th the intelligence
officer at McChord, and took off for their home base, Hamilton. When
they left McChord they had a good idea as to the identity of the
UFO's. Fortunately they told the McChord intelligence officer what
they had determined from their interview.

In a few hours the two officers were dead. The B-25 crashed near
Kelso, Washington. The crew chief and a passenger had parachuted to
safety. The newspapers hinted that the airplane was sabotaged and
that it was carrying highly classified material. Authorities at
McChord AFB confirmed this latter point, the airplane was carrying
classified material.

In a few days the newspaper publicity on the crash died down, and
the Maury Island Mystery was never publicly solved.

Later reports say that the two harbor patrolmen mysteriously
disappeared soon after the fatal crash.

They should have disappeared, into Puget Sound. The whole Maury
Island Mystery was a hoax. The first, possibly the second-best, and
the dirtiest hoax in the UFO history. One passage in the detailed
official report of the Maury Island Mystery says:

Both ------ (the two harbor patrolmen) admitted that the rock
fragments had nothing to do with flying saucers. The whole thing was
a hoax. They had sent in the rock fragments [to a magazine publisher]
as a joke. ------ One of the patrolmen wrote to ------ [the
publisher] stating that the rock could have been part of a flying
saucer. He had said the rock came from a flying saucer because that's
what ------ [the publisher] wanted him to say.

The publisher, mentioned above, who, one of the two hoaxers said,
wanted him to say that the rock fragments had come from a flying
saucer, is the same one who paid the man I called Simpson $200 to
investigate the case.

The report goes on to explain more details of the incident. Neither
one of the two men could ever produce the photos. They "misplaced"
them, they said. One of them, I forget which, was the mysterious
informer who called the newspapers to report the conversations that
were going on in the hotel room. Jackson's mysterious visitor didn't
exist. Neither of the men was a harbor patrolman, they merely owned a
couple of beat-up old boats that they used to salvage floating lumber
from Puget Sound. The airplane crash was one of those unfortunate
things. An engine caught on fire, burned off, and just before the two
pilots could get out, the wing and tail tore off, making it
impossible for them to escape