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You can see Northwest Newsradio’s Ryan Harris’ interview with Steve Edmiston on the first “MIB” appearance in the video below:
A few weeks before the alleged UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, and a few days before a Washington businessman reported a sighting, a father and son from Tacoma had a UFO sighting of their own. That was followed shortly thereafter by the first known meeting with one of the infamous “Men In Black”.
It was June 21st, 1947 when Harold Dahl and his son, Charles, took their boat out on Puget Sound, where they reportedly saw a group of six flying discs, shaped like donuts, that they didn’t understand.
Entertainment lawyer, Steve Edmiston, who’s studied this incident for years, including government reports he saw after a Freedom of Information Act request, says one of the discs was lower than the others and was giving off some kind of smoke and debris before it exploded and all six disappeared. After that, he says Dahl claims some sort of molten metal rained down on them, and the Dahls decided they were frightened and didn’t understand what they saw, so they wouldn’t talk about. Edmiston says that’s not the end of the story.
Edmiston says the next morning 76 years ago, on June 22nd, Harold Dahl got a knock on his door from a mysterious man, “and surprise, surprise, the man is dressed in black. He’s got the black suit, and the black tie, and the white shirt, and the black shoes and the fedora. He’s arrived in a 1947 black Buick. This is all information that we gleaned from FBI records.”
Edmiston tells Northwest Newsradio the “man in black” told Dahl he knows what happened and they should go somewhere to talk, so they meet at a Tacoma diner. “In the diner,” Edmiston says, “this man in black recounts to Harold everything that happened to Harold the day before. And then he did what we now know men in black do. He issued the warning. ‘You shouldn’t talk about anything that you saw on the water yesterday. If you do, there are consequences. Bad things will happen, not just to you but to your family, your business. Don’t talk about it.’”
Edmiston says Harold Dahl’s friend, Fred Crisman, was the one who pushed Dahl to talk about it – even telling the story to a science fiction pulp magazine, Amazing Stories – but before that, he says a couple of U.S. Army Intelligence officers brought Dahl, Crisman and Kenneth Arnold to a hotel to interrogate them.
Arnold is the businessman and pilot who, a few days after the Dahl’s 1947 report, says he was flying his plane to Yakima when he saw a small fleet of ‘saucer-shaped’ vehicles near Mount Rainier and travelling at incredible speeds. It was Arnold’s account as told by a reporter for The Oregonian newspaper that coined the term “flying saucer.”
Meanwhile, as promised, Edmiston says bad things started happening to Harold Dahl, so he decided he wanted to make it stop and started telling the press it was a hoax and that he made up the story. Edmiston says former FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, was deeply involved with many of these UFO cases and got direct reports from field agents, including one looking at the Dahl report. Edmiston says he read reports of the communications, which show Hoover wanted to close the case because it was a hoax, but the agent told Hoover that Dahl never actually denied nor recanted his story. He only fed the hoax story to reporters to get people off his back. Edmiston believes the Maury Island incident has gotten a lot less attention than Roswell or even Kenneth Arnold’s sighting because it was dismissed as a hoax and because the government allowed us to believe that for 50 years.
Edmiston points out that this was at the very beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, so it’s believed the government’s concern was not about ‘little green men’ but that the Soviets might be using new technology to fly over the U.S.
As for the slag taken by Army Intelligence, Edmiston says it was taken on a plane that crashed shortly after it left McChord Field, with the crash site sealed by the military until the samples were recovered.
Edmiston says there’s limited information on possible testing, and that it might have been considered “unexplainable” or that it was something from the Asarco smelter, but he says the truth about what some believe is extraterrestrial material remains a mystery.
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