Battle of Los Angeles

From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)

This image was on the front of the Los Angeles Times the next day. Note that the spotlights are trained on the object; the smaller spots of light nearby are the explosions of artillery shells.

The West coast air raid (sometimes referred to as the Los Angeles air raid or The battle of Los Angeles) involved an unknown object (or objects) flying over Los Angeles on February 24, 1942, that triggered a massive antiaircraft artillery barrage because of fears of Japanese attack. The target was later officially declared to be a lost weather balloon, although this was never confirmed. Some believe this to have been an early unidentified flying object or UFO incident.

In the late evening of February 24 and the early morning hours of February 25, 1942, several unidentified aircraft were reported over Los Angeles.

Air raid sirens were sounded throughout Los Angeles county at 2:25 a.m., and a total blackout was ordered. Thousands of Air Raid Wardens were summoned to their positions.

At 3:16 a.m. the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade began firing 12.8 pound antiaircraft shells at the unidentified objects, which were sometimes illuminated by bright spotlights.

After the air raid warning began, the pilots of the 4th Interceptor Command prepared their airplanes to fly, but no such order ever came, and the planes remained grounded. The artillery fire continued occasionally for nearly an hour, ceasing at 4:14 a.m. The objects were said to have taken about 20 minutes to have moved from Santa Monica to Long Beach. The all-clear was sounded and the blackout order lifted at 7:21 a.m.

In addition to several buildings damaged by friendly fire, three civilians were killed by the antiaircraft fire, and another three died of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long bombardment. The incident was front-page news along the U.S. Pacific coast, and earned some mass media coverage throughout the nation. One Herald Express writer who observed some of the incident insisted that several antiaircraft shells had struck one of the objects, and he was stunned that the object had not been downed.

Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox announced that the entire incident was a false alarm due to anxiety and "war nerves". The press was outraged by this explanation: some suspected a cover up: the Long Beach Independent wrote, "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." Others speculated that the incident was a ruse designed to give coastal defense industries an excuse to move further inland. And if there truly was nothing to the incident, the possibility that Navy personnel had fired heavy artillery shells for nearly an hour at nothing at all--killing three civilians in the process--seemed to suggest that the men of the U.S. Navy were dangerously incompetent.

Proposed explanations for the event have included misidentification of Japanese fire balloons or common weather balloons. [1] However, historically the Japanese fire balloons did not exist in 1942, so this proposed explanation is spurious. It is also pointed out that multiple objects had been sighted, not a single object like a weather balloon, and that no weather balloon could have survived such a massive bombardment.

In 1974, due to a Freedom of Information Act request, a memorandum regarding the incident was released. Written by General George C. Marshall for President Franklin Roosevelt, and dated February 26, 1942, the memo contradicts Knox's assertion that the incident was due only to "war nerves," and proves that officials took the event seriously. Marshall wrote that "unidentified airplanes, other than American Army or Navy planes, were probably sighted over Los Angeles" moving from "'very slow' to as much as 200 MPH and from elevations of 9000 to 18,000 feet."[2] Marshall speculated that the craft might have been commercial airplanes used as a sort of psychological warfare to generate panic. [3]

Some documents, perhaps of dubious authenticity, have suggested that the Los Angeles Air Raid inspired the formation of the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU). While the IPU undoubtedly existed (official U.S. Military sources have confirmed its reality), little is known of the unit, and any connection to the Los Angeles Air Raid must be regarded as unproved.

The incident was part of the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's World War II comedy 1941.

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