Documents / FOIA release
This is part five of the FBI's UFO file, a set of Bureau memoranda and reports from 1947 to 1949. Most of it covers the FBI's inquiry into the Maury Island flying disc story in Tacoma, which concluded that the disc fragments were ordinary rock formations and that the story was a hoax. It also examines the fatal crash of a B-25 at Kelso and finds no sign of sabotage. The file includes other items: the Rhodes disc photographs, a proposed flying saucer convention in Alexandria, Louisiana, and ash from a fire near Scranton that someone suggested came from a flying saucer.
“Hamilton”19 pages
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## FLYING DISCS The "Tacoma News Tribune" and through them the United Press put out a story that an army plane which was allegedly carrying parts of a disc which had struck a boat owned by Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman had crashed on August 1, 1947, killing two Air Force Intelligence officers who were interviewing persons who were alleged to have seen flying discs. when interviewed by Bureau Agents, advised in a signed statement on August 7, 1947, that in the early part of June, 1947, they picked up some strange rock formations from a gravel pit on Mauri Island, Washington./ They sent a cigar box of these formations to one in Chicago, Illinois. According to them they requested to make only a chemical analysis of the rock formations. They then wrote asking for additional samples stating he had been unable to analyze the material and remarked that a few days after the flying disc stories appeared during the latter part of June, he contacted them by telephone saying he would pay for an exclusive story if the materials they had sent him were fragments of a flying disc. He said he wrote a letter in which he represented the material as being a part of a flying disc, and both and admitted that this statement was entirely false. and then received a call from one of Boise, Idaho who requested them to meet him at the Winthrop Hotel in Tacoma on July 31, 1947. According to them they called in army intelligence officers from Hamilton Field, California and one Captain of United Airlines of Seattle, Washington to attend this meeting. and maintained they told the intelligence officers Captain Davidson, Lieutenant Brown, and exactly how they got the rock formations and that they had no connection with any flying discs. and stated that they then furnished some of the rock formation to the intelligence officers as samples. Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown left Tacoma, Washington in a B-25 to return to Hamilton Field, California about 2:30 A.M. August 1, 1947, and were killed when their plane crashed at Kelso, Washington, after the left engine burned out an exhaust stack which in turn caught the left wing on fire which caused it to break off. The crew chief and each officer parachuted to safety. at Tacoma advised that two or three days after the flying disc story started he contacted to check the story CLOSURE
FOIA release, from the fbi-vault collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 74 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.