By Steve Erdmann
There's a man who leads a life of danger To everyone he meets he stays a stranger With every move he makes another chance he takes Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow
Secret agent man, secret agent man They've given you a number and taken away your name
Beware of pretty faces that you find A pretty face can hide an evil mind Ah, be careful what you say Or you'll give yourself away Odds are you won't live to see tomorrow
Secret agent man, secret agent man They've given you a number and taken away your name
Lyrics from "Secret Agent Man" written by P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri.
In the book, JFK & UFO Military-Industrial Conspiracy and Cover-up from Maury Island to Dallas,Kenn Thomas concentrates on the UFO connection with shadowy figures going back to the June 21, 1947 sighting of six large doughnut-shaped aircraft and the dumping of fragments into the Puget Sound near Tacoma, Washington.
MAN IN BLACK SUIT
“The story of the Maury Island case resides in that nexus of Para politics and popular culture,” says Thomas. “…the case itself comes and goes in the popular memory. The release of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK in 1991, for instance, reminded many of the national brouhaha first brought on by Jim Garrison’s 1968 investigation of John Kennedy’s murder and taught many others about it for the first time. Stone’s movie carefully noted that Garrison believe the man he wound up prosecuting, New Orleans business man Clay Shaw, represented only a toehold on a much larger conspiracy.”
Aside from the six UFOs sighted, the Maury Island case also encompassed mysterious witnesses. Harold Dahl, Dahl’s son, Charles, a pet dog, two unidentified crew men (abroad a harbor boat calledThe North Queen), and a further far-right-wing politician named Bernard Ramey Leroy, who saw, from another location that day, an estimated twenty tons of UFO debris being deposited over the bay by the aircraft.
Later, Dahl’s “superior,” Fred Lee Crisman, became intimately involved: “Crisman indeed did see what he estimated to be about twenty tons of the bizarre white and black material Dahl claimed had spewed from the UFOs,” says Thomas. “As he looked it over, he got to see much more. One of the doughnut-shaped craft appeared and circled in the sky above the bay. It rose up and entered the center of a thundercloud. Crisman saw the portholes, the inner tube like structure and the spinning observation window. It appeared gold and silver to him, with intense reflected light as Dahl described, but it had no ‘squashed’ effect.” (Page 23.)
A day later, Dahl was approached by a man in a black suit, driving a 1947 black sedan Buick. The man took Dahl to breakfast where he revealed quite a bit about Dahl, as well as making veiled threats about Dahl’s well-being. “I did think it was rather fantastic how this gentleman happened to know what I had seen,” said Dahl.
KENNETH ARNOLD JOINS THE UFO CHASE
Shortly after his own famous sighting of nine delta-shaped UFOs on June 24, 1947[1], Kenneth Arnold, at the behest of publisher Raymond A. Palmer, was encouraged to investigate the claims of Crisman and Dahl. Arnold’s venture into the Maury Island UFOs was soon ballooned into multiple bizarre incidents.
Captain William Lee Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank Mercer Brown of the Fourth Air Force A-2 Intelligence had been dispatched by General Carl “Ptooey” Spaatz, and soon joined the train of investigators. Spaatz was “an air force commander concerned about the July 4thwave of sightings” and he provided the officers with a B-25 airplane. Davidson and Brown interviewed Arnold at dinner at the Hotel Owyhee, after which Arnold returned home.
Crisman and Ray Palmer had a prior connection through the tales of Richard Sharpe Shaver who told of “a diminutive race of beings” called “deros” (contraction of the words ‘detrimental’ and ‘robots’) who originally came from outer space to organize life on earth, but became victims of Sun and other solar radiation “attracted” into their advanced machinery, causing perpetual zombies of the Elder Race[2]. The tale became a complex series of articles in Palmer’s Amazing Stories Magazinein the 1940s heralded by enthusiastic fans as true history.
One of those fans was Fred Crisman. Palmer had published two of Crisman’s letters in Amazing Storiestelling of his own encounters with “dero” in underground caverns in Myana Mar southeast of India, and Kashmir, near Jammu and Tibet. A second encounter was in Alaska, where Crisman claimed a companion named “Dick” lost his life.