Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, July 2025
by: Brent Raynes
Maury Island – The book Keel didn’t get to write
Fred Lee Crisman, a man of mystery.
Peter Jordan, an ace Fortean investigator from New Jersey, who through the years has covered everything from UFOs, contactees, MIBs, poltergeists, cattle mutilations, and more, made it a point when in New York City in years past to visit noted UFO author John A. Keel and pick his brain about many of these high strange phenomena that he had delved into. Sometimes they would sit and talk for hours.
“We were talking about Maury Island, and he pointed to like three boxes in his apartment, and he goes, ‘I’ve got books worth on that subject. I talked to everybody. I researched that backwards and forwards. I was more involved in that case than people know.”
In the previous June issue in my two articles on Kenneth Arnold and Maury Island, one Fred Lee Crisman’s involvement in the 1947 Maury Island UFO case was touched upon. An extremely controversial and complex personality, Crisman curiously turned up in other puzzling situations, claiming for example in a letter to Ray Palmer, editor then of Amazing Stories science fiction magazine that in 1946 he fought strange beings in caves in Burma that were using laser weapons, and in 1968 he was identified by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as a person of interest in the John Kennedy assassination, who Garrison implied was potentially a CIA operative, or someone “engaged in undercover activities for a part of the industrial warfare complex.”
Peter explained, “When we talked about Crisman Keel said to me, ‘You know, I think Crisman’s a very dangerous man and one of the reasons I haven’t been that vocal about him is I don’t want to arouse his ire, and neither should you.’”
Peter and I agreed that Maury Island UFO: The Crisman Conspiracy by Kenn Thomas was probably one of the most comprehensive books covering this classic situation. Peter told me how at one time he was in a screen writers’ group and how from time to time he would join a friend who worked at WCTC Radio in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and who did programs on the paranormal, which Peter from time to time would join him. They both eventually became transfixed on Thomas’s book and together wrote like a 180-page manuscript. They sent out copies for consideration to various film makers, had a couple of bites, but ultimately none that led to its production. Most reviewers complained that it didn’t arrive at a satisfactory conclusion, which was because Peter and his co-writer wanted to stick closely to the way the story factually unfolded, which didn’t have the kind of conclusion that usually works in Hollywood. Nonetheless, in spite of the failure in getting someone to produce it, Peter continued on with his interest in the case. Thus, when he noticed Kenneth Arnold and Maury Island described in the previous June issue, Peter insisted that we needed to do a video call. This was a complex and significant area of inquiry and there would be a lot of ground to cover.
After Crisman’s passing (December 10, 1975), Peter notes how Keel became more vocal on the matter and writing more on it. Peter also mentioned how in Garrison’s subpoena of Crisman on October 31, 1968, it was mentioned how his cover was that of a “preacher” and a “person engaged in work to help the gypsies.” In fact, he was said to be a bishop of what was known as the Universal Life Church. “That’s a very typical thing for CIA, or former CIA people to do,” Peter noted. “Like David Ferrie, the guy with the weird hair and all. He also was a part of one of these churches. There’s hundreds of these churches, and very often when the CIA people want to get lost what they do is they become a preacher within a particular church because it’s also non-profit and they can do whatever they have to do and basically nobody touches them.” (1) Crisman had many strangely placed acquaintances, which Garrison found extremely curious, and as Peter pointed out to me Garrison also subpoenaed a Thomas Beckman who Garrison questioned as to why phone records revealed how after he was subpoenaed the first person he phoned was Crisman. Beckman replied, ‘Oh, I just want to talk to him about it,” to which Garrison replied, “Well, that’s really strange. It’s also very strange that Shaw, also when he learned he was being subpoenaed the first person he called was Fred Crisman.”
Garrison believed that Clay Shaw (2) was involved in the Kennedy assassination. “Of course, he just did a little dance and waltz, ‘Oh I don’t recall that, sir.’ Peter said Shaw replied. “But he was very, very nervous.” “Garrison asked this guy (Thomas) Beckman (3), ‘Why are you calling Dr. Frank Stranges out in California? Why were you calling him?’ Stranges was never subpoenaed but his name kept appearing in phone calls that were being made by both Crisman and Beckman. And Beckman says, ‘Well, I’m an entertainer. So, we would do road shows and me and Crisman had an agency.’ Garrison goes, ‘What was your agency about?’ He goes, ‘Well Frank had his own agency called the Association for Parapsychologists and he also had one on UFOs, and we also helped to handle talent.’”
Peter next remarked, “That becomes a whole other thing because as you know when I was involved in the (Howard) Menger affair, I always wondered about Augie Roberts and the birth of Val Thor and this whole thing that sounds like something concocted for some strange reason to create a meme that would be perpetuated forever.”
“I never considered him credible. I often wondered about that church he was running, or what he was really doing behind the scenes. Why was he connected with Crisman and why was he connected with this guy Beckman?” Good question. I wondered about that myself years ago. In fact, I had come upon, in the March 1970 letters to the editor section of Ray Palmer’s Flying Saucers magazine, a long message from one Milton Northdurft of Sioux city, Iowa, describing how “T. Edward Beckman” had helped to organize what was called the “first Midwest UFO Convention” in Omaha, Nebraska in August1967. Milton was invited, he wrote, to participate in the event by Tacoma, Washington resident Wayne Aho, a popular UFO lecturer back then who claimed he had worked in intelligence back during World War II. Aho was to be the master of ceremonies for this event. Crisman himself was supposed to attend but ended up being a no show.
Beckman and Crisman originally scheduled to be at the same UFO conference, I had to find out more, so I wrote to this Milton Northdurft to see what he might be able to share. He wrote back, “I remember that I didn’t seem welcome at that luncheon table in Omaha until Frank Stranges welcomed me, for he had been at my church in Maquoketa, Iowa. Then what could Beckman do but welcome me too? But it was an unusual encounter!”
I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Milton just wasn’t part of their inner circle, or maybe he was interrupting some private conversation. No way to tell for sure, of course, but it seemed like odd behavior to Milton.
Milton kindly sent me an autographed copy of his booklet Take Me To Your Leader (1979), written under the pseudonym of James T. Milton. In the summer of 1947, when he as a young Methodist minister with a wife and a newborn baby, the same week he became the paster of a church in Waterloo, Iowa, “flying saucers” were reported locally that same week. He wrote a skeptical letter to the Des Moines Register but within a short time was introduced to others who presented him with compelling reasons to reconsider his position. He even began investigating some of the local reports, and over time he became very involved and interested in the phenomenon, meeting such people in the UFO field, who were the early shakers and movers, like Kenneth Arnold, Ray Palmer, Richard Shaver, Curtis Fuller, George Adamski, Desmond Leslie, Mark Prophet, Brad Steiger, and others. If you’ve been in the field for a while such names will be quite familiar to you. Milton even wrote me, “I’ve been to Giant Rock. I sponsored several lectures by George Van Tassel in Sioux City, Iowa.”
I should mention how when he visited Kenneth Arnold, the man whose UFO sighting essentially launched the modern “flying saucer era,” at his home in Boise, Idaho in 1949. Arnold was initially suspicious of him due to his previous encounters with, as Milton explained in his book, “so many F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents already (posing as insurance men and other occupations) that he wondered if here was just another one, posing as a Methodist preacher!” As detailed in the previous issue, Arnold had some very strange experiences. Less known is his second UFO encounter on July 29, 1947, at about 5:30 a.m., as he was taking off in his plane. Later that day he was to fly into Tacoma to meet with Crisman and Dahl pertaining to the Maury Island story. But suddenly he caught sight of a dozen or more saucers that were flying in a formation similar to what he had observed on June 24th. Except for the fact that their diameter he estimated this time was no wider than 30 inches! (4)
Milton had explained to me how his UFO studies caused him to drift into metaphysical areas that his former orthodox background and assumptions would never have taken him.
Peter added, “Keel told me that he was able to get confirmation from other people in intelligence I think that were part of what was in those files that he had.”
A newspaperman named Paul Vance visited Maury Island soon afterward in 1947 and saw a high chain-link fence with a sign that stated, “Property of U.S. Government. Keep Out.”
“That’s been confirmed,” Peter told me. “Paul Vance, you may or may not know, died supposedly of a heart attack not long after his involvement in Maury Island. His family sued the government unsuccessfully claiming that this was a kill. They believed that what they were told about how he died couldn’t have happened. They think it was connected to his involvement in this particular affair. So did Keel.”
Keel, in his Anomaly newsletter, wrote up his tentative conclusions: “In 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission’s huge metallurgical plant at Hanford, WA was processing plutonium and creating vast quantities of radioactive waste. Getting rid of this material was already a major problem, and one method was to load it into cargo planes and dump it unceremoniously into various large bodies of water.”
“Apparently a group of cargo planes was heading northwest from Hanford to a dumping ground in the Pacific, when one of the aircraft developed serious trouble. It dumped its ugly cargo into Tacoma harbor and onto Maury Island, and then returned to Hanford. Dahl and his crew were seen from the air and photographed. It was easy for AEC security officers to check with the hospital later and track Dahl down. The Man in Black who visited Dahl was actually an agent for the AEC, intent on covering up what was even then an illegal dumping of dangerous atomic waste.” “Crisman applied to the Atomic Energy Commission for security clearance,” Peter added. “We have a copy Garrison was able to get a copy of. Why would Crisman be applying for security clearance for the AEC? Clearly, he was working on behalf of someone who wanted him to do something to probably cover something else that was going on.” Again, in Keel’s Anomaly feature, he wrote: “In those days, the CIA barely existed as a small group of navy men left over from our WWII spy group, the OSS [Office of Strategic Services]. They were spending much of their time playing cards in a small office in Washington, D.C. However, the AEC had a large, efficient force of well-trained security agents (called ‘DISC,’ the Defense Industrial Security Command – a quasi-military agency originally formed by J. Edgar Hoover to protect Tennessee Valley energy plants operated by Monsanto, Union Carbide, Dupont, etc.). These agents had managed to keep the atomic bomb secret during the war. Now they were caught up in a desperate anti-espionage effort.”
“They had become aware that someone in and around the three ‘atomic’ cities (Oak Ridge, Hanford, and the Savannah River Project in Georgia) was leaking vital secrets to the Soviet Union. Everyone was under suspicion. Hotel rooms in Seattle and Tacoma were wired. Telephones were widely tapped. Strangers to the areas around all three ‘secret cities’ were kept under surveillance.”
“This accounts for Arnold’s strange experience when he arrived in Tacoma. Confidential conversations in his hotel room were immediately passed on to the press by mysterious telephone informants. Why? Because the AEC knew it had committed a ‘no-no,’ and security officials saw the Crisman story of a ‘flying donut’ as a perfect cover for a botched operation. Misdirection and disinformation became the rule of the day. But reporter Paul Lance may have sensed the larger truth as he chased down every lead.”
“This makes so much more sense than anything else I’ve heard about flying donuts,” Peter concluded. “Yeah, we could say it’s that but there’s too much else going on here for this not to be connected. This is probably one of the best things I have ever read on this and I remember when Keel told me some of this I thought, ‘Okay. That’s a possibility.’ But Keel seemed absolutely convinced based on all the additional research that he had done and all the other people he had spoken to.”
Research notes:
1. One Frank Ellsworth once remarked that an organization named the Minute Men was “the right-wing group most likely to have been associated with any effort to assassinate the president.” As it turned out a Rev. Bob LeRoy, founder of the national Minute Men headquartered in Missouri, alleged that his deceased brother Bernard Ramey LeRoy was fishing at Maury Island’s Piner Point back in 1947 when he observed the UFO/Dahl encounter. “On the evening of June 21st, 1947, Barney came by our home very excited telling us about the strange flying disc that let tin foil flakes out onto the bay where he was fishing with others.” I myself ended up receiving publications sharing this information from Rev. LeRoy. In Ken Thomas’s book Maury Island UFO he explains: “LeRoy became the chaplain of the Minute Men and traveled nationally as its speaker. The Warren Commission at one time placed into evidence two exhibits suggesting a link between the assassination and the Minute Men, but later withdrew them. From 1965 to 1968, LeRoy met with members of the FBI and answered questions about possible Minute Men involvement in gun-running operations.” Later he separated from the Minute Men and in 1970 founded the Christian Sons of Liberty in Liberty, Missouri. LeRoy was described as “active in anti-communist and right-wing populist causes.” Beckman connected with albino pilot David Ferrie and then Fred Crisman, eventually putting the word out that he was an ordained priest of the Old Orthodox Catholic Church. David Ferrie made a similar claim and later identified as a minister in the Universal Life Church, which Crisman also came to claim he was a bishop for.
2. Again, in Kenn Thomas’ Maury Island UFO: The Crisman Conspiracy (1999), he points out some of the reasons why this former New Orleans socialite fell onto Garrison’s radar. It seems Shaw was on the board of directors of a group named Permindex, which was “described variously as a shadowy, transnational corporate presence and ‘a CIA front company.’ Other members of its board included an OSS major named Louis Bloomfield and Ferenc Nagy, the premier of Hungary overthrown by communists in 1947. Shaw’s military service apparently did develop around his CIA/OSS involvement dating back to the late 1940s.” It was even claimed that Shaw “had been in business with former Nazis and European fascists involved in several CIA-sponsored covert operations throughout Europe.” “Those covert activities included Paperclip, a spoils-of-war operation that successfully transplanted top Nazi aerospace scientists into the American space program, along with scientific equipment and files on the Nazi rocket program rumored to include its occult and extraterrestrial origins.”
3. Thomas E. Beckman worked with the CIA and reportedly helped with various non-profit organizations that were presumably fronts for undisclosed purposes.
4. Oddly two weeks earlier, a Mrs. Fred Easterbrook in Twin Falls, Idaho recovered an object 30.5 inches in diameter. The object was turned over to an FBI agent named W. G. “Guy” Banister, on July 12. It was described as looking gold-plated on one side and silver colored on the other. The disc was reportedly placed under lock and key at the Twin Falls police station. “We were told to keep our mouths shut, and not describe the object to anyone,” assistant police chief E. McCracken was quoted saying. When author Kenn Thomas interviewed Michael Riconosciuto, who had known Crisman for many years, he stated that the Maury Island incident was “an event that he created.” As for the 30.5-inch diameter “flying disc” that Banister recovered years earlier, which had eventually been identified by the police as a prank of four boys (no names ever given), Riconosciuto claimed: “In post-World War II they had a development phase with these radioactive discs to cloud the film of aerial surveillance platforms. They used different schemes, and they had a lot of trouble recovering them. They had a lot of screw ups.” Years later Banister created a detective agency in New Orleans called Guy Banister Associates. The same building had also housed Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as an anti-Castro group founded by Bernard Barker and E. Howard Hunt, who later became involved in the infamous Watergate scandal. Not surprisingly, Banister also came on Garrison’s radar as well as the Warren Commission.
