Chat with Steve Edmiston, and you’ll soon realize he’s no “Spooky” Mulder, but for an affably casual guy who notes he’s no expert in UFOs, he’s also done no shortage of digging into an historic Puget Sound sighting that he’s cited as perhaps the first recorded report of an encounter with “Men in Black.”

Edmiston is slated to speak in the Carnegie Room at the Port Townsend Public Library on Thursday, Jan. 25, at 6 p.m. on the subject of “UFO Northwest: How Washington state spawned the Men in Black.”

Edmiston lives in Des Moines, in King County, and he credits an offhand coffee shop conversation in 2011 with cluing him into “The Maury Island Incident,” a Pacific Northwest UFO sighting that the FBI investigated in 1947, the same year that Idaho pilot Kenneth Arnold coined the term “flying saucer” to describe the UFOs he reported seeing in flight near Mount Rainier.

“I’ve enjoyed entertainment like ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ but I’d never thought of studying such subjects in real life,” said Edmiston, a business and entertainment lawyer with Bracepoint Law. “But I’m a sucker for local history, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard about this bit of lore before, practically in my own backyard.”

Edmiston’s subsequent research took him into FBI records, some of which had been sealed for decades, and while he makes no attempt to convince anyone of whether Tacoma resident Harold Dahl’s alleged sighting of a UFO over Puget Sound actually happened, he does believe that the documents he’s discovered are enough to debunk claims that Dahl hoaxed the sighting.

“If you really look into the evidence, which includes reports that were made to J. Edgar Hoover himself, the dismissals of this case as a hoax simply don’t add up,” Edmiston said. “That being said, I’m not asking anyone to believe anything about what this sighting might have been.”

Even as Edmiston has remained “less about sci-fi weirdness” and more focused on this specific slice of post-World War II American history, he’s quick to point out the correlation of 1947 being proclaimed “The Summer of the Flying Saucer” by popular contemporary media, especially within the Pacific Northwest, which he pointed out has continued to lead the country in its frequency of UFO sightings.

“This case could easily be regarded as one of history’s first ‘X-Files,’ right down to its accounts of unidentified, self-described government agents warning people away from looking into the matter any further,” Edmiston said. “You can see echoes of those accounts in the reports of ‘Men in Black’ ever since.”

Although Edmiston insists this will likely remain “the only UFO story I’ll ever be involved in,” he acknowledged that the public’s appetite for any and all further details on the “Maury Island Incident” alone has been “ferocious,” to the point that it’s led to the creation of an annual community event called “Burning Saucer” on June 21, the date of Dahl’s sighting.

Edmiston even co-wrote the screenplay for director Scott Schaefer’s 2014 30-minute short film, also titled “The Maury Island Incident.”

When asked whether he believed that something about the culture or character of the Pacific Northwest lent itself to such sightings, Edmiston speculated on whether the region’s receptiveness to “quirky” unexplained phenomena had made such reports more likely, or whether those reports had instead shaped the Pacific Northwest into a “less skeptical” region.

“Kenneth Arnold’s account sparked off a frenzy of searching for flying saucers in the skies,” Edmiston said. “Then again, this was already an area that was prone to Sasquatch sightings.”