Fred Crisman
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 👤 Person
Contents 5
| Type | Person |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Fred Lee Crisman, Fred Crissman, Crisman |
Fred Lee Crisman (22 July 1919 – 10 December 1975) was an American wartime pilot and teacher from Tacoma, Washington, best known for his part in the 1947 Maury Island incident, an early flying-saucer story that he and Harold Dahl admitted to the FBI was false. His name is sometimes spelled Crissman. He later became a figure in Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.[1][2]
Early life and war service
Crisman was born in 1919 and grew up partly in Vale, Oregon, where he graduated from high school in 1939. He enlisted in the Army in May 1942, trained as a pilot, and was awarded the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He left the service as a first lieutenant in February 1946.[1] After the war he was active in veterans' affairs in Washington State.[1]
The Shaver letters
In June 1946 the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, edited by Ray Palmer, printed an unsigned letter from Crisman. He claimed that during the war he and a companion had fought their way out of a cave in the Karakoram mountains, battling hidden beings of the kind described in Richard Shaver's "Shaver mystery" stories. Harper's Magazine quoted the letter in September 1946 as an example of a crackpot letter.[1] Amazing Stories printed a second, signed letter from him in May 1947.[1]
Maury Island
In 1947 Crisman and Harold Dahl, two Tacoma timber salvagers, reported that on 21 June six doughnut-shaped craft had appeared near Maury Island in Puget Sound. They said one dropped debris onto Dahl's boat, killing his dog and injuring his son.[1][2] After Kenneth Arnold's sighting made national news, Crisman offered fragments of the supposed craft to Palmer. Palmer hired Arnold to investigate.[2] Two Army officers who took away a box of the "evidence" were killed when their B-25 crashed on 1 August 1947 on the way to California. The Army found that the crash was caused by an engine fire.[2] Questioned by the FBI, Dahl and Crisman admitted they had made up the story, and the debris turned out to be scrap and rock from the beach.[2] Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt also called the affair a hoax.[1]
Crisman later insisted that it had not been a hoax. In a 1950 letter to Fate magazine he asked why, if he and Dahl had caused the deaths of two airmen, the government had not prosecuted them.[1] He spoke about the case at a UFO convention in Seattle in 1967.[1]
Later life
After the war Crisman studied at Willamette University and worked for years as a teacher and school administrator in Oregon and Washington. In 1966 he was dismissed from a teaching post for insubordination and for creating a secret society among students.[1] In the late 1960s he hosted a talk show on the Tacoma radio station KAYE under the name "Jon Gold". The station's broadcasts became the subject of Federal Communications Commission hearings in 1970.[1]
In 1968 New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison subpoenaed Crisman during his prosecution of Clay Shaw over the assassination of President Kennedy, and claimed he was an undercover operative.[1] Conspiracy writers later claimed that Crisman was one of the "three tramps" photographed in Dallas. In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that he resembled one of them but concluded that he had not been in Dealey Plaza that day.[1] He died in 1975. A 2022 animated comedy, Fred Crisman: Cave of the Space Nazis, was based on his tales.[1]
References
This page was last edited on 31 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
No discussion yet.