The battle of Los Angeles is the most credible UFO sighting observed by a whole city.

Two and a half months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on February 25, 1942, at 02:15 local time, Los Angeles military radars detected unidentified traffic around 220 kilometers west of the city over the Pacific Ocean. The naval intelligence had warned of an anticipated Japanese attack, there had been a false alarm hours earlier, and on February 23, a Japanese submarine bombarded an oil field near Santa Barbara. As a result, the antiaircraft batteries and the pilots of the 4th Commander of Interceptors were informed; nevertheless, no aircraft took off as the radars tracked the object as it flew into Los Angeles.

Six minutes after the initial encounter, when the invader was within a few kilometers of the shore, the military authorities ordered a blackout in the city and its environs. Meanwhile, at 03:16, the 37th Coastal Artillery Brigade began fire on the unidentified object. They fired 1,400 missiles over the course of an hour. None of the shots struck the target. Many buildings were damaged by friendly fire at 7:21 a.m., three people were killed in automobile accidents, and three more died of a heart attack.

Conflicting versions

The next day, the Los Angeles Times ran the headline, "The Army admits the alert was legitimate." Similar to other publications, he requested explanations from the government. And it was unclear what had transpired: "In two official statements, issued while Secretary of the Navy (Frank) Knox attributed the activity in Washington to a false alarm and nervous tension, the Command (Western Defense Army) confirmed and reconfirmed in San Francisco the presence of unidentified aircraft in Southern California," read the headline of a Los Angeles newspaper.

"Quan đội nói rằng báo động là có thật," tờ Los Angeles Times đăng tiêu đề vào ngày hôm sau. Cũng như các tờ báo khác, ông yêu cầu các cơ quan chức năng giải thích. Và không rõ chuyện gì đã xảy ra: "Trong hai tuyên bố chính thức, được đưa ra trong khi Bộ trưởng Hải quan (Frank) Knox quy kết hoạt động này ở Washington là do báo động giả và căng thẳng thần kinh, Bộ Tư lệnh (Quan đội Phòng vệ Phương Tay) đã xác nhận và xác nhận lại ở San Francisco về sự hiện diện của máy bay không xác định ở Nam California ", đọc trên trang đầu tiên của tờ báo từ Los Angeles.

General George Marshall, head of the Army General Staff, thought that commercial planes deployed by the enemy to foment terror among the populace were responsible for the occurrence. Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War, ultimately determined that one to five Japanese aircraft had flown over Los Angeles from secret airfields in California or Mexico, or from submarines. The disagreement between Marina and the Army prompted major news outlets to dispatch with confidence.

The Washington Post reported on February 27 that the Army's hypothesis answered everything "except where the planes came from, where they were heading, and why they did not send American fighters after them." The New York Times poked at the wound the next day: "If anti-aircraft batteries fired at anything, as Secretary Knox claims, it is a symptom of ineptitude and anxiety." If, as Secretary Stimson claims, they fired at planes flying as low as 2,700 meters, why were they completely ineffective? Why weren't American aircraft dispatched to pursue or identify them? What would have occurred had there been an actual air attack?

"A symphony of color and sound"

Colonel of artillery John Murphy watched the action. While he was sleeping in a hotel and was awakened by gunfire, he climbed to the roof to observe what was happening. "It was a beautiful moonlit night, but the magnificence of the Moon was overshadowed by the brilliant glow of the 90-millimeter and 3-inch guns spitting fire into the heavens, the flashes and the noise of projectiles exploding, the delicate red strokes and green 40-mm and 50-mm howitzers arching lazily through the skies, and the bright incandescence of the reflectors, from here to there and up and down,"

He witnessed the identical event as tens of thousands of bystanders. "A gorgeous visual and a fantastic performance! But at what were they firing? Seven years later, the soldier questioned rhetorically in the artillery magazine. For him, it was evident: "The imagination might have easily shown several shapes in the sky amidst that odd symphony of noise and color. But, the cold objectivity did not reveal any aircraft, friendly or hostile, in the sky. Then, all was stillness, and just the moonlight illuminated the desolate cityscape. When he arrived at the 37th Coastal Artillery Brigade headquarters, "nobody understood exactly what had occurred."

Murphy, together with General Jacob Fickel and Colonel Samuel Kepner, interrogated sixty civilian and military witnesses in an effort to understand the situation. Half of the participants had witnessed airplanes, whereas the other half had not. A pilot described 10 aircraft in a V formation. An artilleryman has "many aircraft," but his teammate has none. The conclusion of the study was that all began when someone mistook a balloon for a Japanese or German zeppelin; "Of course, envisioned a Japanese or German zeppelin"; and "once the fire started, the mind invented various targets in the sky, and they all joined the fight." According to Fickel, Kepner, and Murphy, the unidentified object that triggered the alarm was a meteorological balloon launched by the military itself shortly beforehand. Experts from the Air Force History Office concurred with this assessment in 1983, and they also emphasized how the Japanese denied conducting an air raid that night in the Los Angeles area.

The photograph released by the Los Angeles Times, in which the light of the projectors appears to blend with an object among the antiaircraft discharges, is the greatest evidence of the presence of anything weird in California that night. In contrast, in another image when the lights of the spotlights do not concentrate, just the explosions and reflector beams are visible in the sky. In addition, Scott Harrison, the newspaper's photographer from Los Angeles, has recently discovered that the image with the object is so heavily retouched - with some beams highlighted with white paint and others erased to make it look good in the newspaper - that it "would not have been published according to current standards."

Saucers in flight The upcoming Spanish release of the film Invasion to the Earth (Battle: Los Angeles) uses this conflict as the launching point for an extraterrestrial invasion on a global scale. In Hollywood fiction, extraterrestrial spaceships sailed above the California city on February 25, 1942 in preparation for a coming invasion. "We concluded that all prior UFO sightings, including that night's, were reconnaissance flights... They prepped the terrain for the attack of unknown armies, producer Ori Marmur reveals.

No one believed the alarm was connected to extraterrestrials 69 years ago because, among other reasons, the first flying saucers were not spotted in American skies until June 1947. The battle of Los Angeles was included into UFO legend in the latter part of the 1960s, but his ascent to Olympus from the numerous sightings of possibly extraterrestrial ships did not occur until 1987 in the magazine Fate. Since then, the craziest ufologists – the same ones who maintain that alien corpses are stored in a secret base in Nevada and that we are the victims of hybridization experiments – have appropriated the event, minimizing the historical context and ignoring, like many others, the significance of the event. Occasionally, it was explained almost a day later.

During the night of the Second World War in which a meteorological balloon sent off all the alarms in Southern California, however, there were a great number of cheerful individuals. "The residents of Los Angeles must have felt ecstatic. They had both visible and auditory assurance that they were well protected. And anti-aircraft gunners were delighted! They had shot more bullets than would have been permitted during 10 years of peacetime training, as stated by Colonel Murphy in 1949. All because an artilleryman's anxiety caused him to fire prematurely.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which brought the United States into World War Two, seven Japanese submarines began patrolling the Pacific coast of North America. On February 23, 1942, late in the afternoon, one of them bombarded the Ellwood oil field near Santa Barbara, California. This raid, headed by Commander Kozo Nishino's Submarine I-17, and the Battle of Los Angeles inspired Steven Spielberg's 1979 film 1941, in which John Belushi portrays a fighter pilot who pursues Japanese planes everywhere.

During the bombardment of Ellwood, a derrick, a bomb chamber, and a walkway were destroyed. A little event occurred. Yet, it served as a pretext for the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, alerted the military, and spread fear of an imminent assault along the western coast of the United States, ultimately leading to the Battle of Los Angeles the next night. Japanese submarines continued to strike ships and blast coastal infrastructure after the early morning hours of February 25.