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radio announcer, but Garrison's investigators implied that he was either a member of the CIA or had been 'engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex'. He allegedly operated under a cover as a preacher and was 'engaged in work to help Gypsies’. These stories caused a chain reaction in UFO circles, since UFO believers have long accused the CIA of being somehow connected with the flying saucer mystery. Of course, the CIA was in its infancy in 1947 at the time of the Maury Island case and was then largely staffed by naval personnel from World War n intelligence units. Clay Shaw was tried early in 1969, accused by Garrison of having conspired to murder President Kennedy. He was found innocent and freed. The exact nature of Crisman's testimony before the Grand Jury is not known. He did not testify at the actual trial. When Ray Palmer, one of the best-informed urologists extant, summarized his own theories about the Maury Island mystery in the book he coauthored with Arnold, The Coming of the Saucers, he asked pointedly, "Was the Tacoma affair a hoax? Whose?* In recent years many seemingly solid flying saucer cases have dissolved in confusion under close investigation. Often they appear to be outrageous hoaxes perpetrated by some mysterious third party, although the general tendency is to blame the innocent witnesses. These bizarre hoaxes are often identical to the mischievous fairy hoaxes and games of an earlier epoch. The Maury Island case fell apart in Arnold's hands. The slag samples given to him by Dahl and Crisman were switched by someone; two investigating Air Force officers, Brown and Davidson, were killed when their plane crashed shortly after leaving Tacoma; Dahl vanished; Crisraan was literally exiled to Greenland for two years; Tacoma newsman Paul Lance, who helped Arnold in his investigation, died suddenly a short time later. Palmer claims that a cigar box filled with original slag samples was stolen from his Chicago office soon afterwards. find out anything about. *. We tried to find out information at McChord Field [the Tacoma Air Force base] and drew a Wade, and we have informants there who practically smell the runways for news... We've exhausted every avenue attempting to piece what has happened together so it makes some sense... I'm just going to give you some sound advice. Get out of this town until or atoad Arnold mgot into his private plane and headed for home. He stopped in Pendleton, Oregon, to refuel, and shortly after he took off again, Tiis engine stopped cold. Only quick thinking and expert flying saved him from a serious crash. Despite the statements of General Spaatz and Kenneth Arnold in 1947-8, slight, dark-skinned men did not really begin to appear in published UFO reports until around 1954. (There were, however, descriptions of dark - or heavily suntanned - UFO occupants as far back as 1897.) The Men in Black phenomenon did not really grip the UFO field until the early 1950s. At one point Ted Morello of the United Press took Arnold aside and told him: You're involved in something that is beyond our power here to what> ever it is blows over.