On June 24, 1947, the famous “Cascade Mountains incident” occurred in the state of Washington, when American military pilot Kenneth Arnold observed several disc-shaped UFOs in the sky.
It was this event that essentially marked the beginning of the era of ufology, with the term “flying saucers,” coined by Arnold, becoming the primary designation for this phenomenon.
Just a few days after Arnold’s sighting, another UFO incident occurred in the United States, which was far more alarming but has since been largely forgotten.
A resident of Tacoma, Harold A. Dahl, along with his young son Charles and two crew members, was sailing to work on a tugboat in Puget Sound between Seattle and Tacoma. Suddenly, they noticed six golden-silver flying objects in the sky, all of them round in shape, resembling doughnuts.
Suddenly, one of the “doughnuts” wobbled, and from it, a “rain” of thin metal strips and strange black chunks spilled onto the tugboat.
When one of the strips fell on the boy’s hand, it left a mark on his skin, as if from acid. Fortunately, the child escaped with only a minor injury, but similar strips fell on his dog, which died immediately.
Upon reaching work, Dahl immediately reported the incident to his boss, Fred L. Crisman, who went to the tugboat and managed to collect several black strips from the deck as physical evidence.
Kenneth Arnold (left) and Harold Dahl (right)
A few days later, Dahl encountered a classic “man in black,” who was behind the wheel of a black sedan and stopped him right on the street. He got into the sedan, and the stranger drove him to a diner, where they sat down at a table, and a brief conversation ensued between them. The man in black warned Harold to keep quiet about what he saw and what happened to his son and dog.
Somehow, Kenneth Arnold learned about Dahl’s incident in Tacoma and flew there in his plane, then contacted his acquaintances in the military, asking them to investigate the matter and possibly link it to his own recent sighting.
Just a couple of days later, on July 31, two military personnel were sent to Tacoma to investigate the incident – Captain William Davidson and Lieutenant Frank M. Brown. While inspecting the tugboat, they found nothing special there, but according to their initial version, what fell from the sky onto people was simply slag from a smelter, lifted into the air by strong winds.
Nevertheless, they collected several suspicious samples (as well as took the strips collected by Crisman) and took many photographs (presumably capturing the wound on the boy’s hand, the deck damaged by melted steel strips, and even the body of the killed dog).
On their way back to the base from Tacoma, Davidson and Brown were flying on the same B-25 plane that they arrived in to investigate the case. However, the plane never made it back to the base, as it crashed for unknown reasons near Kelso, Washington. Everyone on board died, and the collected samples and photos disappeared without a trace.
The news of this crash had not yet been made public when an anonymous caller contacted the local newspaper and reported the crash, adding that the plane was intentionally shot down because it carried “fragments of a flying saucer.”
All of this became rich “fuel” for subsequent conspiracy theories, suggesting that the military intentionally eliminated those involved to prevent disclosure.
It was also discovered that when Kenneth Arnold was flying out of Tacoma, his engine failed, and he had to make an emergency landing. Upon inspecting his plane, Arnold discovered that his fuel valve had been tampered with (intentionally by someone).
And two weeks later, reporter Paul Lance of the “Tacoma Times,” who covered the UFO story, died suddenly. Allegedly, from meningitis…
