Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a two-part series on the Chehalis Flying Saucer Party. Find the previous article here.
Skeptics and diehard believers alike were in downtown Chehalis last weekend for the 2024 Chehalis Flying Saucer Party, a now annual event started in 2019 to commemorate Kenneth Arnold’s historic UFO sighting that helped coin the phrase “flying saucer.”
The event featured multiple events and speakers discussing paranormal encounters, including not only Arnold’s sighting, but one Arnold helped investigate in the Puget Sound — Harold Dahl’s alleged Maury Island UFO sighting and subsequent encounter with the Men in Black.
After his own sighting, Arnold was hired by the magazine Amazing Stories to investigate and write about other saucer sightings.
On June 24, 1947, Arnold, from Chehalis, was flying to Yakima and over Mineral near Mount Rainier when he witnessed nine metallic objects flying in an echelon formation stretching nearly 5 miles flying past Rainier toward Mount Adams.
He timed the objects as they flew between the stratovolcanoes to estimate their speed and guessed it to be around 1,500 mph, nearly twice the speed of sound, which had yet to be broken by known aircraft.
Arnold spent the rest of his life trying to discover what he saw in the skies that day. Whatever he saw came to be known as “flying saucers” after an East Oregonian article used the words “saucer-like aircraft” to describe them the day after Arnold’s sighting.
However, if Chehalis Flying Saucer Party speaker Steve Edmiston is correct, Arnold’s sighting wasn’t actually the first in what would come to be known as the “Summer of the Saucers” — due to the thousands of reported sightings made that summer.
Three days before June 24, Dahl reportedly saw six circular craft with hollow centers in the Puget Sound near Maury Island.
Dahl was in a boat with his son, two hired helpers and the family dog, when one of the craft appeared to become unstable and began spewing out what was described as hot metal slag, some of which hit the boat. They were forced to beach the boat on Maury Island and sought shelter under the bluffs on shore.
The following day, Dahl was threatened by a man in a black suit who told him to keep silent about what he saw. Dahl later claimed the story was a hoax.
However, was it really a hoax, or did Dahl purposely choose to discredit himself out of fear of both the Men in Black’s threat and public perception of his own sanity? This is the question posed by Edmiston.
Connie Willis, host of the variety radio talk show Coast to Coast, also spoke during the event at McFiler’s Chehalis Theater and shared personal paranormal encounters along with her thoughts on UFO disclosure, the theme of this year’s Chehalis Flying Saucer Party.
Is the Maury Island Incident really a hoax?
Dahl’s June 21, 1947, encounter at Maury Island is believed to be a hoax simply because he said it was, even among diehard believers.
Edmiston is suggesting the hoax claim may have been false thanks to a declassified FBI report on both Dahl’s encounter and the crash of a B-25 that was personally overseen by the FBI’s founder and first executive director, J. Edgar Hoover.
“I love that Chuck (Hall) had a graph he called the spectrum of belief. I invented the spectrum of disbelief for this talk,” Edmiston said. “The notion is, at one end of the spectrum when someone has a story and confesses it’s a hoax, it’s gone. It goes right under the rock and nobody kicks it over again because the person who said they saw it says it's a hoax.”
The other end of the spectrum is the mainstream scientific consensus, in which a hoax is confirmed as a hoax with analysis and evidence.
Edmiston is a lawyer and documentary filmmaker. While he does not consider himself a professional historian, he’s a self-described microhistorian.
He took up interest in the Maury Island Incident after moving to Des Moines just east of Maury Island and hearing Dahl’s story while at a local coffee shop, and in 2014 produced a documentary on the event titled “The Maury Island Incident.”
“All the great stories in the Northwest seem to start at coffee shops,” Edmiston added.
It’s in a report written by FBI special agent Jack Wilcox, Edmiston believes evidence exists that could disprove Dahl’s hoax claim. Being a lawyer by trade, he laid out his case to those in attendance.
When a hoax is hoaxed
While Dahl’s admission to making up the story is detailed in the military’s official report on the Maury Island Incident, Wilcox conducted the FBI’s investigation, which included looking at a U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 crash near Kelso on Aug. 1, 1947.
“(The FBI) had jurisdiction over a peacetime crash of a military aircraft. In that investigation, it is revealed many times that Dahl in fact never confessed to a hoax,” Edmiston said. “Instead, after the crash, Dahl decided to create the idea that he made it up, because he would rather be a liar than someone being ridiculed for being crazy for seeing a UFO.”
This B-25 was reportedly carrying top secret cargo: metal slag samples from the Maury Island Incident. The FBI’s founder and first executive director J. Edgar Hoover was personally getting updates from Wilcox as to what was happening.
Edmiston added Hoover even clashed with top Army officials as to who would investigate cases such as this over the “Summer of the Saucers.”
As for what Dahl, his son and the two workers were doing in the Puget Sound on June 21, they were hired by the Port of Tacoma to collect logs that had fallen off barges being towed to local lumber mills.
After the one object descended toward the boat, appeared to become unstable and dumped metal slag onto his boat, Dahl’s son was allegedly burned and the dog was also killed.
U.S. Army Air Corps investigators interviewed Dahl and reportedly collected metal samples from the boat. Arnold also assisted them in the investigation while working for Amazing Stories magazine.
The Army investigators then boarded the B-25 bound for California, with the samples sealed top secret in the plane’s navigator kit, but crashed around 40 minutes after taking off near Kelso.
Even before the crash happened, Wilcox detailed how Dahl was already considering claiming the story was a hoax.
“He’s reported as saying, ‘The story’s not false, I saw what I saw, but I’ve had enough trouble,’” Edmiston said.
The trouble began the morning after his sighting when Dahl was allegedly visited by the Men in Black. A man in a black suit, without introducing himself or identifying who he worked for, showed up on his doorstep and invited Dahl to a Tacoma diner to discuss the incident.
There, he informed Dahl he had seen what had happened to him and his boat near Maury Island and threatened Dahl if he talked about it.
“Harold did talk freely, and bad things began to happen,” Edmiston said. “His business was vandalized. His wife became suddenly, inexplicably and without diagnosis, very ill. His son allegedly disappeared for two weeks and was found in a bar in Wyoming with no memory of how he got there.”
The B-25 crash only worried Dahl more, and Edmiston obtained the military’s own official crash investigation report through a public records request where he learned immediately after the crash the Army sealed off the crash site and sent an intelligence officer to recover the navigator’s kit.
“We do not know what happened with that material in the navigator’s kit. We only know it was taken from the site by an intelligence officer,” Edmiston said. “A day after the crash, Dahl, I’m sure despondent that this has happened, he tells Ken Arnold, in very conditional language, if contacted by the Army he’s going to say the entire story was a hoax.”
In Wilcox’s final message to Hoover on Aug. 27 when the investigation was finally closed, he repeated Dahl was purposely lying about the hoax claim.
With the now thousands of UFO reports coming in, including many which were unexplainable, Hoover was happy to instead go along with Dahl’s hoax claim and sealed Wilcox’s report as top secret, according to Edmiston.
Despite Dahl claiming the Maury Island Incident was a hoax, Edmiston told the audience that the incident could actually be both the first alleged UFO sighting during the 1947 “Summer of the Saucers” and the first alleged encounter with the mysterious Men in Black.
Even with the hoax claim, Arnold still included the Maury Island Incident in his 1952 book “The Coming of the Saucers.” With Wilcox’s report sealed for 50 years, the hoax claim had plenty of time to solidify in the historical narrative.
Proposing a new historical narrative
Now, Edmiston is seeking to educate the UFO community about Wilcox’s report. With both Dahl’s and Arnold’s sightings, Edmiston considers Washington to be “ground zero” for modern UFO sightings and the Men in Black.
This hasn’t stopped others from claiming they were the first to encounter the Men in Black following Dahl’s hoax claim. Most notably was Albert Bender, who in 1953 said he was approached by three Men in Black who visited him while living in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
A year prior to the Men in Black’s visit, Bender had formed the first major civilian UFO club called the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Its goal was to try to make peaceful contact with UFOs.
Allegedly, the Men in Black visited Bender in his home where they telepathically shared insights and details about UFOs which Bender had drafted for IFSB literature but hadn’t shown to anyone yet, then warned him it wasn’t a good idea to publish.
Bender then reportedly had frequent headaches and didn’t eat for three days. His coworkers claimed he seemed scared and he disbanded the IFSB shortly after.
His story was published in Gray Barker’s 1956 book “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers” and subsequently in Bender’s own 1962 book “Flying Saucers and the Three Men.” Many believe Bender’s encounter with the Men in Black is the first one reported.
“We know what the timeline is, and that can’t be right,” Edmiston said.
He added Bender, in his own book, admitted to having read Arnold’s book “The Coming of the Saucers,” which included Dahl’s reported Men in Black encounter.
This hasn’t stopped Bridgeport from claiming to be the birthplace of the Men in Black, a title that Edmiston believes belongs to Maury Island as he believes Wilcox’s report proves Dahl was lying about hoaxing the story.
For years now, he’s helped organize the Men in Black Birthday Bash festival along with Burning Saucer in Des Moines, which both commemorate Dahl and the Maury Island Incident.
A debate challenge to Roswell
Additionally, Edmiston, along with the organizers Chehalis Flying Saucer Party, have formed the United Festivals of UFOs, or UFO-UFO, which has officially challenged the Roswell UFO Festival to a debate next year to discuss which region is the true birthplace of UFOs.
The debate will be held in the fall of 2025 at the Truth or Consequences Brewing Company in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico — a small city about 150 miles west of Roswell. More details will be released soon.
Edmiston also said a debate challenge will be coming for Bridgeport soon too.
Larry the Lightman and possible Bigfoot and Alien contact
The Chehalis Flying Saucer Party’s final speaker was Connie Willis, host of the variety radio talk show Coast to Coast along with other paranormal podcasts.
While having interviewed countless people who have claimed to have encountered paranormal phenomena including UFOs and Bigfoot, she’s also an investigator and has had her own personal encounters while living in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
She’s also one who believes there may be a connection between Bigfoot and UFOs, a theory that has been bouncing around among UFOlogists for years now.
One of the strangest things she’s seen though isn’t a Bigfoot or a UFO. She was out camping with another investigator who was also a police officer when they encountered what they called “Larry the Light Man.”
While in their camper, they set up solar lights and lanterns to observe during the night. Five lights were spread across a dirt road with only forest on either side.
Suddenly, a mysterious red beam of light, looking to be about 4 feet tall, manifested next to the lights on the road, then disappeared after about 10 seconds.
Willis happened to be live-streaming when it occurred and could only see the light anomaly on her camera.
“I did not see it when I just took my camera away from my eyes and looked through the window. We tried to see if it was a lens flare or something, nothing like that,” Willis said.
She, along with those watching the live stream, theorized the anomaly could’ve been an alien or time traveler simply “checking out the lights.”
“We didn’t think they were Bigfoot related but maybe this is Bigfoot related … Are the Bigfoot ET? I don’t know, they seem to be around when there’s UFO activity too,” Willis added.
She believes she’s captured evidence of a Bigfoot-UFO connection, as during another Bigfoot camping investigation she felt multiple presences outside of her camper.
“I recognized something pushed this window, like they wanted to touch it, and then they reached around to this one,” Willis said.
Later on in the night, she felt something else that messed with the window enough to physically affect her.
“My impression was either a big limb or a big hand went across this window, and I felt it vibrate through my head,” said Willis.
The following morning, Willis and her fellow investigator examined the outside of their trailer. They found what looked like “scratches” in the dust on the trailer that went across all the windows and all around it.
“It was like something went around and sized it up,” Willis added.
Edmiston and Willis were also joined by Charlton “Chuck” Hall, who discussed famous hoaxes including one he and his friends were involved in as teenagers during the 1970s, and retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Kevin Day who talked about his time aboard the USS Princeton in 2004 as a radar operator when Navy pilots encountered the now famous “Tic Tac” shaped objects during a training exercise off the California Coast.
To read The Chronicle’s coverage of Hall’s and Day’s discussions, visit https://bit.ly/3B9tCGq.
