When the lieutenant colonel from the Fourth Air Force made his widely publicized denunciation of saucer believers he specifically mentioned a UFO report from the Tacoma, Washington, area.

The report of the investigation of this incident, the Maury Island Mystery, was one of the most detailed reports of the early UFO era.

The report that we had in our files had been pieced together by Air Force Intelligence and other agencies because the two intelligence officers who started the investigation couldn"t finish it. They were dead.

For the Air Force the story started on July 31, 1947, when Lieutenant Frank Brown, an intelligence agent at Hamilton AFB, California, received a long-distance phone call. The caller was a man whom 111 call Simpson, who had met Brown when Brown investigated an earlier UFO sighting, and he had a hot lead on another UFO incident.

He had just talked to two Tacoma Harbor patrolmen. One of them had seen six UFO"s hover over his patrol boat and spew out chunks of odd metal. Simpson had some of the pieces of the metal.

The story sounded good to Lieutenant Brown, so he reported it to his chief. His chief OK"d a trip and within an hour Lieutenant Brown and Captain Davidson were flying to Tacoma in an Air Force B-25. When they arrived they met Simpson and an airline pilot friend of his in Simpson"s hotel room. After the usual round of introductions Simpson told Brown and Davidson that he had received a letter from a Chicago publisher asking him, Simpson, to investigate this case. The publisher had paid him $200 and wanted an exclusive on the story, but things were getting too hot, Simpson wanted the military to take over.

Simpson went on to say that he had heard about the experience off Maury Island but that he wanted Brown and Davidson to hear it firsthand. He had called the two harbor patrolmen and they were on their way to the hotel. They arrived and they told their story.

I"ll call these two men Jackson and Richards although these aren"t their real names. In June 1947, Jackson said, his crew, his son, and the son"s dog were on his patrol boat patrolling near Maury Island, an island in Puget Sound, about 3 miles from Tacoma. It was a gray day, with a solid cloud deck down at about 2,500 feet. Suddenly everyone on the boat noticed six "doughnut-shaped" objects, just under the clouds, headed toward the boat. They came closer and closer, and when they were about 500 feet over the boat they stopped.

One of the doughnut-shaped objects seemed to be in trouble as the other five were hovering around it. They were close, and everybody got a good look. The UFO"s were about 100 feet in diameter, with the "hole in the doughnut" being about 25 feet in diameter. They were a silver color and made absolutely no noise. Each object had large portholes around the edge.

As the five UFO"s circled the sixth, Jackson recalled, one of them came in and appeared to make contact with the disabled craft. The two objects maintained contact for a few minutes, then began to separate.

While this was going on, Jackson was taking photos. Just as they began to separate, there was a dull "thud" and the next second the UFO began to spew out sheets of very light metal from the hole in the center. As these were fluttering to the water, the UFO began to throw out a harder, rocklike material. Some of it landed on the beach of Maury Island. Jackson took his crew and headed toward the beach of Maury Island, but not before the boat was damaged, his son"s arm had been injured, and the dog killed. As they reached the island they looked up and saw that the UFO"s were leaving the area at high speed.

The harbor patrolman went on to tell how he scooped up several chunks of the metal from the beach and boarded the patrol boat. He tried to use his radio to summon aid, but for some unusual reason the interference was so bad he couldn"t even call the three miles to his headquarters in Tacoma. When they docked at Tacoma, Jackson got first aid for his son and then reported to his superior officer, Richards, who, Jackson added to his story, didn"t believe the tale. He didn"t believe it until he went out to the island himself and saw the metal.

Jackson"s trouble wasn"t over. The next morning a mysterious visitor told Jackson to forget what he"d seen.

Later that same day the photos were developed. They showed the six objects, but the film was badly spotted and fogged, as if the film had been exposed to some kind of radiation.

Then Simpson told about his brush with mysterious callers. He said that Jackson was not alone as far as mysterious callers were concerned, the Tacoma newspapers had been getting calls from an anonymous tipster telling exactly what was going on in Simpson"s hotel room. This was a very curious situation because no one except Simpson, the airline pilot, and the two harbor patrolmen knew what was taking place. The room had even been thoroughly searched for hidden microphones.

That is the way the story stood a few hours after Lieutenant Brown and Captain Davidson arrived in Tacoma.

After asking Jackson and Richards a few questions, the two intelligence agents left, reluctant even to take any of the fragments. As some writers who have since written about this incident have said, Brown and Davidson seemed to be anxious to leave and afraid to touch the fragments of the UFO, as if they knew something more about them. The two officers went to McChord AFB, near Tacoma, where their B-25 was parked, held a conference with the intelligence officer at McChord, and took off for their home base, Hamilton. When they left McChord they had a good idea as to the ident.i.ty of the UFO"s. Fortunately they told the McChord intelligence officer what they had determined from their interview.

In a few hours the two officers were dead. The B-25 crashed near Kelso, Washington. The crew chief and a pa.s.senger had parachuted to safety. The newspapers hinted that the airplane was sabotaged and that it was carrying highly cla.s.sified material. Authorities at McChord AFB confirmed this latter point, the airplane was carrying cla.s.sified material.

In a few days the newspaper publicity on the crash died down, and the Maury Island Mystery was never publicly solved.

Later reports say that the two harbor patrolmen mysteriously disappeared soon after the fatal crash.

They should have disappeared, into Puget Sound. The whole Maury Island Mystery was a hoax. The first, possibly the second-best, and the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history. One pa.s.sage in the detailed official report of the Maury Island Mystery says:

Both ------ (the two harbor patrolmen) admitted that the rock fragments had nothing to do with flying saucers. The whole thing was a hoax. They had sent in the rock fragments [to a magazine publisher]

as a joke. ------ One of the patrolmen wrote to ------ [the publisher] stating that the rock could have been part of a flying saucer. He had said the rock came from a flying saucer because that"s what ------ [the publisher] wanted him to say.

The publisher, mentioned above, who, one of the two hoaxers said, wanted him to say that the rock fragments had come from a flying saucer, is the same one who paid the man I called Simpson $200 to investigate the case.

The report goes on to explain more details of the incident. Neither one of the two men could ever produce the photos. They "misplaced"

them, they said. One of them, I forget which, was the mysterious informer who called the newspapers to report the conversations that were going on in the hotel room. Jackson"s mysterious visitor didn"t exist. Neither of the men was a harbor patrolman, they merely owned a couple of beat-up old boats that they used to salvage floating lumber from Puget Sound. The airplane crash was one of those unfortunate things. An engine caught on fire, burned off, and just before the two pilots could get out, the wing and tail tore off, making it impossible for them to escape. The two dead officers from Hamilton AFB smelled a hoax, accounting for their short interview and hesitancy in bothering to take the "fragments." They confirmed their convictions when they talked to the intelligence officer at McChord.

It had already been established, through an informer, that the fragments were what Brown and Davidson thought, slag. The cla.s.sified material on the B-25 was a file of reports the two officers offered to take back to Hamilton and had nothing to do with the Maury Island Mystery, or better, the Maury Island Hoax.

Simpson and his airline pilot friend weren"t told about the hoax for one reason. As soon as it was discovered that they had been "taken,"

thoroughly, and were not a party to the hoax, no one wanted to embarra.s.s them.

The majority of the writers of saucer lore have played this sighting to the hilt, pointing out as their main premise the fact that the story must be true because the government never openly exposed or prosecuted either of the two hoaxers. This is a logical premise, but a false one. The reason for the thorough investigation of the Maury Island Hoax was that the government had thought seriously of prosecuting the men. At the last minute it was decided, after talking to the two men, that the hoax was a harmless joke that had mushroomed, and that the loss of two lives and a B-25 could not be directly blamed on the two men. The story wasn"t even printed because at the time of the incident, even though in this case the press knew about it, the facts were cla.s.sed as evidence. By the time the facts were released they were yesterday"s news. And nothing is deader than yesterday"s news.

As 1947 drew to a close, the Air Force"s Project Sign had outgrown its initial panic and had settled down to a routine operation. Every intelligence report dealing with the Germans" World War II aeronautical research had been studied to find out if the Russians could have developed any of the late German designs into flying saucers. Aerodynamicists at ATIC and at Wright Field"s Aircraft Laboratory computed the maximum performance that could be expected from the German designs. The designers of the aircraft themselves were contacted. "Could the Russians develop a flying saucer from their designs?" The answer was, "No, there was no conceivable way any aircraft could perform that would match the reported maneuvers of the UFO"s." The Air Force"s Aeromedical Laboratory concurred. If the aircraft could be built, the human body couldn"t stand the violent maneuvers that were reported. The aircraft-structures people seconded this, no material known could stand the loads of the reported maneuvers and heat of the high speeds.

Still convinced that the UFO"s were real objects, the people at ATIC began to change their thinking. Those who were convinced that the UFO"s were of Soviet origin now began to eye outer s.p.a.ce, not because there was any evidence that the UFO"s did come from outer s.p.a.ce but because they were convinced that UFO"s existed and only some unknown race with a highly developed state of technology could build such vehicles. As far as the effect on the human body was concerned, why couldn"t these people, whoever they might be, stand these horrible maneuver forces? Why judge them by earthly standards? I found a memo to this effect was in the old Project Sign files.

Project Sign ended 1947 with a new problem. How do you collect interplanetary intelligence? During World War II the organization that was ATIC"s forerunner, the Air Materiel Command"s secret "T-2,"

had developed highly effective means of wringing out every possible bit of information about the technical aspects of enemy aircraft.

ATIC knew these methods, but how could this be applied to s.p.a.ceships?

The problem was tackled with organized confusion.

If the confusion in the minds of Air Force people was organized the confusion in the minds of the public was not. Publicized statements regarding the UFO were conflicting.

A widely printed newspaper release, quoting an unnamed Air Force official in the Pentagon, said:

The "flying saucers" are one of three things:

Solar reflections on low-hanging clouds.

Small meteors that break up, their crystals catching the rays of the sun.

Icing conditions could have formed large hailstones and they might have flattened out and glided.

A follow-up, which quoted several scientists, said in essence that the unnamed Air Force official was crazy. n.o.body even heard of crystallized meteors, or huge, flat hailstones, and the solar- reflection theory was absurd.

_Life_, _Time_, _Newsweek_, and many other news magazines carried articles about the UFO"s. Some were written with tongue in cheek, others were not. All the articles mentioned the Air Force"s ma.s.s- hysterical induced hallucinations. But a Veterans" Administration psychiatrist publicly pooh-poohed this. "Too many people are seeing things," he said.

It was widely suggested that all the UFO"s were meteors. Two Chicago astronomers queered this. Dr. Gerard Kuiper, director of the University of Chicago observatory, was quoted as flatly saying the UFO"s couldn"t be meteors. "They are probably man-made," he told the a.s.sociated Press. Dr. Oliver Lee, director of Northwestern University"s observatory, agreed with Dr. Kuiper and he threw in an additional confusion factor that had been in the back of many people"s minds. Maybe they were our own aircraft.

The government had been denying that UFO"s belonged to the U.S. from the first, but Dr. Vannevar Bush, the world-famous scientist, and Dr.

Merle Tuve, inventor of the proximity fuse, added their weight.

"Impossible," they said.

All of this time unnamed Air Force officials were disclaiming serious interest in the UFO subject. Yet every time a newspaper reporter went out to interview a person who had seen a UFO, intelligence agents had already been flown in, gotten the detailed story complete with sketches of the UFO, and sped back to their base to send the report to Project Sign. Many people had supposedly been "warned" not to talk too much. The Air Force was mighty interested in hallucinations.

Thus 1947 ended with various-sized question marks in the mind of the public. If you followed flying saucers closely the question mark was big, if you just noted the UFO story t.i.tles in the papers it was smaller, but it was there and it was growing. Probably none of the people, military or civilian, who had made the public statements were at all qualified to do so but they had done it, their comments had been printed, and their comments had been read. Their comments formed the question mark.

CHAPTER THREE

The Cla.s.sics

1948 was only one hour and twenty-five minutes old when a gentleman from Abilene, Texas, made the first UFO report of the year. What he saw, "a fan-shaped glow" in the sky, was insignificant as far as UFO reports go, but it ushered in a year that was to bring feverish activity to Project Sign.

With the Soviets practically eliminated as a UFO source, the idea of interplanetary s.p.a.ceships was becoming more popular. During 1948 the people in ATIC were openly discussing the possibility of interplanetary visitors without others tapping their heads and looking smug. During 1948 the novelty of UFO"s had worn off for the press and every John and Jane Doe who saw one didn"t make the front pages as in 1947. Editors were becoming hardened, only a few of the best reports got any s.p.a.ce. Only "The Cla.s.sics" rated headlines. "The Cla.s.sics" were three historic reports that were the highlights of 1948. They are called "The Cla.s.sics," a name given them by the Project Blue Book staff, because: (1) they are cla.s.sic examples of how the true facts of a UFO report can be twisted and warped by some writers to prove their point, (2) they are the most highly publicized reports of this early era of the UFO"s, and (3) they "proved" to ATIC"s intelligence specialists that UFO"s were real.

The apparent lack of interest in UFO reports by the press was not a true indication of the situation. I later found out, from talking to writers, that all during 1948 the interest in UFO"s was running high.

The Air Force Press Desk in the Pentagon was continually being asked what progress was being made in the UFO investigation. The answer was, "Give us time. This job can"t be done in a week." The press respected this and was giving them time. But every writer worth his salt has contacts, those "usually reliable sources" you read about, and these contacts were talking. All during 1948 contacts in the Pentagon were telling how UFO reports were rolling in at the rate of several per day and how ATIC UFO investigation teams were flying out of Dayton to investigate them. They were telling how another Air Force investigative organization had been called in to lighten ATIC"s load and allow ATIC to concentrate on the a.n.a.lysis of the reports.

The writers knew this was true because they had crossed paths with these men whom they had mistakenly identified as FBI agents. The FBI was never officially interested in UFO sightings. The writers"

contacts in the airline industry told about the UFO talk from V.P."s down to the ramp boys. Dozens of good, solid, reliable, experienced airline pilots were seeing UFO"s. All of this led to one conclusion: whatever the Air Force had to say, when it was ready to talk, would be newsworthy. But the Air Force wasn"t ready to talk.