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Los Angeles: Feb.1942 Incident (The Battle Of Los Angeles)

This was a case of war hysteria, nothing more. The searchlights were probably illuminating clouds, quite likely the clouds produced by the exploding A-A shells. There is no good evidence that there was anything in the sky during this event- except that the initial alarm may have been caused by a balloon or some other random event, maybe just a flock of birds.

No-one at the time even considered the idea that it was extraterrestrial, of course. The 'leaked', 'retyped' documents referred to in that PDF are fakes.
 
eburacum said:
This was a case of war hysteria, nothing more. The searchlights were probably illuminating clouds, quite likely the clouds produced by the exploding A-A shells. There is no good evidence that there was anything in the sky during this event- except that the initial alarm may have been caused by a balloon or some other random event, maybe just a flock of birds.

No-one at the time even considered the idea that it was extraterrestrial, of course. The 'leaked', 'retyped' documents referred to in that PDF are fakes.

Yeah, I dont care as much to the "leaked" documents. The picture is of bigger interest to me. Nobody thought of an "ET" connection but I dont think them to be tall greys or short green men in metallic ships. I base them on my experience of "SQFAI". People don't know what they saw, that is for sure. Descriptions seem to range only so far and the tone seems to be consistent. I also understand your set ways in this matter but I am at a 50% probability of the pic being a real portrayal of an "SQFAI". The events seem to be more at an 80% probability of "SQFAI's" parading the skies. The inconsistent manner of searchlights lighting the area, especially on the "object", are of big interest bringing me to believe it is more than one cloud, a piece of cloud being illuminated, or smoke, artillery fire.
 
Hi AFSCS
Actually it's been up a month and only had 21 views, the poster needs to re-name it.
The name of the newsreader is indistinct and there's no mention of the channel.
The Army Air Force refusal to say whether their planes intercepted anything is odd : planes were seen so they were either the fighters or Japanese, ot they actually found a UFO. It's hard to believe they didn't with all those seasrchlights s on it.
If it was Japanese planes, where had they flown from and why did Japan not publicise the raid?
 
There were no Jaoanese planes or balloons involved. In fact if any physical object was involved, it was probably a balloon released by the US themselves, a barrage balloon or radar-ranging balloon that triggered the radar alert but was destroyed or blew away very early in the event. Everything else was hysteria.

A very important case, proving that even a sighting with thousands of witnesses can be unreliable. There are still people today in Los Angeles who think it was a Japanese bombing raid.

Incidentally that sound recording may have been a re-enactment or dramatisation; the images themselves were mostly mock-ups, library pictures of searchlights or manipulations.

Do people from Los Angeles still say 'Los Angillis' with hard G like that or is it a period thing?
 
If it was a balloon somebody would have recognised it and somebody should have been aware that it had got loose.
The anti aircraft guns should have hit a balloon first shot and there should have been debris.
I'm not 100% sure that is a UFO in the photograph but it doesn't look much like a balloon either.
 
I am pretty certain they did hit the balloon fairly early on in the event, but they didn't see the hit because of the smoke. Alternately they may have simply missed the balloon as it blew out of the searchlights, and continued to fire at the smoke cloud caused by their shells.

The shells they were using had timed fuses, designed to explode at a certain height; this caused a more or less horizontal layer of smoke, which was illuminated by the searchlights and appeared to be a solid object.

I am not entirely convinced that the famous newspaper image is completely authentic- it may have been improved by the photographer in the darkroom, or even faked completely. But assuming it is real, one can clearly see that none of the searchlight beams pass beyond the 'object'- they all stop dead as if absorbed by a flat layer of cloud, which in fact they probably were. The cloud is the only real object in that photo; everything else is just smoke and (parabolic) mirrors.
 
This excerpt suggests that balloons may have been the culprit;
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/aaf2.html
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.
 
eburacum said:
I am pretty certain they did hit the balloon fairly early on in the event, but they didn't see the hit because of the smoke. Alternately they may have simply missed the balloon as it blew out of the searchlights, and continued to fire at the smoke cloud caused by their shells.

The shells they were using had timed fuses, designed to explode at a certain height; this caused a more or less horizontal layer of smoke, which was illuminated by the searchlights and appeared to be a solid object.

I am not entirely convinced that the famous newspaper image is completely authentic- it may have been improved by the photographer in the darkroom, or even faked completely. But assuming it is real, one can clearly see that none of the searchlight beams pass beyond the 'object'- they all stop dead as if absorbed by a flat layer of cloud, which in fact they probably were. The cloud is the only real object in that photo; everything else is just smoke and (parabolic) mirrors.

That the balloon was destroyed early, and they fired at nothing is a new idea. The photo was retouched, I read a discussion around that recently. I don't remember if it was on Randle's or Reynold's blogs, but some claimed that beams could be seen pass beyond the spot, and saw that as an important argument.
If they were hitting a flat cloud, we should see the light of the beams diffused latterally in the cloud cover. Instead, we see only the outline of the spot made by the beams. So, what did they direct their beams at ? A mere poff of smoke ? Just the shreds of a balloon ?
 
I think that all we can see in that image is the bright spot in the centre of the cloud where several searchlights overlap. The rest of the light is diffused too much to be apparent. This is more obvious if you invert the colours and look at it in negative.

There doesn't seem to be much evidence for light passing through the cloud at all, so the total extent of the cloud is not really discernable. But the testimony of the 'acting commander of the anti-aircraft artillery brigade in the area' given in my earlier post indicates that smoke was present, so it remains the most likely explanation.

If the photo was retouched (which seems very likely) then it is not much use as evidence, anyway.
 
How does a puff of smoke get misinterpreted as a solid object by so many gun and searchlight crews all looking at it from different angles? For hours?
What was the windspeed at that altitude? Surely fast enough to dissipate smoke, that dispersal being accelerated by the thinner air.
 
eburacum said:
I think that all we can see in that image is the bright spot in the centre of the cloud where several searchlights overlap. The rest of the light is diffused too much to be apparent. This is more obvious if you invert the colours and look at it in negative.

There doesn't seem to be much evidence for light passing through the cloud at all, so the total extent of the cloud is not really discernable. But the testimony of the 'acting commander of the anti-aircraft artillery brigade in the area' given in my earlier post indicates that smoke was present, so it remains the most likely explanation.

If the photo was retouched (which seems very likely) then it is not much use as evidence, anyway.

What the diffusion of the light implies, is that when a beam hits a cloud, it illuminates its surroundings, making the cloud visible. We discern nothing of the sort on this shot. But this photo is indeed not of much use. Although in the discussion I mentionned, the original version of the photo was presented, or at least a photo claimed to be the original, untouched version. I don't remember precise details.

The testimony of the commander also indicates that he had seen what he interpreted as aircrafts, before they opened fire I suppose. Smoke was the result of the firing. So what did they fire at, at first ? And why were all the searchlights, from different positions, directed at the same spot ? This suggests that there was something more solid than a puff of smoke of the remnants of a weather balloon.
 
Bigfoot73 said:
How does a puff of smoke get misinterpreted as a solid object by so many gun and searchlight crews all looking at it from different angles? For hours?

It didn't. None of the gun crews or radar operators reported seeing a large solid object. They were firing at unseen Japanese planes.
 
So it wasn't a UFO because apparently the gun crews didn't see one, but there were Japanese planes even though they didn't see any of them either ?
How did they know they were Japanese planes if they couldn't see them ?
How could they not see them with all those searchlights ?
How did these planes stay over LA for so long and where had they flown from?
Why did they not report hearing their engines?
Where did all the bombs fall?
Why did the Japanese not exploit the propaganda value of the alleged raid?
 
There were definitely no Japanese planes, or American planes either. Note that many witnesses also reported American interceptors in the air when none were scrambled. This just shows how appalling eye witness testimony can be.
 
Yet another original photo. Must be a time exposure, I can make out 14 shell bursts in it and it seems highly unlikely that they all detonated in the same fraction of a second. added to which two of the beams look burned.
If it was a cloud it must have been the only one up there, apart from all the clouds of smoke from the shells of course. It doesn't seem entirely implausible that in all that time, with all those searchlights plus the flashes from the exploding shells plus an assumed familiarity with clouds among the searchlight and gun crews that it might have dawned on somebody that they were shooting at a cloud.
There are plenty of eyewitness reports of a solid object. Haven't come across any of a cloud.
 
Bigfoot73 said:
It doesn't seem entirely implausible that in all that time, with all those searchlights plus the flashes from the exploding shells plus an assumed familiarity with clouds among the searchlight and gun crews that it might have dawned on somebody that they were shooting at a cloud.
And that is exactly what happened. As I posted earlier
the chap in charge of the guns eventually realised he was looking at smoke
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.
This raises the question- why didn't he stop all the firing then? I suspect that some sort of bystander effect was coming into play- even if the acting commander couldn't see any planes, perhaps he thought that other people could.

There are plenty of eyewitness reports of a solid object. Haven't come across any of a cloud.
Most of the accounts I've seen mention planes (plural) or smoke. Id guess that the individual puffs of ack-ack fire were briefly illuminated, giving the appearance of multiple objects.
 
. Id guess that the individual puffs of ack-ack fire were briefly illuminated, giving the appearance of multiple objects.

Briefly illuminated? They would have been lit by the searchlights too.
However I have always wondered why a UFO would want to lurk around over a city being shot at: there have never been any similar events, there's nothing significant about south LA/ Culver City and if the aliens were announcing their presence they could have been a bit more obvious about it.
 
Bigfoot73 said:
However I have always wondered why a UFO would want to lurk around over a city being shot at...

Tourism? Schadenfreude? Scientific study of a primitive society?
 
It was a deliberate Army drill involving a weather balloon, an exercise designed to test anti-aircraft capabilities, shock Los Angeles residents and thus gauge the potential for mass panic, and ram home the idea to the masses that the Japanese were lurking out there somewhere.

So this august website has decided the above is the logical conclusion.
If you want to test the defences of LA (rather than the far more strategically significant San Diego) you have the guns fire at a balloon. You test the gunners and their commanders to the limit with something that doesn't move faster than the wind blowing it.You try and panic the populus with something that in no way resembles several squadrons of bombers, and doesn't drop bombs. You leave the fighters on the ground., where they actually stayed for the duration of the war because there was never a Japanese airfield anything like near enough to continental USA from which a raid could have been launched, as was perfectly obvious at the time.
Stands to reason, dunnit?
 
It was the subject of yet another UFO programme this eve. The presenter went to the newspaper [LA Times?] to look for the original negative of the famous picture of the incident in their archive.

They found it & the archivist pointed out it was not in fact original but a copy as denoted by the notch on the edge of the negative which was different to their regular stock & the other photos. He had no explanation as to why. It was also much more underexposed than the well known example.

According to the programme weather balloons were documented as released that evening to test wind speed/direction.
 
As DeForest Kelley mentions in the interview --he says he saw the objects, they were a formation of small lights high in the sky. My friend who lived there at the time had a friend tell her she saw "them" --I assume the same formation of lights as Bones saw. fwiw. Who knows what they were; witnesses are probably pretty much gone. I think the original image was altered before publication. There is also footage that has been assumed to be of the object, but it was on a tape given to a UFO researcher years ago "Stringfield"? I dunno.
Anyway, it is perhaps not of the incident but some other event, seen here:
 
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... There is also footage that has been assumed to be of the object, but it was on a tape given to a UFO researcher years ago "Stringfield"? I dunno. ...

I don't recognize the reference, but the researcher would be Leonard Stringfield, who was very active from the 1950s onward.
 
I don't recognize the reference, but the researcher would be Leonard Stringfield, who was very active from the 1950s onward.
Yes, I think it was him, and the footage where the video is set to play was on a cassette that was given to him anonymously, iirc. The footage isn't necessarily from the Battle of LA incident.
 
Here are two more photos from the same event.
battleoflosangelesnoufo.png

This one shows no UFO and no planes; the lines are star traces which indicate it was a timed exposure. From the archives of the Herald Examiner.
========================
This one is from Life Magazine.

battleoflosangelesnoufo3.png

In this one you can see two oval shapes formed by the intersection of the searchlight beams on the clouds produced by anti-aircraft fire; the stars in this image also can be identified, giving a time of about 3 o'clock in the morning. The stars are easily visible though the cloudy apparition in the searchlight beams. The small puff of smoke at top left is apparently an ack-ack explosion.

No UFO - just smoke. As per.
 
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