The Maury Island UFO Incident: The Story behind the Air Force’s first military plane crash

by Charlette LeFevre

  “ The only details I have about this visit (so far)... are that there were two of them dressed in black, she recalls...they came in showing their FBI Identification...My grandma went into the kitchen to cook and clean while they talked to Paul in the living room. She tried to listen in on their conversation from the kitchen... She said they were basically telling Paul to stop! She says they were threatening him...but Paul was bold and was clearly not afraid of them in any way. My grandma was really scared and at one point peeked in on them to make sure everything was okay. She said that Paul was lying on the couch with his knees bent (I'm not sure why. .maybe because of his spine problems?). She said they were there for what seemed like hours, but in reality maybe only a couple of hours. She said that Paul was defiant and determined to get to the bottom of things and he was not going to let the FBI stop him from doing so! Paul was not willing to back off; he was going to dig deep. From what I understand that was his nature with reporting. “Paul was a strong Christian man (he attended a Methodist church in Tacoma off of 6th Ave.) Grandma says that the Lantz family was the main pillar of the church back then. Paul was someone you could trust, he was extremely dependable, reliable, and honest, and he had high moral standards and was kind and generous. He was conscientious and a hard worker and my grandma says he was the perfect husband and father. It was stated that even though he was small (in stature) he had the soul and spirit of a giant. He was musically talented (he sang and played the trumpet). Grandma says he was great with his finances. She also says that he was highly intelligent, a genius!”

  –Mike and Jeni James, October 13, 2006.

  Kenneth Arnold

  Background

  Press photo of Kenneth Arnold in front of his plane. Kenneth Arnold would write the definitive first hand report of the Maury Island mystery in his and Ray Palmer’s “I Did See the Flying Disks!” in the first issue of Fate Magazine in 1948 and the later book “Coming of the Saucers” in 1952.

  The first Fate Magazine featuring A Kenneth Arnold gives a detailed personal account of all the stories, sightings, and information that cannot be lightly dismissed as a hoax, and details of the era in 1947 still reeling and on the alert from World War II.

  Kenneth Arnold’s plane and UFO sighting personal account of the events, Kenneth Arnold was born March 29, 1915 in Sebeka, Minn. He moved to Scobey, Montana when he was six. He attended school in Minot, ND. He played football and was a swimmer and diver for the University of Minnesota. Arnold would take his first flying lessons at the age of 16, paid for in barter for gasoline from his father's filling station. However, it would take him 13 more years to gain his pilot's license, just short of his 30th birthday. In 1938, he went to work for Red Comet, Inc. of Littleton Colorado.

  He invented a specialized automatic dry chemical fire extinguisher system, which he distributed through his company Great Western Engineering that he founded in 1940.

  He married Doris Lowe on January 30, 1941 and moved to Boise, Idaho in 1944. He was active in the Idaho Search and Rescue Mercy Flights and acted as a Deputy Federal US Marshall.

  On June 24th, 1947, Kenneth Arnold would became world famous when he sighted a formation of nine flying discs over Mt. Rainier. Bill Bequette's report on the AP news wire of Arnold’s sighting has been attributed to first using the term "flying saucer" thus the “flying saucer” was coined.

  On April 7th, 1950, Arnold would be interviewed by Edward R Murrow, the famous TV journalist and explained the origin of the term “flying saucer”:

  MURROW: Here's how the name "flying saucer" was born. ARNOLD: These objects more or less fluttered like they were, oh, I'd say, boats on very rough water or very rough air of some type, and when I described how they flew, I said that they flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water. Most of the newspapers misunderstood and misquoted that too. They said that I said that they were saucer-like; I said that they flew in a saucer-like fashion.

  In an interview with Bob Pratt in 1978, Arnold mentioned that he was constantly bothered by “busybodies and intelligence people, they ask a bunch of stupid questions and then all of a sudden ask a question that I know they couldn’t possibly have asked if they weren’t pretty familiar with what the military was trying to do. It’s like they all went to the same school.

  He also mentioned that he learned that Lieutenant Frank Brown was a counter-espionage agent working out of Mitchell Field in NY. Nevertheless, he and Captain William Davidson were very gracious to him. Around 1950 he was invited to speak at “The Knife and Fork Club” on its lecture circuit for $100 per day concerning his sighting. He even printed his own booklet” The Flying Saucer as I Saw It” to use as a program guide for his speech. Arnold said that Brown and Davidson said, “You let us take care of it, Ken. Don’t offer yourself for exposure, or we would advise you not. Of course you can do as you please, but I think you will regret it.”

  “Another thing that puzzled us was that we were familiar with the details of what happened there at Tacoma (Maury Island) and when the news releases came out the public relations apparently through the Pentagon, there wasn’t any semblance of the truth of the whole thing. It was just laughed off as if was just kind of a big hoax, and I have photo static letters and what not from people that were involved in the immediate family of Lieutenant Brown, I don’t think Smith or I could figure out why the personnel that we worked with in connection with military intelligence, why their stories got so completely loused up when it came out of their public relations as explanations for various things that happened.

  I have photo static letters of Lieutenant Frank M Brown as to what happened after their crash, what the flight engineer (Woodrow Mathews) said about the plane, when he left the plane he saw something lift off the top of it and he said he thought probably it was Lieutenant Brown or Captain Davidson, but he said he found out when he got on the ground—he had dropped 11,000 feet in a chute-he heard the crash and then he discovered the next morning in Kelso that both of the people that were left on the plane were killed. He couldn’t understand what this was that came off the top of the plane as he left the plane. They (the flight engineer and the other crewman who survived –Elmer Taff) were forced out by Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown and both Davidson and Brown had on their harnesses but they didn’t have their chutes on when there were found.” http://www.mufon.com/bob_pratt/kenarn.html

  According to Kim Arnold as to the reason why her father did not do speeches later in his life, a man came had come to their house shortly after a speaking invitation was withdrawn. The man threatened Arnold by saying he knew the government and knew that men had been eliminated. He told Arnold that these government men were serious and dangerous people and that Arnold should not talk about flying saucers. In an interview with Greg Long in 1981, Arnold revealed his interest in the works of Charles Fort. He found similarities between his initial sighting and things described in Fort’s work. - Long, Greg “Kenneth Arnold UFO Pioneer,” Mufon UFO Journal, November 1981

  In the same interview, Arnold also mentioned that Brown and Davidson went through his mail and selected letters from religious groups and organizations that had written Arnold for accounts of his was aware of the effects of religious fervor and they did not want that to happen here.

  Kenneth Arnold, Guy Baskin, 1977 Kenneth Arnold in one of his last rare interviews in 1977 revived by Author Stan Deyo from the archives of Guy Baskin relates his frustration even thirty years later.

  “We’ve seen something, I’ve seen something. Hundreds of pilots have seen something in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things and we have had fifteen million witnesses before anyone is going to look at the problem? Why, this is utterly fantastic! More fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I’m concerned!”

  In 1977, Arnold spoke at the First International UFO Congress in Chicago.

  In 1980, Yorkshire Television Ltd, from Leeds, England were allowed to film and tape a reenactment of his original fligh
t and sighting over Mt.Rainier.

  He had four daughters, Kiska, Karla, Kimberly, and April. Sources - CUFOS Associates Newsletter, April-May, 1984- Obituary, Kenneth Arnold p.6.. http://www.project1947.com/fig/arnbiog.htm Project 1947-“Some Life Data on Kenneth Arnold”

  http://www.mufon.com/bob_pratt/kenarn.html

  Transcript of Ed Murrow-Kenneth Arnold Telephone Conversation Long, Greg “Kenneth Arnold UFO Pioneer,” Mufon UFO Journal, November 1981

  Harold Dahl

  Harold Dahl (aka Harold Doll) courtesy of daughter Louise Bakotitch, unknown date)

  Harold Dahl would also turn out to be a mysterious figure in the Maury

  Incident.

  innocent

  Island UFO

  Seemingly an figure who by chance happened to see something amazing over Maury Island, he would change his story several times, leading people to speculate if he really saw something, changed an event to sell a story, was intimidated to say what he saw was a hoax or created a sighting purely out of thin air. Dahl himself seemed to live a double life with his connections to CIA operative Fred Crisman.

  Harold Albert Dahl also known as “Trader” was born on August 15, 1911 in Cosmopolis, WA, a town in Greys Harbor County. He originally spelled his last name, as “Doll” His parents were Theodore and Emma Doll. In the 1930’s he was living in Grey’s Harbor with his first wife Ruby and son Charles. He had married Ruby Toler in 1927 at the age of 16. According to the 1940 census in 1935, he was living in Tacoma with wife Meda. He was reported to be a car dealer.

  Harold married Helen Larson in 1943. He then changed his name to Dahl. In 1945-1947, he was living at 3903 Gove with his wife Helen. His son Charles who allegedly was injured by falling slag was born January 15, 1929 and died April 10th, 1996. According to records, Charles maintained the spelling of “Doll.”

  In 1947 Dahl operated the Commercial Lumber Company at 235 Millwater Avenue, Tacoma (FBI Report 8/19/47)

  It was found that from 1945 until 1947 Harold A. Dahl had lived in the same duplex. He worked at the Seattle-Tacoma Ship yard throughout the war, until the end of the war shutdown the yard.

  Arnold says that Dahl referred to Fred Crisman as his "superior officer,” in fact the "Tacoma Harbor Patrol" -- according to an FBI investigative report dated August 19, 1947 -- was the name of a privately owned for-profit business enterprise seeking to charge owners of vacation homes on the island for keeping an eye out on their properties during the owner's absence.

  “Owners were given the legal right to pursue logs onto private property. But chasing lost logs took time, and owners found it unprofitable to maintain search boats. So, in 1928, a group of them banded together to finance the Washington Log Patrol. Part of its assignment was to keep poachers from precipitating spills by sabotaging the boom-log pens that kept loose logs confined while under tow. But the patrol also retrieved floating and beached strays.

  Private citizens could round up strays on their own and return them to the owners. Soon a dozen or more free-lance patrol boats were roaming Puget Sound in search of runaway fir, hemlock, and cedar. The going price for returned branded logs averaged $17.50 a thousand board feet – John Covington,

  htp://www.seanet.com/~johnco/maury.htm Harold Dahl lived in Tacoma, Aberdeen, and Tenino. He was a selfemployed surplus dealer and a member of the Gun Collectors Association.

  Dahl moved twenty miles south to Tenino, Washington, where he started a used furniture/second hand store and lived peacefully until his death in 1982.

  An article in a Centralia paper showed an interesting aspect of Dahl’s later life in 1975 near Tenino as a used car and junk dealer. The article states “now he has a collection of ‘you name it we have it’ that fills his shop, his junkyard, his Cadillacs, and even his house.

  ‘It took us 16 years to accumulate all this junk’ Dahl says proudly, his hand sweeping across the acreage he owns along Washington 507 in Thurston County. Dahl deals in just about anything, but he can’t resist Cadillacs. ‘I was a travelling repairman for Cadillac’ he explains. He specialized in hearses and ambulances. “The other vehicles serve as fine homes for his collection of pets-chickens ,ducks, dogs, and one lovable wild goose named “Silver.”.. ’ We’re constructing a new building out back, said Dahl ‘We’re going to use it as a showroom. We’ll line up our Cadillacs and display some of our antiques.’ The new building, of course will be made of scrap material-discarded telephone poles, sheets of metal from a steam power plant and lumber from the Tenino Dreamland Dance Hall , which Dahl razed.

  When the main building began to sag, Mrs. Dahl even though she describes herself as ‘more of a businesswoman than a housekeeper,’ became restive when her husband ‘set up shop in the house.

  “You name it, he’s got it: all but space that is.” Centralia Daily Chronicle November 19, 1975

  He had two sons Charles who later moved to Hammond, LA and Daniel of Tacoma. He had two daughters Louise Bakotich who is now 83 and living in Aberdeen and Lynn Palmer of Portland

  Obituary Harold A Dahl Tacoma News Tribune, February 1, 1982

  Note: There has been much controversy over whether Charles Dahl was actually injured or was even on Harold Dahl’s patrol boat. MAURY ISLANDS NO LONGER A MYSTERY: A UFO HOAX EXPOSED! by Anthony Bragalia, July 2010

  http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2010/07/maury-island-no-longer-mystery-ufo-hoax.html In Anthony Bragalia’s 2010 article, he claims that Charles Dahl said that he was never on his father’s boat, and “the entire affair was a hoax and characterized Crisman as a smooth talking con artist.”

  There is little doubt that most people saw Crisman as a con artist. When the authors talked to Louise Bakotich, Dahl’s daughter recently in the preparation of this report she mentioned, “This is a mystery no one knows what to think about.” In 2003, Frank Warren sent her 50 pages of material about the incident. “She also told me that she was estranged from her brother early in life and didn't know him well; nor were they together as family at the time of the occurrence. “ She wasn’t raised by her father and only reunited with him after 1965. She also told Warren that she took care of her father the last two weeks of his life, and although he didn't reference the Maury Island Incident, he did talk mildly about UFOs, which he held onto as a belief until the day he died.”

  Haldor Dahl

  Many researchers have assumed that Harold Dahl’s boat was called the “North Queen.” This comes from the listing in Merchant Vessels of The United States-1947 of a boat called North Queen owned by a “Haldor Dahl.” Researchers have considered this to be merely a misprint and assumed that it really was Harold Dahl. However, the 1947 Tacoma City Directory lists both Haldor Dahl as president of the Tacoma Boat Building Company and Harold Dahl at different addresses. Haldor Dahl was a well-known figure in the shipping industry. As the Merchant Vessels of 1946-1948 do not list a Harold Dahl, Harold Doll, or Crisman, there is no documented reference to the name of the boat Harold Dahl was using at the time of the claimed sighting. Arne Strom and his brother-in-law, Haldor Dahl, established Strom & Dahl

  Boatbuilding Co. The company, later renamed Tacoma Boatbuilding, built purse seiners, and trollers. Haldor Dahl-Obituary, Tacoma News Tribune, November 4, 1953

  Fred Lee Crisman

  (photo of Fred Crisman courtesy of Dr. Larry Haapanen, photographer unknown) Early connection with UFOs Crisman would become one of the most interesting characters in the Maury Island UFO Incident with even more covert relationships than one would think of a Tacoma small businessman and teacher would have.

  FBI documents and statements

  from friends would show Crisman would later be involved with political campaigns, shady church organizations as well as eventually be subpoenaed by Jim Garrison on the JFK assassination. It is very likely much of his skills played a part in manipulation and cover up in the Maury Island UFO Incident.

  In June 1946, Crisman wrote a letter to the editor of Amazing Stories who was Palmer about his battle in Burma with Deros. Crisma
n would write:

  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 five days. I requested leave at Kashmere. I and Capt. (deleted by request) left Srinagar and went to Rudok then through the Khesa pass to the northern foothills of the Kabakoram. We found what we were looking for. We knew 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 has 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 the subject.

  Do not print our names, we are not cowards, but we are not crazy.

  Palmer would later reveal this the author as Fred Lee Crisman

  Background Crisman was born on July 22, 1919, He moved with his family to Vale, Oregon, in 1933 where his father was the proprietor of a hotel. He graduated from Vale Union High School in 1939 and attended Eastern Oregon College in LaGrande, Oregon, for a short time during the 1939-1940 school year before leaving to go to work for the Union Pacific Railroad as a brakeman. In 1942, Crisman joined the military. He was a graduate of Williamette University with degrees in political science, history, and education and psychology-“Crisman Native Tacoman,” Tacoma News Tribune, Dec 16, 1975

  In 1942, in Ontario, Ore., he married Filomena Veristain just before he was sent to the Pacific Theater as a fighter pilot in the US Army Air Corp. Later that year, Filomena gave birth to a daughter, Rita Louise Crisman who was killed in a car accident in 1964. In 1955, Filomena gave birth to a son, Fred Lee Crisman Jr.