Charlette LeFevre - The Maury Island UFO Incident: The Story behind the Air Force’s first military plane crash

Copyright
The Maury Island UFO Incident 2014, Charlette LeFevre and Philip LipsonSelf published, Seattle, WANorthwest Museum of Legends and Lore501(c) 3 educational nonprofitwww.northwestlegendsmuseum.comseattlemysterymuseum@gmail.com

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected underInternational and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint oruse of this material unless under fair use is prohibited. without express writtenpermission from the authors.

This book is dedicated to the militarys first UFO Investigators wholost their lives investigating and protecting evidence,Capt. William L. Davidson and 1st Lt. Frank M. Brown and Paul Lantz - a true investigative reporter who asked the tough

Mystery, was one of the most detailed reports of the early UFO eraand the Maury Island Mystery was never publicly solved
Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. 1956.

Robert Davenport
Rod Dyke
Steve Edmiston
Elmer Frombach
James Greear and Dorene
Dr. Larry Haapanen
Scott Schaefer
William Shortley
Kenn Thomas
John White

Capt. Davidson and Lt. Brown watched closely as the lights from the airfield glintedoff the rivets of the B-25 bomber in the night air as the locked metal box scraped thebottom of the plane floor.
It was so heavy; it took two men to lift the box into the front. The light also caughtthe eyes of the guards who had been protecting the plane - eyes that were just a bitwider because they knew that whatever was being loaded was top secret and likelyheld new technology, foreign and unexplained.
And that created fear. McChord Field was on edge.
All that night at the base, the guards were whispering about unusual craft sightingsthat had happened in the weeks prior. They couldnt help notice all the newspaperswere giving it front page coverage and the reporters were hounding them for moreinformation. Reports of UFOs includedpilot Kenneth Arnold seeing nine discs information over nearby Mt. Rainier that had made International News.

Forward..................................................... pg. 7
Forward by Dr. Larry Haapanen .......... pg. 8
The Incident............................................. pg. 9
Capt. William Davidson ......................... pg. 411st Lieut. Frank M Brown....................... pg. 44Paul Lantz................................................. pg. 45Kenneth Arnold ..................................... pg. 48Harold Dahl ............................................ pg. 52Fred Crisman .......................................... pg. 56Raymond Palmer..................................... pg. 66Ted Morello ............................................. pg. 69Sgt .Elmer Taff ........................................ pg. 70Sgt. Woodrow Mathews......................... pg. 71Mysterious Informant ........................... pg. 71Rediscovery of the Crash Site ............... pg. 74The Slag ................................................... pg. 79Newspaper Articles .............................. pg. 87Theories .................................................... pg. 93Still a Mystery........................................... pg. 101Bibliography............................................. pg. 102About the Authors.................................. pg. 106

The Maury Island UFO Incident is a mysterious case with a series ofevents spanning several months in the summer of 1947 in the Puget Soundarea of Washington State. The mystery for the most part has remained one ofthe lesser-known UFO cases in UFOlogy even though it is as complex and as well documented as the Roswell UFO mystery.
The Maury Island sighting occurred two weeks before Roswell and involvedthree facets. The first facet involved an account by Harold Dahl of UFOsseen over Maury Island, the second Kenneth Arnolds sighting of UFOs overMt. Rainier and the third, the tragic crash of a B-25 Bomber and the deaths oftwo military intelligence officers. This book focuses on the crash site of theB-25 Bomber, a first ever interview with a local who was first on the scene, anewly discovered news photo of the crash site believed to be the only photoavailable of what would be historically become the Air Forces first plane crash and new photos and news articles discovered.
The mystery of what actually was seen has only grown over the years. Nowover 65 years since the incident, one would think the mystery has gonecold, or long forgotten but we believe to the contrary as for decadesquestions have gone unanswered. The incident was dismissed perhaps tooreadily as a hoax alongside the tragedy of the death of two military officers inthe crash.Yet recent news articles found in the basements of libraries havegiven new insight and family members today are more open and talking about their families thus shedding some light on the incident.

We have strived to make the accounts and stories related in this book asaccurate as possible regarding the history of what we consider one of theNorthwests greatest mysteries in the hopes that one day more light will beshed on what really happened or that it will be solved. At the very least, we hope these reports give some recognition to the former investigators andinvestigative journalists by connecting a face to a name and relating theirefforts and to those that dared to ask questions in search of the truth.

We have relied upon FBI files, newspaper articles, and first hand reports including Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmers Coming of The Saucers. Our hope is that this is the most comprehensive and accurate report of The Maury Island Incident available.

In 1947, the term flying saucer (later to be supplanted byUnidentified Flying Object, or UFO) emerged as part of the everydayvocabulary of Americans. While many people today may associate theso-called Roswell crash in New Mexico with that first year of the modern UFO era, it was Kenneth Arnolds sighting of UFOs nearMount Rainier, Washington, that truly started it all, and quick on the heels of that sighting came the bizarre story of the Maury Island incident, told by two self-styled harbor patrolmen, that drew inArnold himself and ultimately resulted in the death of two Army Air Force intelligence officers, Capt. William Davidson and Lieut. FrankBrown.