Alternate Perceptions Magazine, June 2025
Another look at Maury Island
By Brent Raynes
It’s a controversial, well-known story. The Air Force long ago dismissed it as a mere hoax. But was there more to it? A number of ufologists have suspected there was more to it. But what exactly? The incident reportedly began on June 21, 1947, around 2 p.m. A boat owner named Harold Dahl, along with two crew members, were in the waters of Puget Sound off the coast of Tacoma, Washington, busying themselves with the job of recovering resaleable logs for money along the shore around Maury Island, when suddenly they observed six silent metallic doughnut shaped craft, approximately 30 meters in diameter, in the sky above. One of the craft appeared to be having mechanical issues, making a wobbling motion, while the other five craft surrounded it. Each of the craft had a circular “hole” in the middle an estimated 25 feet in diameter and what resembled roundish portholes 5-6 feet in diameter surrounding the exterior of the craft. The central craft descended and then stopped about 500 feet above the bay, while the other five remained an estimated 200 feet above it. Then after about five minutes one of the other craft reportedly broke ranks and moved down close to the seemingly troubled one. Dahl was quoted “as if it were giving some kind of assistance for about 3 or 4 minutes.” Next there was a dull thud sound and an enormous quantity of thin, white, newspaper like metal material began falling out from the middle of the craft, mostly floating down into the water. Then a black substance started falling out, coming down on Dahl and crew. causing steam to rise from the water, killing a dog onboard, and injuring and burning one arm of Dahl’s 15-year-old son Charles. Dahl estimated that as much as maybe 20 tons of material had fallen out of the craft. The boat had sustained some damage to the enclosed area on the deck housing the steering wheel.
Afterwards Dahl notified his friend and co-worker Fred Lee Crisman about what had happened. Crisman allegedly was skeptical initially, suspecting that Dahl and his men had been drinking. Later, on June 23, Crisman visited the site on Maury Island and claimed that he observed for himself a single doughnut shaped craft with portholes and circular area in the middle circling the sky above the bay. Eventually it rose up into the center of a thunder cloud, where it was lost from his sight. He also confirmed that there was an estimated 20 tons of white and black material present.
The next morning, in downtown Tacoma, Dahl claimed that a black suited man in a new 1947 black Buick sedan pulled into the parking lot of a small café Dahl apparently frequented. The stranger suggested Dahl join him for breakfast. He accepted, thinking the man was simply someone looking to buy salvage lumber. However, their conversation soon took a very strange and disturbing turn, an encounter that would become one of ufology’s earlier so-called Man in Black encounters. The stranger had something else on his mind. He described in detail what had happened the day before, the shape of the craft, their maneuvers, and the debris that rained down upon them, and he warned in a not so veiled way about the continued happiness and future well-being of his family and business. “I did think it was rather fantastic how this gentleman happened to know what I had seen,” Dahl would later share with Kenneth Arnold, “and I was quite sure that he hadn’t talked to any of my crew, and I know he hadn’t talked to me before. In fact, I had never seen him before.”
Another odd thing that was reported, Dahl’s son Charles disappeared soon afterwards. He didn’t show up for breakfast one morning. Dahl reported his son missing to the local sheriff’s office who tracked the young man down in another state working bussing tables at a restaurant, saying he had no idea how he had gotten there or even why he had left home. It seemed he was suffering from some form of amnesia. However, the reason for it apparently was not determined.
Shanelle Arnold, the granddaughter of UFO legend Kenneth Arnold, whose sighting of nine UFOs near Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, and who is credited with starting the modern “flying saucer era,” put me in touch with Charlette LeFevre who works at the Northwest Museum of Legends and Lore, who also authored “The Maury Island UFO Incident: The Story Behind the Air Force’s first military plane crash” ,and who gave Shanelle a small and unusual rock that some thought might be related to the Maury Island case. LeFevre sent me an email address for one Elmer “Skip” Frombach, the gentleman who provided her with the rock, and of course I wasted no time in reaching out to him to learn more. And indeed, I did!
Soon, after my contact with Skip, I began to suspect that maybe Maury Island and its neighbor Vashon Island might potentially be what John Keel used to call a “window” area, a region where odd unexplained things happen. Skip and his father, back in the summer of 1971, saw a UFO that hovered over his father’s house for an estimated ten minutes before it shot off to the east over Puget Sound “in a split second,” and then returned, performing various maneuvers, before vanishing mysteriously – in something that he could only describe as a “dimensional portal.”
“When overhead it looked like the ying yang symbol. Red/Orange orbiting Commas. When it moved from overhead it turned brilliant white and moved instantaneously. As if a flashlight was moved in the sky. Our house was 8 miles from the mainland, and it traversed that distance in the blink of an eye. It made this zig zag movement about 4 times before it went between two radio towers about a mile and a half to the South of our house. As it did a purple Corona came out from the two towers. I assume that was the natural transmitted RF from the radio station. However, the ship opened a rectangular portal in the sky. You could see the darkness of space when it opened. The long dimension of the rectangle being up and down. The portal then closed on itself. Like doors being shut from the sides and normal sky was all that remained. This all happened in seconds. “You asked about luminosity. That is really hard to describe. The craft was brilliant white, but it didn’t radiate that light. The light was part of it somehow. When I looked at it with binoculars it appeared like it was made up of a million small points of light moving over the surface of the craft. Corporeal light over a solid object. It was astonishing because it didn’t radiate off like normal light. At one point it was right over our flagpole but still there was minimal light on the ground from the craft. I estimate the craft was at least 30 feet across. Maybe more. When I first saw it over the house it was about the size of a dime at arm’s length. When I swung my telescope up to look at it is when it began to move quite slowly. About the speed you would expect of a Satellite. That was when I got my Dad to take a look at it. We watched it for quite a while.” Interestingly, Skip’s father’s brothers were friends with Harold Dahl. Skip’s uncle Terry even said Dahl was a nice man. “He had lots of respect for him.” Terry’s son, Dick Frombach in fact, had an extraordinary UFO experience himself that, as Skip began explaining it to me, sounded familiar. Turned out, I had read of the case many years earlier. It was a very memorable story obviously.
This intriguing episode had also happened on Vashon Island back on February 18, 1968. Dick Frombach and two of his friends, Boone Powers and Chris Beachner, all between 18 and 19 years of age then, drove into a gravel pit roughly one mile east of the town of Vashon sometime between midnight and 1 a.m. It was there that they observed a glowing object resting on a hill nearby. The young men described it as oval or crescent shaped, with a kind of shiny type glow, or reflected light. A pale bluish white was the best that they could come to describing it.
The young men left for town in search of additional witnesses where they found one Joseph Frabush willing to join them. Frombach, however, decided not to return. This time Powers parked the car on the main road and the young men walked into the pit area. The object had changed to another nearby location but was still present. Frabush described it as lens shaped and about the size of a compact station wagon, made of shiny metal. Like the others, he also had some difficulty describing the quality of the light. Like the others it seemed like it was reflected light but there was no visible light source in the area to account for creating such a reflection.
Now here’s the really strange aspect of this case. There was a pond in the gravel pit that was reportedly about 100 feet across which was completely frozen over. At 2:00 a.m. Sheriff Don Holke was notified of this situation and went to the site to investigate things. He was reportedly startled to discover that indeed the pond was frozen over. The temperature was above freezing. In fact, it had been that way for several days prior. There had been heavy rain there for a couple of weeks. There was no other ice to be found in the area.
An investigation found small puddles near the pond which should have been frozen first but had no ice. The mud was not frozen either. The ice was about three inches thick in spots and was riddled with many bubbles containing air and dirt.
“It’s difficult to speculate on whether the Frombach boys knew Fred Crisman,” Skip explained. “It is possible. You would have to know the close-knit nature of this Island in those years of the 30s/40s. It was a very small community, and they helped each other a lot. Crisman was a log collector for the timber companies so I’m sure he met lots of folks who frequented the piers or lived on the beach. Most of those people were pretty friendly because they had to make a habit of going on private beaches to pull off logs. They were even active here in the 60’s but we knew them as the ‘Log Patrol.’”
Back around the summer of 1968-69, Skip, his father, and family friend Tom Nedderman, the Vashon Postmaster back then, took a camping trip over to Maury Island, to the area where Dahl and Crisman’s famous UFO incident had reportedly occurred, which was also near Skip’s grandfather’s farm. “I found a piece of slag up in the notch of a Madrone tree,” he explained. “It was black, like lava, on one side but kind of a reddish-brown purple on the other and looked melted.”
“The slag was in several trees. This was the only one I could reach easily as Madrone bark is fairly slippery. I think it was unusual that we found those slag pieces in the trees. The slag was similar to that which made up the Assarco refinery slag pile at Pt. Defiance (about 10 miles away to the SE) but why would it be wedged in the trees like that? No one would go to that much trouble.”
Skip told me there was a Gravel Mine on Maury Island. “My Grandfather was the caretaker and that is why his farm was so close. It actually adjoined the mine to the north. The kids used to play on the Pembroke large loading dock. Owners used to let them fish from it back in those days. The area got the name ‘Pembroke’ from the mine. A name coined by the local kids.”
“Maury Island and Vashon Island are basically one island now. They are connected by a land bridge between them. Vashon is 14 miles long and 7 miles wide and is in Puget Sound. Maury Island is kind of boot shaped. The Dahl case happened on Maury. My sighting and Dick Frombach’s happened on Vashon. Dick’s was more near the center of the island and mine on the Northeast end of Vashon about 2 miles North of Dilworth point on the beach.” “There are many other stories as well,” Skip added. “The Nike Zeus missile base was scrambled when high speed UFOs were detected. The base was on the mid-south section of Vashon in the 1960’s. It was vacated in about 1979 and turned over to the town of Vashon. It served as a hospital/clinic after that.”
Skip acknowledged that he even had a Bigfoot encounter that was featured on TV’s Unsolved Mysteries. “Seems like weird stuff follows me,” he quipped. Here’s a link to a You Tube segment where he recounted that experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGsEqrJ_pOA
Here’s a link to the Unsolved Mysteries episode featuring Skip (Season 6, Episode 23):
Hopefully there will be more to report in the next issue. References:
Thomas, Kenn. Maury Island UFO: The Crisman Conspiracy. 1999. IllumiNet Press.
https://nwlegendsmuseum.com/MauryIsland.html
