In early December, the FBI published "classified materials" of particular importance about the famous appearance of six flying saucers in the sky over the United States. "Lenta.ru" figured out how the fantasy of several Americans and the love of newsmen for sensations made the whole country believe in aliens.
Soaring donuts
In June 1947, handyman Harold Dahl decided to take a boat trip with friends, son, and a dog to Morey Island near Tacoma, Washington. While he fished logs out of the water, the others fished and recorded the fun on a movie camera. According to him, suddenly above the head of the vacationers appeared, as Dal himself put it, flying "donuts" - strange disk-shaped objects with holes in the middle.
He counted five or six of them. The Donuts showed no signs of hostility, but they moved very erratically. At some point, they gathered in a heap, after which fragments suddenly fell from the sky, hitting the dog and slightly scratching Dahl's son. Several fragments hit the boat as well. Dahl collected them and took them to his boss, Fred Chrisman.
The next day, together, they allegedly collected the remaining fragments of the aircraft on the shore to send them to the editor of Amazing Science Fiction magazine. Rumors of aliens quickly spread throughout the area, and FBI agents got down to business.
A month later, Chrisman and Dahl already talked in detail about how the cockpit of a flying saucer looks from the inside and how friendly the aliens are.
In an August interview with The Tacoma Times, Dahl gave birth to another sensation by first mentioning the mysterious "man in black." According to him, a stranger who appeared out of nowhere urged him to remain silent about the incident. Everyone immediately decided that Dahl had run into an undercover government agent who, as expected, was trying to hide the consequences of an unplanned meeting of aliens with ordinary citizens.
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In the late 1940s, UFO photos filled the front pages of newspapers
Photo: Barney Wayne / Keystone
A couple of weeks later, Dahl reported that after the FBI conducted the first investigation into the incident, two Air Force officers took the UFO fragment and flew with it to a certain military base. As follows from the documents, they died from an airplane explosion in the air, although the flight mechanic and the pilot managed to escape by parachute. Among the wreckage of the plane, fragments of the alien ship were never found.
Immediately after the alleged UFO disaster, an enthusiastic ufologist Kenneth Arnold joined the case. The self-proclaimed "specialist in paranormal research" came to Takomu, questioned eyewitnesses, kept notes about the incident and demonstrated in every possible way that he was directly related to the complicated case. Naturally, the unusual "scientist" was not averse to talking to journalists and telling a few more stories about secret government laboratories, where some extraterrestrial guests are supposedly dissected.
In the meantime, the investigation went far beyond Washington state, and the FBI could no longer just close the case. The incident was overgrown with new eyewitnesses and newly arrived ufologists, and journalists strenuously supported the most ridiculous theories. It seemed that investigations were no longer required - and so everything is clear. Newspapers across the country were constantly supplying readers with hot facts and seriously discussing the consequences of encountering aliens.
In numerous interviews, Dahl and Chrisman repeated over and over again the incredible story, which ufologists later recognized as the first documented and proven case of human contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. For several more years, the press was extracting from nothing new shocking details about the aliens.
FBI vs. Men in Black
The Mori incident is considered the starting point for the story of numerous fakes, fake photographs and eyewitness accounts that formed the basis of many science fiction movie scripts. Fans of conspiracy theories, by the way, believe that the famous TV series "The X-Files" grew out of that very incident with six flying saucers. There are a great many thematic sites on the network dedicated to the 1947 event, however, they are mainly trying not to prove the existence of aliens, but to accuse the FBI of hiding evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life.
Ufologists often tried to get involved in FBI investigations
Photo: Kurt Strumpf / AP
Allegedly, Dahl, who demanded that Dahl forget the story of the aliens of the unknown in a black suit, is often associated with the heroes of the comics and films "Men in Black", and the general atmosphere of mistrust of the government in UFO matters gradually acquired the status of urban legends.
According to published documents, everything is much more prosaic. FBI agents completed their investigation and concluded that Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman deliberately inflated the story, and then tried to capitalize on their fame and began to demand money from publishers to publish their stories.
The FBI had to tackle the alien case largely because of the endless press buzz, as two eyewitnesses to the alien ship crash were constantly sharing new details. For example, immediately after the crash of a military plane, Dahl suddenly remembered that there was a certain mechanic on board who had been conducting a lively conversation about aliens the day before and allegedly trying to get to the bottom of it.
During the investigation, it turned out that no mechanic was expected at the military base. After reporting that such a person simply did not exist and, therefore, could not fly on the plane carrying the fragment of the saucer, the journalists unanimously decided that he disappeared without a trace or was simply abducted by the same aliens.
Glory in the wreckage
Newspaper headlines about the connection between the plane crash and the mysterious alien wreck on board forced the FBI to check these rumors too. Several dozen pages of declassified documents have been devoted to the plane explosion, and they all say that there was no debris on board.
The documents indicate that the military from the intelligence department of the 4th Army of the US Air Force examined the site of the alleged UFO crash, finding no signs of life and no debris there. Before flying to the base, ufologist Kenneth Arnold, who was actively trying to become a defendant in the investigation, handed the officers something resembling "pieces of porous lava."
According to numerous eyewitness accounts, museums recreate the appearance of aliens
Photo: Eric Draper / AP
By the way, since then, Arnold has become widely known among ufologists as a frequent eyewitness of alien invasions and the keeper of extraterrestrial rocks.
The enthusiast even sent his finds for analysis to the laboratory of the University of Chicago, but experts recognized in them only "slags of volcanic origin." However, Arnold's failures did not cool the ardor of journalists who constantly interviewed him and conducted their own investigations.
In the secret files of the FBI, it is noted that shortly before the closure of the case, the agents were quite sure that Dahl and Chrisman were lying, and were going to bring them to justice. During one of the interrogations, Dahl even let slip that he slightly embellished the events, but still kept repeating about some unknown creatures that forbade him to tell the details of the alien invasion. True, a few years later, he nevertheless admitted that he had invented the whole story from beginning to end.
Anastasia Evtushenko