Dahl eventually agreed to talk to Arnold; by some reports, they met the next day, July 30, at the Winthrop. Dahl gave Arnold some of the material he said he’d found on Maury Island, though to Arnold it looked like ordinary slag, something that would come from an iron smelter.
But then Dahl’s boss, Fred Crisman, joined the meeting. He told Arnold that there were indeed tons of the slaglike material on Maury Island, a place nowhere near an iron smelter.
Sometime around this point, reports say Arnold reached out for expert help. After his own sighting, Arnold had befriended a commercial airline pilot named E. J. Smith. Smith had spotted a set of shiny disks skipping through the sky near Boise, Idaho, just a few days after Arnold’s famous sighting, in an encounter almost identical to Arnold’s.
Smith in turn recommended that Arnold get military intelligence involved. After his own sighting, Smith had been questioned by an Army Air Corps officer named Lieutenant Frank Brown; Smith now contacted Brown and told him what had happened at Maury Island.
Besieged by reports of flying saucers from all over America, the U.S. military was getting concerned that the mysterious aerial objects might actually be Russian secret weapons. So army intelligence jumped at the chance to recover something that had fallen out of the Maury Island object.
Accompanied by another intelligence officer named Captain William Davidson, Lieutenant Brown took off in a B-25 bomber from Hamilton airfield in California and flew to McChord airfield just outside Tacoma. The military officers joined the others in Arnold’s room at the Winthrop Hotel on the afternoon of July 31.
According to Arnold, who later wrote about the meeting in a book, Dahl repeated his story for the military officers. They also discussed the photos Dahl had taken on the day of the incident, which had come out distorted and useless, as if they’d been exposed to X-rays.
But then things took another weird turn. While the meeting was going on, a reporter from the Tacoma Times called Arnold and repeated back to him practically everything Dahl and Crisman were saying to the military officers. The reporter said he got the information from an anonymous phone caller, even though no one beyond Arnold’s hotel room was privy to what was being said. Completely bewildered by this bizarre turn of events, Arnold searched the room for listening devices but found none.
Still, the anonymous caller continued feeding intimate information on the meeting to the newspaperman, baffling both the reporter and the people gathered in Arnold’s room.
It seemed that someone unseen was able to peer in on them and hear exactly what was being said.
By most accounts, after Brown and Davidson listened to the Maury Island story, the military officers hastily took their leave. One report said Brown and Davidson told the others they had to return to the Hamilton air base that night because the following day was the first ever Air Force Day. Whatever the reason, the pair left, taking a box of the mysterious slaglike material with them.
Returning to nearby McChord air base where their B-25 was waiting, Brown and Davidson had a quick briefing with the base intelligence officer. Then they boarded their airplane and took off, carrying a box of classified material with them.
A short time later, both men were dead.
The B-25 Brown and Davidson were flying crashed near the Washington-Oregon border, not far from Mount Rainier, where Kenneth Arnold had spotted the first flying saucers just a month earlier.
Local newspaper reports hinted broadly that the plane had been sabotaged, and the story would become even more intriguing when a spokesman for McChord air base at first denied but then confirmed that the two officers were indeed carrying classified information when their plane went down.
It was Crisman who told Arnold about the B-25’s crash. The next day, Crisman and Dahl met with Arnold once again at the hotel to discuss the tragic event. At some point soon afterward, Arnold decided he’d had enough. He contacted Ray Palmer, the magazine editor, and told him he couldn’t gather enough material to do a proper story. Then Arnold prepared to leave Tacoma.
What was the real reason Arnold wanted out? Some reports say the same Tacoma reporter who’d informed him of the leaks coming from his room told Arnold he was involved in something that was beyond his power, suggesting he get out of town until things blew over.
There were also reports that Brown and Davidson had passed on the same recommendation to Arnold shortly before they died.
In any case, Arnold decided to take the advice. But upon takeoff from Tacoma, Arnold’s plane suffered a mysterious malfunction. A critical fuel valve in his engine had either gotten turned off or had inexplicably frozen over. Either way, Arnold suddenly found himself on the verge of crashing.
It was only because Arnold was a seasoned pilot that he was able to land his plane safely. Yet, had he been airborne just a little longer, or flying just a little higher, there’s no doubt he would have been killed in the resulting crash.
Some UFO historians contend Dahl and Crisman later admitted to the FBI that the Maury Island Incident was all a hoax. There had been no UFOs. No mysterious alien substance. They had only been telling magazine editor Ray Palmer what he wanted to hear.
But on closer examination, exactly what kind of hoax would this be? How could anybody come up with a plan to fool the government, the military and a national magazine with a story about flying saucers, when “flying saucers” did not come into the national vernacular until three days after the supposed event? And how could there be twenty tons of the “slaglike material” on Maury Island beach when there is no smelter anywhere near the lonely spit of land? And who was the mysterious man in black?
Fred Crisman later told Fate magazine that any report that he called the Maury Island Incident a hoax was a “baldfaced lie.” Kenneth Arnold as well believed something happened in Puget Sound that day, talking about the incident at length many years later at the First International UFO Congress in Chicago.
And reportedly, no less than J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, believed the incident was not a deception. Many of the Maury Island accounts cite a message sent on August 14, 1947, in which Hoover was quoted as saying: “It would appear that Dahl and Crisman did not admit the hoax to the army officers…” To which his special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle office responded: “Please be advised that Dahl did not admit to Brown that his story was a hoax but only stated that if questioned by authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble.”
Fred Crisman died in 1975. Harold Dahl died in 1982, and Arnold, in 1984.
But many questions still surround the strange Maury Island Incident.
The slaglike material was eventually tested. Some reports say it was ordinary slag; others claim it didn’t contain enough iron to qualify as such.
Some accounts claim the FBI reported that Dahl’s son disappeared in the middle of all the controversy, showing up in Montana, supposedly with no recollection of how he got there. Still another report says Dahl’s wife later stabbed him because he wouldn’t tell the FBI exactly what happened that day off Maury Island. And supposedly, the newspaper reporter involved in the mysterious tipster episode died two weeks after the incident.
According to some who have studied the case closely (such as noted UFO researcher Jenny Randles) and who know the ins and outs of how intelligence agencies work, the overload of information, disinformation, rumors and half-truths that haunt the Maury Island case seem to bear the earmarks of a sophisticated intelligence operation, possibly one put in place to discredit Arnold’s original UFO sighting.