Fourth Air Force Saucer File, 1947: Maury Island, the B-25 Crash and Arnold
The Fourth Air Force intelligence file from Hamilton Field for 1947: the Maury Island hoax, the fatal B-25 crash at Kelso, Kenneth Arnold's telegrams, an Arizona sighting and a stack of press clippings.
What this record is
This is a 302-page file of correspondence, reports, telegrams and newspaper clippings about flying discs, kept at Hamilton Field, California, the headquarters of the Fourth Air Force, during the summer and autumn of 1947. The catalog names the Fourth Air Force as originator and the command’s Office of Information as recipient. The papers themselves show that the intelligence staff (A-2) handled the material, and the name that keeps recurring is Lt. Col. Donald L. Springer, the assistant chief of staff for intelligence. It was classified SECRET and survives only on microfilm. The Air Force Declassification Office cleared it in full on May 22, 2025, and the Air Force Historical Research Agency transferred it to the National Archives in 2026 under the UAP Records Collection Act. Its place in the transfer is self-explanatory: this is a flying saucer file from start to finish.
The scan is a hard read. Only about ninety of the 302 pages produced any usable OCR text. Many are letterhead routing pages on which only the heading came through; others are handwritten notes, faint carbons or clippings. What follows reports only what can be read with confidence, and the page numbers are those of the PDF.
What it says about UFOs
Most of the legible material concerns the Maury Island affair and the crash that grew out of it. A summary headed “Flying Discs Sighted by Fred Crisman and Harold A. Dahl, Tacoma, Washington”, dated August 19, 1947, runs from page 120 to page 129. It sets out the story as the two men told it. Dahl said he had been patrolling in his boat near Maury Island in Puget Sound when he saw six flying discs. One of them fluttered down and disintegrated, and the fragments damaged his boat and killed his dog. Dahl wrote to Ray Palmer, the Chicago editor of “fantastic adventure magazines,” and sent him fragments. Palmer then engaged Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho, the pilot whose sighting in June had started the wave, to go to Tacoma and check the story.
The summary goes on to describe a meeting in Arnold’s room, number 502 of the Winthrop Hotel in Tacoma, on the afternoon and evening of July 31, 1947. Arnold, the United Air Lines captain E. J. Smith, Crisman, Dahl, and Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown of the A-2 office at Hamilton Field came and went. Davidson and Brown flew out that night in a B-25, bound for Hamilton Field and carrying some of the reported disc fragments. According to the summary, the left engine burned through an exhaust stack, the fire spread to the left wing, and the wing broke off and tore away the tail. Davidson and Brown were killed. The crew chief and a hitch-hiker parachuted to safety. The summary records that intelligence at McChord Field found no indication of sabotage and that the plane came down near Kelso, Washington, early on August 1.
The file then follows the rumors. Five anonymous telephone calls reached the Tacoma Times and Ted Morrello, the United Press wireman in Tacoma, between July 31 and August 2. The callers said that a meeting about the Maury Island fragments was under way in Arnold’s room, that the B-25 had been carrying disc fragments and had been shot down or sabotaged, and later that a 20-millimeter cannon had done it. One caller named the dead officers before the Army released their names (pages 121 and 125). The Tacoma Times printed the shoot-down story on August 2, 1947. The legible conclusion of the summary is blunt. Dahl and Crisman admitted that the material they sent to Palmer had no connection with flying discs, and they gave a signed statement to that effect (pages 121 and 127). The same pages note that Crisman had been a wartime pilot and held a Reserve captain’s commission. Page 129 is a fragment of Dahl’s own account, in which he said the incident had brought him bad luck. The broken lines that follow seem to describe a conversation at his home about five days later, and the words “forget all about everything” survive. The page is too damaged to say more.
Kenneth Arnold appears in his own right. A Western Union telegram on page 50, sent from Boise on August 31 to “Colonel Springer, A-2 Office, Hamilton Field,” reads in part: “I have offer to sell my detailed account of an investigation of flying disc that took place in Tacoma Washington July 29 thru August 3rd.” He says the account includes his movie film of the people, places and fragments involved, and warns that unless A-2 tells him otherwise within five days, the story will be published. Another telegram fragment, on page 215, says that Palmer sent Arnold $200 to go to Tacoma. A page headed “Venture Press” appears at page 214. Page 128 retells Captain Smith’s own sighting, which followed a stop at Boise; the text mentions Ontario, Oregon, but is too fragmentary to reconstruct.
The file does not stop at Maury Island. Pages 65 and 66 hold a typed interview report about two men, a Mr. Clark and a Mr. Anderson, who were about eleven miles from a place in Arizona on October 14, 1947, when they watched a B-25 pass over. The place name is illegible, but the date and names match the report from near Cave Creek, Arizona, in published sighting catalogs. Anderson saw a black object flying in the opposite direction to the B-25. The men estimated it at about three feet across and very fast (the speed figure is garbled in the OCR), with no visible propulsion, and they heard no sound. The wind, they said, was blowing to the northeast, away from them. Clark said he had spent five years in the Army Air Forces, flying for most of that time. Anderson had been an aerial gunner for two. The interviewer judged both men level-headed and sincere and asked that a copy go to Lt. Col. Springer at Hamilton Field. A Federal Bureau of Investigation letterhead appears at page 74, which suggests the report came through the FBI, although the pages carrying the Arizona interview do not show their origin.
Pages 100 to 102 hold a cover letter about photographs sent in by “a very reliable source,” a Portland, Oregon, woman whose surname the OCR renders as Herren or Merren. She took the pictures near Jefferson, Oregon, on November 5 and a later date in the same month. The year reads as 1946 in two copies, but that reading is uncertain. She had not noticed the objects when she took the pictures, but thought the formation might be flying discs. The writer was unconvinced. The uniformity of the markings suggested a defective camera or film, and no flying disc incidents had been reported from that vicinity on those dates. She wanted her negatives back.
The rest of the legible file is press cuttings. Vallejo Times-Herald stories from August 2, 1947, cover Lieutenant Brown, a Vallejo man, under headlines such as “Vallejo Army Flier Killed While Making Secret Flight” (pages 232 to 243). Other headlines include “Plane Crash Linked to Flying Disc Inquiry” (page 235), “AAF Closes ‘Disc’ Probe” and “Army Drops Disc Inquiry” (pages 199 to 202), and “Tacoma Flying Saucer Story Still Unverified” (page 200). A clipping datelined Hamilton Field, August 8, quotes Fourth Air Force intelligence as finding that “there is not sufficient evidence or testimony available to this headquarters to conclude whether the reports of so-called flying discs in the Tacoma area or any other area have any basis of fact” (page 203). The same clipping says Springer had returned from Tacoma and that the reported boat explosion off Maury Island did not happen. It adds that the crew chief, Master Sgt. Woodrow Matthews, had loaded a heavy box at McChord Field that was presumed to hold samples of the metallic material, and that neither box nor material was recovered from the burned wreck. Further afield are a sailor’s sighting off the Oregon coast (pages 76 and 79), a “blue flash” over Boise on October 23, 1947 (page 85), “Flying Saucers May Be ‘Flying Flapjacks’” (page 179), saucers over Oakland (page 202), and disk-type aircraft found in a missing Maryland inventor’s barn (page 137).
Context
Dahl dated his sighting to June 21, 1947, three days before Arnold’s near Mount Rainier. The deaths of Captain William L. Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank M. Brown gave the hoax a lasting weight, and Dahl’s tale of a warning visitor is often called the first “man in black” story. This file is the Fourth Air Force’s side of those weeks. The site’s full account is at the Maury Island incident, and Arnold’s sighting is covered at the Kenneth Arnold sighting. By the end of 1947 the Air Force was setting up a central study at Wright Field, which began work as Project Sign in early 1948. See the Project Sign progress report.
Status
This file shows how one regional intelligence office handled the first flying saucer summer, and it is not evidence that anything unusual flew over Puget Sound. On the central question the record’s own verdict is clear. The two men behind the Maury Island story admitted in a signed statement that their fragments had nothing to do with flying discs, McChord intelligence saw no sign of sabotage, and headquarters said publicly that it had no basis to decide whether the discs existed at all. Much of the rest is newspaper copy.
What the file does add is texture that is hard to find elsewhere: the room number and guest list for the July 31 meeting, the chronology of the anonymous calls that turned a crash into a conspiracy, Arnold’s own offer to sell his story, and an Arizona interview and an Oregon photograph file that show the Fourth Air Force receiving reports well beyond Tacoma. The handwritten notes and faint carbons still need a reading from the images themselves.