Presenter, Steve Edmiston, remarks “If you’re interested in local history, then you must know about the Maury Island Incident. A UFO flying over Puget Sound.” The story goes like this:
On June 21st, 1947, a Tacoma man named Harold Dahl brought his son, two workers, and the family dog aboard his vessel to salvage logs from the waters of Puget Sound. The North Queen and her passengers traveled three miles north until they reached the shores of Maury Island—right across the water from Edmiston’s community. There, Dahl alleged that six flying discs appeared overhead. One seemed to be malfunctioning, flying lower than its companions, eventually spewing molten material down on the boat. The dog was so badly burned that it died, and Dahl’s son’s arm was singed to the point where he was taken to the hospital.
The morning after—June 22nd, 1947—a man dressed in a black suit knocked on Dahl’s door. He brought Dahl to a diner in Tacoma, where Dahl enumerated, detail by detail, the events of the day before. The man did what is considered typical of the Men in Black: he issued a warning that Dahl had better not tell anyone about what had happened.
Those two days comprise what has since been labeled The Maury Island Incident, but it was far from an isolated event. It was the same year— 1947—of “The Summer of Saucers.” It saw Ken Arnold’s famous report of nine flying discs near Mt. Rainier—three days after Dahl’s Maury Island sighting, as well as an apparent UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, that was reported by the U.S. Army Air Forces two weeks later. In the midst of this extraterrestrial buzz, Harold Dahl and his Maury Island Incident were experiencing inconceivable publicity. Then, he admitted that what he saw was a hoax.
The Maury Island Incident faded into obscurity. It was from this junkyard of history that Edmiston, with a little prompting from his coffee shop informant, picked the story up. As a lawyer, he found that the documented evidence surrounding the incident contradicted how history remembers it—and the implications of this are enormous. Edmiston turned his research into a talk for Humanities Washington, “UFO Northwest: How Washington State Spawned the Men in Black,” which he’s currently giving around the state.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
If Harold Dahl confessed to a hoax, why should we continue to take the incident seriously?
If the guy who says he saw something then says he made it up, well, we’re not going to talk about it anymore.
However, the more records I requested from the federal government, it became clear to me as a lawyer that Harold Dahl only said he made up the Maury Island Incident to make the whole story go away. The FBI agent in charge, a guy named Jack Wilcox, [wrote] this incredible historical record of what he did for about sixteen days in September of 1947. He wrote that Dahl was making up the fact that this was a hoax. The hoax was what was fabricated.
In the FBI documents, Dahl says, “Oh, I stand by what I saw—I saw what I saw—but I’m now going to pretend I’m a liar, because that’s an easier thing for me to live with than ridicule.” I just felt, at that point, it’s a story. It’s such a good story. And what really happened, nobody will know. But the story itself doesn’t deserve to be buried under a rock.
