The Maury Island UFO Incident — And Encounters With The Men In Black
Public DomainAn illustration of the Maury Island UFO incident.
On June 27, 1947, Harold Dahl and his son Charles were on a boat near the eastern shore of Maury Island, Washington, in Puget Sound. Suddenly, six donut-shaped objects appeared in the sky above them and dropped a barrage of metallic debris.
Dahl had his camera with him and managed to snap a few photographs of the strange flying craft, but as soon as they appeared, they were gone. When Dahl and his son returned to shore, he showed the photographs to his supervisor, Fred Crisman. Skeptical, Crisman investigated the scene for himself and allegedly also saw one of the flying objects hovering above.
Before he could share the story or photographs, however, Dahl received an unexpected visitor. The next morning, he said a man in a black suit came to him. The man described Dahl’s own experience to him in scarily accurate detail, warning him that if he spoke about what happened, he would suffer the consequences.
Dahl and Crisman would later come out and say that their experience was a hoax, but it was the first time anyone had actually mentioned the eponymous figures known as the “Men in Black,” members of a shadowy, quasi-governmental organization who appear in a number of real sightings of UFOs.
The Men in Black showed up again in the story of Albert K. Bender, a UFO fanatic who published the short-lived magazine Space Review, which covered all manner of strange aerial phenomena.
In one 1953 edition of Space Review, Bender also claimed to have been visited by “three men wearing dark suits” who allegedly demanded that he stop publishing information about UFOs. That same year, Bender shut down his magazine entirely.
He later shared his story with author Gray Barker, who published a collection of stories about the Men in Black in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Since then, alleged encounters with the Men in Black have been a staple of real UFO sightings.
