When you have read as much about UFOs as I have, you begin to see patterns.
But one of the strangest patterns I have seen occurs in the year 1947.

It begins with the Maury Island incident

Now this is how the story goes....
On June 21, 1947, Harold A. Dahl, his son, two crewman and a dog were aboard a boat near Maury Island (a peninsula of Vashon Island, in Puget Sound, near Tacoma,Washington)scavenging for drifting logs, when suddenly six large doughnut shaped metallic objects appeared silently overhead.
There were six of these "craft" , five were circling the sixth that appeared to be wounded.
The UFOs (okay they were Unidentified, they were Flying and they were Objects) were roughly 500 feet over them when one of the UFOs moved in and touched the ailing center one causing it to spew out a hot metallic substance out of the center hole.
(Boy Freud would have had a BALL with this!)
Well after the hot stuff spewed out, the damaged UFO seemed all better and they all six flew off towards the ocean.
Unfortunately, when the hot metallic substance spewed out, a lot of it fell on the boat damaging it, some fell on Dahl's son's arm burning it and some fell on the dog killing it.
The poor dog always gets it.

Well Dahl picked up some of the debris, and headed back to Tacoma.
He took his son to the ER and reported to his boss....Fred Lee Crisman.

Now if you know anything about the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, you may have heard of Mr. Crisman.
But the first time his name pops up is in the very odd "Shaver Mystery" experiences just before this incident.
He claimed in the letters section of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, in 1946, to have encountered underground dwelling beings known as the "Deros" while fighting as a commando in Burma during World War II.
According to Crisman's letter:

"My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9" scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don't know. My friend has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside."

Sounds remarkably like damage done by a laser doesn't it?
Except the first working laser was demonstrated on May 16th, 1960.
(cue Twilight Zone music)

Anyway, Crisman went back out to check the stop that Dahl said the event happened. Crisman allegedly found a lot of the debris and took some with him.
Meanwhile, Dahl received a visit from a man in a dark suit driving a 1947 Buick (Man in Black).
The man told Dahl that he wasn't supposed to have seen what he did, and that he should drop it and not to discuss it with anyone.
(Over 60 years later I'm writing about it on the internet...I don't think it worked.)

Then three days later (June 24, 1947), while flying near Mt. Rainer, pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to see nine unusual objects flying in the skies.
(Side note here, Arnold was there in the first place because he was looking for a U.S. Marine Corps C-46 transport airplane that had crashed near Mt. Rainer.
They were offering a $5000 reward for anyone that could find it.  Hmmmm....)
Now Arnold described one of the objects as crescent shaped, while the other eight objects were more circular, so no doughnuts.

But first the Maury Island incident, then a U.S. Marine Corps C-46 transport airplane crashes, then the famous Kenneth Arnold sighting...all in the same area?
 
And was Arnold's sighting all alone?
Nope.
A prospector named Fred M. Johnson on Mt. Adams, said that he saw six objects on June 24 at about the same time as Arnold, which he viewed through a small telescope.
L. G. Bernier of Richland, Washington said he saw three strange objects over Richland flying "almost edgewise" toward Mt. Rainier about one half hour (2:30) before Arnold's sighting (2:58).
Richland is about about 110 miles east of Mt. Adams and 140 miles southeast of Mt. Rainier.
Ethel Wheelhouse of Yakima, Washington (about 60 miles west-northwest of Richland) reported sighting several flying discs moving at high speeds at around the same time (3:00) as Arnold's sighting.
Actually there were numerous sightings of weird flashing lights in the sky and rapidly moving objects around Seattle that morning and night.

On July 7, 1947, photos were taken by William Rhodes of a lone object over Phoenix, Arizona.
The pictures were published in a local Phoenix newspaper and some other newspapers and when Arnold saw the pictures he said," "It was a disk almost identical to the one peculiar flying saucer that had been worrying me since my original observation—the one that looked different from the rest and that I had never mentioned to anyone."
The negatives and prints were later confiscated by the FBI and military.

Then of course on July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that they had recovered a crashed "flying disc" from a ranch near Roswell.
So much has been written about that, I'm not even gonna try to go into it here.

On July 12, 1947, eight objects were sighted over Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In this case, a photo was taken and published in the Tulsa Daily World the following day.

Then the barn doors opened, and over 850 UFO sightings were made in 1947 alone.
Everyone was seeing saucers and flying flapjacks and of course the military said they were all weather balloons.
That's a lot of weather balloons.

Now the Maury Island incident has been written off as a hoax.
The military says Kenneth Arnold's sighting was a mirage.
And the Roswell UFO Incident was debris from an experimental high-altitude surveillance balloon.
I guess it's up to you to decide what you want to believe.

By the way, Kenneth Arnold actually went to see Harold A. Dahl after the Maury Island incident.
Arnold interviewed him, was convinced his story was real and called two U.S. intelligence officers, Capt. William Davidson and Lt. Frank Brown to come up and take a look.
They got samples of the metal slag Dahl had collected and took off in a B-52 bound for Hamilton Air Force Base in California.
Twenty minutes into the flight, an engine caught fire and ignited the left wing.
The two crewmen with them parachuted out, but Davidson and Brown didn't, apparently riding the plane down.
In 1979, the FBI publicly admitted that Davidson and Brown had been investigating the Maury Island flying discs when they were killed in the plane crash.

(cue X-Files Theme)