THE FILE ON FRED LEE CRISMAN

An FBI file on Crisman was opened in August 1947 (just after Maury Island and the Arnold affair) when he applied for a job at the Boeing plant in Seattle, a facility protected under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. The FBI file falls under the classification Security Matter-X (SM-X), essentially a version of The X-Files cataloguing anomalous incidents and strange events. The FBI paperwork concluded that the Maury Island incident involving Crisman was a ‘hoax’, although the documents carefully point out that in Crisman’s own words he “did not admit that his story was a hoax but only stated that if questioned by the authorities he was going to say it was a hoax”. However, the FBI documents go on to say that both Crisman and Dahl, when interviewed by the FBI, stated there had been no “flying discs”. The document called the supposed fragments “strange rock formations” and that a letter to Ray Palmer “represented this material as being part of a flying disc, and both Dahl and Crisman admitted that this statement was entirely false”. The FBI concluded that the material retrieved by Dahl and Crisman was little more than slag from a nearby smelter. Following the air crash and the death of the two investigators, a memo on the subject, also categorized ‘SM-X’, was sent to FBI head J Edgar Hoover.