by Mark Frost
The possibility that my thoughts or mind in some peculiar way was being controlled or dictated to do this, or that some external force could have caused this to happen would seem perfectly preposterous to anyone who had not experienced what I had just experienced.
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE
After repairs to his plane, Arnold made it home safely, and for the next few years--until publishing his book in 1952--kept largely quiet about his experiences. He later ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Idaho in 1962 and died in 1984.
*7* HAROLD DAHL
Harold Dahl moved away from Tacoma after Maury Island, and lived peacefully until his death in 1982. He never spoke again publicly about these events, other than to maintain his posture that he had made it all up.1
1 One nagging thought I keep coming back to with Harold Dahl: Maybe it was all a hoax or maybe it wasn’t, but would anyone have injured his own son and killed his own dog in order to sell the story?—TP
*8* FRED CRISMAN
Crisman returned to the Tacoma area from his mysterious trip to Alaska and the following month, on September 8, the Air Force revoked his reserve commission.1
A few months after his return, Crisman penned a second letter to Ray Palmer’s magazine Amazing Stories in which he claimed that sometime during this trip to Alaska he discovered a second “Lemurian”-style frozen cave while in the company of a soldier he identified only as “Dick” and, once again, barely escaped with his life. But this time, he claimed, his companion “Dick” was not as lucky, perishing from wounds from a “ray gun” wielded by whatever beings they encountered.2
Crisman wrote a third letter to Palmer’s second magazine, Fate, in 1950, in which he vehemently denied the Maury Island incident was a hoax and that the crash of the B-25, and the death of the two officers, proved it. He also claimed he’d given the two officers photographic evidence of the disks that Harold Dahl had shot on the day he first saw them. No trace of these photos or fragments of the Maury Island materials were ever recovered from the wreckage.
Although his military commission had been revoked, Crisman was recalled to active duty during the Korean War and served as a fighter pilot for two and a half years. After returning again to civilian life, during the remainder of the 1950s and ’60s, Crisman worked as a teacher, school administrator, freelance writer and speechwriter for many political figures. He also hosted a radio talk show in Puyallup, Washington, using the pseudonym Jon Gold, usually promoting far-right-wing causes.3
Although this correspondent has been unable to confirm this as fact, rumors of Crisman’s involvement with CIA as a deep cover operative--from WW2 through the 1970s--continued throughout his lifetime. If this is the case, it appears Crisman may have functioned as a handler, or “black bag go-between,” a discreet conduit facilitating access between official higher-ups and freelance field operatives, offering deniability to both sides of any dubious transaction. In agency parlance, these men were known as “extended agents.”4
Bearing this in mind, Crisman later became a “person of interest” in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When maverick New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested local businessman Clay Shaw in 1967 for conspiring to kill the president, it was reported that the first person Shaw called after he was taken into custody was Fred Crisman, with whom he had apparently served in the OSS during WWII.
Garrison’s grand jury subpoenaed Crisman shortly afterward. He appeared before them and was questioned about relationships he had with a surprising number of the Garrison investigation’s targets. What emerged were a few more strange details about Crisman’s shadowy activities: He had flown back and forth from Tacoma to New Orleans and Dallas 84 times in the three years prior to the JFK assassination. He held a diplomatic passport, vouched for by a senator on the Intelligence Committee. It also turns out that Jim Garrison had worked for the FBI after the war, in the Pacific Northwest, at the time of the Maury Island incident.
But aside from those details little came of Crisman’s testimony in New Orleans and no charges of any kind were brought against Crisman by the grand jury.5
At the age of 56, Fred Crisman died in 1975 at the Seattle Veterans Hospital of kidney failure. An autopsy was ordered, for reasons that remain unexplained.
Three years after his death, Crisman’s name surfaced again during the 1977 House investigation into the JFK assassination. A key witness in those hearings identified Crisman as one of the infamous “three tramps,” a trio of vagrants who were arrested behind the grassy knoll above Dealey Plaza shortly after the shooting. Photographic analysis concluded, and this correspondent concurs, that Crisman did indeed resemble the shortest of the three men to a more than reasonable degree.6
Those who maintain that shots were fired from the knoll traditionally believe the “tramps” may have been the assassins. Although they claimed to have been “riding the rails” and had spent the night in a homeless shelter, all three men were well dressed and clean-shaven at the time of their arrest. All three men were also released not long after being taken into custody, and Dallas police claim to have since lost their arrest records.
Testimony from colleagues at the high school where Crisman was teaching at the time in Rainier, Oregon, seemed to provide him with a posthumous alibi for 11-22-63.
Whatever “official” role Crisman may have played as an operative--and at this point the trail is too tangled and diffuse to reach absolute conclusions--there is no doubt he remains a cog in the machinery of many enduring mysteries and conspiracies through the second half of the 20th century.7
* The three tramps in Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963
* Fred Crisman
1 Suggesting that Crisman suffered a rebuke or punishment from his reserve unit as a result of his involvement in the incident. I have verified that there were military brigs in Alaska during this period that were used for the kind of “off the grid” questioning more familiar from techniques employed in the early 21st century—TP
2 Just an opinion: If it was all a hoax, Crisman strikes me as the man who orchestrated it—TP
3 While researching Fred Crisman, I came across a strange detail that may be of interest only to me: Throughout the ’40s and ’50s there are repeated references to Crisman having a “working telephone” concealed under the dash of his car. Decades before such equipment was commonplace, how did Crisman have access to one?
Which leads me to wonder: What if Crisman himself had been the unidentified caller to both Lantz and Morello? It wouldn’t be out of character, if the following is true—TP
4 This appears to have been the conclusion of Ray Palmer as well, who tied Crisman in a later editorial to the assassination of the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, three weeks before Kennedy was shot in 1963—TP
5 The same can be said for Garrison’s benighted and controversial case—Shaw was acquitted—dismissed by history as prosecutorial overreach and remembered more now as the focus of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK in 1991. But there’s no doubt Garrison stirred up a toxic, corrupt stew of conspiracies, right-wing fringe groups, Cuban exiles and whispers of unholy alliances between gangland figures and espionage agencies, all hovering around the pale ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald—TP
6 At various times, Watergate burglars and former undercover operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis—who fit the same shadowy black-bag profile as Crisman—have also been identified as two of the “tramps.” Along with, strangely, a career criminal and alleged mob hit man named Charles Harrelson—now deceased. Before dying in prison he actually confessed to the killing of JFK, although few gave the confession much credence. He was also the estranged father of well-known actor Woody Harrelson!—TP
7 I have verified some of this. In recently declassified CIA documents, Fred Crisman has an extensive file—heavily redacted—which confirms that he did work as an active agent in the OSS during WWII as a liaison to British Royal Air Force, and later as an active CIA agent, assigned as
a “special investigator at large” in the Pacific Northwest. His return to service as a combat pilot in the Korean War was largely a cover for his varied espionage assignments in the region, including Japan. The teaching and school appointments he later took on in civilian life were also selected as ideal cover for his ongoing CIA activities, as was a position he took at the Boeing Company for two years in the early 1960s. The list of black-bag or “dirty tricks”–style operations he was involved in is extensive. Knowing this makes his motives in the Maury Island case seem more than suspect—TP
*9* RAY PALMER
Chicago magazine publisher Ray Palmer, who died in 1977, adds one last detail worth noting.1
Just after the Maury Island incident, Fred Crisman mailed Palmer a cigar box filled with some of the metallic objects and rocks Harold Dahl had recovered. A few days after the crash of the B-25, Palmer claimed, a single intelligence agent visited him at his office unannounced. If the man mentioned which agency he represented, Palmer did not specify. He described the man as “average looking” and wearing a black suit, and that he “casually questioned me about the Maury Island incident and the Shaver-Lemurian articles.”
Palmer said he showed him the box Crisman had sent him, but the agent--whom Palmer did not identify by name--seemed “remarkably uninterested” in it and Palmer replaced it in a locked file cabinet. The next morning, Palmer discovered that his office had been burgled, and the box and its contents had been stolen from the file cabinet, “where the agent had watched me place it.”2
1 A personal note on Palmer: For his role in popularizing science fiction through his magazines, Palmer was memorialized by DC Comics, who in 1961 gave his name to the alter ego of a new superhero, the Atom—TP
2 Leading one to ask: Had Douglas Milford made his way to Chicago?—TP
*10* THE CRASH OF THE B-25
An extensive Air Force investigation into the crash of the B-25 yielded few satisfying answers. For instance: After the two other crew members parachuted, at an estimated altitude of between seven and ten thousand feet, why did Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown not follow them out and instead die in the crash? It’s also worth noting that they never attempted to notify anyone by radio that their plane was in distress. Perhaps they didn’t have time to react, or whatever caused the fire took out power to the com systems as well.
The surviving crew chief stated that “all persons aboard were in readiness to bail out after efforts to extinguish the fire proved fruitless.” It seems most likely that a true Air Force man like Captain Davidson stayed with the plane simply to steer it away from populated areas to avoid civilian casualties, and lost control before they could abandon ship. In which case he is not only the first Air Force casualty, but a true American hero.
And as to what caused the left engine fire that resulted in the crash? The report concluded: “The cause of the fire could not be determined.”
*11* WHAT WAS IN THE CORN FLAKES BOX?
Two types of material were recovered by Harold Dahl from Maury Island: black slaglike rock, and the previously mentioned thin white metal.
Although the sample Crisman sent to Ray Palmer in Chicago in the cigar box was stolen, and whatever was in the corn flakes box disappeared in the crash of the B-25, reporter Ted Morello wrote one last story on a third batch of samples that Dahl gave to him soon after the crash for safekeeping.
Morello turned these fragments over to a chemistry professor at the nearby College of Puget Sound for analysis. On August 8, reporter Paul Lantz wrote about the professor’s findings in the Tacoma Times:
Although discovered in 1791, titanium was not extracted and isolated from compound ore into its pure, usable form until 1925. At the time of the crash in 1947 it still had few, if any, industrial or commercial uses.
Shortly after the B-25 crash, with the advent of the Cold War in the 1950s, both the Soviet Union and the United States began using titanium extensively in military aviation. The U.S. at that point designated it a “strategic material” and began to collect it at the Defense National Stockpile Center.
In both nations’ aerospace industries, titanium quickly became a key component in developing rockets, missiles and craft strong enough to withstand the atmospheric stresses of space exploration.
*12* PAUL LANTZ
This tragically turned out to be one of the last bylined stories ever written by reporter Paul Lantz. A few months later, on January 10, 1948, at the age of 29, Lantz died suddenly and without warning.
Many years later, the widow of Paul Lantz revealed in a letter to her husband’s friend and fellow reporter Ted Morello this story, about an incident that she said took place at their home sometime in the fall of 1947:
Lantz, a small, brave man who had survived a serious case of polio as a youth, had made many friends while working the police beat in Tacoma. His funeral was attended not only by family, friends and colleagues but by most of the Tacoma Police Department. His tragically premature death remains cloaked in mystery.1
1 If an autopsy was performed on Paul Lantz, I was unable to locate it. Contemporary accounts state that Lantz died after a “short unspecified illness” that apparently puzzled his doctors. The official cause of death offered on Lantz’s death certificate is meningitis, but none of the accounts I’ve found even mention this—TP
*13* DOUGLAS MILFORD’S SHADOW
He flickers through the Roswell and Maury Island stories like a shadow. Knowing what we do now, this appears to have been by design, and we can start to infer his intentions.
Milford is, by July 1947, clearly working for someone. It is, almost certainly, an organization or agency, not an individual. The most likely candidate appears to be the emerging Project Sign, investigating sightings but also suppressing information, intimidating witnesses, and stifling inquiry. At the worst he’s guilty of sabotage and even murder.
He remains inscrutable. Was he, like Fred Crisman, a licensed provocateur, swimming in slipstreams of interconnected conspiracies and double- or triple-dealing? Or was his purpose more pointed and single-minded?
We will follow his trail from here to see what it tells us. And it leads, inevitably, back to his hometown of Twin Peaks.1
But first, let me offer an alternate theory regarding the Maury Island incident that is worth considering, which also may account for the strange behavior of Fred Crisman.
One of the first nuclear production complexes to produce weapons-grade plutonium is located at Hanford, Washington. Located 200 miles east of Tacoma around a bare, desertlike stretch of the Columbia River, the Hanford Ordnance Works--often more benignly referred to as the Hanford Engineering Company--is nearly half the size of Rhode Island. In 1942, the government seized this land by exercise of eminent domain, a constitutional right most citizens don’t even know exists. Over 1,500 people were “relocated” from two nearby farming communities, creating ghost towns that exist to this day.2
They also removed people of three Native American nations, including Lewis and Clark’s old friends the Nez Perce. Yes, this was reservation land, and therefore judged “ideal” by the powers that be for their purposes. Having fleeced the Nez Perce out of their land in their 19th-century treaty, it proved even easier to do it a second time. With a world war on this time, patriotism trumped reason; even the “Indians” couldn’t refuse pitching in to save the world. Once the Manhattan Project split the atom, the B Reactor the government built at Hanford produced most of the plutonium used in the bomb dropped at Nagasaki, as well as in most of the nuclear weapons America continued to manufacture throughout the Cold War.3
As a result Hanford also produced a massive amount of nuclear waste, a threat of contamination to the area’s groundwater and other resources, before the country had developed a coherent plan on how to store or contain it.
So what did they do with it? Recently declassified documents reveal that in 1949, soon after the war, officials at Hanford covertly released massive amounts of raw, irradiated uranium fuel into the loc
al environment. Levels monitored in a 200-mile area around Hanford exceeded the established daily limit of iodine-131 by over 1,000 percent.4
The water and land rights that had been granted to the Nez Perce were fouled for generations to come. But there would be no relocations this time; citizens in the area were, instead, routinely tested to see what effect these contaminants would have on them, and in the next few years thyroid disease and cancer rates soared, at which point officials at every level denied that any radiation above acceptable levels had ever been released. I wonder what Chief Joseph would have had to say to the government about that.
* The Hanford nuclear facility
In the light of this revelation, is it possible that what Harold Dahl encountered that day in Puget Sound were American aircraft--the size and origin of which I’ll deal with momentarily--engaged in the illicit “dumping” of nuclear waste in the Puget Sound? This could explain the “burns” suffered by Dahl’s son and the death of his dog. It could even explain why the photographs taken by Harold Dahl that day were fogged and overexposed. It appears no one ever thought to test the samples he retrieved for radioactivity. Is it possible that the samples taken on board the B-25 may have played a role in disturbing the electronic systems on the plane, thereby contributing to the crash?
When Dahl first went to Fred Crisman with his story, what if Crisman was given an assignment by his CIA handlers to “obscure” the truth with an even more sensational cover story of “flying saucers”? Kenneth Arnold’s UFO story was all over the local news at the time, and would have presented a perfect misdirection. This might explain many of Crisman’s actions--Dahl might not even have known his true motives--as well as why the military closed ranks around the whole affair. It might even explain all of Milford’s subsequent actions, particularly the silencing of Dahl and the attempted intimidations of Paul Lantz and Ray Palmer.
