The Maury Island UFO Incident: The Story behind the Air Force’s first military plane crash (8 page)

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.

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 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 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 flight 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 (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 10
^th
, 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.