The Maury Island UFO Incident: The Story behind the Air Force’s first military plane crash (10 page)

On July 22, 1967, Fred Crisman spoke at the Northwest UFO Space
Convention
at
Seattle Center sponsored by Understanding Inc.
concerning Maury Island. He claimed to still have prints of the Maury
Island photographs. This began his correspondence with Gary Lesley
who wanted to get copies of the Maury Island photographs.
He
provided an address for Harold Dahl in Tenino, WA who he said had
the photographs. Gary Lesley contacted Dahl and asked about damage
to the boat because of the slag. Dahl told Lesley that it was their policy
not to answer letters that wanted to discuss Maury Island, because of
how it was treated by the press. Dahl said he had left the matter up to
Crisman to discuss Maury Island.
In September of 1967, Crisman wrote to Lesley that he did not
approve of his correspondence with Dahl. Crisman said he wanted no
publicity and did not want to get involved in any way.

Thomas Beckham aka Mark Evans, photo from A Farewell to
Justice
Crisman and his JFK Connection

Regardless of the publicity Crisman would
receive during the Maury Island incident; it is
his history later in life and with
the JFK
assassination
investigation
by Jim
Garrison
where he would achieve the most notoriety
during his life.
Crisman would become the
first person Clay Shaw would contact after his

arrest by Jim Garrison for conspiring in the assassination of Pres. John
Kennedy. –
Mellen, Joan, A Farewell to Justice, 2005.
strongly that
Crisman
and Shaw were CIA
somehow Crisman was his supervisor or could somehow get him out
of this situation.
This contact implies

Operatives and that

Crisman himself would be later subpoenaed by the Orleans Grand
Jury in Jan. of 1968 and asked what his relationship was to Thomas
Beckham – a suspect in the JFK assassination. At the time, Crisman
was conducting a talk program on Puyallup radio station KAYE under
the name of Jon Gold. Crisman in his statement to the Jury said he
met Beckham through Harold Dahl in 1966 – that Harold Dahl who
was operating a small second hand store had introduced Thomas
Beckham to Crisman. The facts are that Crisman met Beckham years
earlier in the summer of 1963.
Mellen, Joan, A Farewell to Justice, 2005.

Thomas Beckham would relate he first met Crisman talking to
Newbrough at a restaurant named Holsum. Joseph is asking Crisman
about federal fraud charges. Crisman states to Newbrough “Didn’t it
scare you when you read “U.S. of America vs. Joseph Newbrough?
How did that hit you?”

Thomas Beckham occasionally went by the name of Mark Evans as
a recording artist. Crisman oddly helped finance a trip for his new
friend Beckham to New Orleans to promote Beckham’s
record.
Beckham would later make an LP called “Material Witness” in which
he mentioned Crisman.

In late 1966, Crisman and Thomas E Beckham incorporated seven
businesses.
Among these companies were the Northwest
Relief
Society, Associated Discount Services, TAB Productions, Professional
Research Bureau, and The National Institute of Criminology
.-Jeffords,
Edd “Jury orders Crisman to Testify November 21st in Garrison’s JFK Probe Tacoma
News Tribune, November 1, 1968

Crisman’s relationship with Beckham would
later become
strained. Beckham would state Crisman sent him a message
through Bob Lavender that “If I am subpoenaed as a result of
anything he [Beckham] says to that grand jury, I’ll kill him!”
Mellen, Joan A Farewell to Justice, pg. 286.

Beckham would later confess in his book “Remnants of Truth” that
he lied to the Orleans Grand Jury about Crisman. Beckham would
write in his book, “By no means is this memoir a statement or
confession” but written to clear up questions. He states Jim Garrison
went to his grave “knowing the truth” and that he gained the trust of
officials as well as the mob.

Beckham said that later he
officials, and did his job well.
acquaintances he had including ”There was not only the death of the
President, “my friend Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Martin, Clay Shaw and
Jack Ruby.

Beckham believed he was used in some type of a plot. He said if he
knew then, he would have run. “But as far as I ran, someone always
managed to find me (like my CIA buddies Jack Martin and Fred
Crisman).” Beckham relates in his book how right after his brother
contacted him about the newspaper’s announcement of his subpoena
that “Within ten minutes or even less, Jack Martin and Fred Crisman
called me about the same thing.” Crisman and Martin told Beckham
not to worry, “.everything was being taken care of.”
became a courier for government
Beckham would talk of the many

Beckham wrote a whole chapter entitled “Fred Crisman” in his
book and would write “He always seemed to be there for me, and
always knew where I was, no matter what state I lived in. “ One time
Fred and I were sent to a small town in California to get someone out
of trouble.”
Beckham hid in a closet at the hall of justice and
ransacked the office until they got what they were looking for. On
another occasion, Beckham relates how Fred sprung him from a small
town jail in Louisiana. “I knew that I had it in this rat hole of a town,
but I called Fred and told him I needed help. Within a few hours, I
was told by the jailer to pack up because I was going. It was the best
news I had heard since I had been there, until he said the FBI was
there to get me. I got sick inside, thinking Fred had let me down. But
when I walked out, the first thing I saw was Fred dressed in a gray suit.
He handcuffed me, signed some paper and took me out to a car and
put me in the back seat. We drove a few blocks down before Fred
took the cuffs off.”

Crisman would drive Beckham to his home in Mississippi and
would later see Beckham again a couple of years later when Beckham
moved to Washington State before moving to Nebraska.
Beckham would also state, “Fred had an auto with a phone that was
hid under the dash.”
– Beckham, Thomas, Remnants of Truth, 2008
.

Crisman would be called Beckham’s “mentor and supervisor” with “an
operative at a deep cover level in a long-range clandestine intelligence
mission…an operative at a supervisory level, a Fagin to the Artful
Dodger.”

(Fred
Crisman, Murder
of
a
City, 1970)

 

An indication of Crisman’s involvement with Garrison is reflected in
Ray Palmer’s letter to Gray Barker in 1976.

 

“Dear Gray:

The Fred Crisman summoned to testify in the Clay Shaw trial
was the same Crisman who was involved in the Tacoma-Maury
Island Affair, and the same Fred Crisman who claimed to have
shot his way out of a cave in Burma, receiving a hole the size of a
dime in his arm from a “ray gun” wielded, (he said) by the dero.
His exact words to me: “For God’s sake drop the Shaver cave
stories! You don’t know what you are dealing with here! He is the
same Fred Crisman who offered to go into a cave in Texas and
bring out some of the ancient machinery if I would send him $500
expense money.

It was not Clay Shaw who was ruined financially, personally
and physically, it was Jim Garrison who was ruined. He was (as I
told him in a letter) subjected to IRS audit, finally won the case in
court but at tremendous financial cost – which was the IRS goal in
the first place. He was also libeled, framed in a drug ring, and
hounded from office, finally losing out in a re-election run.

I have Garrison’s letter stating that they were one and the
same man. I also have my answer to Garrison, predicting that
Crisman
could not
be subpoenaed, that
he was
CIA, and
tremendously powerful.

There is a definite link between flying saucers, The Shaver
Mystery, The Kennedy’s assassinations, Watergate and Fred
Crisman. There is one common denominator for everything that
is happening in the world today. That common denominator is
right where Shaver said it was – no matter whether you prefer
caverns or the lower astral or another dimension.
Rap (Ray
Palmer, Rt. 2, Box 36, Amherst, Wisconsin 54406)

-
Gray Barker’s Newsletter #5, March 1976, Letters to Editor, pg 15.
Interestingly, another figure in the JFK assassination Guy Banister
himself researched a UFO sighting case July 11, 1947 when what
appeared to be 30 inch diameter “flying disks” had been found at Twin
Falls Idaho.

“In a lengthy handwritten memo to Jonathan Blackmer, an investigator
for the House select
committee that
re-investigated Kennedy's
assassination in the late 1970s and had a keen interest in Crisman,
Garrison
spelled out
what
he had concluded about
Crisman:

" . . . I suggest the only reasonable conclusion is that he was (and
probably is, if still around), an operative at a deep cover level in a longrange,
clandestine, intelligence mission directly (in terms of our
national intelligence paranoia) related to maintaining national security . .
. Crisman emerges as an operative at a supervisory level . . .
acquired
by the apparatus to carry out the menial jobs that are needed to push a
current mission forward, a middle man--in the final analysis--between
the mechanics who eliminate, and the handy men, who otherwise
support a termination mission, on one hand, and the distant, far
removed, deeply submerged command level, on the other."

http://greyfalcon.us/restored/Fred%20Crisman.ht

During the Assassination Hearings of JFK in 1978 Robert Groden was
asked to identify pictures of the tramps on the grassy knoll and stated
that one of the men was Fred Lee Crisman “who is another ultra-right
winger - a member of the Minutemen. He has become a prime suspect
for critics of the report as a candidate to be the short tramp.”
The Investigation Of The Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy, Hearings Before
The Select Committee on Assassinations Of The United States House Of Representatives,
95th Congress, 2nd Session. .1978

Crisman says that he was teaching school in Rainier, OR when the
President was killed.
School officials in
Rainier confirmed that
Crisman was a high school teacher in November, 1963
.Shomshak, Vern
“True Magazine Less Than True-Crisman Says of Article on JFK’s Death, Tacoma
News Tribune May 22, 1975

In 1973 Palmer commented on Crisman “Fact: Fred Crisman is always
present; in The Shaver Mystery, in the flying saucer mystery…in the
Bay of Pigs, in the assassination of Diem ,in the John Kennedy case,
and quite often causing Ray Palmer all kinds of hell.”
- Palmer, Ray
Forum, November, 1973 p.12

On April 13, 1975, he married Mary Frances Borden, whom he had
met when he was a member of the Tacoma Library Board of Trustees.
He had been appointed to the board in 1970 by the outgoing mayor of
Tacoma, A.L. Slim Rasmussen, and a compatriot in the local political
wars. Fred Lee Crisman died at the age of fifty-six of kidney failure in
the Seattle Veterans Hospital on December 10, 1975.
The official
cause of death on his death certificate was Cardiac Arrhythmia and
Severe Coronary atherosclerosis.

Notes:
Crisman led a very covert secretive life with a pattern of
creating discrediting reports
at
Boeing, misleading statement,
and
running cover church businesses.

Were psychiatric units convenient hideouts? It was common for CIA
operatives to check themselves into psychiatric hospitals to perhaps
hide for a period of time or “lay low.” Because of privacy of medical
records, they would have been perfect sanctuaries. It is interesting that
Beckham was established with a second hand shop perhaps similar to
Harold Dahl’s second hand shop.
An autopsy was performed on Crisman. Autopsies are not performed
normally unless there is a reason. This autopsy would have either been
prior requested by Crisman himself or his wife.
Of interest also is in the FBI reports on Crisman in Sept. of 1947 filed
by Guy Hottel SAC, the character of case is listed as “Atomic Energy
Act Applicant. Crisman had requested an application and the FBI was
more than interested in doing a complete security check on Crisman.