Something was flying over LA. But what?
Different people saw different things. Included in the one million eyewitnesses were several newspaper reporters. Editor Peter Jenkins of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner wrote that he saw a V formation of about twenty-five aircraft go overhead moving in the direction of Long Beach.
A reporter from the Los Angeles Herald Express saw the same objects. He insisted that several antiaircraft shells had struck one of them, and he was astonished the object was not shot down. Reporter Bill Henry of the Los Angeles Times confirmed that there seemed to be a number of direct hits on this particular object, but with no apparent effect.
Quoted in Beyond Earth, Man’s Contact with UFOs, by Ralph Blum, who witnessed the incident as a young child, Long Beach police chief J. H. McClelland said: “I watched what was described as the second wave of planes from the roof of the Long Beach City Hall. An experienced Navy observer with powerful binoculars was with me and counted nine planes in the cone of the searchlight. He said they were silver in color. They passed from one battery of searchlights to another, and under fire from the antiaircraft guns, flew from the direction of Redondo Beach… toward Santa Ana.”
One thing was for certain: These were not Americans flying over the city. Though the pilots of the nearby Fourth Interceptor Command had been alerted, no U.S. aircraft — fighter planes, bombers or blimps — were sent aloft that night, simply because the antiaircraft fire was so intense, the chance of a friendly aircraft being shot down was just too high.
Still, some people swore they saw dogfights between enemy airplanes and U.S. fighter aircraft, though illumination rounds fired from antiaircraft guns were probably mistaken by some people for aerial combat. Others claimed they saw strings of red lights that looked like illuminated kites fluttering in the sky. Some people even theorized these lighted kites were launched by Japanese American saboteurs signaling the approaching enemy aircraft to guide them to their targets.
At least 1,400 antiaircraft rounds were fired over Los Angeles during the “battle,” hitting nothing. Not a single bomb was dropped on the city and not a scrap of any aircraft was ever recovered. The only casualties were caused by unexploded ordnance that rained down on the area. This debris damaged many homes and cars throughout the city and killed three people. Three elderly residents also reportedly died of heart attacks during the incident.
At 4:14 A.M., the cease-fire order was given and the “Battle of Los Angeles” was over. But the controversy was just beginning, because at the height of the incident, an extraordinary flying object had been caught in a photograph taken by the Los Angeles Times.
And even to nonbelievers, its distinctive saucerlike profile looks a lot like a UFO.
As with the scareships and the ghost fliers, it’s easy to determine what the object photographed over LA that night was not.
A Japanese aircraft? The answer is definitely no. At the time Japan did not have any aircraft carriers capable of sailing close to the United States, nor any airplanes able to reach California from Japan. Some speculated the object might have been a seaplane launched from a Japanese submarine lurking offshore. But the object caught by the Los Angeles Times photographer is definitely not a seaplane.
George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff at the time, wrote a memorandum to President Roosevelt after the incident in which he speculated that the “unidentified planes” might have been commercial aircraft flown over Los Angeles by Japanese agents. Why? To spread alarm among the city’s residents. Other reasons for the Japanese to attempt such a brash plan: to pinpoint locations of the area’s antiaircraft batteries and possibly to test the effectiveness of the city’s blackout procedures.
And where would these commercial planes have flown from? The army speculated the Japanese might have a secret base in Mexico.
But this scenario was disproved at the end of the war when the Japanese divulged that they did not have any planes over the area at the time of the incident.
Could the object photographed over Los Angeles have been a blimp or a barrage balloon? The British used barrage balloons to ensnare low-flying enemy planes during the London Blitz. But while LA did have three of its own barrage balloons, they were all accounted for that night.
As UFO writer Frank Warren has pointed out, it’s important to note that the object in the photograph is taking direct hits from antiaircraft fire. So, the question must be asked: What, in 1942, could achieve flight, was elliptical in shape, was silvery in color and could survive direct hits from three-inch antiaircraft guns?
All this eventually led to speculation that whatever was flying over Los Angeles on February 25 was not of earthly origin — and the famous photo seems to bear this out. It shows an object of definite saucer shape caught in searchlights and surrounded by exploding antiaircraft shells. Physicist Bruce Maccabee, who wrote a detailed report about the LA incident, concluded that based on estimates of altitude and the spread of the searchlight beams, the object in the photo could have measured up to 300 feet across!
Whether the U.S. military had quick access to the Los Angeles Times photo is unknown. But the following day, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said the whole “LA Raid” incident was a false alarm, something that could be attributed to “jittery nerves.” (Early 1942 was a nervous time for Southern Californians. Just the day before, a Japanese submarine had surfaced off the town of Goleta about an hour north of LA and fired on an oil refinery there.)
Yet many doubted Knox’s explanation, including the U.S. Army, which later issued a statement saying some kind of aircraft were over Los Angeles that night.
The press was also skeptical. An editorial appearing in the Long Beach Independent soon after the incident stated, “There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter.”
There may be some truth to this. Until the release of that Marshall memorandum some thirty years later, the Defense Department claimed it had no record of the event. No congressional investigation was ever conducted, nor any reasonable explanation given by any government agency as to what happened.
Just about the only thing everyone agrees on is that in the predawn hours of February 25, 1942, something saucerlike and huge, something that couldn’t be damaged by antiaircraft fire, something that was seen by almost a million people, flew over the city of Los Angeles.
5
The Mystery of the Foo Fighters
It all began in either March or June 1942.
That no one knows the date for sure indicates on the grand scale of things how unimportant it seemed at the time.
Total war was raging around the world: Europe, North Africa and Asia were in flames. The Atlantic and the Pacific were killing zones. Millions of men were under arms; thousands of noncombatants were being slaughtered every day. The democracies against totalitarianism. Good versus evil. Freedom or slavery. This was World War II. And in 1942, the outcome was far from certain.