In this blog I wanted to relate some history that you newer people may not be aware of, especially about the fictitious story of people living inside the earth. It was strictly out of Ray Palmer's imagination as he alludes to in the article.
Several different persons are alluded to in the case of the Maury Island UFOs. (I used to live on this island - Aileen) One of them named Harold Dahl was my previous husband's cousin. It was a mystery to the family that he totally disappeared. That was many years ago so I do not know if he ever turned up again. There are some significant investigators that have followed this case for years. So here we go, this is what Ray Palmer has to say:
Kenneth Arnold
Today, of course, it would be rather difficult to claim that the UFO is Ray Palmer's private property, and is strictly out of his imagination. But all the same, it might be a good idea to set newcomers straight about the actual history of the flying saucers, beginning in 1943.
It all began with Richard Shaver and his stories of people living inside the earth. As science fiction, this was a winner. It increased the circulation of Amazing Stories 50,000 over night, and held it there for 4 years. But few people realized that very early in this "mystery," a number of things occurred which convinced the editor of Amazing Stories (your present editor - Ray Palmer) that there was something besides fiction in the manuscripts and letters written by this Pennsylvania welder who heard voices. One of those things, to stay strictly on our present subject, was flying saucers. If Shaver was telling the truth, obviously flying saucers would have to be observed by somebody, sooner or later. So we carefully documented things for ourselves by publishing everything about them, and making a sort of "prediction" that they would appear. When Kenneth Arnold reported them, it was like having the papal "imprimature" stamped on our magazine.
Approximately a month later, the first important thing happened. A man named Crisman reported that flying saucers had actually appeared over Maury Island, near Tacoma, Washington, and that there were, on the beach, tons of fragments from one of them which had been in trouble. He even sent a cigar-box full of the fragments. An analysis of the fragments brought out one fact that your editor was not about to ignore - the element calcium which would not burn off at high temperatures, present in what otherwise seemed to be ordinary slag. So, we wondered who to send to investigate whom we could be reasonably sure would know what he was looking for; that man was Kenneth Arnold.
We wrote him and asked him if he would go to Maury Island and check Crisman's story. He wired us and said if we would send him $500 he would fly up there. We sent him the $500. As Ken put it later (and this was our first contact with him, notwithstanding Air Force hints to the contrary), since we had been the only ones to put our money where our mouth was, he agreed to give his story to us, and not to all the other publishers who were trying to get it from him.
In Ken's book "The Coming of the Saucers," which we have just reprinted in paper-back form, he describes the incredible adventure that happened to him and to Captain Smith of United Airlines. It was on August 1, 1947 that Arnold, Crisman, Dahl, Smith called your editor in the middle of the night to say they were pulling out, because they were frightened, and had called in Military Intelligence (Davidson and Brown). When Ken told your editor that these two men had loaded the fragments in their B-25 Bomber to fly them back to Hamilton Air force Base for examination, a few things clicked into place in our mind. We found we were too late to prevent Brown and Davidson from taking off, but we did insist that Ken leave his plane in Tacoma, and take the train back. He wanted to know why, and we said it was too dangerous. He laughed at us. But two hours later, he called again to tell us that Davidson and Bron were dead. He wasn't laughing this time.
But Ken is no chicken. He did fly back home. But he didn't make it, just as we predicted. He has never forgotten the take-off crash, and how it happened.
It is this factor of pre-knowledge that at first got people to believing that the UFO must be a Palmer fake. But when the pre-knowledge began to include such things as death for two men, a crashed plane that could not have been an accident, and a nineteen-year prediction that nobody would ever catch a flying saucer, or be able to back up a sighting with proof, and that no existing military aircraft or weapon could ever catch one or shoot one down, then it becomes more than a "fake" - it becomes something so "far out" that there is only one recourse; bury the whole thing under the rug. It is a peculiarity of the 'authority', when he can't explain a thing, he denies that it exists.
That is the official position today. (1966) UFOs "exist", but they are not flying saucers - just unidentified objects (all of which could be identified as natural and unterrifying things, if sufficient information were available to track them down). "There is no evidence that flying saucers (UFO) are interplanetary vehicles, and they do not constitute a menace to national security." You know the stock statement as well as we do. And we couldn't agree more!
(Snip)
Thus it is that when members of the Air Force, such as Davidson and Brown, and many others since then, encounter a far different sort of mystery, they become confused and bewildered. We can imagine the thoughts of Brown and Davidson as they rode their flaming B-25 into the side of a mountain, knowing they had "no way out." Your editor can't back up that statement, of course, without being climbed all over by the military people, but we can say that on that same plane there were two "hitch-hikers." On military craft, military personnel can hitch rides if the plane is going their way. These two riders were present, and then the plane caught fire, they were given parachutes (or maybe they already had them on, we can't be sure of this), and told by the two intelligence men to jump. Their account lets this editor know that Davidson and Brown had plenty of time to save themselves, but they did not. This also confused the Sheriff at Kelso, Washington, who watched the crash. We suppose he is still wondering why Davidson and Brown didn't jump, because he knows they had time
Ken Arnold wonders how your editor was able to predict that the fragments that Arnold himself could testify were placed in the plane, were not found in the wreck, and he knew too that they were searched for in the most intense sifting of an area ever carried out by a search team.
It was very important to somebody that those fragments never get to Hamilton Air Force Base, whose men had no business in this affair in the first place, and were in it only because of Ken Arnold's unpredtable decision to call them in.
Your editor can't prove a thing. But he agrees with Ruppelt - this was one of the cruelest hoaxes of all time. It was designed to "kill" the flying saucers invented by Ray Palmer for all time. There never were five "saucers" over Maury Island. They did not leave tons of fragments on the beach. No harbor patrol boat was damaged by those falling fragments. No dog was killed aboard that patrol boat. No person suffered an arm injury from the fragments (from something else, yes) that necessitated hospital treatment. In short, the Maury Island incident was not an incident at all. The fragments later produced DID come from the slag piles of the Tacoma smelter!
It may seem strange to hear Ray Palmer say that one of the most famous of all saucer sightings never occurred. But if you read Ken's book, thinking about what it says in the light of what we know now, you will agree with him. The whole book reads like an Alfred Hitchcock terror story, replete with mysterious men in black in black sedans, haunted houses where spider-webs appear like magic to give the lie to your previous night visit to real people who lived there 12 hours ago, but cannot be found in the light of day, and the very rooms in which you sat, having coffee, are dusty, unfurnished, decked with webs that could not have taken less than weeks to accumulate. Yet, every word in it is true!
Not two, but seven men have died, who were involved in the Maury Island incident. All these deaths have been mysterious. What happened to Dahl, the man who piloted that "non-existent" patrol boat? Where is Crisman, the man who first reports Shaver's Dero are real, because he was in a Burma cave where they wounded him with a ray, then turns up as the master-mind in charge of a flying saucer fake?
Flying saucers are that ORIGINAL cigar-box full of fragments sent to your editor by Crisman, They are NOT the fragments from the Tacoma smelter. Flying saucers ARE the things seen on radar. They are NOT the things seen over Giant Rock. Flying saucers ARE the things that cause the disappearance of military aircraft over Lake Superior. They are NOT the Virgina "monster" that leaves a foul smell to terrify the local hill-folk. Flying saucers ARE the thousands of reports by reputable people, such as airline pilots, traffic officers, scientists, governors, and people usually regarded as possessing integrity. They are NOT swamp gas.
But one thing is sure; they are NOT identifiable to date, but we want to be around when they are! The unfailing efforts to discredit them that have been undertaken by so many official sources are a prod that keeps conviction alive.
We are now engaged in a new discovery era on this planet - the exploration of space. We are also engaged in a new search on this earth, the search for the REAL earth - because we have discovered we know very little at all bout the nature of the world we live on; and from the depths of the oceans to the moon itself, we are learning there is more to it than we suspected, it took the flying saucers to prove it to us. They've got to hide somewhere, and it has to be somewhere other than interplanetary space.
"There is no evidence that we are being visited by interplanetary vehicles...." (Says who!)
And that is what Ray Palmer had to say about the Maury Island Incident.
Try to find Kenneth Arnold's book, "The Coming of the Saucers" and it will fill in what Ray Palmer has alluded to.
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