by Mack Maloney
So what were they?
Sherlock Holmes is famous for saying: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Thus the Swedes were forced to look at other explanations.
As recorded in Jerome Clark’s The UFO Encyclopedia (Second Edition): The Phenomenon from the Beginning on October 10, the Swedish Defence Staff released this statement on the subject: “Most observations are vague and must be treated very skeptically. In some cases, however, clear, unambiguous observations have been made that cannot be explained as natural phenomena, Swedish aircraft, or imagination on the part of the observer.”
Apparently the U.S. military didn’t disagree. A top secret U.S. Air Force document from November 1948 hinted that some military investigators believed the ghost rockets had extraterrestrial origins.
Declassified nearly five decades later, the document states:
“When [our] officers recently visited the Swedish Air Intelligence Service, the question [of the ghost rockets’ origin] was put to the Swedes. Their answer was that some reliable and fully technically qualified people had reached the conclusion that these phenomena are obviously the result of a high technical skill which cannot be credited to any presently known culture on Earth. They are therefore assuming that these objects originate from some previously unknown or unidentified technology, possibly outside the Earth.”
* * *
As unlikely as it might seem, Laurance S. Rockefeller, of the American billionaire Rockefellers, had a serious interest in the UFO question. Through his auspices in 1995, a sober, well-documented paper called “The Best Available Evidence” was produced (see: UFOScience.org).
The report contains this story: On the morning of August 14, 1946, a Swedish air force pilot was flying over central Sweden when he saw an object soaring along slightly above him and about a mile away. It was one of the ghost rockets. He estimated it was traveling about 400 miles per hour.
The pilot reported that not only was the object maintaining a stable horizontal altitude over the ground, it was basically following the terrain, meaning, if a mountain loomed up before it, it simply climbed enough to get over the mountain before returning to its previous altitude. But terrain-following technology is something that wasn’t even attempted until the 1960s and not really perfected until the 1980s.
Eric Malmberg was secretary of Sweden’s Defence Staff committee during the time of the ghost rockets. He was interviewed on the topic forty years later by UFO researchers Anders Liljegren and Clas Svahn. Contained in their paper “Ghost Rockets and Phantom Aircraft” from the anthology Phenomenon — Forty Years of Flying Saucers, Malmberg told them something both perplexing and chilling.
Talking about what was seen over Sweden that strange summer, he said: “If the observations were correct, many details suggest that it was some kind of a cruise missile. But nobody had that kind of sophisticated technology in 1946.”
11
America vs. the Flying Saucers
The “Era of Flying Saucers” began on June 24, 1947.
That day, Idaho businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State when he spotted nine brightly shining objects streaking across the afternoon sky.
In Arnold’s own words, the conditions were clear that day and the air was calm. He was on course to Yakima, Washington, as part of a business trip, when suddenly he was startled by a flash of light to his left. At first Arnold thought he’d strayed into the path of another airplane. But on seeing that the sky immediately around him was empty, his eyes were drawn to Mount Rainier about 20 miles off his left wing. There he saw the line of shiny objects flying at about 9,500 feet, heading south. It was these objects reflecting the sun that had attracted Arnold attention in the first place.
As recounted in Jerome Clark’s The UFO Encyclopedia, Arnold said that he was unable to make out their shapes for the first few seconds. But once they passed Mount Rainier, he saw their outlines against the snow and realized they were flat and tailless. Like a “half a pie plate,” was his initial description.
Arnold’s sighting was no quick event. He had the flying objects in view for more than two and a half minutes. In that time, he saw the strange craft perform some incredible maneuvers, such as all turning as one as they wound their way between the mountaintops.
The obj ects were also moving very fast. As Arnold watched them fly between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, he calculated the objects had traveled almost 50 miles in a minute and forty-five seconds. That works out to 1,700 miles per hour, nearly three times the speed of sound, faster by far than any known airplane of the day.
All this led Arnold to assume the objects were some kind of secret military aircraft.
* * *
Only after he left Yakima and flew on to Pendleton, Oregon, and spoke to some fellow pilots did Arnold begin to think what he’d seen might not belong to the U.S. military — or anyone else’s.
No tails, flying near Mach 3, being able to maneuver themselves between mountaintops with ease? At the time, nothing on earth could fly that way. Nothing man-made, anyway.
Word of Arnold’s sighting spread quickly, and by the next day, he was telling his story to a local Washington newspaper. And although he had indeed previously described the objects as looking like half a pie plate, Arnold was later quoted as saying they moved like saucers skipping across the water. Thus, the term “flying saucer” was born.
No sooner had the story hit the newswires, though, than something strange happened: Suddenly people all over the United States began seeing flying saucers.
Just on June 28 alone, an army pilot flying an F-51 Mustang near Lake Mead, Nevada, spotted five circular objects go by his fighter’s right wing; two farmers in Wisconsin saw ten saucer-shaped objects fly over them at high speed; and four army officers at Maxwell airfield in Montgomery, Alabama, watched an unusual circular object perform inconceivable midair maneuvers for more than twenty minutes.
The next day, June 29, a bus driver in Des Moines saw four circular objects flash through the sky at high speed; in Jacksonville, Oregon, a chevron formation of saucers was seen by people leaving a church; and in New Mexico, a car full of rocket scientists traveling near the White Sands Proving Ground spotted a silvery disk traveling at an astonishing velocity.
On and on it went… On June 30, an F-80 jet pilot reported seeing two gray circular objects while in flight. On July 3, an astronomer in Maine spotted ten saucers flying in perfect formation, and a family of ten in Idaho saw eight huge circular objects actually land. On July 4, a coastguardsman near Seattle, Washington, took a photo of a circular flying object; more saucers were spotted over Portland, Oregon; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Vancouver, Washington; and Emmett, Idaho. In fact, more than twenty other people in Washington State had seen the same mystery disks Arnold had reported back on June 24.
Many unexplained things had been spotted flying through earth’s skies for most of the century: the scareships of 1909, the ghost fliers of 1933–34, the foo fighters of World War II, the ghost rockets of 1946. But for whatever reason, Arnold’s sighting was the one that grabbed the headlines, the one that made the splash. And because no one in the media or the U.S. military ever thought to link Arnold’s saucers to these other mysterious events, Arnold’s aerial enigmas were presented as something new — and, in a way, something uniquely American. Finally, these strange flying things had a name that everyone could understand.
Kenneth Arnold’s story is well-known and has been heavily researched with more details than can be properly presented here. Some highly respected ufologists have pointed out that while the U.S. Air Force eventually concluded what Arnold saw was a “mirage,” no official investigation has ever been conducted on the famous sighting, and no definitive explanation has ever been given for what happened that day.
But an even stranger, if lesser-known, flying saucer story cropped up around the same time as the Arnold encounter. Among other th
ings, this episode featured what might have been the U.S. military’s first serious attempt to actually study a UFO sighting.
It also revealed a dark side to the brand-new science of investigating unidentified flying objects.
* * *
It’s known as the Maury Island Incident.
A somewhat murky affair, many different versions have been told over the years, fascinating some UFO researchers while causing extreme agita in others. Controversial or not, the following account contains those elements most people agree on.
It is said to have started on the afternoon of June 21, three days before the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting. A man named Harold Dahl was piloting a workboat in Puget Sound, near the port of Tacoma, Washington. With him were his son, two crewmen and the family dog. They were out on the sound looking for stray logs. Tacoma is close to logging country, and Dahl worked for a company that rounded up any loose cut trees that might have wound up in the harbor.
Dahl was sailing near Maury Island, a piece of land about three miles north of Tacoma. It was a cloudy day, and the waters of the sound were choppy. Suddenly the boat’s passengers became aware of six strange objects hovering about 2,000 feet above them. At first Dahl and his passengers thought they were balloons, but that idea quickly passed. The objects were about 100 feet long and shaped like doughnuts, complete with holes in the middle. They looked to be built of shiny metal with portholes around their outer rims and one continuous window lining the inside of the center opening. They made no noise.
Almost immediately, Dahl and crew saw one of the objects begin to falter. It dropped far below the others before pulling up directly above Dahl’s workboat. Fearing this object might crash into them, Dahl hastily headed for nearby Maury Island.
The boat’s occupants scrambled onto land, and from there they watched as the other five objects closed in on the wavering saucer and started circling it. Grabbing his camera, Dahl snapped off a handful of photos.
After a few minutes of circling, one of the five objects drew even closer to the ailing disk, making physical contact with it. This maneuver seemed to give the distressed object a boost of energy, as if being jumped by a battery. Suddenly the object began expelling material from the hole in its center. First, there was a rain of thin metal strips that looked like scraps of newspaper. But then came a deluge of what Dahl described as a metallic slaglike material — twenty tons of it.
This storm of weird metal came crashing down all around Dahl and company, damaging their boat, injuring Dahl’s son and killing the family dog. Dahl frantically tried calling for help — but his radio had mysteriously stopped working.
The boat’s occupants scrambled for cover and stayed there until the downpour of slag stopped. At this point, the troubled UFO seemed to recover its faculties. It rejoined the other five objects, and together, the formation climbed to a tremendous height and quickly disappeared.
Shaken by what he’d seen, Dahl hastily recovered some of the mysterious metal and then rushed back to Tacoma where his son was treated for his injury.
By his own account, Dahl told no one about the events on Maury Island.
* * *
The next morning, June 22, a stranger appeared at Dahl’s door.
Dahl described him as a male in his early forties, dressed in a black suit and driving a black car. At first, Dahl thought he was an insurance salesman. But after the man invited him to breakfast, Dahl suspected the visitor was from the government or the military. In any case, Dahl accepted the invitation.
Once at breakfast, the stranger asked Dahl some unusual questions, such as: “Are you happy with your job?” and “Are you happy with your family?”
Then, more chilling, the man proceeded to tell Dahl many intimate details of his UFO sighting on Maury Island the day before. Dahl was shocked; the man knew information Dahl hadn’t told anybody since returning from the incident.
The stranger then advised Dahl to forget what occurred and insinuated that if Dahl spoke any further about what he’d seen, it wouldn’t be good for him or his family.
With that, the man left.
* * *
The implied threat from this individual, possibly the first American “Man in Black” episode on record, did not stop Dahl, though. He reported to work later that day and told everything to his boss, a man named Fred Crisman.
By some accounts, Crisman, a World War II fighter pilot, didn’t believe Dahl’s story. This was no surprise, as the world was not yet aware of the term “flying saucer,” or UFO, for that matter. So Crisman went to Maury Island to see for himself, only to observe a strange flying object there, too. He also recovered some of the mysterious slaglike metal.
A short time later, Crisman sent a sample of the material to a man in Chicago named Ray Palmer. Palmer was editor of the magazine Amazing Science Fiction. Intrigued by the material and the tale that went with it, Palmer asked a rookie reporter to go to Tacoma and write a story about the Maury Island event.
That novice reporter was none other than Kenneth Arnold.
* * *
Arnold flew to Tacoma on July 29, a little more than a month after the Maury Island Incident.
On arrival, he called to reserve a room at the well-regarded Winthrop Hotel. But, some reports say, Arnold was told a room had already been set aside for him, though the hotel staff had no idea who’d made the reservation. That was just a hint of the weirdness to come.
Arnold got in touch with Dahl, but at first his subject was reluctant to meet. Reports say that Dahl had had an unusual streak of bad luck in the five weeks following his UFO encounter. He’d nearly been fired, his son had gone missing and his wife was ill. Whether it was these episodes or the meeting with the man in the black suit that had shaken him, at first, Arnold was met by a brick wall.
Dahl eventually agreed to talk to Arnold; by some reports, they met the next day, July 30, at the Winthrop. Dahl gave Arnold some of the material he said he’d found on Maury Island, though to Arnold it looked like ordinary slag, something that would come from an iron smelter.
But then Dahl’s boss, Fred Crisman, joined the meeting. He told Arnold that there were indeed tons of the slaglike material on Maury Island, a place nowhere near an iron smelter.
Sometime around this point, reports say Arnold reached out for expert help. After his own sighting, Arnold had befriended a commercial airline pilot named E. J. Smith. Smith had spotted a set of shiny disks skipping through the sky near Boise, Idaho, just a few days after Arnold’s famous sighting, in an encounter almost identical to Arnold’s.
Smith in turn recommended that Arnold get military intelligence involved. After his own sighting, Smith had been questioned by an Army Air Corps officer named Lieutenant Frank Brown; Smith now contacted Brown and told him what had happened at Maury Island.
Besieged by reports of flying saucers from all over America, the U.S. military was getting concerned that the mysterious aerial objects might actually be Russian secret weapons. So army intelligence jumped at the chance to recover something that had fallen out of the Maury Island object.
Accompanied by another intelligence officer named Captain William Davidson, Lieutenant Brown took off in a B-25 bomber from Hamilton airfield in California and flew to McChord airfield just outside Tacoma. The military officers joined the others in Arnold’s room at the Winthrop Hotel on the afternoon of July 31.
According to Arnold, who later wrote about the meeting in a book, Dahl repeated his story for the military officers. They also discussed the photos Dahl had taken on the day of the incident, which had come out distorted and useless, as if they’d been exposed to X-rays.
But then things took another weird turn. While the meeting was going on, a reporter from the Tacoma Times called Arnold and repeated back to him practically everything Dahl and Crisman were saying to the military officers. The reporter said he got the information from an anonymous phone caller, even though no one beyond Arnold’s hotel room was privy to what was being said. Completel
y bewildered by this bizarre turn of events, Arnold searched the room for listening devices but found none.
Still, the anonymous caller continued feeding intimate information on the meeting to the newspaperman, baffling both the reporter and the people gathered in Arnold’s room.
It seemed that someone unseen was able to peer in on them and hear exactly what was being said.
* * *
By most accounts, after Brown and Davidson listened to the Maury Island story, the military officers hastily took their leave. One report said Brown and Davidson told the others they had to return to the Hamilton air base that night because the following day was the first ever Air Force Day. Whatever the reason, the pair left, taking a box of the mysterious slaglike material with them.
Returning to nearby McChord air base where their B-25 was waiting, Brown and Davidson had a quick briefing with the base intelligence officer. Then they boarded their airplane and took off, carrying a box of classified material with them.
A short time later, both men were dead.
* * *
The B-25 Brown and Davidson were flying crashed near the Washington-Oregon border, not far from Mount Rainier, where Kenneth Arnold had spotted the first flying saucers just a month earlier.
Local newspaper reports hinted broadly that the plane had been sabotaged, and the story would become even more intriguing when a spokesman for McChord air base at first denied but then confirmed that the two officers were indeed carrying classified information when their plane went down.
It was Crisman who told Arnold about the B-25’s crash. The next day, Crisman and Dahl met with Arnold once again at the hotel to discuss the tragic event. At some point soon afterward, Arnold decided he’d had enough. He contacted Ray Palmer, the magazine editor, and told him he couldn’t gather enough material to do a proper story. Then Arnold prepared to leave Tacoma.
What was the real reason Arnold wanted out? Some reports say the same Tacoma reporter who’d informed him of the leaks coming from his room told Arnold he was involved in something that was beyond his power, suggesting he get out of town until things blew over.
