Crisman is the key to this event. We now know a great deal about him, little of which was available to the early researchers. Crisman, for instance, was a member of the OSS during the war, flew fighter planes over the Pacific, and served as a liaison officer with the British RAF. Later, he wrote to Palmer’s magazine that he had been hit by a “ray gun” in a cave in Burma. After the war, Crisman was supposedly discharged from the military, but actually entered a special Internal Security School. There is evidence linking him to Project Paperclip shortly before the Maury Island affair. Then, sometime around the Maury Island incident, he was brought to the newly formed CIA as an “extended agent” specializing in internal disruption activities. During the Korean War, he sent secret reports to the CIA regarding military officers, and later did the same regarding company officials while working for Boeing. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, while reinvestigating the Kennedy assassination, subpoenaed Crisman (who denied to a grand jury that he was any kind of agent). Crisman was closely connected to Clay Shaw, Garrison’s main target. Shaw, like Crisman, was a member of the OSS and had many ties to the murky world of intelligence and crime. It was later suggested—in the 95th Congress at the Hearings Before the Select Committee on Assassinations—that Crisman was one of the three tramps at Dealy Plaza.49
UFO researchers from Ruppelt to Jacobs to Clark have dismissed the Maury Island incident as a hoax. The standard line is that Crisman and Dahl, under interrogation, had confessed that they made up the whole story in hopes of selling it to Palmer.50 But this is based primarily on statements obtained by the FBI which show all the signs of having been coerced (or otherwise strongly encouraged). Moreover, this assessment does not take into account Crisman’s history with the CIA.
That a CIA agent was pulling some strings regarding the Maury Island incident changes the complexion of the case entirely. Note that Crisman ended up with nearly all the material Dahl found, that he switched it with old scrap to present to Brown and Davidson, and that he obfuscated during the entire time Arnold was in Tacoma. If this were a hoax, what kind of hoax was he pulling, and why would a CIA agent be doing it? Might it be more probable that Crisman’s job was to maintain control over a real event?
In addition to focusing on Crisman, we are bound to ask other questions. First, who was spying on Kenneth Arnold? Several organizations could have done this, but the one with the easiest means to do so was the Army Signal Security Agency (the precursor to the National Security Agency). Shamrock was already in place and theoretically could have been used to follow Arnold through a combination of telephone taps, bugs, and personal surveillance. The FBI is another candidate. It had, after all, interviewed both Arnold and Smith in mid-July, and also engaged in the necessary illegal activities.
Who was the mysterious informant? If we believe Morello, that the voice never changed, then Crisman and Dahl must be ruled out. The informant immediately knew about the flight of Brown and Davidson to Tacoma. How could this have been Dahl or Crisman, when both were with Arnold during the call from Morello? And how did the informant know about the particulars of Brown and Davidson’s death? A military informant, perhaps someone from within McChord, seems most likely.
The Maury Island incident shows all signs of being investigated by multiple agencies (CIA, FBI, army, and private individuals) with competing motives. Poor Brown and Davidson stumbled into this mess and never made it out. Paul Lance may also have been a victim. Almost immediately after writing the key article on Maury Island, he died in mid-August 1947. Arnold stated years later that “the cause of his death was not clear. It was laid to meningitis, but this should have been easy to establish. However, he lay on a slab in the morgue for about thirty-six hours while the pathologists apparently hemmed and hawed.”51 Arnold himself described what appeared to be dangerous tinkering with his aircraft upon leaving Maury Island for home. Had he not noticed this, he said, he could easily have crashed.
Two more interesting facts bear comment. First, an internal FBI memo dated August 6, 1947, referred to one of the men who died in the B-25 crash as a “CIC Agent.” That is, Counter Intelligence Corps, the job of which was to examine and counter enemy (or possible enemy) intelligence. Recall that Brown and Davidson had visited Arnold a week earlier, asking him to send along any new UFO information he collected. Thus, someone charged the CIC with collecting UFO reports. Right from the beginning, UFOs were handled within the classified world—quite logically, one might add—as potentially hostile.52
