Second, the executive summary of the 1994 air force report on Roswell divulges something with possible relevance to this case. The air force author was refuting Vandenberg’s involvement in the Roswell crash by referring to allegations that he was near Roswell on July 7. In fact, claimed the air force, Vandenberg was involved in a “flying disc” incident at that time, but not at Roswell. (Air Force General Nathan Twining, of course, was near Roswell, a fact discussed earlier in this book.) Rather, he was busy with an incident that “involved Ellington Field, Texas, and the Spokane (Washington) Depot.” Vandenberg, in other words, was checking into an event that had presumably occurred earlier, and involved the state of Washington (albeit on the other side of the state). This might be a reference to a different event, but the next remark is suggestive of official comments concerning Maury Island: “after much discussion and information gathering on this incident, it was learned to be a hoax.” At the very least, Vandenberg’s role as a secret investigator of UFO reports speaks volumes about the perceived importance of this topic to the people at the top.53
Unfortunately, Kenneth Arnold was out of his depth in this investigation. He was an honest and intelligent man (he later was a candidate for lieutenant governor of Idaho). But Arnold failed to check into the basic starting points of inquiry, such as Maury Island itself, the alleged witnesses who accompanied Dahl, Dahl’s son, the doctor who allegedly treated his arm, or the story about Dahl’s dog. Arnold’s preoccupation with finding the boat blinded him from pursuing more fruitful avenues of investigation.
Arnold distrusted Fred Crisman (a sign of good instincts), but he seems to have believed Dahl to be sincere, if slow-witted and phlegmatic. Could Dahl have been telling the truth? The description Dahl gave to Arnold of his sighting at Maury Island happens to coincide with the description of a UFO event that took place in Brazil in the 1950s. Such a similarity does not automatically validate the sighting, but it remains possible that Harold Dahl saw what he claimed to see. For many years after, Dahl lived in the state of Washington as a “self-employed surplus dealer,” quietly out of the public view. According to 1990s Maury Island researcher Ken Thomas, he maintained to the end that the event had been real. Harold Dahl died in 1982 at the age of seventy.54
NATIONAL SECURITY REORGANIZATION
Amid the flying saucer mayhem, the U.S. government passed the National Security Act on July 26, 1947. This created a unified National Military Establishment (NME), a National Security Council (NSC) and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The reorganization had been in the making for several years. The investment of time was not wasted—at least from the perspective of the policymaking elite—as the Act was, by far, the century’s most significant overhaul of the country’s national security apparatus. It unified the armed services under the authority of a Secretary of Defense, and scrapped the old, more honest, title of Secretary of War. James Vincent Forrestal, former Secretary of the Navy, became the nation’s first SecDef.
Forrestal himself had done much to sabotage the authority of the new position. As navy secretary, he favored continued independence of that service. Largely due to his efforts, each service secretary—the army, the navy, and the newly established air force—gained the right to appeal to the president regarding crucial issues, such as budget allotments. The Act therefore exacerbated interservice rivalries. Forrestal wanted a coordinating, not executive, role for the position of Secretary of Defense. To his eventual chagrin, he now acquired it.55
The National Security Act also established a Central Intelligence Agency. It prohibited the CIA from any “internal security functions,” that is, from spying operations in the United States. But it contained a huge loophole (written by future DCI Allen Dulles) enabling the CIA “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” This quickly translated into carte blanche to carry out nearly any mission it wished, wherever it wanted, without scrutiny from Congress or, when necessary, the president.
