Conspiracy Alert
Because of Kenneth Arnold’s recent notoriety, and the unresolved mystery of what Arnold saw above Washington’s Cascade Mountains on June 24, Army Air Forces Intelligence dispatched two officers to Puget Sound. After conducting interviews, snapping photos, and retrieving what may have been residue from the peculiar spray, Lt. Frank Brown and Capt. William Davidson departed in a B-25—which crashed in a wooded area near Kelso, Washington, killing the officers (two enlisted men aboard parachuted to safety) and destroying the UFO evidence.
Informed by hindsight, UFOlogists working many years later looked hard not just at the crash of the B-25, but at a series of coincidences that, the investigators assumed (or hoped), pointed to a far-reaching conspiracy: Ziff-Davis fired Ray Palmer; potentially fatal engine trouble struck Kenneth Arnold’s private plane not long after his time with Dahl and Crisman; a Tacoma Times journalist who interviewed Dahl in 1947 died not long after; and The Tacoma Times went out of business in 1949. Further, the physical evidence sent to Ray Palmer disappeared during a breakin at Palmer’s Chicago office.
Well, Arnold’s plane trouble was his own fault: after landing at Seattle, he had closed the fuel valve—SOP after a flight—and forgot to re-engage it during his pre-flight check. The reporter died of natural causes, as people do. The Tacoma Times suspended publication because of mid-century economic woes and social changes (such as suburbanization) that hurt many local papers. And Ray Palmer was not dismissed from his job with Ziff-Davis; he quit—because Z-D planned to relocate to New York City when Palmer was preparing to return to his home state, Wisconsin. Further, Palmer’s private project, Fate magazine, was coming together, and Palmer reasoned (correctly) that he could live without checks from Z-D.
Of all the coincidences, the robbery of Palmer’s office is the most intriguing.
In its foolishness (who breaks into a science fiction magazine?), it has a bumbling, maybe-it-really-happened Watergate feel. Perhaps the act was related to the Maury Island event, but if so, the thief got very little: just fragments of metal that, as far as Kenneth Arnold was concerned, came from the nearby Tacoma Smelting works. In any event, much speculation surrounds the disposition of the debris, with many accounts of the story spiraling into a convoluted maze of “switched” fragments, double crosses, and people being set up to be killed.
By the late 1960s, after making unsuccessful application for a security job at Los Alamos, Crisman was living in Oregon. His interest in UFOs continued, and he frequently attended UFO conferences. In 1978, Crisman became a peripheral, and innocent, figure in a reopened House investigation of the Kennedy assassination; conspiracy theorists had incorrectly fingered Crisman as one of “the three tramps” seen near Dealy Plaza on November 22.
Dahl simply vanished. According to some accounts, a check of old Tacoma phone books suggested that there had never been a Harold Dahl in the area. Fred Crisman eventually gave Dahl’s address to UFO researchers. The researchers managed to contact Dahl by mail around 1967, but later discovered that their correspondence had been answered by Crisman.
UFO researchers of varying credibility looked into Harold Dahl more closely.
One theory suggested that Dahl had been “invented” by Crisman, an OSS operative during World War II, who later worked for the OSS follow-on organization, the CIA. This point of view adds that Crisman found work at Boeing in 1960 and established himself there as a troublemaker, accusing various managers of being Communists or homosexuals. Ray Palmer disowned Maury Island in 1958, declaring the whole thing a hoax.
But he couldn’t say precisely what Crisman had been up to, and he had no explanation at all for the mysterious Harold Dahl.