A few weeks later a lieutenant colonel who was Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the Fourth Air Force was widely quoted as saying, “There is no basis for belief in flying saucers in the Tacoma area [referring to a UFO sighting in the area of Tacoma, Washington], or any other area.”

The “experts,” in their stories of saucer lore, have said that these brush-offs of the UFO sightings were intentional smoke screens to cover the facts by adding confusion.  This is not true; it was merely a lack of coordination.  But had the Air Force tried to throw up a screen of confusion, they couldn’t have done a better job.

When the lieutenant colonel from the Fourth Air Force made his widely publicized denunciation of saucer believers he specifically mentioned a UFO report from the Tacoma, Washington, area.

The report of the investigation of this incident, the Maury Island Mystery, was one of the most detailed reports of the early UFO era.  The report that we had in our files had been pieced together by Air Force Intelligence and other agencies because the two intelligence officers who started the investigation couldn’t finish it.  They were dead.

For the Air Force the story started on July 31, 1947, when Lieutenant Frank Brown, an intelligence agent at Hamilton AFB, California, received a long-distance phone call.  The caller was a man whom 111 call Simpson, who had met Brown when Brown investigated an earlier UFO sighting, and he had a hot lead on another UFO incident.  He had just talked to two Tacoma Harbor patrolmen.  One of them had seen six UFO’s hover over his patrol boat and spew out chunks of odd metal.  Simpson had some of the pieces of the metal.

The story sounded good to Lieutenant Brown, so he reported it to his chief.  His chief OK’d a trip and within an hour Lieutenant Brown and Captain Davidson were flying to Tacoma in an Air Force B-25.  When they arrived they met Simpson and an airline pilot friend of his in Simpson’s hotel room.  After the usual round of introductions Simpson told Brown and Davidson that he had received a letter from a Chicago publisher asking him, Simpson, to investigate this case.  The publisher had paid him $200 and wanted an exclusive on the story, but things were getting too hot, Simpson wanted the military to take over.

Simpson went on to say that he had heard about the experience off Maury Island but that he wanted Brown and Davidson to hear it firsthand.  He had called the two harbor patrolmen and they were on their way to the hotel.  They arrived and they told their story.

I’ll call these two men Jackson and Richards although these aren’t their real names.  In June 1947, Jackson said, his crew, his son, and the son’s dog were on his patrol boat patrolling near Maury Island, an island in Puget Sound, about 3 miles from Tacoma.  It was a gray day, with a solid cloud deck down at about 2,500 feet.  Suddenly everyone on the boat noticed six “doughnut-shaped”