Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting, Tacoma, Washington (August 19, 1947 (Doc 3/P44))
A first saucer wave case from Tacoma, Washington. Harold Dahl and Crisman recounted their experience on Maury Island, describing seeing flying discs.
Background
On August 19, 1947, in Tacoma, 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 Crisman recounted their experience on Maury Island, describing seeing flying discs. Dahl claimed to have taken pictures of the discs, but the film was marred. Crisman verified the story and collected fragments from the island, also witnessing a disc hovering before disappearing into a cloud.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“claimed that several unfortunate incidents had occurred subsequent to his seeing the flying discs and he believed the entire incident had brought him bad luck.”. “he had taken pictures of the flying disc which he had seen but that the printed films were marred with white spots.”. “he also saw one of the flying discs hovering over the Island but that it. had disappeared into a cloud.”
Type of case
The case includes photographic or video evidence of the unidentified object.
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.