Table of Contents
Dedication
Russell Kenneth Thomas
January 27, 1927-November 20, 1977
Decorated veteran of World War II
and Korea
I never thought much of a lie, because nobody believes a lie if he has a chance to find out the truth.
Harry S. Truman in Tacoma, Washington, June 10, 1948
The experts disagree. And in the final analysis this country...on its space effort and all the rest where we will find the most intense disagreement among those who know the mostin the final analysis the people themselves have to make a judgment...
John F. Kennedy, Cheney Stadium, Tacoma, WA, September 27, 1963
Acknowledgements
The following researchers have distinguished themselves in uncovering information about this earliest event in the modern UFO lore:
Thomas Adams
Lucuis Farish
Vaughn Greene
Larry Haapanen
Ron Halbritter
Kalani and Katiuska Hanohano
Charlette Lefevre
Bob Leroy
Phil Lipson
Floyd Murray
Jim Pobst
Mike Sylwester
Foreword To New Edition
BARACK OBAMAS EVOCATION OF JFKS PRESIDENCY WENT beyond his foreign and domestic policy initiatives. He announced his intent to retool America with new, green technologies in much the same way Kennedy waxed enthusiastic about the space program back in the early 1960s, although Obamas actual plans for NASA remained less ambitious. UFOlogists beamed that Obamas transition chief, John Podesta, had in 2002 called upon the Pentagon to release its classified files on the subject. It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than twenty years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the real nature of the phenomenon. Although such a high-placed simpatico gained enough credibility for ufologists to get a press conference aired on CNN, in the end no grand effort for total release emerged. Podesta proclaimed that he was a big fan of the X-Files TV show and his UFO interest became just another popular culture footnote.
The story of the Maury Island case resides in that nexus of parapolitics and popular culture. Although the original edition of this book remains the only full book on the subject, updated and expanded here, the case itself comes and goes in the popular memory. The release of Oliver Stones movie JFK in 1991, for instance, reminded many of the national brouhaha first brought on by Jim Garrisons 1968 investigation of John Kennedys murder and taught many others about it for the first time. Stones movie carefully noted that Garrison believed the man he wound up prosecuting, New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, represented only a toehold on a much larger conspiracy.
Among the other players in the crime that Garrison never had enough on to bring to court was a man named Fred Lee Crisman. Garrison had Crisman pegged as one of the trigger men on the grassy knoll. Although the details of this aspect of the Garrison prosecution remained obscure even to Oliver Stones audience, those alive when Garrisons case grabbed national headlines knew Crisman better than they thought they did, almost subliminally, through television. Since the fall of 1967, they had watched fictionalized adventures from his life weekly in the form of a science fiction program called The Invaders.
Nevertheless, the verifiable facts about Crismans life as discussed herein make his possible connection to The Invaders the least of the biographical stories he could embellish for publicity. Crisman had witnessed the earliest flying saucer sighting of the post-war UFO era, three days before Kenneth Arnolds famous Mount Rainier sightings in 1947. It involved several spinning discs that spewed a weird substance over the shore near Puget Sound, Washington, and Arnold later was hired by a pulp magazine publisher to investigate it. The Air Force sent in two investigators as well and they died in a plane crash trying to bring the substance in for tests.
Roswell happened a month after the Maury Island incident. Considering the wilder claims that assassins killed JFK because of plans to expose the infamous New Mexico alien spacecraft crash, its not surprising that Crismans connection to both this, the earliest of post-war UFO cases, and the JFK assassination would capture the attention of people obsessed with conspiracy connections. Some researchers have argued that Roswell, Maury Island, and Arnolds Mount Rainier sightings might all involve the same craft. Serious JFK scholars usually tangle up the assassination in a tapestry of anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia figures, and the CIA, and try to stay clear of the alien connection for the sake of already shaky credibility issues. Of course, credibility issues surrounded the Maury Island case early on, keeping it fit only for those following Garrisons arcane investigation and as the focus of a creepy TV program.
The chief witness at Maury Island was a man named Harold Dahl, who worked with Fred Crisman salvaging runaway logs in a harbor patrol boat. Dahl later claimed it was all a hoax. Many have dismissed it that way ever since, even though the slightest review of the historical records offered in this volume shows that Dahl made that claim only after his business was sabotaged, his son kidnapped, and his wife threatened. Dahl suffered an early visit from the infamous Men in Black who told him to keep quiet about what he saw. Thereafter, Dahl declared it all a hoax.
Crisman himself may not have seen anything at all. He visited Maury Island a day after Dahls sighting and claimed he saw a single saucer on his own. Dahl had multiple witnesses to his sighting as well as physical evidence: the mysterious substance spewed by the saucers killed his dog and injured his sons arm.
Dahl reported the incident to Crisman, whom he regarded as his boss in the lumber salvaging business. Crisman later went out to the site on his own, to make sure Dahl and the others had not simply gotten drunk and wrecked the boat, and had his sighting without any other witnesses.
Nevertheless, when the Air Force finally sent its investigators, it was Crisman who gave them a Kelloggs Corn Flakes box filled with substances left behind by the UFO at Maury Island. The box and its contents went up in flames, along with the two airmen, when the plane crashed, leading some to suspect that Crisman may have even sabotaged the plane.
JFK & UFO explores all that in great detail. On the fanciful side, it examines the proposition that Crisman may have kept control of the alien substance to use as blackmail in staying employed in the covert world, even to get choice assignments like the JFK hit. A more mundane but equally compelling idea suggests that his involvement with Maury Island may have had to do with covering up top-secret radar-fogging discs or the dumping of nuclear waste from the nearby Hanford plutonium reactor.
Crisman wanted people to believe the first scenario, however. In early 1968, he corresponded with well-known UFO researcher Lucius Farish as the contact person for a group he called Parapsychology Research, under the pseudonym Fred Lee. The alias, which only dropped his last name, provided Crisman with a means to discuss himself in the third person, telling Farish: Mr. Crisman is probably the most informed man in the United States on UFOs and also one of the hardest to findas the FBI has learned several times. Crisman presented himself as a man with secret knowledge of UFOs, on the run from the government. In real life, Jim Garrison was on Crismans heels at that time as a suspect in JFKs murder. Following in the same letter, Crisman notes: An interesting fact one of our members sent a copy of one of the current TV series, The Aliens [sic
