Feb 23 2008

Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942: Wartime Jitters or UFOs?

L.A. Air Raid

For those of you who ever wondered what the strange picture is at the top right of the Ufomystic graphic, here’s a little history.

Listen to the CBS radio report:

L.A. Air Raid CBS Radio: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the early morning hours of February 25th 1942, air raid sirens woke the fitfully sleeping population of Los Angeles at 2:25 AM. Antiaircraft batteries trained their barrels skyward and opened up on targets lighted by arcing seachlights. About 1400 rounds were fired for the next two hours, hitting nothing but homes and cars thoughout the L.A. Basin. There were three deaths, and three elderly residents reportedly died of heart attacks. There was also one reported murder committed during the blackout of the city.

The day before, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Santa Barbara and shelled an oil facility in the small coastal town of Goleta. Combined with the recent bombing of Pearl Harbor almost three months before, public awareness was at a wartime high.

The only thing that came out of the sky that evening was a couple of tons of shrapnel. Gunnery officers claimed hundreds of direct hits, but no aircraft, balloons, blimps, or other things authorized to be in the air at the time were found in a tangled wreck on the ground. The next day, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox stated “as far as I know the whole raid was a false alarm and could be attributed to jittery nerves.” This of course did not explain the thousands of sightings and whatever it was that trained soldiers had seen. Most observers reported mutliple objects, although the one photo we are left with comes from the front page of Los Angeles Times of February 25th, which shows an indistinct, but vaguely flying saucer-shaped object.

Optical physicist/ ufologist Bruce Maccabbee wrote a detailed report on this incident which concluded that, based on estimates of altitude and spread of the light beams, the object was about 330 feet across. The fact remains that for at least an hour, apparently something slower than an aircraft and which couldn’t be damaged by a contstant barrage of large-caliber shells floated over the greater Los Angeles area in the pre-dawn hours of February 25th, 1942.

For those of you in Southern California, there will be a L.A. Raid anniversary reenactment and dance at one of the remaining installations that took part in the spirited homeland warfare today (Feb. 23rd) from noon to 10PM. The organizers are planning tours and soldiers in period costume, and in the evening, vintage hand cranked sirens and searchlights sweeping the sky. They might even shoot down a blimp. The website warns about loud noises. I’m going!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Eyewitness Accounts, Government Projects, UFO Sightings, Wake Up Down There. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.
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