An Origin Story.
[Note: this article was originally published May 21, 2022, by FATE Magazine.]
Preface: My Maury Island “Origin Story.”
I first heard about the Maury Island Incident on a Saturday - October 8, 2011. I recall this date clearly. I’d watched the premiere of Ken Burns’ Prohibition documentary earlier in the week. A small piece of the story was about bootlegger Roy Olmstead’s final Prohibition-era arrest — an arrest that took place in my neighborhood at the old Woodmont Dock on Puget Sound, Washington.
And I had never heard the story.
My neighbor and I had met — as we always did — at a local coffee shop that Saturday. We talked at length about this amazing lost piece of local history. While we were reveling in both our ignorance, and in that “treasure hunt” adrenaline moment that discovering lost history can provide, another man in the coffee shop — a man we did not know — leaned toward us and said:
“You like local history? You must know about the Maury Island Incident, right? Like in the 1950s or something. A bunch of flying saucers? Right here out on Puget Sound!”
We did not know. I have lived in the Puget Sound region for nearly my entire life, and for the last twenty years my home has looked across the Sound to Maury Island, and I had never heard the story.