Status: Explained — widely regarded as a hoax, including by many UFO researchers.
Credit: James B. Settles (1948) · Licence: Public domain (per Wikimedia Commons) · Source
On June 21, 1947, harbor patrolman Harold Dahl said he was on a patrol boat in Puget Sound when he saw six large doughnut-shaped aircraft over Maury Island. According to Dahl, one of them shed lava-like rock and thin white metal that fell on his boat, hurt a crewman and killed a dog. His associate, Fred Crisman, said he later collected debris and saw a craft himself.
The story reached Kenneth Arnold, whose Mount Rainier sighting had made headlines days earlier. At the request of the editor of Amazing Stories, Arnold went to Tacoma in late July and interviewed both men. He and airline captain E. J. Smith judged the “white metal” Crisman showed them to be ordinary material. Two Army Air Forces intelligence officers then collected fragments and interviewed the men, and died in a B-25 crash near Kelso, Washington, on August 1, 1947.
Project Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt later called the whole affair a hoax, and that remains the mainstream view, even among many UFO believers. The case is still part of Pacific Northwest UFO lore, and Des Moines, Washington marks the anniversary with local events.
Sources: Wikipedia: Maury Island incident
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