Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting, Kelso, Washington (August 1, 1947 (Doc 3/P33))
A first saucer wave case from Kelso, Washington. Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman collected unusual rock formations and falsely claimed they were fragments of a flying disc to sell a story to Ray Palmer.
Background
On August 1, 1947, in Kelso, Washington, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman collected unusual rock formations and falsely claimed they were fragments of a flying disc to sell a story to Ray Palmer. They met with Kenneth Arnold and army intelligence officers, admitting the deception. A B-25 carrying Captains Davidson and Brown crashed near Kelso, Washington, after experiencing engine failure, though the crew survived.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“they picked up some strange rock formations from a gravel pit on Mauri Island, Washington.”. “Dahl and Chrisman admitted that this statement was entirely false.”. “Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown left Tacoma, Washington in a B-25 to return to Hamilton Field, California about 2:30 A.M. August 1, 197, and were killed when their plane crashed at Kelso, Washington”
Type of case
The witnesses described the object as disc- or saucer-shaped.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.