Maury Island UFO Incident
Posted: Sun Nov 26, 2017 6:39 pm
http://philipcoppens.com/maury_isle.html
http://thechurchofufology.blogspot.com/ ... ohano.html
https://borderlandsciences.org/journal/ ... izona.html
http://shavertron.com/portals1.html
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Letter from Eldon K. Everett, published in Flying Saucers from Other Worlds Magazine, November 1957, p85
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?40141
Dear Ray,
I'd like to dare you to publish the REAL Maury Island story. Living in Tacoma, I attempted to investigate that thing right after it happened, and the things I found out would blow the lid off a number of so-called "saucer experts"! Among the questions that might be answered are: What was done with the corpse of the dog that was killed by the fragments of the crashing saucer? Why was a detachment of army troops sent to the island in secret, ringing the explosion area with barbed wire, and chasing investigators (myself included) away from the island? Why were all files of the Tacoma papers seized and held for a short time afterward? Why was the Keyhoe paperback taken from the newsstands by govt. order in Tacoma, and why did the army send men to all 2d hand bookstores to buy up used copies of same?
What was the REAL reason for the Tacoma Times going out of business after some 20 years of leadership in the Tacoma area against all rival papers? What was in the bottle which a young boy claimed had been dropped into Hoodlum Lake from a Saucer? Why did this strange liquid explode violently upon human contact?
The TRUTH about the Saucer Invasion of Tacoma so far outstrips the fiction that it would definitely endanger the sanity of any unstable person who might happen across I, but if you have the inside info which you claim to have, I DARE you to publish it!
Eldon K. Everett
Saucers over Puget Sound by Eldon K. Everett, from Flying Saucers from Other Worlds Magazine, July-August 1958, p53-58
First of all, I want to make a couple of things clear.
This will not be a complete catalogue and discussion of UFO phenomena in the Pacific Northwest. Such information is available from a number of sources; best of all, perhaps, being Elliot Rockmore's original saucer reports (to which I contributed).
Instead, it is a record of my experiences in saucer investigation from 1948 to early 1954. Due to a particular chain of circumstances beginning with threats on my life and culminating in the death of my mother under mysterious circumstances, I chose to discontinue my investigations in 1954 and leave Washington state for several months. Since then, I have not been actively engaged in any such research, and my original findings have never been released to the public until now.
Even now, I'm not telling all I know. I'm including only material that I feel can be corroborated by newspaper reports and other public information. Recently I've been deluged by literature and letters from almost a hundred UFO groups on three continents, and frankly, I've come away with the impression that somebody opened the gate at the funny farm, and all the inmates joined UFO clubs.
Still, enough of these letters seem to be from sincerely interested individuals to convince me that I should tell some of what I know.
What are my qualifications as a saucer investigator? Well, earlier in life I did a lot of things. I've been a political campaign manager, a movie projectionist, a theater manager, a radio announcer and actor, a disk-jockey, a newspaper-advertising salesman, and a bartender. Then I went into the aircraft industry, first as an aircraft mechanic. For the better part of 1957, I worked in the Engineering Division of the Boeing Airplane Company doing top-secret work on the records of flight-test instrumentation for the B-52 Bombers and the BOMARC guided missiles.
Late in the year, for reasons that will become clear later in this article, the U.S. Air Force refused to grant me a high-level security clearance, and the company I worked for transferred me to a less strategic position.
So, as you can see, I know enough about flying objects, unidentified or otherwise, to evaluate many reports of saucer sightings.
In 1947, I was living in a small farming town in Washington State. Kenneth Arnold's report of sighting the saucers over Mount Rainier, therefore, interested me not only as a long-time science fan, but because of the locale of the incident itself.
I followed later reports of such phenomena with great interest, including the Maury Island incident, but it wasn't until 1948 that I began any serious investigation.
Even then, around a year after the incident, interest in saucer phenomena in the Puget Sound region was at fever pitch. At the time I moved into Tacoma, the story was on everyone's lips, due to the fact that the Tacoma Times, in business for nearly 40 years, had suddenly gone out of business without warning.
The then current story, as I heard it from a number of independent sources, went something like this: One day in June, 1947, a Harbor Patrol boat was cruising off Maury Island in Puget Sound. One of the men aboard saw a group of doughnut-shaped objects (the number varied) hovering over the island's coast. They seemed to be trying to help one of the objects that appeared to be in trouble, about to crash. The sailor called other members of the crew, including the captain's small son, up on deck, where they all stood at the rail, watching. Then, the object fell toward the ground and there was a tremendous explosion. After the flash had faded from their eyes, the crew discovered that the other objects had vanished. Fragments from the explosion rained upon the deck. The little boy's dog was struck by one of the red-hot fragments and killed, while the boy himself suffered a severe burn on one of his arms.
The Patrol Boat returned to port quickly in Tacoma. A doctor was called for the boy and the authorities were notified.
For the next few weeks, the patrolmen were plagued by mysterious telephone calls, cautioning them to keep their mouths shut about what they'd seen. The offices of the Tacoma Times, which had given extensive coverage to the incident, were also plagued with telephone calls, and even visited by mysterious individuals who cautioned them to lay off the story.
Two of the patrolmen had in their possession fragments they had picked up from the ship's deck. These had been confiscated by the Air Force and were to be flown from McChord Air Force Base in Washington to Hamilton Air Force Base in California.
The plane in which the fragments were carried took off all right, but it never reached Hamilton. It crashed mysteriously at Kelso, Washington, and the two crewmen aboard were killed. It was also said that a search of the wreckage had failed to produce the fragments, and that the Air Force had roped off the section of Maury Island where the saucer had crashed and had an armed guard around the area.
This was the story, or perhaps I should say, the legend, as I heard it a little over a year after it happened.
During the next year, while saucer sightings were filling the news, both in Washington State and elsewhere, I undertook a thorough investigation of this incident, aided by Clarence J. Sevdy, Jr., and hindered by almost everything imaginable.
With the publication of Donald E. Keyhoe's article in True magazine, and later his book, The Flying Saucers are Real, the U.S. Government seemed to clamp down on the area. I DID discover some errors in the previously-recounted Maury Island legend at that time, though.
The two "patrolmen" most concerned with the matter had already left the Puget Sound area and all inquiries met with the same reply: "Whereabouts Unknown." And it was not a patrol boat, belonging to the Harbor Patrol, but a small fishing boat.
Sevdy and I set about to make a trip to Maury Island early in 1950 to visit the site of the crash. Maury Island is a fairly good-sized piece of land, with several radio transmitters located along it.
We intended to charter or rent a boat to make the trip, but investigation soon proved that we were not alone in this intention. People seemed to be coming from all over the U.S. to visit the spot, and all of them met with the same response.
The "crash" area was fenced off with barbed wire, and uniformed guards were still patrolling the area armed with rifles. In the light of the Air Force's later claim that the entire matter was a hoax, this is hard to explain.
Many of the people formerly employed by the Tacoma Times had left the area to take employment elsewhere. This was another obstacle in the investigation, but having checked elsewhere, we felt it absolutely necessary to investigate this part of the story.
Over a period of weeks, we visited the Tacoma Public Library and checked their files of the Times, trying to verify the reports. This turned up some positive results, inasmuch as the information regarding the newspaper's part in the Maury Island story seemed to check out.
Then something very peculiar happened.
For several weeks, we were refused admittance to the Times files. Friends who requested to see the bound volumes of the paper for the months in question were also refused.
Eventually the files were opened up again, and this is the rumor that went around: When the Times had folded, its presses and equipment were sold to a newspaper in Oregon. The story was that the representatives of the USAF had seized the files, removed certain pages (NOT pages containing saucer reports), had new sheets printed by the Oregon paper, rebound the files, and returned them to the library.
We checked the files again, but obviously we couldn't collate anything but the saucer reports. A young fellow working as a page in the reference department of the library told us that he had heard that the information which had interested the USAF had concerned a number of mysterious fatal accidents in the area during the period of the Maury Island story.
After the Keyhoe pocketbook had been on the stands for several months, one of our friends who was operating a newsstand informed us of a VERY peculiar development in the matter.
It appeared that an amazing number of copies were being sold to Air Force members from the nearby McChord Field. They were buying them regularly in lots of three and four at a time. Inquiries at local second-hand stores brought out the fact that uniformed Air Force officers were also buying up second-hand copies of the book in small lots.
Routine investigation on our part proved this to be true. Air Force members were to be seen regularly at most of the city's newsstands, surreptitiously buying copies of Keyhoe's book. After a few months, it became nearly impossible to procure a copy in the area. Second-hand copies changed hands for as much as a dollar a copy.
Late in the summer of 1950, I was taking a walk during the early afternoon. Looking up into a cloudless blue sky, I saw what appeared to be a silver disk, hovering over the city. It appeared to be at some 3,000 feet elevation, and perhaps the size of an F-86. The object hovered for about 90 seconds, then rose into the air, silently, at tremendous speed, and disappeared. Censorship was so tight at this time that no report of the sighting ever appeared in the newspapers of the area.
Shortly thereafter, I left Tacoma and moved to Puyallup, a small town about 12 miles away. Sevdy and I kept up our work but the wraps were down pretty tight and for a year and a half we turned up very little information.
Then in the Spring of 1952, sightings in the area began again, "Meteors" and "fireballs" were seen over Seattle, and I moved back into Tacoma.
Sevdy and I, now joined by a third investigator, Ivars M. Skuja, a Latvian student, set to work in earnest. There was apparently a systematic attempt by certain anonymous groups in the area to discredit saucers in toto.
Among those reported in the local press: a Margret Harman, of Yakima, who got front page notice when she came to Tacoma carrying a large, deflated balloon labeled "genuine grade AA flying saucers" ... and a W.B. Monroe, who found a "saucer" in his front yard which he described as "a rubber balloon about four feet in diameter covered with a sheet of paper and heavy metal foil ... pointed at the top and reinforced with struts like those of a kite." In this case, it is very interesting to note that there had been a large number of sightings in the days preceding Monroe's "balloon", and officials at McChord Air Force Base said: "the objects were undoubtedly balloons of one sort or another."
Again and again throughout 1952, although hampered by a newspaper strike and unofficial censorship in other communication media, we encountered sighting after sighting. "Flying saucers" were seen and reported to newspapers by such people as Fire Chief Harold Fisk; Frank Evans, director of Civil Defense; Maj. N.A. Vosburg, director of Intelligence at McChord Air Base (who commented: "this is the height of the meteor season" and who declined to say whether or not two air force jets had been dispatched to chase an UFO); Max Bice, of radio station KTNT; Detective Geo. P. Johnson; Special Officer H. C. Toy of the U.S. Cushman Indian Hospital; and a lady who reported seeing a "snake of fire" in the sky.
McChord Air Force Base used every means at their control to discourage this rash of reports. Vosburg admitted that over 200 saucer reports had been received at the offices of the 25th Air Division in July, 1952, but disclaimed them all, saying that they were ALL meteor sightings. U.S. Meteorologists guardedly mentioned "inversions".
All through this period, silvery disks raced overhead, mysterious explosions shook the city and broke windows, and oddly-colored lights flashed through the night, but the Air Force remained adamant: "No Flying Saucers!"
In the early autumn of the year, while on my way to a conference with Sevdy, I heard the roar of a jet in the morning sky. I looked up to see a silvery disk, with a triangular dark section in its trailing edge, flash by at approximately 600 m.p.h.; close behind, and apparently gaining, was an Air Force pursuit plane. I watched the chase for about four seconds as they crossed my range of vision from left to right across the horizon at a height of approximately 5500 feet. When the jet put on an added burst of speed trying to close in on the object, the saucer flashed upward into the sky and disappeared. The jet cruised around for about ten minutes, and then sped back toward McChord Air Base.
Sevdy's family owned a 4-story building in the city, and a rented a 3d floor apartment. Together, Sevdy, Skuja, and I ran a sort of boiler-room operation, listening to the radio all night long, checking the newspapers, corresponding with other saucer investigators, and making dozens of phone calls to people whose names appeared in saucer stories in the local papers, checking the facts given in the printed reports.
Shortly after this phase of our operation was begun, we discovered that the building was under surveillance 24 hours a day. Strange automobiles parked outside during both night and day, and their drivers never left the cars. When one car would leave, another would pull up in to take up the watch.
Inasmuch as these people did not interfere with our operations, we took no action.
Late at night, the Sevdy family (on the 1st floor) began to be disturbed by strangers prowling around the grounds, and fussing at the windows. In one event, Sevdy, Skuja, myself and some visiting friends chased one of these individuals under a house, and trailed him on hands and knees with a flashlight. He broke away and we lost him in an alley.
By Spring of 1953, there was another rash of sightings, most of them at night and of "fireballs". Over a period of 60 days or so, our investigation team spent many fruitless nights looking with small telescopes for these objects. On several occasions we DID see glowing objects in the sky. Always, the next day, we were rewarded with seeing reports in the Tacoma Tribune of numerous independent reports of these objects.
During this period, the air force was in feverish activity. Jets and recon aircraft roared through the sky night and day. And there was another funny thing...
The skies were red.
For weeks, the skies were red over Puget Sound. An opalescent glow, tinted reddish-pink, filled the night skies. No one we could find could recall this condition having existed in the area before 1953, and I have not seen it since.
The cause of this phenomenon is still unknown, but in my own opinion (and opinion ONLY, I stress) is that the United States Armed Forces were conducting experiments to determine the mass of Unidentified Flying Objects by spreading a reddish gas over the area in order to check on any trails left by these objects.
One evening we discovered a very interesting story in the Tribune. It concerned a strange substance which had been spread on the streets in Tacoma. It was whitish, almost invisible; but when stepped on, it exploded with a loud noise.
In following days, a young junior high school student was arrested by Tacoma Police Department for coating the sidewalks with this substance. It gave the local papers a field day.
According to the boy, he had been playing near a desolate swamp known in the area as Hoodlum Lake, and seen a disc-shape silver aircraft drop down to within a few hundred feet of the surface of the swamp. As he watched, trembling, an object was dropped from the craft into the water, and the ship rose soundlessly into the air.
Fishing the object out with a stick, he found it to be a container, of a strange whitish substance, similar in texture to polyethylene, and containing a liquid. Being an amateur scientist, he took the bottle home, and experimenting, discovered its explosive properties. As a joke, he smeared it on the sidewalk.
We investigated, and came to know him quite well. In fact, he aided us in later investigations, although never becoming too active in the group. The police confiscated the bottle and its whereabouts is now unknown. Although the papers gave this incident a humorous treatment, the boy stuck to his story when we questioned him later.
I have not given his name, as he is now a fugitive from justice, along with his brother (who was in no way involved in this), on an unlikely charge made by the federal government.
One night, after making important sightings of bright lights in the sky, the plague of mysterious telephone calls began at our headquarters. It was usually the same line, "We've seen you making observations of our craft. Stop it or you'll be sorry!" Most of the time it was one of two female voices making the anonymous call, and on one occasion, the woman requested me by name to come on the phone. Sevdy called me down from the third floor, and the voice warned me to stop my investigations, or my life would be in danger.
For various reasons, we decided to disband, in the main, our "boiler-room", and spread out over the city. Our general headquarters were to be in the Sevdy family building, with Skuja monitoring radio broadcasts from his own home, and with me handling our files and correspondence five miles away in the suburb of South Tacoma.
It was now late in 1953.
In South Tacoma, I met Frank. That was the only name he ever gave me, and for reasons to be made clear, I didn't inquire further.
Frank was a wiry little man in his mid-'30s. He had formerly been an air force officer, but I didn't know what he was doing for a living at the time he contacted me.
More than anything else, Frank was scared.
He came to the South Tacoma house at about 8:00 p.m. on a very windy, stormy night. He said my mother had mentioned my interest in saucers in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. I invited him in.
Frank visited me on several occasions, always at night. He disappeared between the visits once for a period of several months, returning sporting a full beard. He confided that he had gone back into the Idaho Hills, and was hiding out there. We drove back to his brother's home, where he picked up a suitcase of clothes, and then he left again for Idaho. I never saw him again.
He had reason to be afraid. There is very little of what he confided to me that I can reveal. Most of it isn't corroborable, and much of it could make things uncomfortable for me if I were to reveal it.
Among other things, Frank had been on hand the night that the Maury Island fragments had been "loaded" aboard the B-25 at McChord Field. According to his information, the AF had received mysterious warnings before the flight of what would happen, and he swore that the fragments HAD NOT BEEN ABOARD THAT PLANE. He was unable to say what had been done with them, but he had seen them the day before the flight and described them as looking like the kind of slag that was to be found near the Montana Copper Smelters where he had once worked.
On one visit, he had seen my collection of science-fiction magazines and confided to me that he had read them thoroughly back in the '40's when the "Shaver mystery" was current. We discussed SM at some length, and he guardedly told me he believed that Shaver was correct and that he (Frank) was certain that there were several underground entrances in the Tacoma area, including one in the sub-basement of one of the city's most important buildings.
During my tenure at the South Tacoma house, I was a witness to a spectacular "UFO" display. A strange reddish light appeared in the night sky over the area, hovered there for several minutes, and then exploded with a tremendous noise, rattling windows for blocks around. I discovered the facts behind this UFO hoax in 1956 by sheer accident. I was at a radio ham gab-fest, and one of the hams confided that he had perpetrated the entire incident with an army surplus balloon, a red safety-light, and several sticks of dynamite.
My mother had volunteered from time to time for secretarial duties in our organization, and had been present at a number of our conferences. She had also talked on several occasions with the mysterious "Frank". Her contribution was negligible, but her interest in outré phenomena was very strong.
She was certainly not an angel, being (among other things) an alcoholic, and my family ties were never too strong. She had (over a period of years) been arrested for drunkenness on several occasions, so I wasn't too surprised, when, in February, 1954, her fifth marriage broke up, and she was arrested one night for disorderly conduct.
What was a shock was that she died that night in her jail cell under extremely peculiar circumstances. The Tacoma police told me the next day that they weren't sure what had happened to her, but that she had been confined with three other women, all of whom were too scared to tell what had happened.
The official verdict was that she had strangled herself.
I was unemployed and staying with an aunt. Once again I received telephone communication from the same mysterious individuals. I was warned that I and my associates would get the same as my mother if we didn't drop our investigations then and there.
With a hasty goodbye to my friends late one night, I packed my bag and accepted a ride to California.
Late in 1954, when I felt things might have cooled off, I left Santa Cruz and returned to Tacoma. After a discussion with Sevdy and Skuja, we all decided to close our investigations and destroy our records, and we turned to other pursuits.
Since that time, I've kept my nose clean of UFOs. Nevertheless, applications for Civil Service jobs have been refused or indefinitely postponed, and the afore-mentioned security clearance trouble with the Air Force has arisen.
I'm beginning to think it may be time to reopen our boiler-room. Somebody's covering up!
Ray Palmer’s Response to Eldon K. Everett’s Article:
WE PICK UP MR. EVERETT’S GAUNTLET:
First, let us say that Mr. Everett is not unknown to us: for many years we have known of him as a science fiction fan, and a member of what is popularly known as “fandom”, largely because of what they termed the “smearing of science fiction’s reputation” by the inclusion of the now famous Shaver Mystery. As part of the campaign against the Mystery, “fandom” conducted a boycott; requested your editor’s dismissal in personal visits to Mr. William B. Ziff, my then employer; wrote vitriolic articles in their fan magazines; began a barrage of hoaxes designed to gain publication, then to be exposed as hoaxes so as to cast doubt on the legitimate phases of the Shaver Mystery; circulated reports that your editor was insane, had been found in his basement clutching a magnet in one hand, piece of coal in the other and screaming wildly that the deros were after him; criticized every story in the magazines as trash (no matter how good) in order to get me relieved of my editorship; and many other things hardly of a gentlemanly or honest nature. Some of them, in fact, came under the heading of despicable. Thus, it is entirely possible that this present article by Mr. Everett is a clever hoax, an outright falsehood.
In spite of that, we are inclined to consider it legitimate, but our acceptance of it is somewhat reserved. In the event that it is false, we wish to stress that it contains an enormous amount of truth, and some of it we are puzzled to account for, because it would have been extremely difficult for Mr. Everett to secure it, and impossible to imagine.
All right, then. The Puget Sound story, the Maury Island incident, was true. It involved, as investigation progressed, a series of deaths. The box of fragments loaded into the command car, with the personal help of Kenneth Arnold, were NOT placed aboard the B-25 by Davidson and Brown, but were abandoned as worthless, because that’s exactly what they were.
They were nothing but slag from the Tacoma Smelter, and Kenneth Arnold KNEW it when felt of them in the dark. They were NOT like the actual fragments of the saucer, all of which were confiscated, except fragments in your editor’s possession. Later, most of these fragments, planted by your editor in a file where an intelligence officer was given the chance to observe them, were promptly stolen that same night, proving their importance.
Velma Brown, the wife of one of the men killed in this plane, has never been directly informed by the Air Force that her husband's death was entirely explained, and she herself suspects hat it was not an accident.
It is certainly true that Brown and Davidson suddenly learned the truth, that they were involved in something being investigated by higher authorities than they were, and were ordered to "get out" and forget the whole thing.
It is also true that Brown and Davidson had ample time to escape from their plane, while only one motor was on fire. Yet they chose to ride the plane for eleven minutes to their deaths. Why? Most logically, because it was an extremely valuable plane. No one will ever know.
It is true that the boat shown Arnold and Smith was NOT a harbor patrol boat, but an unseaworthy tub, and that the damage to it and the repairs were faked (by Crisman?) The idea was to convince Arnold and Smith that the boat story was untrue, and the damage could not possibly have been caused as claimed. The REAL boat was not seen by Arnold and Smith. Yes, there is a hoax in the Maury Island incident, and it is Mr. Crisman’s hoax. Even the Air Force, in its Project Bluebook report labeled the Maury Island incident as a hoax, and it is positively true that the whole incident was first reported by Mr. Crisman.
Mr. Crisman was not pioneering, however, in his hoax. He had, several years before, claimed an encounter with Shaver’s deros in a Burma cave, and claimed a “hole the size of a dime burned in my arm by a ray”. He further warned your editor “for God’s sake, drop the whole thing. You don’t know what you are getting into!”
Later, he phoned from a south-western state using another name, and asked for $500.00 to buy camera equipment with which to descend into yet another cave and bring back “positive photographic proof of the mech in Shaver’s stories, too huge to be moved.”
This Maury Island story cannot be extricated from its involvement with the Shaver Mystery. They are one and the same.
The saucers do not come from outer space and Maury Island proves it.
The actual saucer fragments, and the Tacoma slag, were analyzed by the same agencies. One was found to be slag, the other cannot be explained by any metallurgist. Like the pure tin found in South America, it does not exist naturally on the Earth, nor can it be duplicated. The mystery ingredient is calcium; its purpose is for protection against radioactive material; it is an absolute necessity at heights of 600 miles or more.
Lastly, Mr. Everett, why not tell everything “Frank” told you? If you aren’t hoaxing us in this article, you can prove it by telling us. If you wish it to be in confidence, we guarantee it. We will only tell our readers that you have proved yourself, which should be enough. We have no desire to place you in a position of terror – and there was terror on Maury Island.
A hypnotic terror that almost brought death to Kenneth Arnold himself, even though your editor “called the shot” over the phone the previous night! When a man can predict a plane accident, his is not just “shooting in the dark”. He knows something!
If you know it, how about backing yourself up? Why are you afraid to tell everything you know? A man is killed only to seal his lips. Once the story is out, he’s safe. Why take a chance, especially since you’ve dropped enough hints to make you a target, if Shaver is right!
Incidentally, we’ve received a letter, after all these years, from Fred Crisman. All we have to say is: “Come on, Fred, is that the best you can do?”
And Mr. Everett, your suspicion that “someone’s covering up” is the understatement of the year! How about you?
Flying Saucers, August 1960, letter from Brian Murphy
Mr. Palmer:
I have just finished reviewing one of your back issues, Dec. 1958 to be exact. In it is an interesting story about Mr. Edward Ruppelt and his book "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects." From what I gather, you choose a book (factual) to pick on, make up your own quotes on it, weave them into a convincing story against a REAL seeker of the truth, and them blow them out with a lot of other hot air in your magazine (?)
I used to be a sort of fan of yours. I believed that you through your magazine were bringing out facts which would wake up Americans as to what was actually happening around them. But brother, let me tell you my ideas of your altruism have sure changed. I can only deduct two possible reasons for your actions. 1). You’re out to make a fast buck along and in the same boat with the Hollywood slander type magazines; or 2). You are trying to escape reality; if the saucers are not there, you will put them there, so what, it will forward the illusions of Ray Palmer. You are always talking about the truth; how can you possibly deny what you yourself write and lie about? If Ruppelt is a liar (which I doubt) you are by far the 15th power of his deception.
Now I will return to what I was originally saying. I saw these quotes and thought for the fun of it I would see if they were in my book. Not one was! My book was published in 1956 in the U.S.A. by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. I received it through the Science Fiction Book Club. This of course leads to three possibilities: 1) The little men in dark suits are at work. 2) You’re a liar. 3) I’m a liar. You would no doubt prefer the latter or the first one. Probably the third, however, because it would be more believable to the gullible readers of your magazine. In the first place, number one appeals to me for its mystery, and who can say what is what? The second however is more believable to me since little men in dark suits would be arrested by big men in dark suits known by some unmentionable strata of society as the “Feds,” if they tampered with mail in the leather bag of the pony express.
Just one more grievance before I close. Pioneer V is now about 4,000,000 miles out and is still read “loud and clear.” It didn’t divide into atoms yet, did it, Ray?
Brian Murphy,
65 Franklin Street,
Lewiston, Maine.
Ray Palmer’s response:
If you get your book from the Science Fiction Book Club, maybe it is actually a fiction book – because it sure isn’t like mine! Every quote that I made is in the book, and a little researching will reveal them to you! When Ruppelt talks of me (and when he refers to the Chicago publisher – or editor – he is talking about me) who should know better than I whether he lies or not! I say he lies. Positively and completely lies. Since he wasn’t actually on the scene, and did not interview any of the people who were, maybe his “lie” is simply ignorance, or he has been lied to! One thing is certain – the statements made about my activities and Ken Arnold’s activities, and everybody else concerned at Tacoma, are just not true. I insist that they are not. I KNOW they are not. This Maury Island affair happened to ME. I sent Ken Arnold there to find out the truth. I have a complete report on Soundscriber records sent to me by Ken.
I talked to Dahl and Crisman and Captain Smith over the phone that fatal night. I KNOW what each man said--and it disagrees 100% with what Ruppelt says SECOND HAND in his book. He got his information from Wright Patterson files to which he either had access or was furnished. If he THINKS he told the truth in his book HE was lied to! The point is, I’ve taken it upon myself to defend myself, and it doesn’t help when people like you up and decide with no evidence whatever that I’m a liar – especially when you claim to have a book which MUST be different from the one I have, or else you did not do more than SCAN it for the quotes which are undeniably there!
Did you know Ruppelt’s book has now been reissued, in many different countries simultaneously in many translations, as well as in this country, in NEW AND REVISED EDITION which entirely reverses his conclusions in the original book? Why was this done? Not to make money, because this is one publisher who KNOWS that the project CANNOT be a financial success. It is an insane project, business-wise, and therefore must be some sort of a project, and I believe I can safely say it is a BRAINWASHING type of project designed to further bury the honest investigator (I venture to mention myself first in line here, so make what you will of that bit of ego!) under a landslide of publicity that reaches everywhere, whereas our little magazine reaches hardly anywhere, and then thousands of copies mysteriously disappear!
You don’t know that 5000 copies of the February issue went aboard a truck, apparently, and have yet to come off it! You don’t know that the whole shipment to Oakland, California (750 copies) was neither delivered to the distributor (who himself cannot now be located – and we tried, because he owes us over a thousand dollars!) nor returned to us, in spite of the fact that each parcel carries a request for return if undeliverable, and guarantees return postage! Lots of little things, like this, and each one costs us money we can ill afford. It doesn’t take much to break a little guy like me, and end the publication of FLYING SAUCERS. Except for one thing – we have ANOTHER JOB which supports us, and when FLYING SAUCERS goes broke, as it does periodically, we merely “lend” it more money (which we know we’ll never get back!).
http://thechurchofufology.blogspot.com/ ... ohano.html
https://borderlandsciences.org/journal/ ... izona.html
http://shavertron.com/portals1.html
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Letter from Eldon K. Everett, published in Flying Saucers from Other Worlds Magazine, November 1957, p85
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?40141
Dear Ray,
I'd like to dare you to publish the REAL Maury Island story. Living in Tacoma, I attempted to investigate that thing right after it happened, and the things I found out would blow the lid off a number of so-called "saucer experts"! Among the questions that might be answered are: What was done with the corpse of the dog that was killed by the fragments of the crashing saucer? Why was a detachment of army troops sent to the island in secret, ringing the explosion area with barbed wire, and chasing investigators (myself included) away from the island? Why were all files of the Tacoma papers seized and held for a short time afterward? Why was the Keyhoe paperback taken from the newsstands by govt. order in Tacoma, and why did the army send men to all 2d hand bookstores to buy up used copies of same?
What was the REAL reason for the Tacoma Times going out of business after some 20 years of leadership in the Tacoma area against all rival papers? What was in the bottle which a young boy claimed had been dropped into Hoodlum Lake from a Saucer? Why did this strange liquid explode violently upon human contact?
The TRUTH about the Saucer Invasion of Tacoma so far outstrips the fiction that it would definitely endanger the sanity of any unstable person who might happen across I, but if you have the inside info which you claim to have, I DARE you to publish it!
Eldon K. Everett
Saucers over Puget Sound by Eldon K. Everett, from Flying Saucers from Other Worlds Magazine, July-August 1958, p53-58
First of all, I want to make a couple of things clear.
This will not be a complete catalogue and discussion of UFO phenomena in the Pacific Northwest. Such information is available from a number of sources; best of all, perhaps, being Elliot Rockmore's original saucer reports (to which I contributed).
Instead, it is a record of my experiences in saucer investigation from 1948 to early 1954. Due to a particular chain of circumstances beginning with threats on my life and culminating in the death of my mother under mysterious circumstances, I chose to discontinue my investigations in 1954 and leave Washington state for several months. Since then, I have not been actively engaged in any such research, and my original findings have never been released to the public until now.
Even now, I'm not telling all I know. I'm including only material that I feel can be corroborated by newspaper reports and other public information. Recently I've been deluged by literature and letters from almost a hundred UFO groups on three continents, and frankly, I've come away with the impression that somebody opened the gate at the funny farm, and all the inmates joined UFO clubs.
Still, enough of these letters seem to be from sincerely interested individuals to convince me that I should tell some of what I know.
What are my qualifications as a saucer investigator? Well, earlier in life I did a lot of things. I've been a political campaign manager, a movie projectionist, a theater manager, a radio announcer and actor, a disk-jockey, a newspaper-advertising salesman, and a bartender. Then I went into the aircraft industry, first as an aircraft mechanic. For the better part of 1957, I worked in the Engineering Division of the Boeing Airplane Company doing top-secret work on the records of flight-test instrumentation for the B-52 Bombers and the BOMARC guided missiles.
Late in the year, for reasons that will become clear later in this article, the U.S. Air Force refused to grant me a high-level security clearance, and the company I worked for transferred me to a less strategic position.
So, as you can see, I know enough about flying objects, unidentified or otherwise, to evaluate many reports of saucer sightings.
In 1947, I was living in a small farming town in Washington State. Kenneth Arnold's report of sighting the saucers over Mount Rainier, therefore, interested me not only as a long-time science fan, but because of the locale of the incident itself.
I followed later reports of such phenomena with great interest, including the Maury Island incident, but it wasn't until 1948 that I began any serious investigation.
Even then, around a year after the incident, interest in saucer phenomena in the Puget Sound region was at fever pitch. At the time I moved into Tacoma, the story was on everyone's lips, due to the fact that the Tacoma Times, in business for nearly 40 years, had suddenly gone out of business without warning.
The then current story, as I heard it from a number of independent sources, went something like this: One day in June, 1947, a Harbor Patrol boat was cruising off Maury Island in Puget Sound. One of the men aboard saw a group of doughnut-shaped objects (the number varied) hovering over the island's coast. They seemed to be trying to help one of the objects that appeared to be in trouble, about to crash. The sailor called other members of the crew, including the captain's small son, up on deck, where they all stood at the rail, watching. Then, the object fell toward the ground and there was a tremendous explosion. After the flash had faded from their eyes, the crew discovered that the other objects had vanished. Fragments from the explosion rained upon the deck. The little boy's dog was struck by one of the red-hot fragments and killed, while the boy himself suffered a severe burn on one of his arms.
The Patrol Boat returned to port quickly in Tacoma. A doctor was called for the boy and the authorities were notified.
For the next few weeks, the patrolmen were plagued by mysterious telephone calls, cautioning them to keep their mouths shut about what they'd seen. The offices of the Tacoma Times, which had given extensive coverage to the incident, were also plagued with telephone calls, and even visited by mysterious individuals who cautioned them to lay off the story.
Two of the patrolmen had in their possession fragments they had picked up from the ship's deck. These had been confiscated by the Air Force and were to be flown from McChord Air Force Base in Washington to Hamilton Air Force Base in California.
The plane in which the fragments were carried took off all right, but it never reached Hamilton. It crashed mysteriously at Kelso, Washington, and the two crewmen aboard were killed. It was also said that a search of the wreckage had failed to produce the fragments, and that the Air Force had roped off the section of Maury Island where the saucer had crashed and had an armed guard around the area.
This was the story, or perhaps I should say, the legend, as I heard it a little over a year after it happened.
During the next year, while saucer sightings were filling the news, both in Washington State and elsewhere, I undertook a thorough investigation of this incident, aided by Clarence J. Sevdy, Jr., and hindered by almost everything imaginable.
With the publication of Donald E. Keyhoe's article in True magazine, and later his book, The Flying Saucers are Real, the U.S. Government seemed to clamp down on the area. I DID discover some errors in the previously-recounted Maury Island legend at that time, though.
The two "patrolmen" most concerned with the matter had already left the Puget Sound area and all inquiries met with the same reply: "Whereabouts Unknown." And it was not a patrol boat, belonging to the Harbor Patrol, but a small fishing boat.
Sevdy and I set about to make a trip to Maury Island early in 1950 to visit the site of the crash. Maury Island is a fairly good-sized piece of land, with several radio transmitters located along it.
We intended to charter or rent a boat to make the trip, but investigation soon proved that we were not alone in this intention. People seemed to be coming from all over the U.S. to visit the spot, and all of them met with the same response.
The "crash" area was fenced off with barbed wire, and uniformed guards were still patrolling the area armed with rifles. In the light of the Air Force's later claim that the entire matter was a hoax, this is hard to explain.
Many of the people formerly employed by the Tacoma Times had left the area to take employment elsewhere. This was another obstacle in the investigation, but having checked elsewhere, we felt it absolutely necessary to investigate this part of the story.
Over a period of weeks, we visited the Tacoma Public Library and checked their files of the Times, trying to verify the reports. This turned up some positive results, inasmuch as the information regarding the newspaper's part in the Maury Island story seemed to check out.
Then something very peculiar happened.
For several weeks, we were refused admittance to the Times files. Friends who requested to see the bound volumes of the paper for the months in question were also refused.
Eventually the files were opened up again, and this is the rumor that went around: When the Times had folded, its presses and equipment were sold to a newspaper in Oregon. The story was that the representatives of the USAF had seized the files, removed certain pages (NOT pages containing saucer reports), had new sheets printed by the Oregon paper, rebound the files, and returned them to the library.
We checked the files again, but obviously we couldn't collate anything but the saucer reports. A young fellow working as a page in the reference department of the library told us that he had heard that the information which had interested the USAF had concerned a number of mysterious fatal accidents in the area during the period of the Maury Island story.
After the Keyhoe pocketbook had been on the stands for several months, one of our friends who was operating a newsstand informed us of a VERY peculiar development in the matter.
It appeared that an amazing number of copies were being sold to Air Force members from the nearby McChord Field. They were buying them regularly in lots of three and four at a time. Inquiries at local second-hand stores brought out the fact that uniformed Air Force officers were also buying up second-hand copies of the book in small lots.
Routine investigation on our part proved this to be true. Air Force members were to be seen regularly at most of the city's newsstands, surreptitiously buying copies of Keyhoe's book. After a few months, it became nearly impossible to procure a copy in the area. Second-hand copies changed hands for as much as a dollar a copy.
Late in the summer of 1950, I was taking a walk during the early afternoon. Looking up into a cloudless blue sky, I saw what appeared to be a silver disk, hovering over the city. It appeared to be at some 3,000 feet elevation, and perhaps the size of an F-86. The object hovered for about 90 seconds, then rose into the air, silently, at tremendous speed, and disappeared. Censorship was so tight at this time that no report of the sighting ever appeared in the newspapers of the area.
Shortly thereafter, I left Tacoma and moved to Puyallup, a small town about 12 miles away. Sevdy and I kept up our work but the wraps were down pretty tight and for a year and a half we turned up very little information.
Then in the Spring of 1952, sightings in the area began again, "Meteors" and "fireballs" were seen over Seattle, and I moved back into Tacoma.
Sevdy and I, now joined by a third investigator, Ivars M. Skuja, a Latvian student, set to work in earnest. There was apparently a systematic attempt by certain anonymous groups in the area to discredit saucers in toto.
Among those reported in the local press: a Margret Harman, of Yakima, who got front page notice when she came to Tacoma carrying a large, deflated balloon labeled "genuine grade AA flying saucers" ... and a W.B. Monroe, who found a "saucer" in his front yard which he described as "a rubber balloon about four feet in diameter covered with a sheet of paper and heavy metal foil ... pointed at the top and reinforced with struts like those of a kite." In this case, it is very interesting to note that there had been a large number of sightings in the days preceding Monroe's "balloon", and officials at McChord Air Force Base said: "the objects were undoubtedly balloons of one sort or another."
Again and again throughout 1952, although hampered by a newspaper strike and unofficial censorship in other communication media, we encountered sighting after sighting. "Flying saucers" were seen and reported to newspapers by such people as Fire Chief Harold Fisk; Frank Evans, director of Civil Defense; Maj. N.A. Vosburg, director of Intelligence at McChord Air Base (who commented: "this is the height of the meteor season" and who declined to say whether or not two air force jets had been dispatched to chase an UFO); Max Bice, of radio station KTNT; Detective Geo. P. Johnson; Special Officer H. C. Toy of the U.S. Cushman Indian Hospital; and a lady who reported seeing a "snake of fire" in the sky.
McChord Air Force Base used every means at their control to discourage this rash of reports. Vosburg admitted that over 200 saucer reports had been received at the offices of the 25th Air Division in July, 1952, but disclaimed them all, saying that they were ALL meteor sightings. U.S. Meteorologists guardedly mentioned "inversions".
All through this period, silvery disks raced overhead, mysterious explosions shook the city and broke windows, and oddly-colored lights flashed through the night, but the Air Force remained adamant: "No Flying Saucers!"
In the early autumn of the year, while on my way to a conference with Sevdy, I heard the roar of a jet in the morning sky. I looked up to see a silvery disk, with a triangular dark section in its trailing edge, flash by at approximately 600 m.p.h.; close behind, and apparently gaining, was an Air Force pursuit plane. I watched the chase for about four seconds as they crossed my range of vision from left to right across the horizon at a height of approximately 5500 feet. When the jet put on an added burst of speed trying to close in on the object, the saucer flashed upward into the sky and disappeared. The jet cruised around for about ten minutes, and then sped back toward McChord Air Base.
Sevdy's family owned a 4-story building in the city, and a rented a 3d floor apartment. Together, Sevdy, Skuja, and I ran a sort of boiler-room operation, listening to the radio all night long, checking the newspapers, corresponding with other saucer investigators, and making dozens of phone calls to people whose names appeared in saucer stories in the local papers, checking the facts given in the printed reports.
Shortly after this phase of our operation was begun, we discovered that the building was under surveillance 24 hours a day. Strange automobiles parked outside during both night and day, and their drivers never left the cars. When one car would leave, another would pull up in to take up the watch.
Inasmuch as these people did not interfere with our operations, we took no action.
Late at night, the Sevdy family (on the 1st floor) began to be disturbed by strangers prowling around the grounds, and fussing at the windows. In one event, Sevdy, Skuja, myself and some visiting friends chased one of these individuals under a house, and trailed him on hands and knees with a flashlight. He broke away and we lost him in an alley.
By Spring of 1953, there was another rash of sightings, most of them at night and of "fireballs". Over a period of 60 days or so, our investigation team spent many fruitless nights looking with small telescopes for these objects. On several occasions we DID see glowing objects in the sky. Always, the next day, we were rewarded with seeing reports in the Tacoma Tribune of numerous independent reports of these objects.
During this period, the air force was in feverish activity. Jets and recon aircraft roared through the sky night and day. And there was another funny thing...
The skies were red.
For weeks, the skies were red over Puget Sound. An opalescent glow, tinted reddish-pink, filled the night skies. No one we could find could recall this condition having existed in the area before 1953, and I have not seen it since.
The cause of this phenomenon is still unknown, but in my own opinion (and opinion ONLY, I stress) is that the United States Armed Forces were conducting experiments to determine the mass of Unidentified Flying Objects by spreading a reddish gas over the area in order to check on any trails left by these objects.
One evening we discovered a very interesting story in the Tribune. It concerned a strange substance which had been spread on the streets in Tacoma. It was whitish, almost invisible; but when stepped on, it exploded with a loud noise.
In following days, a young junior high school student was arrested by Tacoma Police Department for coating the sidewalks with this substance. It gave the local papers a field day.
According to the boy, he had been playing near a desolate swamp known in the area as Hoodlum Lake, and seen a disc-shape silver aircraft drop down to within a few hundred feet of the surface of the swamp. As he watched, trembling, an object was dropped from the craft into the water, and the ship rose soundlessly into the air.
Fishing the object out with a stick, he found it to be a container, of a strange whitish substance, similar in texture to polyethylene, and containing a liquid. Being an amateur scientist, he took the bottle home, and experimenting, discovered its explosive properties. As a joke, he smeared it on the sidewalk.
We investigated, and came to know him quite well. In fact, he aided us in later investigations, although never becoming too active in the group. The police confiscated the bottle and its whereabouts is now unknown. Although the papers gave this incident a humorous treatment, the boy stuck to his story when we questioned him later.
I have not given his name, as he is now a fugitive from justice, along with his brother (who was in no way involved in this), on an unlikely charge made by the federal government.
One night, after making important sightings of bright lights in the sky, the plague of mysterious telephone calls began at our headquarters. It was usually the same line, "We've seen you making observations of our craft. Stop it or you'll be sorry!" Most of the time it was one of two female voices making the anonymous call, and on one occasion, the woman requested me by name to come on the phone. Sevdy called me down from the third floor, and the voice warned me to stop my investigations, or my life would be in danger.
For various reasons, we decided to disband, in the main, our "boiler-room", and spread out over the city. Our general headquarters were to be in the Sevdy family building, with Skuja monitoring radio broadcasts from his own home, and with me handling our files and correspondence five miles away in the suburb of South Tacoma.
It was now late in 1953.
In South Tacoma, I met Frank. That was the only name he ever gave me, and for reasons to be made clear, I didn't inquire further.
Frank was a wiry little man in his mid-'30s. He had formerly been an air force officer, but I didn't know what he was doing for a living at the time he contacted me.
More than anything else, Frank was scared.
He came to the South Tacoma house at about 8:00 p.m. on a very windy, stormy night. He said my mother had mentioned my interest in saucers in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. I invited him in.
Frank visited me on several occasions, always at night. He disappeared between the visits once for a period of several months, returning sporting a full beard. He confided that he had gone back into the Idaho Hills, and was hiding out there. We drove back to his brother's home, where he picked up a suitcase of clothes, and then he left again for Idaho. I never saw him again.
He had reason to be afraid. There is very little of what he confided to me that I can reveal. Most of it isn't corroborable, and much of it could make things uncomfortable for me if I were to reveal it.
Among other things, Frank had been on hand the night that the Maury Island fragments had been "loaded" aboard the B-25 at McChord Field. According to his information, the AF had received mysterious warnings before the flight of what would happen, and he swore that the fragments HAD NOT BEEN ABOARD THAT PLANE. He was unable to say what had been done with them, but he had seen them the day before the flight and described them as looking like the kind of slag that was to be found near the Montana Copper Smelters where he had once worked.
On one visit, he had seen my collection of science-fiction magazines and confided to me that he had read them thoroughly back in the '40's when the "Shaver mystery" was current. We discussed SM at some length, and he guardedly told me he believed that Shaver was correct and that he (Frank) was certain that there were several underground entrances in the Tacoma area, including one in the sub-basement of one of the city's most important buildings.
During my tenure at the South Tacoma house, I was a witness to a spectacular "UFO" display. A strange reddish light appeared in the night sky over the area, hovered there for several minutes, and then exploded with a tremendous noise, rattling windows for blocks around. I discovered the facts behind this UFO hoax in 1956 by sheer accident. I was at a radio ham gab-fest, and one of the hams confided that he had perpetrated the entire incident with an army surplus balloon, a red safety-light, and several sticks of dynamite.
My mother had volunteered from time to time for secretarial duties in our organization, and had been present at a number of our conferences. She had also talked on several occasions with the mysterious "Frank". Her contribution was negligible, but her interest in outré phenomena was very strong.
She was certainly not an angel, being (among other things) an alcoholic, and my family ties were never too strong. She had (over a period of years) been arrested for drunkenness on several occasions, so I wasn't too surprised, when, in February, 1954, her fifth marriage broke up, and she was arrested one night for disorderly conduct.
What was a shock was that she died that night in her jail cell under extremely peculiar circumstances. The Tacoma police told me the next day that they weren't sure what had happened to her, but that she had been confined with three other women, all of whom were too scared to tell what had happened.
The official verdict was that she had strangled herself.
I was unemployed and staying with an aunt. Once again I received telephone communication from the same mysterious individuals. I was warned that I and my associates would get the same as my mother if we didn't drop our investigations then and there.
With a hasty goodbye to my friends late one night, I packed my bag and accepted a ride to California.
Late in 1954, when I felt things might have cooled off, I left Santa Cruz and returned to Tacoma. After a discussion with Sevdy and Skuja, we all decided to close our investigations and destroy our records, and we turned to other pursuits.
Since that time, I've kept my nose clean of UFOs. Nevertheless, applications for Civil Service jobs have been refused or indefinitely postponed, and the afore-mentioned security clearance trouble with the Air Force has arisen.
I'm beginning to think it may be time to reopen our boiler-room. Somebody's covering up!
Ray Palmer’s Response to Eldon K. Everett’s Article:
WE PICK UP MR. EVERETT’S GAUNTLET:
First, let us say that Mr. Everett is not unknown to us: for many years we have known of him as a science fiction fan, and a member of what is popularly known as “fandom”, largely because of what they termed the “smearing of science fiction’s reputation” by the inclusion of the now famous Shaver Mystery. As part of the campaign against the Mystery, “fandom” conducted a boycott; requested your editor’s dismissal in personal visits to Mr. William B. Ziff, my then employer; wrote vitriolic articles in their fan magazines; began a barrage of hoaxes designed to gain publication, then to be exposed as hoaxes so as to cast doubt on the legitimate phases of the Shaver Mystery; circulated reports that your editor was insane, had been found in his basement clutching a magnet in one hand, piece of coal in the other and screaming wildly that the deros were after him; criticized every story in the magazines as trash (no matter how good) in order to get me relieved of my editorship; and many other things hardly of a gentlemanly or honest nature. Some of them, in fact, came under the heading of despicable. Thus, it is entirely possible that this present article by Mr. Everett is a clever hoax, an outright falsehood.
In spite of that, we are inclined to consider it legitimate, but our acceptance of it is somewhat reserved. In the event that it is false, we wish to stress that it contains an enormous amount of truth, and some of it we are puzzled to account for, because it would have been extremely difficult for Mr. Everett to secure it, and impossible to imagine.
All right, then. The Puget Sound story, the Maury Island incident, was true. It involved, as investigation progressed, a series of deaths. The box of fragments loaded into the command car, with the personal help of Kenneth Arnold, were NOT placed aboard the B-25 by Davidson and Brown, but were abandoned as worthless, because that’s exactly what they were.
They were nothing but slag from the Tacoma Smelter, and Kenneth Arnold KNEW it when felt of them in the dark. They were NOT like the actual fragments of the saucer, all of which were confiscated, except fragments in your editor’s possession. Later, most of these fragments, planted by your editor in a file where an intelligence officer was given the chance to observe them, were promptly stolen that same night, proving their importance.
Velma Brown, the wife of one of the men killed in this plane, has never been directly informed by the Air Force that her husband's death was entirely explained, and she herself suspects hat it was not an accident.
It is certainly true that Brown and Davidson suddenly learned the truth, that they were involved in something being investigated by higher authorities than they were, and were ordered to "get out" and forget the whole thing.
It is also true that Brown and Davidson had ample time to escape from their plane, while only one motor was on fire. Yet they chose to ride the plane for eleven minutes to their deaths. Why? Most logically, because it was an extremely valuable plane. No one will ever know.
It is true that the boat shown Arnold and Smith was NOT a harbor patrol boat, but an unseaworthy tub, and that the damage to it and the repairs were faked (by Crisman?) The idea was to convince Arnold and Smith that the boat story was untrue, and the damage could not possibly have been caused as claimed. The REAL boat was not seen by Arnold and Smith. Yes, there is a hoax in the Maury Island incident, and it is Mr. Crisman’s hoax. Even the Air Force, in its Project Bluebook report labeled the Maury Island incident as a hoax, and it is positively true that the whole incident was first reported by Mr. Crisman.
Mr. Crisman was not pioneering, however, in his hoax. He had, several years before, claimed an encounter with Shaver’s deros in a Burma cave, and claimed a “hole the size of a dime burned in my arm by a ray”. He further warned your editor “for God’s sake, drop the whole thing. You don’t know what you are getting into!”
Later, he phoned from a south-western state using another name, and asked for $500.00 to buy camera equipment with which to descend into yet another cave and bring back “positive photographic proof of the mech in Shaver’s stories, too huge to be moved.”
This Maury Island story cannot be extricated from its involvement with the Shaver Mystery. They are one and the same.
The saucers do not come from outer space and Maury Island proves it.
The actual saucer fragments, and the Tacoma slag, were analyzed by the same agencies. One was found to be slag, the other cannot be explained by any metallurgist. Like the pure tin found in South America, it does not exist naturally on the Earth, nor can it be duplicated. The mystery ingredient is calcium; its purpose is for protection against radioactive material; it is an absolute necessity at heights of 600 miles or more.
Lastly, Mr. Everett, why not tell everything “Frank” told you? If you aren’t hoaxing us in this article, you can prove it by telling us. If you wish it to be in confidence, we guarantee it. We will only tell our readers that you have proved yourself, which should be enough. We have no desire to place you in a position of terror – and there was terror on Maury Island.
A hypnotic terror that almost brought death to Kenneth Arnold himself, even though your editor “called the shot” over the phone the previous night! When a man can predict a plane accident, his is not just “shooting in the dark”. He knows something!
If you know it, how about backing yourself up? Why are you afraid to tell everything you know? A man is killed only to seal his lips. Once the story is out, he’s safe. Why take a chance, especially since you’ve dropped enough hints to make you a target, if Shaver is right!
Incidentally, we’ve received a letter, after all these years, from Fred Crisman. All we have to say is: “Come on, Fred, is that the best you can do?”
And Mr. Everett, your suspicion that “someone’s covering up” is the understatement of the year! How about you?
Flying Saucers, August 1960, letter from Brian Murphy
Mr. Palmer:
I have just finished reviewing one of your back issues, Dec. 1958 to be exact. In it is an interesting story about Mr. Edward Ruppelt and his book "The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects." From what I gather, you choose a book (factual) to pick on, make up your own quotes on it, weave them into a convincing story against a REAL seeker of the truth, and them blow them out with a lot of other hot air in your magazine (?)
I used to be a sort of fan of yours. I believed that you through your magazine were bringing out facts which would wake up Americans as to what was actually happening around them. But brother, let me tell you my ideas of your altruism have sure changed. I can only deduct two possible reasons for your actions. 1). You’re out to make a fast buck along and in the same boat with the Hollywood slander type magazines; or 2). You are trying to escape reality; if the saucers are not there, you will put them there, so what, it will forward the illusions of Ray Palmer. You are always talking about the truth; how can you possibly deny what you yourself write and lie about? If Ruppelt is a liar (which I doubt) you are by far the 15th power of his deception.
Now I will return to what I was originally saying. I saw these quotes and thought for the fun of it I would see if they were in my book. Not one was! My book was published in 1956 in the U.S.A. by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. I received it through the Science Fiction Book Club. This of course leads to three possibilities: 1) The little men in dark suits are at work. 2) You’re a liar. 3) I’m a liar. You would no doubt prefer the latter or the first one. Probably the third, however, because it would be more believable to the gullible readers of your magazine. In the first place, number one appeals to me for its mystery, and who can say what is what? The second however is more believable to me since little men in dark suits would be arrested by big men in dark suits known by some unmentionable strata of society as the “Feds,” if they tampered with mail in the leather bag of the pony express.
Just one more grievance before I close. Pioneer V is now about 4,000,000 miles out and is still read “loud and clear.” It didn’t divide into atoms yet, did it, Ray?
Brian Murphy,
65 Franklin Street,
Lewiston, Maine.
Ray Palmer’s response:
If you get your book from the Science Fiction Book Club, maybe it is actually a fiction book – because it sure isn’t like mine! Every quote that I made is in the book, and a little researching will reveal them to you! When Ruppelt talks of me (and when he refers to the Chicago publisher – or editor – he is talking about me) who should know better than I whether he lies or not! I say he lies. Positively and completely lies. Since he wasn’t actually on the scene, and did not interview any of the people who were, maybe his “lie” is simply ignorance, or he has been lied to! One thing is certain – the statements made about my activities and Ken Arnold’s activities, and everybody else concerned at Tacoma, are just not true. I insist that they are not. I KNOW they are not. This Maury Island affair happened to ME. I sent Ken Arnold there to find out the truth. I have a complete report on Soundscriber records sent to me by Ken.
I talked to Dahl and Crisman and Captain Smith over the phone that fatal night. I KNOW what each man said--and it disagrees 100% with what Ruppelt says SECOND HAND in his book. He got his information from Wright Patterson files to which he either had access or was furnished. If he THINKS he told the truth in his book HE was lied to! The point is, I’ve taken it upon myself to defend myself, and it doesn’t help when people like you up and decide with no evidence whatever that I’m a liar – especially when you claim to have a book which MUST be different from the one I have, or else you did not do more than SCAN it for the quotes which are undeniably there!
Did you know Ruppelt’s book has now been reissued, in many different countries simultaneously in many translations, as well as in this country, in NEW AND REVISED EDITION which entirely reverses his conclusions in the original book? Why was this done? Not to make money, because this is one publisher who KNOWS that the project CANNOT be a financial success. It is an insane project, business-wise, and therefore must be some sort of a project, and I believe I can safely say it is a BRAINWASHING type of project designed to further bury the honest investigator (I venture to mention myself first in line here, so make what you will of that bit of ego!) under a landslide of publicity that reaches everywhere, whereas our little magazine reaches hardly anywhere, and then thousands of copies mysteriously disappear!
You don’t know that 5000 copies of the February issue went aboard a truck, apparently, and have yet to come off it! You don’t know that the whole shipment to Oakland, California (750 copies) was neither delivered to the distributor (who himself cannot now be located – and we tried, because he owes us over a thousand dollars!) nor returned to us, in spite of the fact that each parcel carries a request for return if undeliverable, and guarantees return postage! Lots of little things, like this, and each one costs us money we can ill afford. It doesn’t take much to break a little guy like me, and end the publication of FLYING SAUCERS. Except for one thing – we have ANOTHER JOB which supports us, and when FLYING SAUCERS goes broke, as it does periodically, we merely “lend” it more money (which we know we’ll never get back!).