The Maury Island Incident

It’s the summer solstice, 1947. A man named Harold Dahl is out on a salvage boat in Puget

Sound when six enormous, doughnut-shaped objects appear in the sky above him. One of them

falters. Debris rains down — burning the hull, injuring his teenage son, killing the family dog.

And the morning after Dahl tells his story, a stranger in a dark suit shows up at his door, knows

exactly what happened, and tells him to stay quiet.

That stranger is, by most accounts, the very first Man in Black.

But that’s only where this story starts. Because the other man in it — Dahl’s business partner,

Fred Crisman — turns out to be one of the strangest figures in postwar American history. A man

who spent twenty years drifting through the weirdest precincts of the American century: secret

caves, shell companies, a far-right radio show broadcast under a fake name. And then, in 1968,

a New Orleans prosecutor investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy subpoenaed him

by name.

The same Fred Crisman. The Maury Island man.

Today we’re going out on the gray water near Tacoma — to the UFO case the Air Force called

the dirtiest hoax in flying saucer history, and the one thread you can pull that somehow connects

the Men in Black to Dealey Plaza.

Mini Pines is a single-host narrative podcast for people who like their stories unhurried.