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Feb. 22, 2022 - Skeptoid
17:45
Skeptoid #820: Maury Island: The Government's Alien Artifacts

The origin story of some of the government's alleged alien wreckage is a little bit shaky. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Arnold's UFO Debris Story 00:06:56
Every so often, there's a new blurb in the news about the government's supposed interest in UFOs.
And sometimes that even includes a claim that they have alien materials in their possession, and some new Pentagon office will be analyzing them.
Well, is that true?
Today we're going to have a look at one of the original sources of these alleged alien materials.
The Mori Island incident is coming up right now on Skeptoid.
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Maury Island, the government's alien artifacts.
Skeptoid listeners may recall episode number 486 on the history of flying saucers, which opened with the tale of Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot who reported a string of nine saucer-like objects near Mount Rainier in Washington state in 1947.
Famously, it was the first time they were called flying saucers in print.
Arnold had his 15 minutes of fame and was well known in the nation's newspapers as the pilot who saw the flying saucers.
And those 15 minutes are usually where Arnold's story ends.
But if we dig a little bit deeper into UFO mythology, we find that it has a lesser known chapter two.
For just a few short weeks later, while his flame of UFO celebrity was still burning hot, Arnold found himself thrust into the middle of a totally different UFO encounter.
And that event had ties to today's UFO news.
While today's alien visitation enthusiasts salivate over Pentagon UFO offices and claims of long overdue technical analysis of recovered alien materials, we find that among the materials mentioned are some that Kenneth Arnold personally handled and examined so many decades ago.
So now that things are coming full circle, let's take a closer look at this second chapter of Arnold's Life Among the UFOs.
Maury Island is one of many in Puget Sound, off the coast of Tacoma, but accessible only by private boat or by ferry from Seattle.
It's green and beautiful and relatively sparsely populated with waterfront homes.
In 1947, residents appreciated the services of a private security company that sent a small patrol boat along the coast, keeping an eye on the homes.
According to the story, this patrol boat was being driven by Harold Dahl, D-A-H-L.
He had a couple of buddies and his son and their dog on board.
Here is how what happened next was recounted by UFO author Gray Barker in his 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.
Dahl was patrolling in his boat at Maury Island near Tacoma when he and his crew saw six huge doughnut-shaped objects in the sky.
They appeared to be about 100 feet in diameter of bright metallic coloring.
Portholes were spaced around the outside of the things, and inside the holes of the doughnuts were dark circular continuous windows.
Five of the objects were circling around the sixth, which seemed to be in mechanical trouble.
Suddenly they heard a muffled explosion, and the sixth object discharged a great quantity of metallic residue, something like lava rock, which fell all around them.
Some of the fragments hit the boat, causing considerable damage.
One of them killed a dog, and another injured Dahl's son.
The five remaining objects flew off.
Dahl told what happened to his boss, Fred Chrisman, and the two of them went back there and collected some, quote, mysterious white metal that accompanied the fall.
Chrisman stated that while he was picking through some 20 tons of the material that had fallen onto the shoreline, one of the UFOs returned and circled the bay.
Shortly afterwards, Kenneth Arnold received a letter from Raymond Palmer, the editor of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in Chicago.
Arnold had heard about the Maury Island incident, and knowing Arnold from all his recent publicity around his Mount Rainier sighting, wanted to know if Arnold would go to Tacoma, meet with Dahl and Chrisman, and report back.
Arnold agreed when Palmer wired him $200 in advance to cover expenses, with the expectation that Arnold would write an article about the event.
And so for a couple of days, Arnold's hotel room in Tacoma was quite the busy little conference room.
In addition to Dahl and Chrisman, Arnold invited his friend Captain Emil Smith, a United Airlines pilot, who had also recently reported a UFO.
Chrisman showed the white metal fragments to Arnold and Smith.
Arnold described the experience in his 1952 book, The Coming of the Saucers.
Both Smith and I would grant that it was very light, but no more than the ordinary aluminum which certain sections of all large military aircraft are made of.
If this was truly the light metal that Harold Dahl said was spewed from these strange aircraft, we knew, or we thought we knew, that it was a fake.
We had seen hundreds of piles of this stuff in salvage dumps many places throughout the United States, where surplus army bombers had been junked.
Despite being less than impressed by the alien artifacts, Arnold saw no reason not to bring in some more heads.
As a result of his own highly publicized sighting, he'd gotten to know two Air Force investigators, Lieutenant Frank Brown and Captain William Davidson, who were based at Hamilton Field in California, about a thousand kilometers south.
Brown and Davidson jumped into a B-25, as one does, and flew themselves straight up to Tacoma, landing at McCord Field.
Brown and Davidson interviewed Dahl and Christman and collected some of the debris to take back with them.
The Brown Davidson Investigation 00:08:17
And that is where the story likely would have ended, except that fate was about to deal it a very unfortunate hand.
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At 2.12 a.m. on August 1st, Brown and Davidson took off in their B-25 to return to Hamilton Field.
18 minutes later, the left engine caught fire and filled the cabin with smoke.
Two other men on board, the crew chief Sergeant Matthews and an Army man hitching a ride, bailed out safely with parachutes.
But Brown and Davidson were not so lucky.
The burning wing separated and the plane crashed at 2.50 a.m. near Kelso, Washington, killing both men.
The plane crash made the news that same day.
Arnold decided immediately he wanted nothing further to do with this story and called Palmer to tell him he wouldn't be writing any article about it.
Later that evening, Ted Morello, a United Press and local radio reporter in Tacoma, received an anonymous call stating that the plane had been carrying saucer fragments and that it had been shot down from the air with a 20mm cannon.
An odd claim, as with the very few oddball exceptions, American aircraft of the day did not carry 20mm cannons.
The caller gave Brown and Davidson's names, which had not yet been released to the public, to prove that his information was valid.
Five calls in all were made.
Arnold stayed around long enough for Christman to fulfill one final promise, to show him and Smith the patrol boat that had been so heavily damaged by the tons of falling debris, and also show them photos he claimed Dahl had taken of the six big UFOs.
Christman said he couldn't find the photos and that he must have, quote, taken them up to his mountain cabin.
Arrived at the boat, Arnold and Smith were shown a small gray fishing boat completely unlike the patrol boat Christman had described.
It did appear to have a few small surface patches, but again, nothing like the dog-killing destruction given in the story.
And predictably, they couldn't go out in it because Chrisman's mechanic was having trouble with the engine.
Arnold and Smith, both pilots with plenty of experience inspecting engines, weren't buying it.
Arnold wrote, The engine did not look like a bolt or a screw had been turned on it.
Not only did this seem fishy to us, but frankly, I wouldn't travel 100 yards to sea in a boat in that condition.
And with that, the men all parted ways.
It seemed clear that everything about Dahl and Christman's story was either unevidenced or supported by apparently fabricated evidence.
But the heat was about to be turned up.
Due to the deaths of the two Air Force officers, the FBI investigated.
Today, these case files are publicly available in the UFO section of the FBI's Vault website.
Although most of the names are redacted, it's fairly easy to match up the people and events from other sources.
One interview, which appears to have been of Dahl at his home, was terminated early by the agent when Dahl's wife came in, quote, in a considerable rage, and demanded that he, quote, admit the entire story was a plain fantasy which he had dreamed up.
The agent actually wrote that Dahl was, quote, a mental case.
The FBI also found that neither Dahl nor Christman worked for any company that patrolled Maury Island.
All they had was an old beat-up boat or two that they used to salvage floating lumber.
The FBI also asserted that while they had no proof, the anonymous caller was, quote, probably most likely a redacted name with the same number of letters as Fred Chrisman.
We know that Chrisman had met with Brown and Davidson and so knew their names and was able to provide them to Morello.
And today, even many UFologists consider Chrisman the primary creator and driver of this story.
According to the FBI, Chrisman's plan was to profitably sell the story to Ziff Davis, the Chicago area publisher of Amazing Stories that Raymond Palmer edited.
And it was really this that brought the Maury Island incident full circle.
Kenneth Arnold had been brought into the mess by Raymond Palmer, who had been told about it by, you guessed it, Fred Chrisman.
They already knew each other.
Chrisman had been on quite a roll with amazing stories.
As recently as a month before, they published a series of letters from him in which he recounted his hair-raising adventures after being shot down in Burma in World War II.
Chrisman had actually been a fighter pilot.
He and a companion found themselves in a cave armed with submachine guns, you know, like pilots, and doing battle with strange, invisible creatures.
In later years, Chrisman hosted a late-night conspiracy theory radio program in Tacoma, and he floated enough claims about having connections to the JFK assassination that he was actually subpoenaed in the trial of Clay Shaw, who was charged with conspiring in the assassination.
It was even Chrisman who had suggested to Palmer that they bring in Kenneth Arnold, whose celebrity would lend tremendous publicity value to their story.
We'll leave the final word on the Maury Island incident to Edward J. Ruppelt, the Air Force officer who had been the head of Project Blue Book.
Upon his retirement from the program, he wrote a 1956 book titled, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, in which he called this case, quote, the first, possibly the second best, and the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history.
Ruppelt had been able to add one final detail that many other writers hadn't been privy to.
When Brown and Davidson returned to McCord Field to head home, they met with the intelligent officer at McCord.
They told him they left so soon because they had quickly determined the entire thing was a hoax.
Rupelt also revealed that the government had been very close to prosecuting Dahl and Christman for the false report and its disastrous consequences.
The only reason they didn't is that they'd done nothing more than try to prank a UFO publisher.
And it wasn't their fault that Arnold had called in the Air Force and the guys died in a crash.
Skeptoid Premium Support 00:02:27
And so, we are still left without any alien artifacts to test.
Maybe we will one day, but history tells us, it's very unlikely to come to us via the UFO community.
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