Thread: The Battle of L.A. UFO Attacked by U.S. Army

Imagine a visiting spacecraft from another world, or dimension, hovering over a panicked and blacked-out LA in the middle of the night just weeks after Pearl Harbor at the height of WWII fear and paranoia. Imagine how this huge ship, assumed to be some unknown Japanese aircraft, was then attacked as it hung, nearly stationary, over Culver City and Santa Monica by dozens of Army anti-aircraft batteries firing nearly 2,000 rounds of 12 pound, high explosive shells


If it wasn't a weather balloon, what else could it of been?
In my opinion i think it was infact a craft of ET origin, or it was a secret german craft.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oQmbGMWlL7w

I heard about this incident a couple of years ago. I think it's fascinating and would love to know exactly what went down, there.

What ever it was in the sky that night, it was incredibly strong, to resist the impact of anti-aircraft guns..

I think if it was aliens they were being retarded.

"Oh this planet looks nice let's stop for lunch and make the local people think we're Gods or something OMGWTF!"

Imagine what people at LA were thinking.

"Wow those Japs got some serious shit."

Maybe I'm blind, but it looks like a zeppelin to me. And back in 1942, AA guns were so primitive that I doubt those shells even got high enough to hit the thing, and then they're also extremely inaccurate. We've all seen videos of flying fortresses flying through clouds and clouds of flak, apparently taking no damage. Well, that's because flak cannons and machine guns couldn't hit shit back then. And zeppelins had metal hulls too. It would take many direct hits to down one.

1942: Gen. Marshall's memo to Pres. Roosevelt

In 1974, due to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, a memorandum regarding the incident was released. Written by General George C. Marshall for President Franklin Roosevelt, and dated February 26, 1942, Marshall wrote that the "Air Raid" incident was due to "unidentified airplanes, other than American Army or Navy planes [which] were probably sighted over Los Angeles [and moved from] 'very slow' to as much as 200 mph and from elevations of 9000 to 18,000 feet." Because the objects did not seem to be part of any attack, Marshall speculated that the craft might have been commercial airplanes used as a sort of psychological warfare campaign to generate panic. This very likely was the Chief of Staff report cited by Secretary of War Stimson in his press statement the same day.

1942: Questionable Marshall/Roosevelt memo of incident as UFO event

A top secret document of questioned authenticity (see Majestic 12), dated March 5, 1942, from Gen. Marshall to President Roosevelt, says that the Army had supposedly recovered an unconventional craft east of Los Angeles and Rear Admiral Walter S. Anderson, chief of Naval intelligence, had also informed the War Department that the Navy had "...recovered an unidentified airplane off the coast of California... with no bearing on conventional explanation... This Headquarters has come to the determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin." Marshall then ordered the formation of a special intelligence unit to investigate the phenomenon. This supposedly was the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU). While the IPU seemingly did exist and investigated UFO reports in some capacity, according to the Air Force Directorate of Counterintelligence, it is unknown if it had any connection to the Los Angeles incident or even whether it existed in 1942.

----- According to Milk and Cookies, the smaller crafts that were in the "air raid" were never hit, and obviously the big one was like a tank that wasn't damaged at all hardly. So I doubt any of them fell to the ground, and was already stated in the above paragraph, it might be a fake report.

1945: Army history of event

An Army history from 1942-1945 of West Coast defenses went into great detail on the raid without drawing any conclusions as to whether the raid was real or not. It noted that the Army had expected attacks on West Coast cities from early February and had been on high alert at the time the incident happened. Naval intelligence specifically expected an attack on Los Angeles sometime on February 24 or February 25. The history goes into the evidence that unidentified aircraft, sometimes traveling in V-formations, were both seen and heard by many Army personnel and also tracked by radar. The first radar contact of an unidentified aircraft occurred at 1:44 a.m. on February 25 and was confirmed by two other radar. An object 120 miles off the coast was picked up at 2:00 a.m. and was "well-tracked" by radar to within three miles of Los Angeles. The history also mentions that in some instances an object spotted may have been a weather balloon recently released. Lt. General John L. DeWitt, commanding general of the Fourth Army and the Western Defense Command, wrote a month later: "It has been definitely ascertained that the blackout and antiaircraft firing... were caused by the presence of from one to five unidentified airplanes. While it is possible that these airplanes were launched from Japanese submarines, it is more likely that they were civilian or commercial planes, operated [by] unauthorized pilots."

“The Battle of Los Angeles”

During the night of 24/25 February 1942, unidentified objects caused a succession of alerts in southern California. On the 24th, a warning issued by naval intelligence indicated that an attack could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening a large number of flares and blinking lights were reported from the vicinity of defense plants. An alert called at 1918 [7:18 p.m., Pacific time] was lifted at 2223, and the tension temporarily relaxed. But early in the morning of the 25th renewed activity began. Radars picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Antiaircraft batteries were alerted at 0215 and were put on Green Alert—ready to fire—a few minutes later. The AAF kept its pursuit planes on the ground, preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force. Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of “enemy planes, ” even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted “about 25 planes at 12,000 feet” over Los Angeles. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon “the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.” From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance.

Probably much of the confusion came from the fact that anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes. In any case, the next three hours produced some of the most imaginative reporting of the war: “swarms” of planes (or, sometimes, balloons) of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000 and flying at speeds which were said to have varied from “very slow” to over 200 miles per hour, were observed to parade across the skies. These mysterious forces dropped no bombs and, despite the fact that 1,440 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition were directed against them, suffered no losses. There were reports, to be sure, that four enemy planes had been shot down, and one was supposed to have landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection. Residents in a forty-mile arc along the coast watched from hills or rooftops as the play of guns and searchlights provided the first real drama of the war for citizens of the mainland. The dawn, which ended the shooting and the fantasy, also proved that the only damage which resulted to the city was such as had been caused by the excitement (there was at least one death from heart failure), by traffic accidents in the blacked-out streets, or by shell fragments from the artillery barrage.

Attempts to arrive at an explanation of the incident quickly became as involved and mysterious as the “battle” itself. The Navy immediately insisted that there was no evidence of the presence of enemy planes, and Secretary [of the Navy, Frank] Knox announced at a press conference on 25 February that the raid was just a false alarm. At the same conference he admitted that attacks were always possible and indicated that vital industries located along the coast ought to be moved inland. The Army had a hard time making up its mind on the cause of the alert. A report to Washington, made by the Western Defense Command shortly after the raid had ended, indicated that the credibility of reports of an attack had begun to be shaken before the blackout was lifted. This message predicted that developments would prove “that most previous reports had been greatly exaggerated.” The Fourth Air Force had indicated its belief that there were no planes over Los Angeles. But the Army did not publish these initial conclusions. Instead, it waited a day, until after a thorough examination of witnesses had been finished. On the basis of these hearings, local commanders altered their verdict and indicated a belief that from one to five unidentified airplanes had been over Los Angeles. Secretary Stimson announced this conclusion as the War Department version of the incident, and he advanced two theories to account for the mysterious craft: either they were commercial planes operated by an enemy from secret fields in California or Mexico, or they were light planes launched from Japanese submarines. In either case, the enemy’s purpose must have been to locate anti-aircraft defenses in the area or to deliver a blow at civilian morale.

The divergence of views between the War and Navy departments, and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the affair, touched off a vigorous public discussion. The Los Angeles Times, in a first-page editorial on 26 February, announced that “the considerable public excitement and confusion” caused by the alert, as well as its “spectacular official accompaniments, ” demanded a careful explanation. Fears were expressed lest a few phony raids undermine the confidence of civilian volunteers in the aircraft warning service. In Congress, Representative Leland Ford wanted to know whether the incident was “a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to take away Southern California’s war industries.” Wendell Willkie, speaking in Los Angeles on 26 February, assured Californians on the basis of his experiences in England that when a real air raid began “you won’t have to argue about it—you’ll just know.” He conceded that military authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert but deplored the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. A strong editorial in the Washington Post on 27 February called the handling of the Los Angeles episode a “recipe for jitters,” and censured the military authorities for what it called “stubborn silence” in the face of widespread uncertainty. The editorial suggested that the Army’s theory that commercial planes might have caused the alert “explains everything except where the planes came from, whither they were going, and why no American planes were sent in pursuit of them.” The New York Times on 28 February expressed a belief that the more the incident was studied, the more incredible it became: “If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them?... What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?” These questions were appropriate, but for the War Department to have answered them in full frankness would have involved an even more complete revelation of the weakness of our air defenses.

At the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send planes over the area at the time of this alert, although submarine-launched aircraft were subsequently used over Seattle. A careful study of the evidence suggests that meteorological balloons—known to have been released over Los Angeles —may well have caused the initial alarm. This theory is supported by the fact that anti-aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to have been airplanes. After the firing started, careful observation was difficult because of drifting smoke from shell bursts. The acting commander of the anti-aircraft artillery brigade in the area testified that he had first been convinced that he had seen fifteen planes in the air, but had quickly decided that he was seeing smoke. Competent correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Bill Henry witnessed the shooting and wrote that they were never able to make out an airplane. It is hard to see, in any event, what enemy purpose would have been served by an attack in which no bombs were dropped, unless perhaps, as Mr. Stimson suggested, the purpose had been reconnaissance.

– The Army Air Forces in World War II, prepared under the editorship of Wesley Frank Craven, James Lea Cate. v.1, pp. 277-286, Washington, D.C. : Office of Air Force History : For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 1983

Originally Posted by drewmandan

Maybe I'm blind, but it looks like a zeppelin to me. And back in 1942, AA guns were so primitive that I doubt those shells even got high enough to hit the thing, and then they're also extremely inaccurate. We've all seen videos of flying fortresses flying through clouds and clouds of flak, apparently taking no damage. Well, that's because flak cannons and machine guns couldn't hit shit back then. And zeppelins had metal hulls too. It would take many direct hits to down one.

The man on the video said there were direct hits.

I think they would have been able to identify a zeppelin seeing as zeppelins are pretty darn huge.