center, then dropped a substance that looked like lava rock. The rock broke a crewman's arm and killed the dog.

Dahl was a Tacoma harbor patrolman. His employer was Fred Crisman, a former military intelligence officer turned timber salvager. Within a week, the two men had a claim, a fragment, and a story aimed at a pulp science fiction magazine in Chicago.

The investigation that turned fatal

The case entered the public record on June 26, 1947, the day Kenneth Arnold's Mount Rainier sighting made the press and "flying saucer" became a national phrase. Amazing Stories editor Raymond A. Palmer wired Arnold $200 and asked him to fly to Tacoma. Arnold brought United Airlines Captain E. J. Smith, who had reported his own disc on July 4. Together they looked at Crisman's "white metal" debris and called it slag from a Maury Island beach — mundane, and inconsistent with Dahl's description.

Arnold then called in Lieutenant Frank Brown of Military Intelligence, Fourth Air Force, Hamilton Field, California. Brown arrived at Arnold's hotel on July 31 with Captain William L. Davidson. They interviewed Dahl and Crisman, took custody of a box of fragments, and prepared to fly the evidence back to California out of McChord Field.

In the early hours of August 1, 1947, the B-25 Mitchell carrying Brown and Davidson crashed outside Kelso, Washington. Both officers were killed. The Tacoma Times reported that the plane "might have been sabotaged or shot down" to prevent inspection of its cargo. The U.S. Army and the survivors concluded the cause was an engine fire.

What the FBI found

The FBI opened a formal investigation. According to the bureau's file, summarized in the MuckRock release of FBI Vault material, Dahl said that "if questioned by the authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter." Crisman, on the same record, had approached several publications to build the story toward a sale to Fantasy Magazine of Chicago. The fragments were pumice and beach-side scrap.

Project Blue Book chief Edward J. Ruppelt later wrote (in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1956): "The whole Maury Island Mystery was a hoax. The first, possibly the second-best, and the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history." Ruppelt added that the government had considered prosecuting both men and decided against it, after concluding the loss of two lives and a B-25 could not be directly blamed on them.

Why the case kept opening

Maury Island is the seed of the Men in Black story. Dahl said a "man dressed in a black suit" menaced him and fogged his photographs of the incident. Crisman echoed the same shape of visit. In 1956, writer Gray Barker used the Maury Island file as a centerpiece of They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, the book that introduced "men in black" as a fixed UFO motif.

In 1984, the debunked Majestic 12 documents tried to retrofit the same metal fragments as a nuclear-reactor artifact handed to the CIA.

A mural by Nancy and Zach Pahl stands in Des Moines, Washington, on the east shore of Puget Sound, with Maury Island visible across the water. In 2017, the Washington State Senate passed Resolution 8648 acknowledging the seventieth anniversary. In 2024, the city of Des Moines held its third annual "Men in Black Birthday Bash" on June 22.

The FBI closed the case in 1947. The file is still being catalogued.

Related UAP Logbook notes

• The UFO hoaxes that still haunt disclosure
• The Roswell Slides collapsed on a museum placard
• Gulf Breeze had a model in the attic

Sources

• Wikipedia: "Maury Island incident", with the FBI Vault, HistoryLink, Ruppelt, and MuckRock citations in the references.
• HistoryLink.org Essay 2068: Walt Crowley, "Dahl and Crissman report a June 21, 1947, explosion of a flying saucer over Maury Island."
• Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), Project Gutenberg edition 17346, including the "dirtiest hoax in the UFO history" passage.
• MuckRock FBI Vault release on the Maury Island file, December 5, 2016.
• Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer, The Coming of the Saucers (Amherst, WI: 1952).
• Washington State Senate Resolution 8648, 2017, acknowledging the seventieth anniversary.
• South Seattle Emerald, "Men in Black Birthday Bash Fest," June 20, 2024.