They gave up on seeing Maury Island and talked briefly with reporter Paul Lance in their hotel lobby. Lance’s article appeared later that day in the
Dahl told Arnold and Smith that Crisman had left and would be gone “for a few days.” Morello then called. His informant said that Crisman boarded an Army bomber and was flying to Alaska. It turned out that an army flight was leaving from Tacoma’s McChord Field to Alaska, but no passenger list was available. Morello said his paper’s normally excellent channels of obtaining data “drew a blank” with McChord, as did attempts to trace the informant’s calls. He did confirm that the B-25 had been under military guard “every minute it was at the field.” Morello told Arnold and Smith, “you’re involved in something that is beyond our power here to find out anything about.... I’m just giving you some sound advice. Get out of this town until whatever it is blows over.” Yet they remained, mistakenly assuming that military intelligence would want to speak with them. They spent the next day sitting around “like a couple of dead ducks.”
Finally, on August 3, Smith reached a Major Sander of army intelligence at McChord Field. Sander came and said he was “positive” they had been victims of a hoax. Even so, he took the fragments for analysis—just to be thorough—leaving none for Arnold or Smith. Sander made the empty promise that they would know the official evaluation in two weeks. He then drove the two to a smelting lot. Arnold thought it odd that Sander knew just which road to take, and that he stopped exactly at pieces of slag similar to their own. Arnold “thought [Sander] must have been there before.” From inside the car, it initially appeared that Sander had been right. But after examining the pieces, Arnold believed they looked like the material Crisman gave Davidson and Brown, not like the original fragments. Unfortunately, Sander did not allow Arnold or Smith to take out any original fragments from the truck for comparison. Thus, while Crisman and Dahl’s story “did not ring completely true ... for some reason we couldn’t convince ourselves it was all as simple as the Major put it.”
Still, the two pilots were relieved to be done. They checked out of the Hotel Winthrop, trying but failing to find Dahl’s house one last time. Arnold then flew home to Boise and continued his efforts to reach Dahl, but could not track him down.
On August 7, 1947, the Seattle FBI office interrogated Crisman and Dahl, and soon announced the affair had been a hoax, and that the two had also been the mysterious informants. They supposedly offered Palmer their exclusive story for money—something Palmer vehemently denied. The fragments mailed by Dahl, said the FBI, were not from a flying saucer. Palmer, by the way, claimed that the fragments were stolen from his office shortly thereafter. Before they were stolen, he had sent them out for analysis. The results, he said, indicated they were neither slag nor natural rock. One may ask, why would someone break into his office to steal some slag samples, anyway?47
Behind the scenes, the matter was not so clearly settled. J. Edgar Hoover wrote the following week: “It would also appear that Dahl and Crisman did not admit the hoax to the army officers....” In response, the FBI special agent in charge from Seattle answered:
Please be advised that Dahl did not admit to Brown that his story was a hoax but only stated that if questioned by authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter.48
