On December 7th , 1941 The United States was bombarded in a surpirse attack at the Naval Base in Pearl Harbor, Honululu Hawaii byvthe Enpire of japan. The attack left the country shaken and scared, especially Americans on the west coast who feared another attsck by the Japanese. At the time, Americans were shaken and the country began working toward together on the war effort. Alrhough Americans were ready to defend the country at all costs, nothing could prepare them for what was to happen on the night of February 25 th, 1942 , around 2 in the morning.
Katie , a resident of California, was a young, beautiful, and highly-successful interior decorator and artist who worked with many of Hollywood’s most glamorous celebrities and people in the film industry. She lived on the west side of Los Angeles, not far from Santa Monica. Due to rising fear of a Japanese air attack, Katie, like thousands of other residents volunteered for wartime duties on the home front. She became an Air Raid Warden like 12,000 other residents in the city of Los Angeles and surrounding communities. The main responsibility of an Air Warden was to protect people during air raids, by getting them to shelters or by handing out gas masks.
In the early morning hours of February 25th, Katie’s phone rang. It was the Air Raid supervisor for her district notifying her of an alert and asking if she had seen the object in the sky near her home. She immediately walked to the window and looked up. As Katie recalls, “It was huge! It was just enormous! And it was practically right over my house. I had never seen anything like it in my life!” . “It was just hovering there in the sky and hardly moving at all.” “It was a lovely pale orange and about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. I could see it perfectly because it was very close. It was big!”
With the city blacked out, Katie, and hundreds of thousands of others, were able to see the strange craft on that clear night. “
As the object hovered, the military began sending planes up to fire thousands of rounds. As Katie recalled , “They sent fighter planes up and I watched them in groups approach it and then turn away. They were were shooting at it but it didn’t seem to matter.” It was like the Fourth of July but much louder. They were firing like crazy but they couldn’t touch it.” The attack on the object lasted over half an hour before the UFO eventually disappeared from sight. I’ll never forget what a magnificent sight it was. Just marvelous. And what a gorgeous color!”.
Besides Katie, Many eyewitnesses talked of numerous “direct hits” on the big craft but no damage done to it. “
Katie was insistent about the use of planes in the attack on the object. The planes were apparently called off after several minutes and then the ground cannon opened up. The Army later denied planes were sent up.
The sudden appearance of the enormous round object frightened all of LA and most of Southern California into an immediate wartime blackout with thousands of Air Raid Wardens scurrying all over the darkened city while the drama unfolded in the skies above. In ghe end, the drama would result in the deaths of six people and the raining of shell fragments on homes, streets, and buildings for miles around.
Dozens of gun crews and searchlights of the Army’s 37th Coast Artillery Brigade easily targeted the huge ship which hung like a surreal magic lantern in the clear, dark winter sky over the City of the Angels.
Few in the city were left asleep after the Coastal Defense gunners commenced firing hundreds and hundreds of rounds up toward the glowing ship which was apparently first sighted as it hovered above such west side landmarks as the MGM studios in Culver City. The thump of the batteries and the ignition of the aerial shells were heard from one end of LA to the other as the gun crews easily landed scores of what many termed “direct hits”…., but with no damage to the ship whatsoevrr.
After about an hour and half after the first sighting the massive UFO slowly disappeared into the night. As the morning rolled around, the city was in blackout mode until around 7:20 am .
As residents and journalists demanded answers , their would be news coverage from several national papers including LA gimes and washington post. Many demanded answers but then Navy Secretary Frank Knox called the event “a false alarm”. Still, this didn’t provide the explanation needed. Some newspapers did report a potential cover-up to conceal an actual invasion by enemy airplanes, but after WW2 ended Jqpan and Germany confirmed they were never there.
In 1942, this was 5 years before The Roswell NM Alien Crash, perhaps the most fanous UFO Case ever. The modern ERA of UFOs had bot begun and maybe more importantly , many Americans were focused on what would be happening with the War the next few years.
As such, the government would later explain the event with, in my opinion, with a laughable explanation. 1949, the US govt said the United States Coast Artillery Association identified a meteorological balloon sent at 1:00 am , and as a result panic ensued once shooting started. As shooting began imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in”. Later, In 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History attributed the event to a case of “war nerves” triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries.
As many state today the 1942 Battle of Los Angeles was no case of mass hysteria or a weather balloon. And this is for several reasons . First, there were thousands of witnesses that saw a massive craft in the sky, too big to be a westher balloon and with a variety of colors. Also, there’s no disputing that thousands of rounds, including high explosive shells, were fired at the object and yet the object was able to slowly hover away. If it was a westher balloon, wouldn’t the balloon , which would have been easy to hit, fallen down into the city. Furthermore, many report shell and round debris falling from the eye, as if the roundds had somehow ricochet back midair. One final conclusion we can also draw is that the military would have been aware of any weather ballooons in the area at the time and wouldn’t have alerted Air Raid Wardens to their stations.
Still, others believe that there was general concern in the military sround a new type of technology being used by the enemy. That could explain the initial secrecy and the suggestion that it was a weather balloon. Maybe the government wanted to keep morale high for the war, and didn’t want to create fear. As this excuse seemed to work, maybe when the Roswell crash happened in 1947, the govt remembered how well it worked in LA and decided to use it once again.
Perhaps what’s most surprising about aboit the Battle of Los Angeles is how few citizens are aware of the story. The general public is pretty familiar with the Rosell UFO crash and even cases like the Travis Walton Abduction. However, not too many are familiar with this case. This is probably due to the fact the public trusted the press and that this was before 1947, when both Kenneth Arnold popularized the term UFO after spotting crafts travelling over 1200 mph in Washington State and when the Roswell crash occured.
Despite the lack of hard evidence, if this were to happen today there would be thousands maybe millions of videos and photographs.
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