CHARACTERISTICS OF SEARCHLIGHTS
Searchlights in action, Gibraltar 1940, looking south. ( Imperial War Museum)
British civilian defense forces fire on German Navy airship caught in searchlights overhead during WWI.
Photo: Time Life Pictures/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images ---- Jan. 01, 1916
Instruments Used to Detect Aircraft
1) SOUND LOCATOR - "Before radar, the first practical means of detecting airplanes at a distance at night was by listening to the noise of their engines with the aid of horns...operator listened to the top and bottom horns for elevation information. These units had been in use by the Army since the early 1920s, were phased out in the late 1930s, and replaced with the conical, rounded horns. These latter locators had a very short lifespan since the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 led to more aggressive advances in detection, including radar."
2) HEAT DETECTOR - "used to locate enemy aircraft in the late 1930s. Resembling a searchlight drum, this device was designed to sweep the sky and detect the heat emitted from the engines of overflying aircraft...Heat detectors relayed directional data to the on-board radio-control equipment and, via cable connections, to a searchlight. Tests conducted by the Coast Artillery Corps in 1936-37 showed that while adequate in detecting ships, heat detectors were inadequate for aircraft detection, and more emphasis was placed on developing
radio-beat and
pulse-echo methods (the forerunners of radar) for use by the fledgling antiaircraft branch."
3) RADAR LOCATOR - "As the war and technology progressed, radar was added to the list of locator devices used to point searchlights to light up enemy aircraft...Signals from the radar unit relayed to the light greatly increased the accuracy of the light beam. By the time the 225th began its training in 1942-43, the combination of the SCR-268 and the 60-inch searchlight was the primary method of detecting, tracking, and illuminating aerial targets for the U.S. Army antiaircraft artillery...The method for using the SCR-268 would be to use it to pick up the airplanes at night and to synchronize the radar plot with a searchlight through an already developed gun director. The director performed the basic mathematical function of taking the range and angle data out of the radar and aimed the searchlight in that direction. At the appropriate moment, when
range and
angle to target were known, the controller would order the searchlight turned on...It was also advantageous to wait as long as possible to turn on the light since the longer the beam remained on, the more vulnerable the light and crew was to retaliatory fire."
NEW TECHNOLOGY
"Three young British scientists — Chick, Eastwood and Oxford — first adapted a radar system to searchlights in
June 1940...By 1942-43, the system (pictured above) became semi-automated and each searchlight (and antiaircraft guns) could be fitted with four-foot radar "mirrors" and could track a target automatically."
"PFC Homer Amay, USMC, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, adjusts the detector controls on a 60-inch searchlight during training at the Marine Ordnance School, Quantico, Virginia on
August 13, 1942."
"What was the final piece of the puzzle in U.S. efforts to put all of these technologies together and integrate them tactically? If one had to point to one moment, it surely had to be
May 26, 1937. That evening, Mr. Harry Woodring, the Secretary of War, stood with a group of officers and civilian scientists on a field of the U.S. Army Signal Corps Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Before them, spread over the field, were the transmitter and receivers of a radio detector, the SCR-268 prototype. Connected with the radar were the controls of a standard antiaircraft searchlight.
http://www.skylighters.org/howalightworks/index.html
1. So what searchlights were used during the raid?
2. Were these searchlights from the Los Angeles Air Base?
3. The searchlights are targeting "something" that is less than ?500ft? in the air in the pic I propose that looks like the shape of "my ufo".
4. The searchlights do not seem to be going past the object in question. Is this due to the type of technology of the searchlights?
5. If this was a cloud, why would the searchlights not just go past the mist (as in the first pic on this post)?
6. What type of artillery shells were used?
(I cant really find to much information on the Air Base the object seems to be right in the middle of)
Very interesting the moments before this raid happened, in regards to the radar, pursuant to wiki. Also people seeing many unknown objects in the sky during the incident are of very big interest. Some objects going slow, some going fast. :hmm:
