Maury Island incident
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The Maury Island incident is an early modern UFO encounter incident, which took place shortly after the sighting of the original flying saucers by Kenneth Arnold. It is also one of the earliest reported instances of an alleged encounter with so-called Men in black.
The incident took place shortly after June 21, 1947. On that date, seaman Harold Dahl, out scavenging for adrift logs, claimed to have seen six UFO's near Maury Island (which is actually a peninsula of Vashon Island, in Puget Sound, near Tacoma, Washington). Dahl, his son, and their dog were on the boat. Dahl claimed to have taken a number of photographs of the UFOs, and reported that one UFO shed some type of hot slag on to his boat. The slag, he said, struck and killed his dog and injured his son.
The next morning, Dahl reported, a man arrived at his home and invited him to breakfast at a nearby diner. Dahl accepted the invitation. He described the man as imposing--over six feet tall and muscular, and wearing a black suit. The man drove a new 1947 Buick, and Dahl assumed he was a military or government representative.
While the two men ate, Dahl claimed the man told him details of the UFO sighting, though Dahl had not related his account publicly. Furthermore, the man gave Dahl a nonspecific warning--which Dahl took as a threat--that his family might be harmed if he related details of the sighting.
Some confusion and debate over Dahl's statements has occurred: Dahl would later claim the UFO sighting was a hoax, but has also claimed the sighting was accurate, but he had claimed it was a hoax to avoid bringing harm to his family.
Regardless, Dahl had reported the incident to his immediate superior, Fred Crisman, who had long claimed to have experience with unusual phenomenon (and who was later linked to the John F. Kennedy assassination). Crisman gathered more of the slag, then called in the press, who in turn called in Kenneth Arnold to investigate the incident.
Alfred K. Bender seized on Dahl's story, and printed it in his newsletter. In 1953, Bender claimed three men in black visited him, and warned him to stop his UFO research.
Arnold, realizing the story was beyond his capacity to investigate, called in the United States Army Air Corps, which dispatched two investigators. The investigators were largely unimpressed with Crisman and with his evidence, but agreed to take some of the slag with them for further inquiry. In a bizarre and tragic twist, the plane carrying the two investigators and the UFO evidence crashed shortly after leaving Tacoma, killing both men.
In the UFO community, the Maury Island Incident is still highly controversial, dismissed by many as a complete fabrication by the wildly imaginative and conspiracy-obsessed Crisman, while others think it may be among the most important encounters in modern times.