Monthly Archives: April 2018

Northwest Nuggets

Northwest Nuggets: Fred Crisman’s Murder of a City, Tacoma

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Fred Crisman, UFOs, and the Murder of a City

The Maury Island Incident is a well-known (though perhaps not as well-known as it should be) Washington state UFO event. Whether you consider the event to be a legitimate UFO contact or just a hoax, it’s a story that lives on to this day, and Fred Crisman played an important role in it.

Less well-known than the “Incident” is that Crisman was also involved in a weird aspect of the John F. Kennedy assassination, being fingered as one of the “Three Tramps.”

Even LESS well-known than that is that Crisman spent years raising hell around the city of Tacoma under the pseudonym “Jon Gold.”

As “Jon Gold,” Crisman ran a radio show spreading what some call “conspiracy theory” and others call “investigative journalism.” Much like the UFO stuff, it really depends on which side of the aisle you choose to stand.

Out of those Gold radio shows was spawned a book titled Murder of a City, Tacoma, published in 1970. The Northwest Nomad recently got his hands on a copy of that fascinating slice of weird history.

Murder of a City, Tacoma was written off in its day as a “rant” and basically a bunch of paranoid conspiratorial lunacy. I’m partway through the book, and it doesn’t seem that way to me.

I need to research and verify the stuff he’s saying, of course, but so far, the book reads more like an expose of the political corruption Crisman says afflicted Tacoma in that time.

Whether there was any meat to Crisman’s claims remains to be seen, but we do know that Tacoma was a city in dire straits in the 1970s and all the way up to the 2000s, when the city’s famously successful revitalization effort began to take hold. It doesn’t seem (to me, anyway) to be a major stretch that there may indeed have been a lot of corruption in the city at that time.

The Northwest Nuggets series is designed for little slices of Northwest history and travel, so I’ll be doing a full examination of the book in another post. Here, I just wanted to bring The Murder of a City, Tacoma to light.

(UPDATE: I’ve started covering Murder of a City, Tacoma in earnest here.)

Things to do in Tacoma, Wandering Around With a Notebook

Ruston Waterfront: The Nightmare Continues

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I have written in the past about the terrible, mysterious suspended bike of the Ruston Waterfront. I write now to let you know the horror is multiplying, and the nightmare has deepened.

I was out walking the Ruston waterfront on this beautiful April day of sunshine, seals, and the Sound, when I discovered to my great dismay that a new suspended bike has appeared.

This one’s red—spawned, undoubtedly, from the same nether regions as the last bike, which has haunted my dreams from the I first set eyes upon it—monstrous, unnatural thing that it is.

When the tide is out, as it was when I got there today, you can get rather close to the new bike. It was a just a couple feet off the shore, screwed to a pole in shallow water.

In researching this phenomenon, I found that my friends over at Grit City have already located this bike, and are less irrationally horrified by it as I am.

Grit City‘s excellent detective work puts forth the hypothesis that this and the other bike are related to Burning Man in some way.  I’m not going to plagiarize or steal their thunder here, so I’ll just say that it’s erudite detective work on their part, and you should follow that Grit City link up above to see what they’ve to say.

Let no one say that the Northwest Nomad is less than noble in his content creation…and let no one say, either, that the Nomad is anything less than paranoid about cool art sculptures that add so much wonder to our fair city of Tacoma.

Thanks, suspended bike guys…gals…demons…whatever thou be.

Thanks, too, to Grit City for the fine gumshoeing.

If you’re mad enough seek this bike out, I can tell you that it’s near Cummings Park, which I’m going to pin to a map below. Good luck, seeker, but remember the old adage: be careful what you wish for. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paranormal, Washington Places

New Maury Island Incident Film Sheds New Light on an Old Legend

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For me, one of the highlights of the UFO/Paranormal Conference at the Quinault Beach Resort and Casino was their showing of The Maury Island Incident.

The film, now being shown on select dates around the Pacific Northwest, dramatizes one of the most fascinating events in Washington state history, and one of the most significant UFO events (or hoaxes, depending on where you stand on the issue) ever.

That event is known as the Maury Island Incident, and it just happened to be the event that spawned the “Men in Black” myth.

The event took place on June 21, 1947, just off the shore of Maury Island (same location as Point Robinson Lighthouse), which is just off Vashon Island, which itself is a short ferry ride from Tacoma‘s shore.

During the event that would come to be called the Maury Island Incident, Fred Crisman and Harold Dahl were working on a harbor patrol boat when six UFOs appeared in the sky.

One of the doughnut-shaped objects emitted a lava-like substance onto the boat. The impact of the substance killed the dog on board and broke a man’s arm. The men initially spoke about the event, but eventually the official story became that it was all a simple hoax cooked up to win the pair a spot in Fantasy magazine.

The new Maury Island Incident film, however, uses newly declassified FBI documents to make the case that the hoax claim was a lie made out of fear after Dahl and Crisman were harassed by unidentified men wearing black suits.

These “men in black” appeared to be unrelated to the FBI or the Air Force personnel also sent to investigate the situation. No one’s really sure who they represented.

If they were real, though, they managed to frighten two hardy Pacific Northwesterners enough that they destroyed their own reputations and said they’d been hoaxing everyone the whole time.

My purpose in this post isn’t to give away the new information contained in the film nor to fully recap the whole Maury Island Incident story, but instead to encourage readers to check out the film and the rest of the story.

The film is half-an-hour long and very well made, so much so that it can be enjoyed purely as a fictional movie, if the reader is not a UFO believer at all.

In the short space of 30 minutes, the movies packs in a whole lot of intrigue and emotion. I felt connected to the characters despite the relative brevity of the film and the broad scope of the events packed into that short time frame.

It’s well worth checking out, whether you’re a devout believer, a devout non-believer, or just someone interested in one of the most fascinating, iconic events in Washington state history.