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

The Maury Island UFO Incident
The Maury Island UFO Incident
The Story behind the Air Force’s First Plane Crash.
The classic case with new discoveries and new photos on modern day
UFOlogy’s first UFO incident.

 

By Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson
Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore

 

1
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Edition Published 2014

 

ISBN:
ISBN-13:
978-1493674961
ISBN-10:
149367496X
Cover:
Longview Daily News, Aug. 1, 1947
Illustrations by Charlette LeFevre
Dedication

This book is dedicated to the military’s first UFO Investigators who
lost their lives investigating and protecting evidence,
Capt. William L. Davidson and 1st Lt. Frank M. Brown and
Paul Lantz - a true investigative reporter who asked the tough

Capt. Davidson

 

questions.

 

1
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Lt. Brown
Paul Lantz

 

“The report of the investigation of this incident, the Maury Island

Mystery, was one of the most detailed reports of the early UFO
era…and the Maury Island Mystery was never publicly solved”…
– Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.
1956.

Acknowledgement and Thanks to:

Robert Davenport
Rod Dyke
Steve Edmiston
Elmer Frombach
James Greear and Dorene
Dr. Larry Haapanen
Scott Schaefer
William Shortley
Kenn Thomas
John White

and the many families and friends of the figures involved and those
that have supported the open case investigation.

 

Maury Island,
King County Library

 

Map of Maury Island

Capt. Davidson and Lt. Brown watched closely as the lights from the airfield glinted
off the rivets of the B-25 bomber in the night air as the locked metal box scraped the
bottom of the plane floor.
It was so heavy; it took two men to lift the box into the front. The light also caught
the eyes of the guards who had been protecting the plane - eyes that were just a bit
wider because they knew that whatever was being loaded was top secret and likely
held new technology, foreign and unexplained.
And that created fear. McChord Field was on edge.
All that night at the base, the guards were whispering about unusual craft sightings
that had happened in the weeks prior. They couldn’t help notice all the newspapers
were giving it front page coverage and the reporters were hounding them for more
information. Reports of UFOs included
pilot Kenneth Arnold seeing nine discs in
formation over nearby Mt. Rainier that had made International News.

Index

Forward..................................................... pg. 7
Forward by Dr. Larry Haapanen .......... pg. 8
The Incident............................................. pg. 9
Capt. William Davidson ......................... pg. 41
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Lieut. Frank M Brown....................... pg. 44
Paul Lantz................................................. pg. 45
Kenneth Arnold ..................................... pg. 48
Harold Dahl ............................................ pg. 52
Fred Crisman .......................................... pg. 56
Raymond Palmer..................................... pg. 66
Ted Morello ............................................. pg. 69
Sgt .Elmer Taff ........................................ pg. 70
Sgt. Woodrow Mathews......................... pg. 71
Mysterious Informant ........................... pg. 71
Rediscovery of the Crash Site ............... pg. 74
The Slag ................................................... pg. 79
Newspaper Articles .............................. pg. 87
Theories .................................................... pg. 93
Still a Mystery........................................... pg. 101
Bibliography............................................. pg. 102
About the Authors.................................. pg. 106

Forward
by Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson

The Maury Island UFO Incident is a mysterious case with a series of
events spanning several months in the summer of 1947 in the Puget Sound
area of Washington State. The mystery for the most part has remained one of
the lesser-known UFO cases in UFOlogy even though it is as complex and as
well documented as the Roswell UFO mystery.
The Maury Island sighting occurred two weeks before Roswell and involved
three facets. The first facet involved an account by Harold Dahl of UFOs
seen over Maury Island, the second Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of UFOs over
Mt. Rainier and the third, the tragic crash of a B-25 Bomber and the deaths of
two military intelligence officers. This book focuses on the crash site of the
B-25 Bomber, a first ever interview with a local who was first on the scene, a
newly discovered news photo of the crash site believed to be the only photo
available of what would be historically become the Air Force’s first plane
crash and new photos and news articles discovered.
The mystery of what actually was seen has only grown over the years. Now
over 65 years since the incident, one would think the mystery has gone
“cold,” or long forgotten but we believe to the contrary as for decades
questions have gone unanswered. The incident was dismissed perhaps too
readily as a hoax alongside the tragedy of the death of two military officers in
the crash.
Yet recent news articles found in the basements of libraries have
given new insight and family members today are more open and talking about
their families thus shedding some light on the incident.

We have strived to make the accounts and stories related in this book as
accurate as possible regarding the history of what we consider one of the
Northwest’s greatest mysteries in the hopes that one day more light will be
shed on what really happened or that it will be solved. At the very least, we
hope these reports give some recognition to the former investigators and
investigative journalists by connecting a face to a name and relating their
efforts and to those that dared to ask questions in search of the truth.

We have relied upon FBI files, newspaper articles, and first hand reports
including Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer’s
Coming of The Saucers.
Our hope
is that this is the most comprehensive and accurate report of The Maury
Island Incident available.

– Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson

 

Directors Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore
Foreward
by Dr. Larry Haapenen

In 1947, the term “flying saucer” (later to be supplanted by
Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO) emerged as part of the everyday
vocabulary of Americans. While many people today may associate the
so-called “Roswell crash” in New Mexico with that first year of the
modern UFO era, it was Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of UFO’s near
Mount Rainier, Washington, that truly started it all, and quick on the
heels of that sighting came the bizarre story of the Maury Island
incident, told by two self-styled “harbor patrolmen,” that drew in
Arnold himself and ultimately resulted in the death of two Army Air
Force intelligence officers, Capt. William Davidson and Lieut. Frank
Brown.