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Winter 2001/2

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Issue 42

Maury Island UFO: the Crisman Conspiracy
Kenn Thomas
Illuminet Press, Lilburn, GA 30048
USA, 1999, $14.95

www.illuminetpress.com

The Crisman in the book's title is a man called Fred Lee Crisman who is one of only two people who were involved at the beginning of the American UFO saga and who appear in the Kennedy assassination story. The other one is the former FBI agent Guy Bannister, who had a minor role in the Kennedy assassination, running Oswald at one time in some domestic anti-Cuban operations. Fred Lee Crisman has a minor role in the Kennedy assassination investigation and literature - not the same bowl of chile.

Crisman and Bannister were there right at the beginning of the UFO story. The book includes Bannister's drawing of a small disk he claims he saw in 1947. Interested in both UFOs and Kennedy, I find this sort of detail fascinating. If you don't, this book isn't for you. Crisman, Fred Lee, was part of - or the creator of - a strange incident at a place called Maury Island near Seattle in 1947, a UFO sighting before the term UFO had been widely adopted. During this incident, it is claimed, a group of UFO's, shaped like doughnuts, appeared and dropped some tons of metal waste material - 'slag' - some of which landed on a small boat owned by a man called Harold Dahl, allegedly killing Dahl's dog and injuring his son. This, be it noted, took place, if it took place at all, a matter of days before Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting of a group of UFO's which led to the use of the expression 'flying saucers'. (Had the media paid more attention to Maury Island we might have spent the last 50 years discussing flying doughnuts.) So we are talking about the very beginning of the post-war American UFO mystery.

Thomas lays out the bare bones of this in the first 20 pages but includes the following footnote on p. 21:

'Researchers Kalani and Katiuska Hanohano interviewed Charles Dahl [son of Harold. who had allegedly been injured by debris falling from the UFO] for UFO Magazine in 1994 (Vol. 4 no 1). He claimed the Maury Island incident was a hoax perpetrated by "smooth-talking con artist" Fred Crisman.....'

That the incident was a hoax is the view of John Keel. (2) Keel tells a straightforward but interesting tale of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission disposing of waste from a plant processing plutonium by loading it into a plane and dumping it in the sea. (This is the world of nuclear power we know and love.) Something went wrong on one of the dumping trips, according to Keel, and the load was jettisoned prematurely - thus the 'slag' falling on the fishing boat and Maury Island. To cover up this nuclear dumping accident, says Keel, the story of the mysterious 'doughnuts' in the sky over Maury Island was concocted to explain the 'slag' falling from the sky.

Crisman's connection to the Kennedy assassination is his being named, albeit as 'Crismon' not Crisman, as one of the three 'tramps' photographed being marched off Dealey Plaza by armed policemen. This identification appeared first, I think, in one of the more famous anonymous publications produced by the Kennedy assassination, The Torbitt Memorandum.

None of this was terribly clear to begin with and Thomas gleefully muddies the water by chucking into the story some of the information, disinformation and speculation which have accreted to both the Maury Island event and the Crisman/ Crismon/tramps episode. So we get a fair bit about Torbitt, (3) even though to me Torbitt is pretty clearly disinformation.

The Danny Casolaro/Octopus story, in which writer Casolaro dies a mysterious death while uncovering the unified field theory of conspiracies at the heart of the American nightmare, also butts onto this. (4) The link between Casolaro and Maury Island is typical of the coincidence and overlapping circles which are in this book. Casolaro's major source was a man called Michael Riconosciuto who claims to have known Fred Lee Crisman his whole life and to have a hand-written memoir by him. Riconosciuto also states that the Maury Island incident was a hoax concocted by Crisman.

Confused? You might well be. Depending on your point of view Thomas' thickening and reheating of this stew is either a disastrous muddle in which fact, factoid, fantasy and speculation are all given equal status and almost nothing is clear; or - and this is my view - a collection of fragments which, though they do not form a coherent whole, are of considerable Fortean interest.

Notes
2 In his account of it in the book, UFOs 1947-1987, ed. John Spencer and Hilary Evans, London: Fortean Tomes (sic), 1987.

3 Thomas republished Torbitt, with a commentary, as NASA, Nazis and JFK, reviewed in Lobster 32. The fact that Crisman is named in Torbitt suggests to me that Crisman might be the author of it. Who else would bother to put him in there? Torbitt is supposed to have been written by a Texas lawyer named Cope but no one seems to have found him and my assumption is that he is fictitious.

4 Thomas has also written about this in The Octopus, also reviewed in Lobster 32.

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