Maury Island’s UFO: 60 years later

Roswell, once just a military base in the New Mexican desert, is known today as the site of the United States' most high-profile and controversial UFO sighting and crash. But few Islanders know that Maury Island was home to the first alleged UFO sighting in U.S. history, and it took place weeks before two crafts fell from the sky in Roswell. Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the Maury Island Incident, as it was later dubbed in books and newspaper articles. It took place in June 1947, two years after World War II ended. The nation was abuzz with paranoia and suspicion, and it was in this atmosphere that first one, then two, then hundreds of Americans reported seeing strange, unidentifiable, usually saucer-shaped, objects whizzing through the sky. These were the incidents that triggered UFO hysteria, which gripped the nation for decades and spawned countless movies and books. But it all started with one close encounter. One X file. It all started with Maury Island. "I consider (the Maury Island Incident) the most complex mystery in Washington," said Charlette LeFevre, co-director of the Seattle Museum of the Mysteries, the state's only paranormal science museum.

"It wasn't as well promoted as Roswell, but it was the beginning of modern UFOlogy." While no one can say for sure what happened that afternoon in the Puget Sound, after cobbling together the various eyewitness, secondary, government and media accounts, a story with a life of its own emerges: At 2 p.m. on June 21, 1947, Tacoma seaman Harold Dahl was trolling the waters just east of Maury Island, looking for loose logs, which he collected and sold for profit. "As I looked up from the wheel on my boat I noticed six very large donut-shaped aircraft," Dahl later told one of the investigators of the incident. "I would judge they were about 2,000 feet above the water and almost directly overhead." He said the ships were 100 feet in diameter, had no "visible signs of propulsion" and made no noise.