GAt 3:15 a.m. on the night of February 24-25, 1942, the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade opened fire. For three quarters of an hour, more than 1,400 grenades were launched into the airspace over Los Angeles. A senior coastal defense officer reported the approach of “about 25 planes at 12,000 feet”. And the “Los Angeles Times” immediately headlined “Airstrike on Los Angeles”.
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The incident went down in the history of the Second World War as “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid”. Since no traces of enemy aircraft could be found after sunrise, the speculations shot up. Japanese bombers, stray US planes, weather balloons or even extraterrestrial spaceships are said to have made the sky above the metropolis of the American west coast their hunting ground. For conspiracy theorists, there is still no question that this is one of the most popular best documented cases of UFO sightings acted, which was verified by numerous eyewitnesses.
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This is how America was brought to war
On December 7, 1941, Japanese carrier aircraft raided the U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. America declared war on Japan, which ultimately became World War II.
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It all started on December 7, 1941. On the morning of that day, the aircraft of six Japanese carriers without a declaration of war attacked the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. A day later, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on the Empire with Congress approval. In unfamiliar unity, the United States set out to avenge the “Day of Shame” (Roosevelt). It would take months before the great power was ready.
At first a feverish nervousness gripped the country. Saboteurs, spies and invaders were suspected everywhere. Members of the Japanese-born minority, especially on the west coast, were particularly suspicious, tens of thousands of whom were interned in special camps. For large cities like Los Angeles, night-time darkening was ordered, which increased the number of accidents drastically. Even unusual noises were enough to report new alleged Japanese or German attacks – Hitler had declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941.
On the evening of February 24, 1942, the air defense around Los Angeles was put on alert. However, since no enemy bomber appeared despite concentrated reconnaissance, the alarm was cleared around 10 p.m. Until a good four hours later, a radar station 120 kilometers away detected something that was interpreted as a flying object. The anti-aircraft guns were manned immediately. When the outline of an aircraft was discovered at 3:06 a.m. over Santa Monica, the order to fire was issued.
“The airspace over Los Angeles exploded like a volcano,” said an eyewitness. Others reported swarms of airplanes that thundered over the city at high altitudes or at low altitude and hunted innocent passersby. About four enemy planes are said to have been shot down, one is said to have even collapsed at an intersection in Hollywood.
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Heavily retouched photos like this are given as evidence of foreign flying objects
Source: Wikipedia / archive
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The longer the anti-aircraft batteries fired, the more excited messages came from the entire stretch of coast, the inhabitants of which suddenly thought they were at the front. Tracer bullets and searchlights bathed the night in a ghostly light, the noise of the guns did the rest.
When the traces of the attack were saved the morning after, it soon became apparent that the alleged bomb debris was remnants of the American anti-aircraft grenades. The five people who had not survived the night were not victims of Japanese low-flying aircraft, but of traffic accidents or had suffered heart attacks as a result of the excitement.
US Navy Secretary William F. Knox spoke at a press conference of a “false alarm”, which was hardly suitable to calm the mind. When he answered yes to the question of whether such attacks were possible at all, further conspiracy theories shot up. The city’s industrial facilities were to be moved from the coast to the hinterland, it said.
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In Steven Spielberg’s film “1941 – Where Please Go To Hollywood” (1979) Dan Aykroyd (left) and John Belushi go hunting for Japanese
Quelle: picture alliance / United Archives/IFTN
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Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson did not speak until a day later. For him, up to five planes had traveled over Los Angeles. This would probably have been unidentified civilian aircraft or light reconnaissance aircraft from the Japanese fleet that had risen from submarines to spy on air defense over Los Angeles. These versions were also hardly suitable to calm the mood. Angry citizens asked Stimson why the Army Air Corps interceptors hadn’t intervened in time.
In 1983, the Office of Air Force History attempted to shed light on the “Battle of Los Angeles” with a study. After that, weather balloons together with glow and flak grenades were responsible for the strange sky phenomena. This and the tense nerves (“war nerves”) of all those involved would have turned an air attack out of a few observations or hallucinations. Japanese soldiers confirmed after the end of the war that attacks on submarine carriers against the US coast had been planned, but had never occurred in February 1942.
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A case similar to the “Battle of Los Angeles” is well known in history. In the summer of 1789, shortly after the storm on the Bastille, news spread in France that the disempowered aristocrats and their allies would march on Paris with armies. In the Limousin, it was said, the Count of Artois was advancing with an army, in East France the Germans, in the Dauphiné the Savoyards. Peasants clustered together, and the alarm was raised in Paris. But the enemies didn’t come, they weren’t there. “Grande Peur” (Great Fear) historians have called this mass psychological phenomenon, which was fed exclusively by fear and rumors.
The most likely explanation for the phenomena of the 24th and 25th centuries is that these ingredients also led to the “Battle for Los Angeles”. February 1942. Ufologists and other conspiracy theorists naturally see it differently. A number of allegedly secret memoranda from the management team of the Roosevelt administration are circulating on the Internet, which are intended to convey a completely different picture: extraterrestrial flying objects would have appeared over Los Angeles.
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The “Los Angeles Times” was already speculating on February 26, 1942
Quelle: Wikipedia/Public Domain
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The “Los Angeles Times” was already waving a heavily retouched photo about this rumor. It showed a “silvery and candy-shaped” object at the intersection of several searchlights that had finally disappeared over the Pacific. Since the turn of the millennium, documents from US Navy holdings have appeared in relevant forums, including a memorandum in which President Roosevelt At the end of February 1942 he spoke of new “materials”“Which are owned by the Army and which could be of great importance for the development of a” super war weapon “.
In his hardly legible answer, the American chief of staff, George C. Marshall, dealt with “unconventional phenomena in airspace”. From that the American ufologist Robert Wood concluded that the recovery of extraterrestrial flying objects in the early years of the war could explain the astonishing technology gain of the United States after the Second World War.
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From the appearance of an extraterrestrial flying object over Los Angeles in 1942, it is not far to the famous Roswell incident, which is said to have happened only five years later, in June 1947 in New Mexico. At that time, a UFO and its crew were said to have crashed and were recovered by US troops in a secret commando company. Officially, the flying object was a weather balloon, as in Los Angeles.
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Jonathan Liebesman’s film “World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles” (2011) shows devilish aliens attacking the city
