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6/22/07  #422
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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.

One craft wobbled and dipped to about 500 feet, he told investigators. It then spewed what Dahl described as thin sheets of white metal and several tons of hot lava-like rocks or slag. As the slag rained down on Dahl, his son and his dog, it punched holes in the vessel, burned Dahl’s son on the arm and killed the family dog.

Another of the six saucers seemed to come to the assistance of the ship in distress, “jump-starting” it, according to Dahl. Then the crafts took off. Dahl gathered samples of the rocks and the white metal and went home for the night, shaken.

The next morning he had what modern UFOlogists refer to as the first encounter with a “Man in Black” — an ominous individual who warned Dahl his family would be in danger if he went public with his story, according to Kenn Thomas, who wrote the book “Maury Island UFO.” Although Dahl had not yet told anyone about his UFO sighting, the man in black knew many details of the incident, he later reported. Dahl said he suspected the man was a government official.

Later that day, Dahl told his supervisor Fred Crisman about his UFO sighting. Crisman, dubious, visited Maury and collected his own samples of the slag. He then contacted Ray Palmer, an adventure magazine publisher, to see if Dahl’s story was fodder for his magazine.

The next day, three days after Dahl’s sighting, UFOs went from obscurity to front-page news. On June 24, 1947, U.S. Forest Service employee and pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine “saucer-like” objects flying in formation at speeds of up to 1,200 miles per hour near Mount Rainier. Arnold contacted the press immediately, and the tale spread like wildfire. Soon, U.S. media were saturated with reports of Americans spotting UFOs, almost always saucer-shaped. “Flying saucer” became a household term.

Because Arnold had the eye of a highly trained pilot, his story became big news. Dahl’s story, however, remained obscure until Arnold was dispatched by Palmer to investigate just what it was Dahl saw off the shores of Maury.

Arnold flew to Tacoma in July 1947 and rented a room in the Winthrop Hotel, where, according to FBI reports, Arnold met with Dahl, decided the sighting was authentic and called two U.S. intelligence officers to tell them the news. The men, Capt. William Davidson and Lt. Frank Brown, became the first two Army officers to investigate UFOs, Arnold said in a book he later wrote.

After Arnold phoned Davidson and Brown on July 31, 1947, they flew to Tacoma within an hour, gathering in Arnold’s hotel room where they pored over the details of the incident and collected samples of the slag and white metal, according to Arnold.

The officers’ plane was due back the following morning for inaugural Air Force Day ceremonies, marking the separation of the Air Force from the Army. So, although it was after midnight, they returned to their plane, allegedly carrying UFO slag and metal, and headed for Hamilton Air Force Base in California. Twenty minutes into the flight, their engine caught fire, igniting the left wing. The two crew members aboard the plane with Davidson and Brown parachuted to safety. But neither intelligence officer jumped nor radioed distress, according to news reports. Instead, both died when their B-25 plane crashed near Kelso, Wash.

“Why didn’t they call in to land?” LeFevre said. “It was like they made up their minds they were going to go down with the plane.”

The military promptly sealed off the crash site and cleaned up the rubble from the U.S. Air Force’s first accident. But they left some of it behind.

Only a few locals knew the location of the crash, and none investigated it fully, LeFevre said. But in April 2007, now-owner of the site Bob Greear visited it, accompanied by LeFevre and Philip Lipson, co-directors of the Seattle Museum for the Mysteries.

The three retrieved a blackened, lava-like rock from the site, which now sits in their museum, as well as mangled pieces of the B-25 that went down that night.

Bill Beaty, a research engineer at the University of Washington and a member of the museum’s board, analyzed the rock and found that it was “almost certainly an Earth rock.” But more analysis should be done before writing the specimen off, he said.

After the fatal accident, the government staunchly denied any classified material had been on board the B-25.

But the media knew the names and mission of the deceased officers before the military released them. An anonymous caller contacted various Washington dailies on July 31 through Aug. 3, 1947. The caller gave such intimate details of the conversations that took place in Arnold’s hotel room that Arnold thought the room was bugged. The identity of the caller remains unknown.

While newspapers differed on details, they were in agreement on one thing — the government wasn’t telling the whole truth.

The U.S. military cited Dahl and Crisman’s signed confession that the Maury Island Incident was a hoax. But upon government questioning, the two said they had only sworn their story was a fabrication to protect their families.

It wasn’t until 1979 that the government declassified the FBI files admitting Davidson and Brown had been investigating the Maury Island flying discs at the time of their deaths.

“It didn’t start with Roswell. It started here in the Pacific Northwest,” LeFevre said of UFOlogy. “People should be aware of that.”

Source: Vashon Beachcomber
http://www.vashonbeachcomber.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=
90&cat=23&id=1009159&more=0

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Among armchair sailors, Gunnar Thompson is a master mariner. He has navigated oceans and continents, east to west, pole to pole and back again — most of it without leaving his small home near the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Thompson's vessel is a historical time machine, guided by ancient maps and journals, and powered by a fertile imagination and an obsession with early exploration. And his mission is to sink what he considers the greatest myth in history: that Columbus discovered America.

"I'm proving that Columbus was not the first," he says. "Everybody beat Columbus."

Over the course of his 30-year journey, Thompson has written five books, all self-published, detailing what he believes to be conclusive evidence that, long before 1492, the Americas were explored repeatedly — by the ancient Chinese, Venetians, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Irish, English and who-knows-who-else.

He argues, for example, that a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, commanding a fleet of Chinese junks in the early 1400s, explored the coasts of the Americas. He believes that Marco Polo sailed with the Chinese into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and perhaps into Puget Sound in the 13th century. He is convinced that Sir Francis Drake sailed these waters some 300 years later. And he has copies of maps that he believes prove each claim.

Give him a chance, and he'll fill a room with his hand-copied or photocopied evidence — ancient Chinese maps that he believes depict Puget Sound and the Columbia River, Roman maps that show the Florida peninsula, ancient Chinese and European coins and other artifacts, and similarities between art motifs produced in Asia and among the ancient Aztecs and Incas.

Now he's compiled much of what he's learned into a 265-page, thoroughly illustrated volume called "Secret Voyages," or "True Adventure Stories from the Forbidden Chronicles of American Discovery," self-published last year by Misty Isles Press, Seattle.

"This book represents the culmination of nearly 30 years of research," he says, lifting his hefty volume.

But most of the time, Thompson sails single-handed. Established historians dismiss his theories. Google his name, and you'll find pages of criticism from academics, many of whom seem outraged by his heresy.

"They seem to be very angry," Thompson says. "They don't like people questioning these things. But history is too important to be left to historians."

Thompson is an affable 60-year-old bachelor with a mop of dark brown hair over a round, Nordic face. He lives in a small "shed" he rents from a friend in a housing cooperative in uptown Port Townsend.

He attributes his skeptical nature to his parents. His father was an engineer and artist, his mother a nurse who crusaded for the polio vaccine before it was widely accepted. "They were troublemakers who taught me the value of truth," he says.

When he was a youth living in suburban Chicago, Thompson's family took cross-country car trips, stopping along the way at museums and Native American sites, where Thompson developed an early interest in art, history and anthropology.

At the University of Illinois, he asked more than his share of questions and learned to write "from an artistic standpoint." He went on to graduate school in anthropology, where he became fascinated by archaeology and by striking similarities between art forms from ancient China and the Americas.

"I was experimenting with other cultures and religions, and this didn't go over too well," he recalls.

Thompson moved on, and in time he grew accustomed to academics who did not welcome his maverick ideas. He taught anthropology but lost his job when he refused to conduct an exam that conflicted with an anti-war protest.

Eventually, he earned a Ph.D. in "rehabilitation counseling" and set out looking for a job. He taught at colleges from Wisconsin to Hawaii and the University of Washington, but he never earned crucial tenure. He kept moving, always keeping one hand in ancient art and maps, until he took a job in mental-health services in Port Townsend — "my last real job."

Since then, he's been devoted full time to his global quest, launching a Web site while writing and illustrating his books on ancient exploration.

Three years ago, Thompson finally found an intellectual ally in Gavin Menzies, a former British naval officer who has written his own controversial book, called "1421," (Penguin, 2004) about the pre-Columbian voyages of Zheng He. They spent three days in a Seattle motel room studying each other's maps and exchanging ideas. Menzies eventually wrote a glowing introduction to Thompson's new book.

Together, they've made some impact. They've given talks at the Library of Congress and at a couple of conferences. There have been stories in The Economist news magazine and on British television, focusing on a recently discovered Chinese map that Menzies and Thompson believe proves Chinese knowledge of the Americas long before Columbus.

But a little publicity only doubles the criticism. Historians argue that Thompson and Menzies essentially started with their conclusion and searched the globe for fragments of evidence to support it. "Given only one data point, you can draw any line you want to," one critic argues.

The theory that Marco Polo sailed these waters is a bit too far out for John Findlay, history chair at the University of Washington and an authority on Northwest history. But Findlay admits he is "intrigued" by the theory, shared by a few amateur historians in Canada and England, that Sir Francis Drake sailed into Northwest waters in 1579. "There's a strong desire for it to be true, and it's difficult, if not impossible, to disprove," he says.

State historian David Nicandri isn't familiar with Thompson's work, but he remains open-minded. History is laced with gaps and unanswered questions that are fair game for researchers willing to test new theories, he says.

Nicandri cites the example of J. Harlen Bretz, the upstart geologist who in the 1920s theorized that much of the Eastern Washington landscape had been carved in a few days by a monumental ice-age flood. "He was derided by the establishment," Nicandri says. "But now he and his theory are accepted as a story of courageous perseverance against the dominant thinking of his day."

That describes perfectly how Thompson feels about his own work. "I'm reminded of the bumper sticker I see around Port Townsend," he says. "Don't believe anything until it's been officially denied."

The history establishment is hopelessly handicapped, he says, by its insistence on written documentation. Such records of ancient voyages either don't exist, or haven't been found, because they were systematically suppressed, censored or destroyed by ancient rulers intent on secrecy.

"For me, the real breakthrough came when I began to understand the importance of secrecy in early exploration," he says. "Why would Marco Polo lie about what he'd seen in the Americas? Because he worked for a maritime government [Venice] with a huge incentive to keep that information proprietary."

If journals were suppressed, maps tended to survive, passed along from one ship captain to the next, but always preserving the crucial information, he says.

That's the gist of "Secret Voyages." In each case, from the ancient Chinese to Drake, Thompson attempts to explain why and how the details were kept secret.

But the controversy continues, he says. "Academic historians hate Gavin Menzies and his book," Thompson says. "When he spoke at the Library of Congress, they tried to prevent it. I can't name a single historian who accepts our evidence — except in China."

Challenging historical orthodoxy isn't easy. Literary agents won't look at his books. Publishers won't stick their necks out.

But these days, the Internet provides troublemakers a chance to bypass the establishment and confront conventional wisdom. So, whatever the historians think, Thompson's theories are out there, bouncing around the Web.

None of this pays Thompson's rent. His savings are almost gone, and soon he'll be back on the streets, looking for a job to support his obsession.

But he won't quit.

"I'm a reluctant detective," he says. "I'm an artist by nature, not a historian. But when an artist gets an inspiration, you have this need to express it."

Source: The Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document_
id=2003752118&zsection_id=2002111777&slug=thompson18&date=20070618

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Conspiracy Journal - Issue 422 6/22/07
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