ConspiraCy Central
The coming of the flying saucers, tales of the Hollow Earth, the assassination of JFK and the Watergate scandal: one man connects them all. BRIAN J ROBB explores the bizarre world of wannabe spy and ‘conspiracy nexus point’ Fred Lee Crisman.
Flying saucers, the Hollow Earth, the assassination of JFK and Watergate: one man connects them all. BRIAN J ROBB explores the bizarre world of ‘conspiracy nexus point’ Fred Lee Crisman.
There has long been a search for a ‘theory of everything’ in physics – the idea that all the ‘fundamental forces’ of the Universe can be linked in one ultimate theory that might explain everything. In the paranormal and supernatural world there is a similar search for a ‘theory of everything’, an idea or a concept that might link together all the fortean ‘high strangeness’ of the Universe.
In the perhaps more down-to-Earth world of conspiracy, however, this ‘theory of everything’ could be embodied in one man: the mysterious and slippery figure of Fred Lee Crisman. Born in 1919 (or 1920 in some accounts), Crisman is a figure that connects various worlds of 20th century conspiracy, from the birth of the UFO phenomenon to the paranoid worlds of secret intelligence and political assassinations.
In the mid-1940s, Crisman was a correspondent for Amazing Stories magazine, claiming to have battled strange underground creatures. He was later involved in the 1947 Maury Island UFO incident (see FT41:52-57, 307:30-36), and it has been suggested that the late-1960s alien invasion television series The Invaders was based upon his exploits.
Notoriously, in 1968 Crisman was one of many subpoenaed by Jim Garrison in his effort to find those behind the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy (see FT176:32-36). Crisman was claimed to be one of the mysterious trio of ‘tramps’ present at the assassination and to be working on behalf of a secret American government agency. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations declared Crisman the only one of several suspects to actually resemble photos of the three ‘tramps’. Little wonder, then, that students of deep conspiracy regard Fred Lee Crisman as a nexus point for cover-ups ranging from the 1940s to his death in 1975.
AMAZING STORIES!
It is fitting that Crisman’s story should have its origins in fantasy. In April 1926, Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the first regular periodical devoted exclusively to science fiction. Although it was published for over 80 years, Amazing had a turbulent beginning and Gernsback went bust and lost the magazine. It passed through several publishers in the Depression years, and by 1938 was published by Ziff-Davis and edited by Raymond A Palmer (see pp40-45).
Palmer was an odd character in his own right. Born in 1910, he was hit by a milk truck at the age of seven, leaving him with a broken back and a spinal infection. In an autobiographical sketch in a 1934 issue of Fantasy, Palmer recalled: “At the age
Students of deep conspiracy regard Fred Lee Crisman as a nexus point for cover-ups
It was little wonder then that Fred Lee Crisman saw in Palmer someone he could use to further his own interests. Like the UFO phenomenon itself, Crisman had been born in Washington, in the city of Tacoma – almost 60 miles northwest of Mount Rainier, where Arnold’s saucer sighting took place. Crisman first surfaced in a letter to Amazing in June 1946 describing his own experience of the ‘deros’. He had served in the US Army during World War II and while hiding in a cave in Burma was the victim of a dero attack in which the creatures wielded a fantastic laser weapon.
Crisman wrote of his experience: “My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with sub-machine guns. I have two nineinch scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50ft [15m] from a moving object of any kind…” His main concern was Palmer’s publication of classified intelligence information. Crisman’s letter continued: “You can imagine my fright when I picked up my first copy of Amazing and see you splashing words about on the subject. For Heaven’s sake, drop the whole thing!” There was further correspondence from Crisman, including a letter in May 1947, just before the Arnold sightings.
When Kenneth Arnold first reported his ‘flying saucer’ visions that June, Raymond Palmer was one of the first to take the pilot’s report seriously. Palmer planned an ‘all-saucer’ edition of Amazing, only for his publisher to kill the idea; Palmer said his plan was dropped “the day after a man with a gold badge paid a visit”. Partnering with Curtis Fuller, another Ziff-Davies editor, Palmer (under the pen name ‘Robert N Webster’) launched Fate magazine (see
FT237:44-49) in 1948 as a repository for his saucer lore, including Crisman’s stories of what became known as the ‘Maury Island hoax’.
UFOLOGY GROUND ZERO
What happened next – much of it drawn from Palmer’s own accounts – puts Fred Lee Crisman at ground zero of the UFOconspiracy, right at the centre of the nexus of flying saucers and ‘parapolitics’. If Palmer thought the Shaver Mystery had been bizarre, he was about to discover a whole new level of weird.
The Maury Island incident has been widely denounced as a hoax, but in the beginning Palmer was firmly convinced he was involved in something extraordinary. On 21 June 1947, just days before Arnold’s ‘flying saucer’ encounter and mere weeks before the Roswell ‘UFO crash’ of July, something strange happened at Puget Sound, near Maury Island. The information about this weird event came to Palmer from Crisman in the wake of Arnold’s story hitting the news, so Arnold’s sighting may have inspired the tale Crisman told of a supposed earlier event.
Crisman claimed to be a logger who was involved in salvage operations in Tacoma. His colleague Harold Dahl (either a harbour patrolman or a junk dealer) witnessed six donut-shaped silver craft in the skies above Maury Island. Each around 100ft (30m) in diameter, five of the ‘saucers’ had circled the sixth, which appeared to be suffering a malfunction. Dahl reported to Crisman a loud bang and a wave of silver metallic debris that rained down upon Dahl, his teenage son Charles (who suffered burns), and his dog (who, in an especially poignant touch, was killed). The flying discs, including the impaired sixth, then flew off.
Palmer contacted Arnold and sent him to Tacoma to investigate Crisman’s claims. Dahl first related the tale to Arnold, but ended by warning the pilot off, telling him not to investigate further. The next day, Arnold met Crisman, who confirmed Dahl’s story, claiming to have retrieved the saucer debris and to have witnessed one of the silver craft himself the following day. Arnold was uneasy. He later wrote in his book
The Coming of the Saucers (co-written with Palmer) that he and fellow pilot Captain Smith “both had a peculiar feeling that we were being watched or that there was something dangerous about getting involved with Crisman and Dahl”.
Dahl reported a loud bang and a wave of silver metallic debris raining down
Much that would become common in conspiracy tales and UFO lore stemmed from this moment. Crisman’s complex and involved tale included such incidents as a bugged hotel room, warnings to drop the investigation, the involvement of mysterious ‘men in black’, the recovery of saucer crash debris, the death of an over-inquisitive newspaper reporter, and ultimately accusations of an elaborate hoax (itself potential misdirection to cover something even more astonishing). The Maury Island incident had it all – and Fred Lee Crisman was right at the centre of it.
On 31 July 1947 two Air Force men – Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown – took away some of Crisman’s ‘saucer debris’, heading for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. They never arrived, as their airplane crashed near Kelso, Washington, after an engine fire. Both flyers were killed and Crisman’s ‘debris’ was never recovered. Crisman later claimed the wreckage showed signs of having been subjected to the same dero ‘energy weapon’ he’d encountered in Burma. The remaining evidence, including mysterious ‘white metal’ resembling lava, was dumped by Arnold as he fled the scene. Crisman and Dahl similarly vanished, with Crisman spotted boarding an Air Corps plane bound for Alaska. The only man left standing, and so carrying responsibility for the ‘hoax’, was Raymond Palmer.
In his 1956 Project Blue Book ‘Report on Unidentified Flying Objects’, Edward J Ruppelt concluded: “[Crisman and Dahl] admitted that the rock fragments had nothing to do with flying saucers. They had sent in the rock fragments [to Palmer] as a joke… and said the rock came from a flying saucer because that’s what [Raymond Palmer] wanted him to say.” For his part, Palmer felt Crisman was the true orchestrator of the Maury Island incident, but Palmer had been left holding the bag.