All ya gotta do is speed-browse this.....but if you've read GR once

[Thomas Eckhardt]

This is far too good and interesting for speed-browsing. Thanks a lot!


Speaking about Boeing at the beginning of the 60s, Fred Lee Crisman 
comes to mind, a highly mysterious character who was involved in the 
Maury Island incident, testified before a Grand Jury during Jim 
Garrison's investigation of the JFK assassination and even has a link to 
PROMIS (referenced in BE) via his protégé Michael Riconosciuto.

(I think I have commented on Crisman before. If you remember this, 
please skip.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Crisman

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Fred_Lee_Crisman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Riconosciuto

Crisman worked for Boeing from 1960 to 1962 as a "personnel 
representative", according to his Grand Jury testimony (available 
online) which is quite remarkable for a guy who had before been a 
fighter pilot in WW II and Korea and later a teacher and school 
administrator -- apart from writing letters to Ray Palmers' "Amazing 
Stories" about the Shaver Mystery.

Even more remarkable is the alleged impact of his activities on the 
senior management of Boeing:

"Crisman had started to work for Boeing, in 1960. He was responsible for 
the resignation of several senior managers. According to the rumours 
that Crisman himself spread out, the reason for their demise was the 
fact that they had been homosexuals."

http://philipcoppens.com/maury_isle.html

This last bit is, as far as I can tell, according to an unsubstantiated 
but very detailed document supposedly authored by the CIA which also 
claims that Crisman had been with the OSS and that he was a trained 
"disruption agent". Given his activities through the years, at least the 
latter claim appears very plausible. That Crisman worked for Boeing from 
1960 to 1962 is uncontroversial however.

One should remember that the Maury Island incident, the first UFO 
sighting in modern times, just before Kenneth Arnold and the Roswell 
incident, took place close to the old Boeing Field which had been used 
by the US military during WW II and after for testing aircraft.

Garrison believed that Crisman was an agent of military intelligence:

'Mr. Crisman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part
of the industrial warfare complex for years. His cover is that of a
"preacher" and a person "engaged in work to help gypsies." Our 
information indicates that since the early 1960's he has made
many trips to the New Orleans and Dallas areas in connection with his
undercover work for that part of the, warfare industry engaged in the
manufacture of what is termed, in military language, a "hardware"--
meaning those Weapons sold to the U.S. government which are uniquely
large and expensive.

Mr. Crisman is a "former" employee of the Boeing Aircraft Company
in the sense that one defendant in the case is a "former" employee,
of Lockheed Aircraft Company in Los Angeles. In intelligence terminology
this ordinarily means that the connection still exists but that
the "former employee" has moved into underground operation.'

Crisman was subpoenaed by Garrison to testify against Clay Shaw. Clay 
Shaw, according to unverified claims, worked for the OSS and Paperclip 
and at the time of the assassination had connections to the European 
fascist underground (in the 70s it turned out that Shaw indeed was CIA). 
Crisman is suspected to have known Shaw from this time but denied 
knowing him before the Grand Jury. We cannot know for sure whether 
Crisman was in the OSS or Paperclip (there was also an article in UFO 
magazine claiming that he had been).

In V. we meet a German rocket engineer working at Yoyodyne (Boeing). Was 
Boeing testing Nazi /Wunderwaffen/ in the years after WW II? Was this 
what Crisman covered up for in the Maury Island incident?

Crisman also was a mentor to boy genius ('You don't forget a 16-year-old 
youngster who shows up with his own argon laser.') Michael Riconosciuto 
of PROMIS fame. Riconosciuto said in an prison interview that during the 
Maury Island incident Fred Crisman worked for the security service of 
Boeing and invented the UFO story to cover up aircraft tests that were 
performed by Boeing (and probably the military within the framework of 
the MIC) and that Crisman retrieved some sort of radioactive material 
which had gotten lost.

All of which sounds reasonable. More reasonable at least than the 
existence of alien spacecraft or Crisman's life being a series of highly 
improbable but coincidental involvements in world-historic parapolitical 
events.

Crisman worked at Boeing in Seattle while Thomas Pynchon also worked 
there. He probably would not have met the young technical writer, and 
the correspondences between the uncorroborated aspects of Crisman's 
weird career (OSS, Paperclip), and Pynchon's interests in GR are surely 
coincidental. If it is true that Crisman shook up Boeing's senior 
management, however, Pynchon must have heard of it.

In any case, I find Crisman's story fascinating in its own right.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l