It was June 21, 1947. Three weeks before the rancher Mac Brazel found debris scattered across a sheep pasture outside Roswell, New Mexico — the incident that would define UFO mythology for the next eight decades — something happened over Puget Sound that the U.S. government would spend years trying to make disappear.
It's called the Maury Island incident. You've probably never heard of it. That's not an accident.
What Fred Crisman claimed he saw
Harbor patrolman Harold Dahl was on a routine boat run near Maury Island, Washington, when he said he witnessed six donut-shaped objects hovering at about 2,000 feet. One appeared to be in distress. The others circled it. Then the struggling craft began spewing two types of material: a white metal substance that floated like aluminum foil, and a dark, slag-like rock that fell into the water and onto the boat deck.
One piece of the falling debris struck Dahl's son on the arm. His dog was killed.
The next morning, Dahl said he was visited by a man in a dark suit who arrived in a brand-new black Buick. The man described the incident to Dahl in perfect detail — detail Dahl had told no one — and told him that if he valued the safety of his family, he would forget what he saw.
This is the first documented account of the Men in Black. Three weeks before Roswell. Twelve days before Kenneth Arnold's famous "flying saucer" sighting over Mount Rainier that started the modern UFO era.
What the Army Air Force found
Kenneth Arnold himself was sent to investigate. He brought a pilot named Captain E.J. Smith. What they found was confusing enough that they gathered samples of the debris and loaded them onto a B-25 for transport to Wright Field in Ohio for analysis.
The B-25 crashed near Kelso, Washington, killing both men aboard.
The official verdict: mechanical failure. The cargo: never recovered, officially.
Why it disappeared
The Maury Island incident was quickly labeled a hoax by Army investigators. Dahl's employer, Fred Crisman, later turned up in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination — Jim Garrison subpoenaed him as a witness in 1968. Crisman claimed to have worked for the CIA. He may have.
The incident has the ingredients that make historians uncomfortable: a witness who partly recanted, a death that may or may not be connected, a government investigation that closed faster than it opened, and a paper trail that leads in several directions at once.
What we know for certain: three weeks before the most famous UFO incident in American history, something happened over Puget Sound, two Army Air Force officers died carrying samples of it, and the official explanation was filed and closed within weeks.
The 1950s hadn't even started yet.