Recorded as local legend, not as proven fact. Names, dates, and buildings are real; the haunting is the story people keep telling.
At about 3:45 a.m. on July 27, 1984, the fishing tender Steeva Ten, a forty-two-foot boat under master Richard Dale Hartman of Port Orchard, was in Rosario Strait when a white and orange fireball trailing sparks crossed west to east and hit the water. The splash threw a plume Hartman put at about a hundred feet. The object sank and bubbled. The position, as reported, was about a thousand yards south of Lummi Island in water around two hundred and seventy feet deep, with the strong currents that strait is known for.
The Coast Guard found no debris. No aircraft were missing. No space junk was claimed. Whidbey’s radar had nothing. A tug at Anacortes saw a flash. A Coast Guard crewman later reported a white object in the sky at the south end of Lummi. Petty Officer Gene Hoff called it an unknown flying object, which in 1984 was both a technical shrug and a phrase the papers knew what to do with. The Coast Guard’s later working answer was a meteorite. That is still a working answer, not a recovered stone on a museum stand.
Dominic Papetti dived the area months later and described a teacup or disc on the bottom. It was gone the next time. Divers lose objects in two-hundred-seventy-foot current. They also see shapes that do not stay. File the report. Do not promote it into a craft with a flag.
The tale circulated immediately, because a fireball, a fishing boat, and a Coast Guard “UFO” are a complete local-news package. It returned whenever someone needed a Rosario mystery, and again when diving talk revived Papetti’s disc. Hartman’s account is the spine: a master on a forty-two-foot tender, a time, a direction, a plume, a bubble. The Anacortes tug and the later white object over the south end of the island are corroboration of a light, not of a machine. The rest is what a strait does with a splash that leaves no wreckage.
What is unknown is the object. Meteorite is the official habit. A piece of something that should have been on a radar is the unofficial habit. Neither habit has produced the thing. The depth and the current are not in dispute. The absence of debris is not in dispute. Those absences are the story’s honest center.
Lummi Island’s south water is still a working strait. The Steeva Ten’s watch is a matter of record. Hoff’s phrase is a matter of record. A craft is not. Leave it in the file where Hartman left it: a fireball, a plume, a bubble, and nothing to pick up.