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Mike Conley's Tales of the Weird: Captain's odd encounter makes waves

By Mike Conley | The McDowell News

Published: June 10, 2009

The year 1947 was certainly a milestone in UFO history. It was the year of pilot Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine weird objects flying in formation over Mount Rainer, Wash., which gave birth to the term "flying saucer." It was also the year that a strange craft supposedly crashed in the desert near Roswell, N.M. and alien bodies were recovered by the military.
And during the summer of 1947, a Coast Guard captain and his crew reportedly had an amazing encounter while patrolling Puget Sound in Washington state.
At around 2 p.m. on June 21, 1947, Capt. Harold A. Dahl and his Coast Guard crew were sailing along the southern end of Puget Sound near Maury Island. Along with Dahl, there were his son, two crewmen and a dog on board their boat. Dahl looked up from the wheel and was startled to see "six very large doughnut-shaped machines" in the air. He estimated that they were approximately 2,000 feet up in the sky. The objects were stationary and silent, according to a Web site.
At first, Dahl thought they were large balloons until one of them started to descend. The other five then followed suit. The first weird object continued to descend until it was directly overhead, about 500 feet above the water. The objects remained totally silent.
Dahl later reported they were each about 100 feet in diameter and each one had a hole in its center. He noticed that the sunlight was brilliantly reflected from their metallic surfaces. In addition, they seemed to have portholes all around them.
Dahl and his crew pulled their boat over to the beach, got out their camera and went ashore. Dahl took four photos of the objects.
"All the time, the five were circling around the one which was stationery," Dahl later stated. "Five minutes passed, and then one of the circling machines detached itself from the formation and came right down to the stationery one. It seemed to touch it, and stayed motionless for about four minutes. Then we heard a dull thud, and the central craft spewed out what looked like thousands of newspapers from the inside of its center."
Those falling fragments actually turned out to be a strange type of very light metal that fluttered down over the bay. Then, darker and heavier metal fragments rained down on the bay and the crew. Steam rose when they hit the water. Dahl, his son and the crew ran for shelter under a cliff. A falling fragment of metal hit his son's arm and their poor dog was killed.
"Then the rain of metal stopped," Dahl stated. "The strange craft silently lifted and went westward towards the Pacific. All the time, the center one remained in the formation. We found the fallen metal too hot to touch, for some time. But when it cooled, we loaded a large number of pieces into our launch."
When they climbed back into the boat, Dahl found that his radio was not working. He started up the engine and returned to Tacoma. His son had to be seen by a doctor at the hospital. Dahl later had his film developed but the negatives were covered with strange white spots. Some specimens of the strange metal were supposedly taken to a university for analysis. One report stated that the metal was an alloy of calcium, iron, zinc, and titanium, according to a Web site.
The tale about Harold Dahl's UFO encounter gets even weirder. The day after the sighting, he came face to face with one of the dreaded Men in Black.
The following morning, a strange looking man drove to his house and got out of a black sedan-type car. He was dressed in a black suit, was around 40 years old and in Dahl's words, looked like "an insurance agent." The weird man asked Dahl some curious questions.
"Are you happy at your job, and in your family?" he asked.
Dahl demanded to know what he was getting at. The weird stranger merely smiled and proceeded to tell Dahl about what he had experienced the day before. He then gave a stern warning to the frightened and bewildered man.
"Mr. Dahl," said the stranger in black, "you had better forget what you have seen, and stop talking. Silence is the best thing for you and your family. You have seen what you ought not to have seen!"
He then abruptly left.

Contact Mike Conley at 652-3313, ext. 3422 or e-mail nconley@mcdowellnews.com.