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11: Unidentified Aerial Podcast #2 - Kenneth Arnold
415 Plays3 years ago
Dave Partridge (Creator of Shadows of your Mind magazine) & Graeme Rendall (Author) are two of the UK's best when it comes to the history of UFOs.
In this episode they discuss;
While some folks think Kenneth Arnolds sighting of nine craft around Mt.Rainier is the extent of his interest in the UFO subject, they delve a little deeper and discover how a letter from a science fiction pulp magazine editor let him to investigate "The Curious case of the wounded donut", otherwise known as the Maury Island hoax. There's comedy, tragedy, twists and turns in this extended second episode.
How to get in touch;
Email: UnidentifiedAerialPodcast@gmail.com
Twitter: @ShadowsMagazine (Dave) or @Borders750 (Graeme)
This podcast is produced by the Anomalous Podcast Network, in association with That UFO Podcast (@ufouapam)
In this episode they discuss;
While some folks think Kenneth Arnolds sighting of nine craft around Mt.Rainier is the extent of his interest in the UFO subject, they delve a little deeper and discover how a letter from a science fiction pulp magazine editor let him to investigate "The Curious case of the wounded donut", otherwise known as the Maury Island hoax. There's comedy, tragedy, twists and turns in this extended second episode.
How to get in touch;
Email: UnidentifiedAerialPodcast@gmail.com
Twitter: @ShadowsMagazine (Dave) or @Borders750 (Graeme)
This podcast is produced by the Anomalous Podcast Network, in association with That UFO Podcast (@ufouapam)
Recommended
Transcript
Anomalous Podcast Network Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Anomalous Podcast Network. Multiple voices, one phenomenon.
Flying Saucers in Washington
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm here to discuss the so-called flying saucer. In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours.
00:00:33
Speaker
You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. You are about to experience the awe and mystery.
Episode Introduction with Dave Partridge
00:00:51
Speaker
Hi folks, welcome to the second episode of the unidentified aerial podcast on the anomalous podcast network.
00:01:02
Speaker
today in the studio. We've got Mr. Shadows of Your Mind magazine, Dave Partridge. Hello, Dave. Great to meet you. I'm fine. Thanks. Good to see you here. My name's Graham Randall.
1940s UFO Cases with Graham Randall
00:01:13
Speaker
I'm the author of UFOs Before Roswell, European Foo Fighters, 1940 to 1945. We're both interested in old cases as well as new ones. And this is a good opportunity to
00:01:25
Speaker
talk about cases from the 40s, which we're starting the series with. And the one we're going to use today, the one we're going to talk about today rather, is the one that kicked everything off as far as most people are aware and are concerned.
Kenneth Arnold's 1947 Sighting - Beginning of Modern UFO Era
00:01:39
Speaker
And that's Kenneth Arnold, 24th June, 1947. What do you reckon, Dave? I'm looking forward to this because everybody knows that this is the start of the modern UFO
00:01:52
Speaker
history, I guess. It was the one that kicked it all off and started this whole flying saucer hype. The investigations of projects signed started. We had the CIA being created a couple of months down the line and Kenneth Arnold will always be the OG of flying saucer investigators, if you will.
00:02:13
Speaker
I guess that's true. It doesn't matter how you try and bring the ghost rocket to 1946 or even the things that are close to my heart, the Foo Fighters of earlier, into the mix and try to say that those are where it all started. It all comes back to Kenneth Arnold in June 1947. And I guess we just have to accept that.
Kenneth Arnold: Pilot and Businessman
00:02:30
Speaker
But like most cases in ufology, it's not cut and dried as to what he saw or how he even he saw it. There are still
00:02:39
Speaker
sort of elements of it that don't necessarily add up but more just have a little bit of kind of wiggle room if you like in terms of you know how valid they are and what the truth is behind them so we're going to discuss that as well um do you want to kick off um and Dave and just like describe it or do you want me to do it um you know I'll kick off I mean Kenneth Arnold he was a pilot um at his own business he lived in Boise Idaho um and he was responding to a call
00:03:09
Speaker
regarding the crash of a US Marines plane, I believe, in the Cascade Mountains. Yeah, that's right. So he was, rather than just a pilot, I mean, he said he had his own business. What he used to do was he distributed firefighting equipment to farmers, basically, or sold the equipment to them. And of course, he's aircraft that he had that so he could fly into meadows and farmer's fields to make it much easier because he got a car you just spent all day on the road.
00:03:36
Speaker
and he wouldn't have got around so many places. So he made his money by being able to get around quick.
00:03:42
Speaker
And you're right, he actually had a trip up to Yakima in Washington arranged. But he had about an hour spare, and he wanted to use that to try and look for the wreck of this aircraft that had gone missing. I think it was the previous November. It was quite a long time earlier.
The Search for a Missing Aircraft
00:03:57
Speaker
And there was a reward, I think it was $1,000 for the information leading to somebody finding where it was. Because those mountains in the Northwest of the USA,
00:04:09
Speaker
parts of it are quite remote and therefore this wreck had been missing and the bodies of about 30 US Marines and the crew had been missing for quite a long time.
Mount Rainier UFO Sighting
00:04:18
Speaker
So that's what he was doing and you'd spend some time looking around various gullies and ridges and all the rest of it in these mountains near, well you're going to put me right on my pronunciation because I've always thought it was just Mount Rainier but it's not is it?
00:04:34
Speaker
No, it's Mount Reneer. Not reindeer, Reneer, yes. Not reindeer, no, that's a totally different mountain in Matland. There's a jolly old fat man in a red suit lives up there. OK, so every time I get this wrong, I must put 10 pence in a reindeer box. I suppose it's subjective anyway, because it does.
00:04:52
Speaker
I mean, it's about Rainier, isn't it? It is, yeah. But it could be Rainier. It's probably one. I don't think anyone's going to nitpick over a mountain. Fair enough. And it detracts from the whole story anyway. But he was flying along, and he was looking in the distance. And he saw how there was a reflection that appeared. And it was a series of reflections that caught his eye. And those were the nine objects when he finally managed to see what they were in the distance.
Skepticism and Alternative Explanations
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he saw them kind of in the direction of Mount Baker, which is to the north of Mount Rainier. And, you know, at first he just saw this this glare in his cockpit when he wondered what it was, couldn't really focus. And as he looked again, he could see these very fast moving objects like you see. I mean, one of the explanations I like for it was by
00:05:49
Speaker
it wasn't by Howard Menzel but someone thought they were flying pelicans and that's what he saw. Yes I've heard that as well and people have said oh they're probably just flying geese but flying pelicans is one of the one the ones that sort of you're stuck recording with me thinking that's a really good one to come out with but uh no. Yeah exactly yeah
Project Bluebook and Project Sign Analysis
00:06:10
Speaker
so
00:06:10
Speaker
If you go back to Project Bluebook, because they came along five years later, but they did do retrospective analysis of a sort on some of these cases, they summed up the start of modern ufology in three lines. Well, two lines and three handwritten words. And this is exactly what they said.
00:06:32
Speaker
Observer cited a large circular objects heading west. They appeared as mirror-like reflections which dipped and twisted at a very high rate of speed. Sketches were made and that's that's basically the summation on the record card for for this case and that was obviously written sometime afterwards.
00:06:50
Speaker
But when you go back to Project Sign, which was the first official US Air Force investigation into UFOs, they again looked back from a year later, they looked back at this case, which was incident number 17. It wasn't incident number one, they looked at other ones before that. And incident 17, I'll just quickly read what they came up with, because I'll see this is something we're going to talk about as well.
00:07:18
Speaker
24th of June, 1947, afternoon, Mount Rainier, Washington. One witness viewed nine saucer-like discs from the air calculated to be 20 to 25 miles distant and 40 to 50 feet in length, brackets, about 20 times as long as wide, which traveled 47 miles in 102 seconds. Again, brackets, 1,700 miles per hour. Dr. Heineck, astrophysicist and also a consultant to Sine,
00:07:48
Speaker
Calculated mathematically that assuming the estimate of distance to be accurate, in order to see such detail, the objects would need to have been at least 100 feet thick, therefore 2000 feet long. If the estimated size is more nearly correct, then to have been seen as described, the objects would have to be roughly six miles distant.
00:08:10
Speaker
At this distance they would have travelled only 11 miles in 102 seconds or approximately 400 miles an hour. The entire report of this incident is replete with inconsistencies. It is to be noted that the observer has profited from the story by selling it to Fate Magazine.
00:08:25
Speaker
And then there was a slight there was another lack of the lines, which was a material commands opinion. And they were the that was part of one of the departments that writes Paterson where sign was based. And they said the report cannot bear even superficial examination, therefore must be disregarded. There are strong indications that this report and its attendant publicity is largely responsible for subsequent reports.
00:08:52
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a reason for that publicity as well, which we'll go into in possibly the second half of this episode. But the thing was, as well, there was a DC4 in the area which he could just about make out. It was
00:09:12
Speaker
to the east, I guess. It was sort of behind him and to one side, I think, if you remember rightly. It was travelling north, that's it. But yeah, I mean, that report says that these craft were flying west, but from what I can remember of this, he saw them in the direction of Mount Baker, which is north of Mount Rainier, and he said they were flying towards Mount Adams, which is south of Mount Rainier.
Flight Path and Speed Estimation
00:09:37
Speaker
So where does that west come into it?
00:09:40
Speaker
Or is that, I mean, that's not him going west because he was going east back to his home in Boise, Idaho. So that's, that flummoxes me a little bit. I won't lie. Right, from one arm away, he wasn't actually in Boise, because that's Idaho, that sort of neighbouring state. From what I've read about this, he was heading back to another airfield. Yeah, he was going to refuel in Pendleton, I think. That's right, yeah.
00:10:07
Speaker
usual refuelling spot. Yeah because he knew people there as well and he talked to them about the case when he landed. So yeah but it's in the same area but whichever way you slice it he did pick up on the fact that there was nine these nine objects and they were kind of in a line so a line of stern kind of formation you know heading in a particular direction and also he had to measure the distance by using
00:10:34
Speaker
reference points on two mountains than the ones we mentioned there, Renea and Adams. Is that right?
00:10:44
Speaker
Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams. Baker and Adams.
00:11:08
Speaker
help him out with those didn't he yeah because that's how he worked out what the distance was um so yeah i mean he was flying himself like 100 120 miles an hour um you know so he wasn't he was shifting it a bit i guess
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah. Now you mentioned the DC-4, the airliner that you've seen. He actually makes a note about that. He says that he observed the objects very plainly and he estimated from each distance from them, which is almost at right angles, to be between 20 and 25 miles. He said, I knew they must be very large to observe their shape at that distance, even on a clear day as it was that Tuesday.
Size and Shape Comparisons
00:11:45
Speaker
In fact, I compared a Zeus fastener or a cowling tool. That was something you could open up the engine compartment and run on.
00:11:52
Speaker
craft with that he had in his pocket with him. He held it up and he held it up towards the DC-4 because you could see that in the other direction and you could observe that at quite a distance to his left and they seemed smaller than the DC-4 but then he judged their span or their width and he said that was quite about twice as wide as the furthest engines on each side of the fuselage of the DC-4 itself so that's how he could work out the kind of size that they were the 25 to 50 feet sort of thing. So he was
00:12:21
Speaker
He was also using something that he had to hand to try, probably held an arm's length kind of thing, to try and work out what the size of them, what these objects were in relation to something that he actually knew or had a pretty good idea of what the sort of size was. Yeah, one thing we haven't mentioned as well. This was two o'clock in the afternoon, hardly a cloud in the sky. He's going to see the glinting off anything. He's not going to mistake it for the reflection of snow.
Speed Calculations and Jet Comparisons
00:12:50
Speaker
Well, that was one of the explanations. Wasn't it blowing snow coming off the ridge? I can't remember who said that now. There's a good start. It was one of quite a few different things I think you might have said about what this might have been. So yes, very important. And this was like the height of 9,500 feet. So, you know, he had to be that high anyway to
00:13:19
Speaker
You know, that's above the mountain plateaus in that area. Yeah. So the way he worked it out was he watched the nine passing another snow covered ridge between Mount Rainier and Adams as the first one passed the south crest of the ridge that he mentioned before. The last one was passing over its northern crest.
00:13:38
Speaker
and he was flying in that direction as well apparently and he took the opportunity to measure the length of the ridge for himself and it was about five miles long and using that information that's how he managed to calculate the chain of nine objects was about five miles in length because one was sort of you know just
00:13:53
Speaker
getting away from the end of it when the last one was entering it so that's how he knew how far apart the first and the last ones were and also then when he worked out the last one had passed by the southernmost high crest of Mount Adams he checked his watch again he'd done that originally and that's when he worked out it was one minute 42 seconds or 102 seconds.
00:14:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean the thing is though he wasn't, he was making mental notes on this, he wasn't actually working it out as he was flying, he waited until he landed at Pendleton to actually get a map out, get a bit of paper and a pencil and you know do the math. Yeah, he had, certainly at one point he had friends when he landed and he was talking to them about this and they were doing calculations with him apparently based on his kind of recollections, but then they worked out that they
00:14:41
Speaker
may not have been using either the right measurements or the right points on the mountains that they were probably too high up. So they sort of reevaluated these estimates or these positions that they were trying to calculate the distance from and the time from. And they came up with a slightly revised figure, because originally they were saying that these things were traveling at something like 1,700 miles an hour. But then when they did a different calculation, it was still 1,350 miles an hour. So that's nearly twice as fast as the fastest. Well, actually, yeah.
00:15:11
Speaker
twice as fast as the fastest jets in service at that time. So, you know, really, really quick and nothing in the world was flying that quick. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Fate Magazine earlier and, you know, the Project Grudge Report, which in 1949, it mentioned the Fate, his story being in Fate Magazine. And there's a quote here, I've got the article,
00:15:37
Speaker
in front of me, and there's a quote from a former Army Air Forces pilot called Sonny Robinson, who was at Pendleton Airfield in Oregon, and he'd been speaking to Kenneth Arnold, and he said, to Arnold, what you observed I'm convinced is some type of jet or rocket propelled ship that is in the process of being tested by our government, or even it could possibly be by some foreign government. So even then, back in 47,
00:16:05
Speaker
The thinking is not, oh, it's flying saucers. It's either a secret attack or a foreign adversary just happened to be flying over the northwest. Yes. Yeah. Sonny Pendleton was a crop duster pilot. He said, yeah, you're right. He'd been a war like pilot, but he was he was out in the service. But that's somebody who had a different opinion on things. He had other people who were listening to it. And then in sort of 1952,
00:16:34
Speaker
He then, in Arnold's book, Coming of the Sources, he mentions that what, you know, there was a had the sunny pendulum, this helicopter pilot, the crop sprayer, was talking to him and the person who worked at the airport, the airport manager, he was talking to as well, telling the story. And then he then Arnold throws this little thing at the works. He says, I remember that I'd forgotten to mention the fact that one of these craft look different from the rest was darker and is a slightly different shape.
00:17:03
Speaker
So really we should talk about the shapes involved because what people associate with a story now is actually different from how it started and
Initial UFO Drawing and Descriptions
00:17:13
Speaker
you have to go back to the original nine-page letter that Arnold wrote himself very very shortly after the event when he was effectively trying to establish his bona fides with the investigators.
00:17:30
Speaker
Which letter was that? So he wrote a nine-page letter out, which basically gave his life history, his education, how he managed to get flying lessons at an early age, and also what he was doing that day. And it basically went through the whole, it spent quite a few pages just explaining why he was up there, which direction you were flying, all the rest of it. And right at the end of these nine pages, he draws one of the objects.
00:17:59
Speaker
That's right. And this is the one where it's not crescent shaped. It's not dish shaped. It's not flying saucer shaped. It's heel shaped. So if you can imagine the heel of a shoe.
00:18:12
Speaker
but with rather the straight edge, if you like, or the slightly curved edge that's in the middle of the shoe, towards the middle of the shoe. Think of that as being a wedge instead, with a point pointing towards the toe of the shoe very slightly. And that's what he described it as looking like.
00:18:32
Speaker
He did, and he's also saying that the way they flew, they kind of wobbled a little bit, which gave rise to the famous quote that started a ton of mythology off from, Phil Beckett is the journalist attributed to actually saying that these craft flew as a saucer would if they were skipped over water. And then the flying saucer,
00:19:01
Speaker
flying saucer myth was born. That's right. I mean, this is where it all stems from. It actually spoke to a couple of more, a couple of other journalists beforehand from the East Oregonian newspaper in Pendleton, where he landed. And they were Bill Beckett and Nolan Skiff. And between them, or at least Bill Beckett couldn't work out whether they were responsible. He just didn't remember.
00:19:22
Speaker
but you know it's equally likely somebody else came over because a few people had talked to him and of course he was getting, Arnold was getting quite annoyed because he reckoned he couldn't get on with his job and he couldn't make a living because every time he landed somewhere the press were trying to ask him questions so you turn up an airfield or somewhere or you'd land in the middle of nowhere next to a next to a township and then the local press would be on there as well you know with a load of questions and taking pictures of him so he got a bit annoyed after a while but obviously these were early days
00:19:52
Speaker
Well, you would. I mean, someone's finding up and you think it's for a job and it's just someone who wants to know what you think. Exactly. You're losing work because everyone wants to hear your story. Did you know what his pilot's license was? I don't know the number, no.
00:20:10
Speaker
right at the end of the flight article he actually gives himself a little bit of uh a little bio in the end do you want to know it um is it three three three four or seven 487 487 right okay so it's a call air airplane it's a three place single engine land ship that is designed and manufactured at Afton, Wyoming but yeah that's actually the end of the nine page letter
00:20:34
Speaker
Is it? Yep, that's the last paragraph you typed. Right, because that's the pretty much the end of the article in the February 1948 issue of Fate Magazine. So they'll have cribbed bits of that letter.
00:20:47
Speaker
You may have kept copies of it or something like that, but those letters and some other documents are in the Bluebook files because they also include some of the much earlier stuff as well. So that's where that's from. I wouldn't be surprised if it is an exact carbon copy of your letter.
00:21:08
Speaker
because magazines would always plan ahead. So we probably submitted that in September. OK, so for the nerds out there and for the aircraft spotters, that's his pilot's license number. His aircraft registration was November Charlie 33355.
00:21:24
Speaker
and it was a cola a3 that's the type of aircraft it's quite an agricultural looking aircraft even though it's not actually a crop duster it's got these kind of bars which come from the top of the wing they're like struts and they
Arnold's Aircraft: Cola A3
00:21:36
Speaker
attach just below underneath the cockpit to the front of the cockpit and it does look like a crop sprayer without the big kind of vats for the um without the vats for the fertilizer and or the or the weed killer and things like that it's quite a it's quite a rugged looking aircraft but it would have to be
00:21:50
Speaker
if it was landing on Father's Fields and the Meadows and things like that. It was quite a unique type of aeroplane. They're built in Wyoming as well, so it's pretty close to near where you lived. Yeah, and they were manufactured for mansion work essentially, or high altitude work anyway, so they had this structural integrity to operate at low temperatures.
00:22:15
Speaker
So one thing I should mention about the shape, and this actually sort of has a bit of a parallel with the black triangles. So you're talking about this heel shape with this kind of little point facing in one direction. That wasn't actually the direction they were flying in, according to Arnold. He said that they were flying with the kind of the curved end front
00:22:37
Speaker
And that sort of goes to the black triangles where David Marla, when he talks about these things, he talks about them flying with a blunt end first rather than the pointed end. Because we were thinking of it in every dynamic so that you would fly with a pointed end first. But it's not the way. And not the way with these either. Yeah. I mean, if anyone's seen the new Eternals movie from Marvel, Their Craft Fly is a massive triangle. And that flies with edge on rather than the point.
00:23:06
Speaker
So where do we go from here? So we now we've talked about the speed, we've talked about the location, we've talked about the shape. What do you think it was? I have no idea what they were. I know a lot of people sort of think because well we might as well go under this bit before we do any other examination. At some stage they morph or one of them at least morphed from this heel shape object which was the original description
00:23:33
Speaker
to Arnold then in his 1952 book talking about one being slightly different shaped and darker than the rest, two you'll see a picture of him if you look on the internet he's holding up and he's watching much later in life because he doesn't look like he did when he was 35 when he had this sighting and he's holding up a picture and he's obviously endorsing it because he's holding it up of this crescent shaped
00:23:57
Speaker
flying wing type design. And that has led a lot of people who believe in a more mundane or earthly description for this object as being, well, we might as well just call it this, a Horton flying wing. People who don't know what that is. You can tune into a future episode. Well, yes. I'll give you a little bit, just a minute on it here, just so I don't go nuts.
00:24:24
Speaker
The Horton brothers were two brothers who lived in who were German and during the Second World War and actually beforehand built a series of unpowered and powered gliders that were based on crescent wings and one was a parabola as well but they had a particular way where they had no tails on these aircraft.
00:24:42
Speaker
And they were quite, you know, specialist designers coming up with these types of aircraft. And right at the end of the wall, they designed and actually built and test flew a jet powered flying wing called the Horton 9, which you might hear as the Horton 229 or the Gotha 229, depending on which source you look at.
Speculation on Horton Flying Wings
00:25:03
Speaker
But actually the name of it was the Horton 9 as an H.IX in Roman murals.
00:25:09
Speaker
The third prototype was captured by the Americans at the end of the war and brought to right field, later right partisan, for testing. But the earlier one, the V2, the second prototype crashed in February 1945 and was destroyed and the first one was a glider.
00:25:27
Speaker
So, but after the war, Northrop apparently had a look at it because they were interested in flying wings in the States as well. And they looked, they managed to examine the airframe, even though it was incomplete, it hadn't flown either. And some people seem to think that they took this information and either built
00:25:46
Speaker
their own Horton flying wings or somehow the Americans managed to get a hold of the Hortons because they actually they were brought to the States after the war and somehow managed to get them and build these fleet of aircraft or the Russians got a hold of the Hortons because they did try
00:26:03
Speaker
and built their own and certainly you can find online you'll see documents which apparently suggest that the Russians were building something like 1300 or 1800 night fighter versions of a Horton flying wing in the late 40s but that was all rubbish and then it never happened so there's a line of thought and you'll see it all over the internet where people say oh yeah it's just these Horton flying wings but no they weren't this didn't happen
00:26:33
Speaker
No, and I still kind of question people's line of thinking when they suggest that the Russian would fly an experimental craft over the Pacific Northwest.
00:26:45
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. The longest kind of range aircraft that the Russians had at that time was effectively, it wasn't quite a copy, but it might as well have been, it was a copy of the B-29 Superfortress. And during the Second World War, when the Americans were bombing Japan, a lot of aircraft, well, it was quite a few aircraft, it was getting towards the dozen of so, the crash landed in Eastern Siberia around the Vladivostok area.
00:27:13
Speaker
And rather than let the crews back to America, the Russians interned them for quite a long time, for months, in some cases. But the aircraft they kept, and they effectively reverse, that's a lovely phrase, they reverse engineered
00:27:28
Speaker
the B-29. They had to use inferior grade aircraft metal. They used their own measurements rather than feet and inches because they had to like tinker around with the design who had different engines. But it became the tuple of TU-4, what they call the NATO code name Bull, and it was effectively a copy of the B-29 and it had the same role as a bomber.
00:27:52
Speaker
But where they were based, they couldn't fly to the Pacific Northwest and say bomb American cities and fly back again. It would have been a one-way trip. So they just didn't have the range to do it. So there's things that rule out these kind of things. And that was the only real aircraft that the Russians had that could have possibly reached that part of the world from bases in Russia, either flying over the pole or flying over the Bering Straits and then down the coast of Alaska and Canada.
00:28:21
Speaker
it just wasn't possible and yeah you're right for the people who think oh some secret Russian prototype was flying around either you know that kind of the Pacific Northwest or it was flying around Roswell because obviously that came up a couple of weeks later you know and that was the reason why that you know for that craft then yeah I'm sorry but it justifies credibility sorry. We've also got a thing that Arnold described these
00:28:46
Speaker
craft is individually being the size of a DC4, which, you know, they're not small.
00:28:52
Speaker
Yeah, I believe this quote was to do with the engines, the inboard, the sort of the engines where they're mounted on the wings of a DC-4. So it was from the engine, you know, from the outer engine on one side of the aircraft to the outer engine on the other side of the aircraft, which would be about that kind of 25 or 50 feet ride. Obviously a DC-4 is the wingspan slightly bigger. So it's not quite the size of a DC-4, but getting on for it, definitely. So these things were quite, you know, quite some size.
00:29:20
Speaker
And also going extremely quick as well. Yeah, I mean just The thing about that Different shape craft hmm as well, which he didn't reveal he kept to himself basically until you know, he released coming of the sources. Yes If I remember rightly some I think it was the US
00:29:46
Speaker
Army Air Force Intelligence came up to him and they showed him a picture of the craft that he hadn't mentioned. Or a sketch and he kind of got a little worried say, hang on a minute. I've never mentioned that anywhere. How do you know that's what that looked like? Well, that's not something I've come across. So that's interesting. Yeah, that's good. Then I'm blowing your mind.
00:30:16
Speaker
There's a little postscript to this as well because Kenneth Arnold was obviously friends with pilots as well, being that was his job.
Additional UFO Sightings by Pilots
00:30:30
Speaker
He received word from a Captain Emil Smith, who was a pilot for United Airlines, who saw five desks on July the 4th, 10 minutes after leaving Boise. That's right, yes.
00:30:49
Speaker
There are pictures of Arnold and Emile Smith and also Emile Smith's co-pilot looking at your information about the flying disks. So yeah, they all knew each other. Yeah, because he said five disks appeared and then sped off and then four disks appeared and did exactly the same thing. That's right, yes. So they're going to compare notes and remain in touch.
00:31:15
Speaker
Yep, very, very true. So yeah, Emile Smith and Ralph Stevens, that was his co-pilot. There were United Airlines, it was flight 105. It was a DC-3 airliner, as you say, had just taken off from Boise's Gowan Field at about just after nine o'clock on the evening of the 4th of July.
00:31:33
Speaker
And actually, the funny thing is, just before they boarded the aircraft, both of them were asked, have you seen a flying saucer? And Smith had the prophetic words, I'll believe them when I see them. And then also the air traffic controller at Cowanfield had also asked them when they were getting ready for departure, watch out for flying saucers. So how crazy is that? No, no, it had become a joke already.
00:32:01
Speaker
Yeah, you know, within in some ways. Yeah, towards definitely. Yeah. But again, we mentioned the fake magazine article. Now, the editor of fake magazine at the time was a man called Raymond Palmer, who was also the editor of a science fiction magazine called Amazing Stories. He was. And we will hear a bit more about him in a later episode again.
00:32:28
Speaker
especially amazing stories because that's very relevant to one of the things we're going to look at in the future. But Raymond Palmer actually sent Kenneth Arnold a letter on the 15th of July describing an event that happened on June the 21st, 1947, in Puget Sound, Washington state, in the environs of Maury Island.
Introduction to Maury Island Incident
00:32:57
Speaker
Aha, so this is the associated story in terms of, yes, yeah, because also Arnold is connected with this particular story and also there's a tragedy at the end of it as well.
00:33:12
Speaker
i wouldn't say connected he was basically the lead investigator he was the jay allen heineck before jay allen heineck was without the um without the kind of cruel put me down as to they're just venus and without the pipe and without the pipe yes very good so yeah i mean arnold receives this letter in the post totally out of the blue uh ray palmer tells him he's the editor of amazing stories and later on he publishes arnold's
00:33:42
Speaker
letter or description of his own sighting in Fate Magazine, February 48. So they have Arnold, he replies, responds to Palmer very politely saying, oh, that's really interesting. And a week later, Palmer actually described a story of one Harold Dahl and one Fred Crisman. Not Crimson, Crisman.
00:34:08
Speaker
And he paid him $200. Is that right? He was offered $200 to investigate it and obtained samples of Debris or alleged debris now if anyone who doesn't know the Moray Island story It kind of starts like this. So on June the 21st 47 Harold Dahl his son Charles and their dog and two of the crewmen are said to be
00:34:36
Speaker
on their boat in the Puget Sound area, they were timber salvages. So they used to pick up any logs that had fallen off the big timber cargo ships. And then they'd sell that timber, and that's how they made their living. There was another story going on about why they were there as well, because apparently they were classed as harbor patrolmen, but they weren't official harbor patrolmen. They had their own company to look after shorefront properties.
00:35:06
Speaker
So yeah, it was. But are these the Delboi trotters of Puget Sound? Sort of, yeah, I guess you could say that. But yeah, I mean, you know, they're in this boat, they're looking for timber and then they see what appears to be in the sky, a 600 foot diameter flying donuts.
00:35:35
Speaker
Big, shiny, gold, silver, pearlescent donuts with circular portals evenly spaced. And Harold Dahl is said to be stunned at first, but then has peace of mind to go into his boathouse, pick up his camera and snap off three or four photos. But they claim that one of these donuts was in trouble. He was lagging behind the rest, you know, kind of like the wounded bison do on the prairies, leave behind the fat ones and the weak ones.
00:36:03
Speaker
But the other craft, they started circling around this injured one. If you can call it injured. There's some kind of static electricity going on. You know, it goes pretty quiet. And then this
00:36:20
Speaker
Damaged donut just suddenly ejects 20 tons of slag. At least that's not how dolls head isn't isn't the two types of Stuff it ejects because I've read somewhere that Something that was the class did the customers and even just call them newspapers that were ejected from the middle of the donut want this wounded donut Wounded donut
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, it kind of starts as this light white metallic material that floats down like a newspaper would blowing in the wind. And then it's followed by 20 tons of this black slag. And that did some damage, didn't it? And caused some casualties. Apparently, well, some casualties, yes.
00:37:08
Speaker
The poor dog died, hit. You know, they couldn't put him down. He was killed instantly. And he was buried at sea. Poor Matt. They said they buried the dog at sea. So yeah, basically pushed him over. And broke somebody's arm who was on the boat. Charles Dahl, the son of Harold.
00:37:32
Speaker
um you know the Danish ancestry so they got the doll spelling like Roald Dahl yeah um yeah his son Charles while Harold was taking these pictures um he heard a scream and he glanced at his son Charles he was apparently hit in his arm um burnt by this hot metallic
00:37:55
Speaker
Debri, I suppose, that was chucked out of this wounded donor. And then it took Charles to the hospital and... Well, yeah, and then Harold went to see his mate, Fred Crisman, to tell him what had happened. Crisman thought he was just a drunken sailor and took no mind about it. But yeah, this all happened in and around Tacoma, Washington.
00:38:20
Speaker
So we've also got another element because we'll have all these wonderful elements. We've got a we've got a wounded donut. We've got newspapers and we've got slag and dead dogs and broken arms.
Men in Black and Maury Island
00:38:32
Speaker
So you can tell I'm not exactly entirely convinced with this so far. But then we've got another element that appears as well, because apparently, is this where the Men in Black story start? Right. Almost. Almost. OK. Almost.
00:38:48
Speaker
Okay, so after Harold Dahl goes to see Fred Chrisman and Chrisman, what writes it off is a drunken prank. Dahl goes back home. And apparently, according to him, as related to Raymond Palmer, the next morning, there was a knock on Harold's door and there's a man in a black suit.
00:39:06
Speaker
who invites Harold to breakfast, which is nice of him. He's driving a 47 Buick. Being early in the morning, Harold thought he was just a business deal. He was a businessman wanting to buy some timber off him, so he goes willingly. It's only during breakfast that he thinks, hang on a minute, this isn't a business deal. There's something up here. And yeah, this guy apparently regaled Harold with the events of the previous day to the letter.
00:39:35
Speaker
But by that point, they hadn't told anybody. Is that right? No, I mean, Darla only told Chrisman. Chrisman had just left in his face. This guy in a black suit, he warns Dahl to keep quiet if he wants to keep his family safe. So what does Dahl do as soon as the guy's left? He tells all his co-workers. Yes. As you would. Yeah, of course. And then a few days later, his wife gets sick. Charles vanishes somehow, according to Dahl.
00:40:05
Speaker
All these timber stocks at his warehouse are washed away in a freak storm and Harold's kind of freaked out by a law. So it's about around this point where Arnold, Kenneth Arnold sort of appears on the scene and starts talking to Chrisman and he shows him the white, what was classed as a newspaper, this white metal, is that right? Yeah, sort of.
00:40:36
Speaker
Arnold and Smith, sorry, both of them, because they were both there. He was, but Arnold went ahead. He left on July 29th for Tacoma. Hadn't thought to book a hotel before he left. You know, this is after he kind of thought, all right, I'll take the $200 because Palmer was nagging him to do it. Yeah. So he leaves with Tacoma, turns up, hasn't got any accommodation. All the hotels in town are booked.
00:41:03
Speaker
He eventually finds himself in the Winthrop Hotel in the reception area. You know, this is quite a fancy well-to-do hotel, if you think like the Sedgwick in the first Ghostbusters film. It's that kind of place. You've got chandeliers in the dining room, you know, massive lobby marble floors and all that. And he asks whether they got any room and he's told that he already has a reservation.
00:41:30
Speaker
And Smith made that for him. No, Smith hadn't entered at this point. He was unaware. Arnold hadn't found him yet. So who'd made the reservation? Well, exactly. Well, it's one of those stories, is it? It is. Was it Chris Smith? Was it Dahl? Was it Palmer? Twilight Zone music cue.
00:41:51
Speaker
Could be Twilight Zone. But could it be the mysterious man in the black suit? The black suit. Who didn't want him to do anything about it and wanted him to keep quiet and then reserve a, you know, very interesting. Well, it is. So Arnold is kind of confused by the fact that he's got a reservation at a hotel he's never heard of before. Room 502, which is very important, as we will find later on.
00:42:16
Speaker
And he's kind of in a quandary. Do I, you know, is it another Kenneth Arnold that's made this reservation? You know, I can't be the only Kenneth Arnold in the Pacific Northwest, but, you know, he takes the room anyway. And the following morning he's woken up by a banging on his door and it's Harold Dahl who knows that Kenneth Arnold is in the Winthrop Hotel and he knows what room he's in. Okay.
00:42:42
Speaker
They just tip the guy on the front desk by any chance. Yeah, give me a call when he comes in and I'll give him a knock. But yeah, I'll try to convince Arnold to give up the investigation and go back to Boise. So is this on the strength of being contacted by the mysterious man in the black suit? Is there anything more to do with this? Possibly, yeah.
00:43:05
Speaker
But Arnold says, no, I've taken the $200, I'm going to do it. So when Dahl realizes this, he tells Arnold the whole story, the one related to you earlier. And it was at that point that Kenneth Arnold phoned his friend, Captain Emil Smith, invited him to Tacoma.
00:43:24
Speaker
And he also told, phoned Frank Brown and William Davidson, the US Air Force intelligence officers. From the 4th Air Force, yeah, in California. I mean, they'd already interviewed him about his sighting of Matt Rainier. So he phoned down and says, look, I've been asked to look into this. Do you want to come down and see what it's about? So yeah, that's where we are on the morning of July 30th. Mm.
00:43:55
Speaker
So Arnold speaks to Dahl and Dahl takes him to this wood cabin, you know, somewhere out of town so he could show him the material that he collected and that had landed on his boat. And Arnold's looking at it and he kind of thinks it's kind of like a bit volcanic, you know, it's heavy, it's dark. He thinks basically it looks like kind of industrial slag, you know, the waste material from smelting.
00:44:24
Speaker
Yeah. You know, Dahl tries to convince him, says it's not, you know, so it's debris from these donuts that I saw flying about. And, you know, he gives Arnold a piece and, you know, they go and see, they go and see Fred Crisman. Now, what is interesting is that there's a journalist called Ted Morello,
00:44:53
Speaker
who works in the office's opposite hotel. And after Smith had got there and met up with Arnold and Arnold had told Smith everything as related to him by Dahl, they get a phone call from this Ted Morello saying he knows about the conversations that are going on in room 502 and he can retell parts of their conversations from that room.
00:45:18
Speaker
So, a boat. Or listening with a glass at the door. Yeah, or one of those umbrella microphones from a window across the street. So this freaks out Palmer and Smith and they dissemble their room looking for bugs. They think, what is going on? It's all just a little bit weird for them.
00:45:44
Speaker
So I suppose if you turn up your first investigation as a fledgling UFO investigator and you get into all this intrigue that people are reserving hotel rooms in your name, you don't know anything about it. People are saying that they know intimate deals, the conversations. Yeah, you would be freaked out, wouldn't you?
00:46:04
Speaker
You've been running like hell for the airport. I'm out of here. Yeah, I mean Palmer had flown there. Arnold had flown there anyway. Yeah. So his plane was, you know, the Tacoma Air Force thing, McCord, McCord Airfield, I think it was. So yeah, at any point he could actually just get in his plane and go back to Pendleton, go back to Boise and forget everything about flying saucers.
00:46:31
Speaker
But then the whole this whole thing, you know, we've got all these crazy elements and all these extra things that have come along afterwards. But that's not the end of the weirdness about this story, is it? Because, you know, Frank Brown and Davidson, the two counterintelligence core agents who, you know, familiar intelligence at the Fourth Air Force, they then end up dead. They do.
00:46:54
Speaker
But there's a little bit that goes on before that. Even more intrigue. Even more intrigue. So yeah, Chris Mendel had apparently sent some samples off to a lab in Chicago to be tested. Obviously asking, is this flying saucer material? Which obviously in June and July 1947, every laboratory in the country is going to know what flying saucers are made of. Yeah, of course. Yeah.
00:47:24
Speaker
So that's one weird thing, but you get Brown and Davidson who are looking at the same material. And they put some in the box and they put it in the boot of their car. And by this time, Arnold and Smith are so entirely unconvinced by Darl and Chrisman's story that they just want out of there. Chrisman is this little excitable Delboy, like you said earlier.
00:47:53
Speaker
You know, he's this cheeky chappy. He basically wants to tell a story and he wants you to believe him and he wants to be liked by you. And obviously he probably wants you to buy him many drinks at the bar later. So we've got one excitable man. We've got Howard Dahl who's the complete opposite who seems reluctant to say anything. And so you've got this Brown and Davidson putting this material saying that we're gonna get
00:48:21
Speaker
you know, Air Force intelligence to have a look at it. They're going to freak out, aren't they? It's almost like you can also I mean, let's just throw argument like say this is a complete hoax, then it's gone too far down the road, hasn't it? It's got its own momentum now, the story, and they're not in control of it anymore. No, I mean, how often over the years have we seen something similar? You know, even recently?
00:48:48
Speaker
But yes, you know, Brown and Davidson, they drop Arnold and Smith off at the airport, and then they go off to, I think it's the Air Force airfield where they got a B-25 bomber waiting. Yeah, that'd be 25 Mitchell, which was basically the kind of there were there were army surplus effectively in terms of from the Second World War, and they were used by a lot of sort of
00:49:12
Speaker
headquarters units in various air forces that made up the United States Army Air Force at that time. And they were used just as general hacks, you know, liaison aircraft, because also you have pilot, co-pilot, but you get a few passengers on board these aircraft now because they're effectively converted bombers. And they weren't really used for that role anymore by 1947. They had them based at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington for the benefit of the senior officers to fly.
00:49:37
Speaker
But you could find them all over the place, buying used by, you know, colonels and left-handing colonels and all the rest of it. So it wasn't unusual for two intelligence officers to basically requisition one of these aircraft from whichever base they were based at and fly up somewhere in the course of their duties.
00:49:53
Speaker
Yeah, sorry, I just remembered I said that Arnold Smith had been taken to the airfield, where in fact they'd been taken back to their hotel and told to leave for the airfield in the morning, first thing in the morning, and just go in because this story is a non-event. So around, well, as Arnold and Smith are just getting ready for bed, they're sick of this place, they want to get out of coma as fast as they can. There's a phone call to their room.
00:50:24
Speaker
And it's Fred Crisman, very excited to tell them that a B-25 bomber has just crashed. Literally 20 minutes after it was due to leave from the airfield he was stationed at. And so Emil's Captain Smith, he foams up below Clairefields and he, you know, he confirms that this is the same plane that Brown and Davidson were on. Two out of the four people on that plane died.
00:50:54
Speaker
Brown and Davidson. One of the survivors, Sergeant Alma Taff, had noticed there was a fire on the left engine shortly after takeoff. Brown had turned around and said to Taff and the other passenger, get your parachutes. We're going down. Taffy's then pushed out of the door. He finds himself floating down. What happened to the fourth person? I mentioned it was forward. It was forward.
00:51:25
Speaker
Don't know. Don't know if you're going to feud or just another survivor. So, so Brown and Davidson basically stay at the controls trying to run the aircraft themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Well.
00:51:37
Speaker
Yeah, I guess you would when it's your responsibility, any kind of possibly engine, engine, fires and aircraft back then were reasonably common. It wasn't as if it was anything out of the ordinary. So it's possibly just coincidence that that's more likely to be the case, that it was simply coincidence that that happened through the flight that happened. This occurred on. It could have been the next flight. It could be in one previous. Exactly. And you said these were like old
00:52:06
Speaker
which have been just kind of phased out. So, you know, who knows how many air miles it had done anyway. Well, it's certainly been hammered during the war because there were, you know, there were medium bombers to fly low at fairly for medium to low level. So, you know, they took a bit of punishment. They weren't, you know, weren't really well looked after in terms of loving care and all the rest of it. They were built to do a job. Yeah.
00:52:29
Speaker
So anyway, Arnold gets off the phone to Chris Mann. He tells Smith all about it. They're both stunned because they'd seen these guys like 20 minutes before. So Arnold then phones Ray Palmer and says, look, I'm quitting. I'm gone. I've had enough. I'm going home tomorrow. And that's when Chris Mann actually comes to the hotel.
00:52:48
Speaker
takes the phone, realizes that Arnold's speaking to Palmer and takes the phone off, Arnold, and describes the crest of Palmer with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, which apparently was quite a lot. Remember that Ted Morello I mentioned earlier? Yes. The following day he'd actually been told that the B25 had been shot down. Shot down? Yeah.
00:53:19
Speaker
By what friendly fire or something? Or not so friendly fire. But yeah, apparently investigators examining the wreckage had some anonymous source had told Moreno that, yeah, it looked like it had been shot down. Which is quite quite crazy, because then you're thinking, has it been shot down because of the material that's on board? Has it been shot down because Brown, Davidson, Arnold and Smith are getting too close to something they shouldn't be?
00:53:50
Speaker
So it adds another layer to this whole thing where you have this journalist who seems to have many sources being told different things.
Intrigue and Information Leaks in Tacoma
00:53:59
Speaker
Too many for comfort by the sound of things and can hear like conversations through walls and all the rest of it. Very, very strange.
00:54:09
Speaker
Morello went on this, you know, after he's said about this thing, had bullet holes in the side of it, he then goes on to tell Kenneth Arnold that he knows that he and Emil Smith had both been shot at while they were flying over Oregon and Montana respectively.
00:54:26
Speaker
Arnold himself cannot remember ever being shot at. I've never heard that. I've never heard that story either, that Arnold was shot at. And when was, did Smith say that he had? Smith being a pilot for United Airlines says he's never even flown over Montana. Well, right, there you go. You probably hadn't. They'd be on set routes. So, you know, where is this journalist getting his information from? He's just mental.
00:54:54
Speaker
and the more I've been looking into it it just gets even weirder because the following morning after you know Arnold and Smith have packed checked out a hotel they meet Morello who as I mentioned his offices are opposite the hotel so it's just a short hop across the road and they listen to the interview of the sergeant Taff who was on board yeah he was the first survivor and you know Arnold just looks at Smith and says well
00:55:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a pretty nasty story. This is probably the first case where
00:55:33
Speaker
You get all these wonderful sounding elements in a story and people rub their hands together and think, oh, this is going to be a really, really great UFO case. It's going to make everything else pale in significance in comparison. And then they start adding bits more. And then a little bit later, you get another bit added to it. And it gets to the point where it just collapses under its own weight sort of thing, doesn't it?
00:55:58
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, after they'd visited the newspaper or Morello's offices, you know, they'd already promised to go and have a look at the boat, which they hadn't done. So, yeah. So they go and investigate Dahl's boat and they turn up there expecting this, you know, river cruiser, harbour, patrol-sized boat. That's a leaky tub, was it? Pretty much. More leaky because it's had all this, you know, 20 tons of industrial stuff done to it.
00:56:27
Speaker
But 20 tons of that material, you know, that's enough to sink a small fish into it. Yeah, exactly. But now apparently- You might break somebody's arm and kill a dog. Exactly.
00:56:39
Speaker
Yeah. And apparently most of it had been repaired already. So, you know, they just aren't on the spith, just look at each other and say, nah, we're done. Exactly. I think that if I'd been there and under similar circles, that'd probably be my reaction as well. I guess there are people who love this story and probably think it's true. But
00:56:59
Speaker
I don't know what you think about it. I'm sure you're going to tell me now, but really, it just what I've seen too many stories like this in the past way, you know, through the kitchen, think of these things and you just get the point where you go.
00:57:11
Speaker
one or two things like this you could probably think yeah that might have happened but when you get like you know six or seven different elements and they're all supposed to mesh together but they don't and things are said but they don't happen and people have these like kind of you know evidence which turns out to be nothing of the sort you just go nah sorry yeah yeah i know we've both been there we have um that's not the end of the story oh good grief i know far from it
00:57:40
Speaker
You know, there's more twists than the corkscrew and towers. A couple of other jibberty crickets. Right. So Smith and Arnold leave. They want to leave Tacoma. They go buy some cigarettes at a newsstand. Arnold sees the front page of the local rag that says sabotage hinted. And this other journalist, a guy called Paul Lance, has written that he believes that the B25 bar was sabotaged.
00:58:10
Speaker
This is where, you know, they find out about the bullet hole theory is printed in the press.
B-25 Bomber Crash and Investigation
00:58:17
Speaker
There's other details as well, which this guy shouldn't know about. Well, I think some of the accident report or yeah, where was my information from? Yeah, so Smith immediately believes that, you know, Christmas and doll were the sources of the leaks and all the information inside information. And then Ted Morello pops up again.
00:58:41
Speaker
Um, and he says krismun is on an army transport plane bound for alaska Okay, let's get sent back into exile They left him like an arrow going already. He's on a plane to alaska Right Oh, you just get it gets better i mean it's not confirmed That planes, you know army transport planes have left mccord airfield for alaska
00:59:09
Speaker
Yeah, because it was like one of the closest airfields in America to that part of America. Exactly. Separate by Canada. Yeah, that would be a fairly normal event. But to have a civilian on board? Well, that's the thing. Was Chris Mann a civilian? Okay, so there's a later room is claimed. Later room is put in with Clay Shaw, who is instrumental figure during the JFK.
00:59:37
Speaker
trials. There's other rumors that Chrisman was a CIA agent. There's all kinds of rubbish going on. There's a link to Roswell next. No, see, that's one thing I found in all the early literature, the 40s and the 50s, early 50s, there is no mention of Roswell whatsoever. Well, there's a reason for that. But we'll come to that in another episode. Exactly. Yeah. So I mean, Arnold Smith, they get their bags from the room. But while they're in the room, Dahl knocks on the door. Mm hmm.
01:00:07
Speaker
They've tried been trying to get him on the phone all day and he said he's been at the films. She's been at the movies Kicking back watching, you know local cinema and didn't know where Christmas was It's one of these just you never know where this story is gonna go next come on You're gonna tell me you've got something else on you
01:00:32
Speaker
Yeah, it goes further. Of course it does. So Arnold Smith and Harold Dahl go for breakfast, because apparently it's still early in the morning and breakfast is being served after 11 o'clock. Smith says, I just got to make a phone call. So he goes into the back to use the payphone and comes back and tells Arnold to wait for him at the hotel until 12.
01:00:58
Speaker
So they pay for breakfast. They leave basically goodbye to Dal. Arnold goes back to the hotel room. 12 noon comes. Smith still hasn't turned up. One o'clock. Still no Smith. Arnold's wondering what's going on, just about to leave. And then at two o'clock, Smith turns up with a friend of his. A major George Sander as to army intelligence. Okay.
01:01:25
Speaker
who comes in and promptly says, you boys have been given the run around. It's all a load of bits. But this sander takes the slag fragments and says, yeah, we'll get army intelligence.
01:01:40
Speaker
because Arnold had kept some of them and he wanted to keep some of them you know just for his own curiosity but Sander took all the fragments put them in the back of the car and then he says to Smith and Arnold I'm going to take you somewhere I want to show you something so he takes them to the Tacoma smelting company where they see these huge piles of industrial waste slag do they look anything like the bits on the boat
01:02:10
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, absolutely. So they're looking at it, and Arnold wants to compare the slag in the piles to the slag in the boot, but Sander wouldn't have it. He says, nope, you don't need to. It's the same stuff.
01:02:26
Speaker
Which is kind of... It's odd in a way, but you can almost... Yeah. I mean, I suppose sometimes you have to be careful that you don't assign kind of motive or agency when there isn't any, but it just seems a bit odd that when you've got on one side, you've got too fantastic a story to even be credible. But then on the other side of it, you've got all these extra little bits that seem to make you go, well, there might be something to this, actually.
01:02:53
Speaker
You think, hang on a minute, why would he dismiss me that quickly? And then still say, yeah, we're going to get tested at 11. But you can't see the results, which I could just do a comparative test here and now. Here is lump E from the smatter, and here's lump B, which you give me earlier. Yeah, but remember, the army intelligence hadn't got the stuff from Brown and Davidson. No, because they'd have perished.
01:03:21
Speaker
So only Santa goes off and as Smith and Arnold are on their way to the airfield where Arnold has his plane, they decide to go and say goodbye to Harold. And so they drive to the house where Harold had taken them before, you know, this nice pristine house, you know, it was furnished. There was a radio. Oh wait, he doesn't actually live there. No one lives there.
01:03:49
Speaker
And it appears that... Well, it does because it appears no one's lived there for months. Good grief. This is just... It's just a disheveled, run-down old cabin that is covered in detritus. You know, dust, bugs, feathers, cobwebs, the lot. So, you know, Arnold,
01:04:19
Speaker
He's pretty disillusioned. Smith just, he wants to go out. Yeah, I'm not surprised. And he probably hasn't seen any of the $200 either. No, he hasn't. I doubt whether Arnold said, eh, you know, come down and I'll pay your expense. I'll see you right here. Arnold gives his planer once over, just in case, because he remembers what happened to Brandon Davidson. Not sensible.
01:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, but everything's fine and he takes off and he stops the Pendleton again to refuel Doesn't leave the plane Well, it doesn't leave the comp the area of the plane so he could see what was going on refuels takes off At 50 foot his left engine packs up What was he what was he flying his own? It was only a single engine aircraft. So it was it was just the only engine that packed up But yeah, I guess was it on the left?
01:05:18
Speaker
The propeller fails, so he lands it heavily but safely, so that's all right. Now he kept that secret until he wrote his book in 52. Right, so it's in there. Now can you remember who his co-author was for that book? Off the top of my head, was it Ray Palmer? It was.
01:05:46
Speaker
Right. So is this because we're getting sensational elements in because somebody wants to sort of make the book more sexy? I don't know. I mean, he'd already asked Arnold if he could run his story in fake magazine and then he passed up or he just wanted his name on the book and probably just proofread it or edited it or published it and said, I'll do this if I can have my name on the cover as well alongside yours. I mean, Parma was just fame hungry. He wanted the attention.
01:06:14
Speaker
He wanted the notoriety. He wanted to be somebody in publishing. Not quite a, you know, not quite a Citizen Kane, but... Yeah, that's the name I was going to come up with for you, hadn't I? Yeah, I mean, Arnold, this case, he just dwelled on it for years. He was never quite sure whether it was a hoax because of all these other different elements that went along with it. But yeah, he never gave it up, apparently.
Conclusion: Maury Island Hoax
01:06:45
Speaker
Weird, weird, weird. Sir, couple of days, go on. No, sorry, I'm just, I'm trying to work through my exasperation about this story. Oh no, it's great. A couple of days later he tries to phone Harold Dahl, say sorry, missed you, didn't say goodbye, etc. He's told by the Tacoma operator that there's no such person as Harold Dahl in Tacoma. Okay, right. Yep, so one doesn't exist and the other one is on an aircraft bound for Alaska. Well,
01:07:15
Speaker
They were told he was on an aircraft now for Alaska. But whether he did a lot is a different question. Well, on August the 5th, Fred Crisman wanders into the Seattle office of the FBI. Okay. Yeah. For what reason? He's rambling a lot about flying saucers and the debris that he sent to a lab in Chicago. And so the FBI make a note of this. And two days later, they pick up him and Harold Dahl for questioning.
01:07:43
Speaker
They pick up the person who doesn't exist. Yeah. Well, obviously Fred knows where he is. So yeah, they pick them both up, sit them in the in the art in one of the rooms and start questioning them. And from the outset, they're sweating, they're nervous and they change their story. Do they change something like nothing happened?
01:08:13
Speaker
No, they do say they admit that, you know, at the start of June, they'd found unusual looking rocks on Maury Island. Fred had suggested that they write to Amazing Stories editor Raymond Palmer. I mean, Chris Chrisman was apparently an avid reader of Amazing Stories and had written a couple of stories to the magazine for possible publication. And one of them
01:08:40
Speaker
relates to something else we're going to talk about in the future. So I'm not going to disclose it here, but it's very interesting. And it's very similar to the Dulce done fight. Oh, good grief. Yeah. Oh, no. And I'll leave that there. Yeah. You know, they wrote to Raymond Palmer, who eventually writes to Kenneth Arnold. Palmer had asked them, you know, is this debris from a flying disk? And they say, yeah, maybe.
01:09:11
Speaker
But they admit to the FBI it was all a joke. So yeah, that's pretty much, apart from Chrisman's alleged associations with the JFK case, that's pretty much what it was. The Maury Island hoax was made up by a couple of science fiction magazine aficionados enhanced by an editor
01:09:37
Speaker
who was after fame and notoriety. Yeah, and who was famed for printing exaggerated stories, which he claimed were true. Yeah. And that's something we'll no doubt see in the future as well. If we haven't seen it already. Yep. Well, exactly. But one final twist before we leave. Of course there is. Apparently the material
01:10:08
Speaker
that was analyzed by the laboratories was just generic industrial waste slag. However, Ray Palmer sent Kenneth Arnold a letter some months later saying that the slag collected by Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman, who was sent to a laboratory for testing, contained titanium.
01:10:32
Speaker
which is supposedly used in, was used in missile casings at the time, and calcium, which was included to counter the effects of radiation. So a final twist to the story. However, this is Ray Palmer we're talking about. Yeah. So exaggerations. Yeah, exactly. And
01:10:57
Speaker
Believe it or not, the 20 tons of slag that dropped into the Puget Sound was never found. And there were no other witnesses that ever come forward. They wouldn't be. No.
01:11:09
Speaker
So I'm distraught, Dave, because the wounded donor doesn't exist. It's a fragment, sorry, a figment or a fragment of their imagination. It was. Yeah, they're fragmented imagination. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how does Kenneth Arnold go from seeing, you know, being the person who sees what is basically the first modern ufology sighting?
01:11:38
Speaker
And then suddenly he's just involved in investigating this crew of mentors hoax. You couldn't you couldn't make it up. Well, clearly, you could make it up because they did. But in this kind of situation, as you say, with somebody who effectively gives birth to modern ufology, and then five minutes later, he's investigating the dark side of it where people are making up stories effectively to try and get fame fortune and who knows what else. Yeah, it's
01:12:05
Speaker
Oh, words fail me. I know, all in the space of like a month, six weeks. Yeah. Because they didn't come, obviously they didn't come forward with their story at the time on the 21st of June, did they? They waited until all the notoriety and all the publicity and all the rest of it regarding Kenneth Arnold's sighting had appeared before anything happened. So
01:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. But the Maury Island case was included in a number of books at the time. Would be genuine by Greg Barker by the chance.
01:12:39
Speaker
um well it's mentioned in harold wilkins book oh there would be joed healds right well i mean joe joe heald was he's also like someone who was pronounced for um he like the flowery prose yeah well harold wilkins i mean some people do sort of laud him as being like one of the pioneers but he was he was prone to exaggerate as well and he was also um
01:13:03
Speaker
I just I'll quickly talk about the Foo Fighters angle here. He managed to get a hold of that magazine from December 1945 and the various accounts. And he blew it up into about four pages, even though it was like, you know, a couple of paragraphs kind of thing. So he was he was quite willing to like build up on things when there was nothing to build up on. He was he was known for that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty sure Kehoe even mentioned it in one of his books. Because they knew no different. Exactly.
01:13:33
Speaker
No, I mean, the story came out. It was in amazing stories. It was in, you know, probably mentioned in fate as well. And then when Kenneth Arnold's book coming of the sources came out. Yeah, he tells everything about that case. He tells a different story. Yeah. Yeah, which I'm surprised that given that Ray Palmer was his editor. Maybe it served his purpose by then. Yeah, get you to get that kind of
01:14:04
Speaker
ball rolling that kind of momentum in terms of publicity and fame and all and money and all the rest of it. Well, yeah, because Palmer was still reading his magazine. Yeah, because Palmer had, you know, launched Fate magazine, which came on to be a hugely successful publication. Oh, it did. That's right. Yeah. I remember the books I used to read about Ufology in the 70s and 80s.
01:14:22
Speaker
they would refer to things from fate. When I was young, I didn't even know what fate was. But it was always referenced. So it was something clearly big. It informed these men's magazines, wasn't it really? It was fate and look and a few others from True magazine. And they all had UFO stories in them. Well, I'd say, I mean, I think that Donald Kehoe wrote something about the Air Force in True.
01:14:50
Speaker
Well, he had the talent. His first book was serialized, wasn't it? It was just before it became published. It was at the end of 1949. He started December 1949. He started with the flying saucers are real. Yeah. Cool. Well, I think that is pretty much all we can go into in these cases. Yeah. So we'll
01:15:14
Speaker
We'll leave that for Kenneth Arnold and the Maury Island case. We got from the Sublime to the Ridiculous. We have. But just before we go, there is some audio from an interview on June 26, 1947. This is Kenneth Arnold talking to Ted Smith at KWRC Radio in Pendleton. And we hope you enjoy it.
01:15:42
Speaker
Join us next time on
01:16:05
Speaker
We'll ask you to just tell in your own fashion, as you told us last night in your hotel room and again this morning, what you were doing there and how this entire thing started. Go ahead, Kenneth. Well, at about 2.15, I took off from Chehalis, Washington, en route to Yakima. And of course, every time that any of us fly over the country near Mount Lanier, we spend an hour or two in search of the marine plane that's never been found that they believe is in the snow someplace southwest of that particular area.
01:16:33
Speaker
That area is located at about, or its elevation is about 10,000 foot. And I had made one sweep in close to Mount Rainier and down one of the canyons and was dragging it for any types of objects that might prove to be the marine ship. And as I come out of the canyon there, it was about 15 minutes. I was approximately 25 to 28 miles from Mount Rainier. I climbed back up to 9,200 feet and I noticed to the left of me
01:17:00
Speaker
a chain which looked to me like the tail of a Chinese kite, kind of weaving and going at a terrific speed across the face of Mount Rainier. I at first thought they were geese because it flew like geese, but it was going so fast that I immediately changed my mind and decided it was a bunch of new jet planes in formation. Well, as the planes come to the edge of Mount Rainier, flying at about 160 degrees south,
01:17:28
Speaker
I thought I would clock them because it was such a clear day, and I didn't know where their destination was, but due to the fact that I had Mount St. Helens and Mount Adams to clock them by, I just thought I'd see just how fast they were going, since among pilots we argue about speed so much. And they seemed to flip and flash in the sun, just like a mirror. And in fact, I happened to be at an angle from the sun that seemed to hit the tops of these peculiar-looking things,
01:17:57
Speaker
in such a way that it almost blinded you when you looked at them through your plexiglass windshield. Well, it was about one minute to three when I started clocking them on my sweet secondhand clock. And as I kept looking at them, I kept looking for their tails. They didn't have any tails. I thought, well, maybe something's wrong with my eyes.
01:18:23
Speaker
I turned the plane around and opened the window and looked out the window and, sure enough, I couldn't find any tails on them. And the whole observation of these particular ships didn't last more than about two and a half minutes. And I could see them only plainly when they seemed to tip their wing or whatever it was, and the sun flashed on them. They looked something like a pie plate that was cut in half with a sort of a convex triangle in the rear.
01:18:52
Speaker
Now, I thought, well, that maybe their jet planes were just the tails painted green or brown or something, and didn't think too much of it, but kept on watching them. Now, they didn't fly in a conventional formation that's taught in our army. They seemed to kind of weave in and out right above the mountaintops. And I would say that they even went down into the canyons in several instances, oh, probably 100 feet. But I could see them against the snow, of course, on Mountaineer and against the snow on Mount Adams as they were flashing.
01:19:22
Speaker
and against a high ridge that happened to lay in between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. But when I observed the tail end of the last one passing Mount Adams, and I was at an angle near Mount Rainier from it, but I looked at my watch and it showed one minute and 42 seconds. Well, I felt that, well, that's pretty fast and I didn't stop to think what the distance was between the two mountains. Well, I landed at Yakima, Washington, and Al Baxter was there to greet me
01:19:54
Speaker
And he told me, I guess I better change my brand. But he kind of gave me a mysterious sort of a look at maybe I had seen something he didn't know. And well, I just kind of forgot it then till I got down in Pendleton, and I began looking at my map and taking measurements on it. And the best calculation I could figure out now, even in spite of error, would be around 1,200 miles an hour, because making the distance from Mount Lanier to Mount Adams in, we'll say, approximately two minutes, it's almost
01:20:22
Speaker
Well, it'd be around 25 miles per minute. Now, a line for air, we can give them three minutes or four minutes to make it, and they're still going more than 800 miles an hour, and to my knowledge, there isn't anything that I've read about outside of some of the German rockets that would go that fast. These were flying in more or less a level of constant altitude. They weren't going up and they weren't going down. They were just simply flying straight and level and
01:20:47
Speaker
I laughed and I told the powers of hell, I said, they sure must have had a tail wind, but it didn't seem to help me much. But to the best of my knowledge and the best of my description, that is what I actually saw, and like I told the Associated Press, I'll be glad to confirm it with my hands on a Bible, because I did see it, and whether it has anything to do with our Army or our intelligence, or whether it has to do with some foreign country, I don't know. But I did see it, and I did clock it, and I just happened to be in a beautiful position to do it, and
01:21:17
Speaker
It's just as much a mystery to me as it is to everyone else who's been calling me the last 24 hours wondering what it was. Well, Kenneth, thank you very much. I know that you've certainly been busy the last 24 hours because I've spent some of the time with you myself. And I know that the press associations, both Associated Press and our press, the United Press, has been right after you every minute. The Associated and United Press all over the nation has been after this story. It's been on every newscast over the air and in every newspaper I know of.
01:21:44
Speaker
The United Press in Portland has made several telephone calls here to Pendleton to me and to you this morning, and from New York I understand they're after this story, and we may have an answer for it before night, because if it is some new type of Army or Navy secret missile, there will probably a story come out on it from the Army or Navy asking, saying that it is a new secret plane, and that will be all there is to it, and they will hush up the story, or perhaps that we will finally get a definite answer to it.
01:22:11
Speaker
I understand the United Press is checking on it out of New York now with the Army and also with the Navy, and we hope to have some concrete answer before nightfall. We certainly want to thank you, Kenneth, for coming into our studio. We feel very pleased that this news, which is making nationwide news across the country, we are able to give our listeners over KWRC a first-hand report direct from you of what you saw.
01:22:33
Speaker
And we urge our listeners to keep tuned to this station, because any time this afternoon or this evening, and we get something on it on our United Press teletype, which is in direct communications with New York, Chicago, Portland, in fact every United Press year across the nation, why we'll have it on the air. I am here to discuss the so-called flying saucer.
01:23:00
Speaker
In Washington, ghost-like objects dart across the radar screen at the CAA Traffic Control Center at National Airport for several hours. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. You are about to experience the awe and mystery.