The Maury Island Incident

Summer 1947. On June 24, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported craft near Mount Rainier, and the term "flying saucer" was coined. Only after that story hit the national papers did a Tacoma log salvager named Harold Dahl come forward. His encounter had happened three days earlier.

June 21, 1947. About two o'clock in the afternoon. Dahl was aboard his salvage boat in the East Passage off Maury Island. With him were two crewmen, his 15-year-old son and the family dog. Overhead, at about 2,000 feet, were six very large doughnut-shaped aircraft. Each was about 100 feet across, with a hole in the center about 25 feet wide. Silver metal. Large round portholes around the edge. In Ruppelt's retelling, they made no sound.

Five circled over the sixth. It dropped slowly to about 500 feet, unstable in the air. Then another craft came down and touched it. A thud. The stricken craft began "spewing forth what seemed like thousands of newspapers from somewhere on the inside of its center." Dahl said they turned out to be a white, very lightweight metal. Dark, hot rock followed. His son was hurt. The dog was killed. Then the group rose together and headed off at incredibly high speed.

Dahl said his photographs came out fogged. The next morning, a man in a dark suit took him to breakfast. The stranger seemed to know every detail. He warned that bad things would happen to Dahl and his family if he told anyone. That same morning, Dahl's employer Fred Crisman went to the island. He said he saw another craft himself and collected debris.

Crisman sent fragments to Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories. On July 28, Palmer wired Kenneth Arnold $200 to investigate. Arnold and United Airlines pilot Capt. E. J. Smith met the men at the Winthrop Hotel in Tacoma. They thought the white metal looked ordinary.

On July 31, two Fourth Air Force intelligence officers interviewed Dahl and Crisman and took slag samples. They were 1st Lt. Frank M. Brown and Capt. William L. Davidson. Their B-25 left McChord Field. Minutes into the flight, it was on fire. Sgt. Elmer Taff bailed out. Brown and Davidson died when the bomber came down near Kelso on August 1. Three days later, a Tacoma Times headline read "Wrecked Bomber Carried Disc Secret."

The FBI filed the case under "Security Matter X." On August 19, 1947, Special Agent Jack B. Wilcox told J. Edgar Hoover that Dahl "did not admit … that his story was a hoax, but only stated 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." Other FBI papers said the pair hoped to make a profitable deal with Palmer. The Bureau compared the rock to slag from a smelter. The Air Force blamed the crash on a fire in the left engine.

In 1956, Project Blue Book's Edward J. Ruppelt gave his verdict. "The whole Maury Island Mystery was a hoax." Defenders, filmmaker Steve Edmiston among them, argue that Dahl's confession came under pressure.

Also in 1956, Gray Barker's They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers retold the case and pushed the idea of men in black silencing witnesses. Jim Garrison's New Orleans grand jury later subpoenaed Crisman. The story fed the discredited Majestic 12 documents, Mark Frost's The Secret History of Twin Peaks and a 2014 short film. In 2017, Washington State Senate Resolution 8648 honored Davidson and Brown.