The Maury Island Incident as Documented Inside the Bureau (July–August 1947)

Summary

The PURSUE Release 01 publication of FBI file 62-HQ-83894 (Sections 2–6 and 10) makes the Bureau’s own contemporaneous July–August 1947 paper trail on the Maury Island incident publicly machine-readable for the first time. The case has been written about for seventy years from second-hand sources. The actual FBI memos and teletypes inside the file are now sitting in raw/_ingested/ufo-files-2026-05-08/pursue-release-01/converted/ as OCR’d markdown.

This source page summarizes what the FBI’s own internal documentation says about Maury Island, separate from the later mythology layered on top of it.

What Maury Island Was

In late June 1947, two Tacoma, Washington men — Fred L. Crisman and Harold A. Dahl — claimed a damaged flying disc had passed over Maury Island and dropped slag-like fragments onto a boat owned by Dahl. A box of alleged fragments was eventually handed to two Army Air Force intelligence officers, Captain William L. Davidson and Lieutenant Frank M. Brown of Fourth AAF HQ, San Francisco, who flew to Tacoma to investigate. On August 1, 1947, on the return flight, their B-25 crashed at Kelso, Washington and both officers were killed. Press reports immediately speculated the plane had been carrying disc fragments and had been sabotaged. The story tied directly to Kenneth Arnold — the Boise pilot whose June 24, 1947 sighting near Mt. Rainier had launched the whole “flying disc” wave — because Arnold had been hired by Amazing Stories editor Raymond Palmer to investigate Dahl and Crisman.

Maury Island sits at the literal origin point of the modern UFO era. It is the case that put the FBI into the flying-discs business.

What 62-HQ-83894 Actually Documents

August 12, 1947 — FBI Seattle teletype, urgent (Section 2, pages 142 and 146)

A multi-page FBI Seattle field-office teletype to the Director and SACs Chicago and Butte, marked URGENT, summarizing an interview with Emil J. Smith, the United Airlines pilot who had himself reported a flying-disc sighting on July 4, 1947, and who was present at the meeting in Tacoma.

The teletype establishes:

• Smith, Arnold, Davidson, and Brown all attended a meeting at the Winthrop Hotel in Tacoma the night of July 31, 1947, at which Crisman and Dahl told them the disc-fragment story.
• Crisman gave Davidson and Brown a box of “alleged fragments” which the officers took with them on the August 1 fatal flight.
• After the crash, Arnold called Raymond Palmer of “Venture Press” [sic — Amazing Stories] in Evanston, Illinois, who told Arnold to discontinue the investigation and return Palmer’s expense money.
• Five anonymous phone calls were placed on July 31 and August 1 to a Tacoma Times reporter and the United Press wireman, alleging the B-25 had been “shot down or sabotaged” because it was carrying disc fragments.
• Hotel records show Arnold made collect calls to Palmer in Evanston (and later in Chicago) and to a Boise number on July 31. No record of the anonymous calls being placed from Arnold’s room could be located.
• Dahl and Crisman ultimately admitted the disc-fragment story was false. Verbatim from the teletype: “the Dahl and Chrisman story, which both have subsequently admitted to be false.”
• The Bureau’s read of the anonymous-calls source: “Dahl and Crisman state these calls could only have come from themselves, Smith or Arnold, and deny that they made the calls.”

August 14, 1947 — Memo from D. M. Ladd to Director Hoover (Section 3, page 31)

Assistant Director Ladd’s status memo to J. Edgar Hoover. Subject: FLYING DISCS. The most consequential page in this whole 1947 paper trail because it commits the Bureau’s official position to writing.

Ladd reports that Aviation editor Leaveritt G. Richards of the Portland Oregonian contacted Major General Twining of Wright Field, Ohio, and from him gained the impression that “the AAF instituted this investigation to wash out the disc reports since they are definitely not of AAF origin.”

Ladd further commits, on FBI letterhead:

“Investigation by the Bureau has reflected that this plane was definitely not carrying parts of a disc and there appears to be no substantiation of a sabotage charge.”

And:

“Air Force Intelligence has been advised of the results of our investigation.”

The same memo names the experienced pilots Davidson and Brown had interviewed during their pre-Maury-Island investigation: Kenneth Arnold (Boise businessman), Captain E. J. Smith (United Airlines), Ralph Stevens (Smith’s co-pilot), and Dave Johnson (aviation editor, Idaho Statesman) — i.e., the original four-pilot core of the 1947 wave.

August 14, 1947 — Memo from J. P. Coyne to Ladd (Section 2, page 50)

A short transmittal memo attaching two copies of a “blind memorandum” of facts on the Davidson-Brown plane crash, recommending it be furnished to Air Force Intelligence via the Liaison Section. Stamped 62-83894-64. This is the operational pairing to the Ladd-to-Hoover policy memo above.

August 8, 1947 — SAC San Francisco letter to D. M. Ladd (Section 2, page 2)

Earlier in the chain. SAC San Francisco transmits photostatic copies of three Army Air Force letters dated August 4, 1947 entitled “Investigation of Flying Discs,” produced by Major William R. Graham (Deputy AC of S, A-2, AAF, Hamilton Field) covering disc-sighting investigations in Oregon and Arizona. Notes that these AAF investigations “were conducted prior to the time Bureau instructions were issued that our own Bureau would conduct inquiries into the reported sightings of flying discs.”

This dates the FBI’s formal entry into UFO investigation to roughly early August 1947 — about six weeks after the Arnold sighting and three days before the Maury Island B-25 crash.

Why This Matters

1. The original FBI position on the original UFO case is now public-domain markdown. Researchers have been working from secondary sources (Vallée, Maccabee, Bloecher) and partial FOIA releases for decades. The full text of the August 12, 1947 Seattle teletype and the Ladd-to-Hoover memo can now be read end-to-end.

2. The FBI committed in writing to “this plane was definitely not carrying parts of a disc.” That is an internal policy decision, not a press statement. It locks in the Bureau’s official posture from week one.

3. General Twining’s “wash out” quote is here. The FBI memo records Twining (later Air Force Chief of Staff and Joint Chiefs Chairman, and the namesake of the famously-circulated 1947 Twining memo on flying discs) telling a journalist that the AAF investigation was meant to wash out the disc reports because they “are definitely not of AAF origin.” That phrase is a primary-source data point for anyone trying to read 1947 official posture.

4. Crisman recurs. Fred Crisman would later be subpoenaed by Jim Garrison in the JFK/Clay Shaw investigation (1968). His reappearance in the assassination orbit is part of why Maury Island has stayed in the disclosure conversation. The 62-HQ-83894 documents are the FBI’s contemporary first-encounter record of him.

5. Almost no PURSUE Release 01 coverage has touched this file at all. AARO’s own catalog references 62-HQ-83894 only generically. The case-level content inside the 1,262 OCR’d pages is buried beneath bureaucratic routing slips and clipping books, but it is there.

Connections

• PURSUE full inventory
• PURSUE master report
• PURSUE program
• AARO
• Department of War
• UAP disclosure (concept)

Open Questions

• Does Section 10 (FBI serials 448+, 184 pages, post-1968 era) contain the FBI’s later position on Maury Island after Crisman’s Garrison-investigation reappearance? Worth a follow-up grep.
• The five anonymous phone calls are still unattributed. The Seattle teletype lists Smith, Arnold, Crisman, Dahl as the only people with the meeting-room information. None confessed. Identity of caller(s) is the loose thread.
• The “box of alleged fragments” Crisman handed Davidson and Brown — what happened to it after the B-25 crash? FBI documents say “this plane was definitely not carrying parts of a disc” but do not document the disposition of the box itself.
• Are the AAF Hamilton Field “Investigation of Flying Discs” letters of August 4, 1947 (referenced in the SAC SF transmittal) elsewhere in the release, or only in 62-HQ-83894?

Quotes Worth Keeping

“The Dahl and Crisman story, which both have subsequently admitted to be false, was told to Smith, Arnold, Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown by Crisman and Dahl.” — FBI Seattle teletype, 8/12/1947, marked URGENT to Director, SACs Chicago and Butte

“Investigation by the Bureau has reflected that this plane was definitely not carrying parts of a disc and there appears to be no substantiation of a sabotage charge.” — D. M. Ladd to Director, 8/14/1947, Section 3 page 31

“the AAF instituted this investigation to wash out the disc reports since they are definitely not of AAF origin” — Major General Twining to Oregonian aviation editor Leaveritt G. Richards, recorded in Ladd’s 8/14/1947 memo to Hoover

“These investigations were conducted prior to the time Bureau instructions were issued that our own Bureau would conduct inquiries into the reported sightings of flying discs.” — SAC San Francisco to D. M. Ladd, 8/8/1947, Section 2 page 2 (dating the FBI’s formal entry into UFO investigation)