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(Saucer Country)

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A decade before we sent a dog to space to die, did space come to Earth and kill a dog?

During the USA's hot UFO summer of 1947, Washington State harbour patrolman Harold Dahl reported a fatal encounter whilst captaining his boat near Maury Island in Puget Sound. On board were two crewmen as well as Dahl's 15 year old son, Charles, and his dog. Whilst patrolling the east bay of the Island, Dahl noticed what he initially thought to be six doughnut shaped balloons floating about 2,000 feet above them. Their movement and appearance suggested they might not be balloons as five of them seemed to be circling around one that was losing altitude. It dropped to about 500 feet above the boat with the others following at a distance. Fearing it would fall into the bay, Dahl pulled the boat up to the shore and they disembarked to watch from the beach.

The craft were each no less than 100 feet in diameter with the doughnut-like hole in their centre being around 25 feet. Something like a squashed inner tube in shape, they had a metallic gold and silver surface that shimmered in a way that reminded Dahl of a Buick dashboard. At the time Buicks were often fitted with a patterned brushed aluminium dash, providing a textured, shimmering effect. The craft also had portholes around their outer edge and what looked like a continuous dark window situated low around the interior of the doughnut hole, like a viewing port.

One of the higher craft had descended and sidled up to the distressed doughnut, perhaps even making physical contact to provide support. After a few minutes however, a dull thud was heard and the troubled torus appeared to spew newspaper-like material from somewhere within its centre. These were in fact sheets of some white metallic material which fluttered and dispersed into the bay. A dark hail then started to fall with a more threatening composition emanating heat and causing steam to rise from the water as the stones rained down like molten volcanic rocks. The crew of the patrol boat took shelter under a cliff and behind some logs but, even so, Charle's arm was injured and his dog killed by one of the fiery fragments.

There are all manner of peculiarities appended to this story which can be found elsewhere, including the fact that Dahl later reported the occurrence to his superior, a Fred Lee Crisman. Crisman was an Army war veteran and would, two decades later, be subpoenaed by Jim Garrison in relation to the Clay Shaw trial and the investigation of the assassination of JFK. Crisman was asserted in that subpoena to be an intelligence community asset previously employed by both Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Some placed Crisman at the assassination, suspecting him to be one of the 'three tramps' photographed at the scene under police escort. At the time of the Maury Island encounter he had a relationship with Ray Palmer, publisher of science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, to whom he supplied pseudonymous tales of a purportedly autobiographical nature.

The potentially spurious tale of Maury Island is variously suspected to be a hoax, a misinformation campaign, or a cover-up of the illegal dumping of waste from the nearby Hanford nuclear reactor. This was a nascent encounter of the third kind so far as the modern era is concerned. It predated the incident near Roswell by a couple of weeks and Kenneth Arnold's famously misattributed 'flying saucer' sighting by just three days. Arnold, a rather qualified observer, took it upon himself to investigate the topic more widely and wrote a book entitled The Coming of the Saucers, in which Dahl's account can be found.

Two military intelligence officers, Captain William L Davidson and Lieutenant Frank M Brown, subsequently investigating the matter managed ultimately to obtain via Arnold the apparent debris collected by Dahl. They thought it to be nothing more than volcanic rocks and common aluminium. Nonetheless, they were flying the heavy box of evidence back for further study when a fire started on board their B-25 Mitchell. A Sergeant Elmer L Taff, one of the survivors of the subsequent explosion and crash recalled that, despite preparing his harness to parachute to safety, Brown never followed. Neither did Davidson. They were the only casualties, along with the apparently underwhelming evidence of a UFO.

Amidst all these curious connections, secrets and deaths that so often feature in ufology, we may never know if a dog really was killed by a UFO. Dahl said their canine crewmate was buried at sea, like an honoured sailor, but we do not know its name, its age or its breed. We can only believe that it was a good dog who may have liked to warn Laika about the dangers awaiting her beyond the heavens.