Battle of L.A. 1942 - Read all about it!

I got off on a tangent and wound up with the "Battle of L.A.", so here is some interesting trivia.

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Battle of L.A. 1942
tinyurl.com... - I made the URL smaller 'cause it took up half a page!

The following may be confusing but stick with it for the visuals and if you want more info on the actual story search on Google.

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Another Good Story Ruined: Saucers Over L.A.! -- Part 1
March 7, 2011 | 10:14 pm

"I have the old and battered 1942 print in front of me as I’m writing this and I can confirm without question that much of what you see in this photo is painted: The beams from the searchlights are airbrushed. The supposed bursts of antiaircraft shells are blobs of paint. And the entire bottom quarter of the picture, supposedly showing a darkened skyline, is a combination of black paint outlined with the faintest edge of airbrushing."

a reply to: idusmartias

I've read a lot about this, and there was something definitely something in the sky, and it didn't come down either.

I think this is one of the most convincing and well documented sightings. They sure as Hell weren't shooting at nothing. Whatever it was withheld a massive barrage of Flak. No easy feat for any conventional aircraft. I really feel like our government is 100% aware that we are not alone and they know what the visitors are doing here as well. I have had a few close encounters myself, and even got photos that MUFON couldn't identify. The truth is out there.

Found this…..



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originally posted by: Ophiuchus1
Found this…..

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That's one of many doctored photos.

Wikipedia:

When documenting the incident in 1949, the United States Coast Artillery Association identified a meteorological balloon sent aloft at 1:00 am as having "started all the shooting" and concluded that "once the firing started, imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in".[5] In 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History attributed the event to a case of "war nerves" triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries.

The Battle of LA was considered nothing but war jitters for a long, long time. The previous night Japanese submarines had shelled the West Coast of the USA. So there was an air of expectancy and it could all well have been triggered by a weather balloon.

The photo shown on the front page of the LA Times was certainly 'enhanced'. A common practice for low quality news print. Here is a shot of the original photo taken from the negatives held at UCLA.



However, the 'notch' identification on the negative was not from any of the LA Times film stock and appeared to be a 'copy' negative. So the source of the original photograph has an air of mystery about it.

But when I looked into this case many years ago I found that its origins seem to lie with the creation of the MJ12 papers and it was never really considered as a UFO story until the Reagan years. UFO literature makes scant reference to it until the late 1980s. On balance, it was probably not an alien spacecraft.

a reply to: idusmartias

Think i seem to recall hearing a documentary or show on Art Bells Coast to Coast AM where they claim the battle was against a Japanese dirigible aircraft carrier that housed some kind of small antigravity fighters, the pilots of such being surgically or genetically altered so as to be able to fit into and pilot their crafts.

I don't hold me to the credibility of such all the same.

a reply to: andy06shake

Except that there's no evidence of any such thing.

If such a thing existed, they'd have used it elsewhere I think.

That something was shot at seems likely to me, but dirigible aircraft carrier is well down on the list.

Here's an interesting read on the concept...

USS Akron.

If the object was a balloon or dirigible then it should have easily been brought down when the firing started. Where is the wreckage?

a reply to: seagull

Except that there's no evidence of any such thing.

Nope, just a nutter on the Coast to Coast AM bumping his gums.

But it was rather entertaining at the time and certainly a new take on the matter on my end anyway.

If such a thing existed, they'd have used it elsewhere I think.

Indeed, and that would be my thoughts also.

That something was shot at seems likely to me, but dirigible aircraft carrier is well down on the list.

USA build dirigible that could carry small planes, so not beyond the realms of possibility i suppose, but antigravity fighters and genetically modified pilots back in the 1940s, computer says no on that score, or even today. LoL

Here's an interesting read on the concept...

USS Akron.

Cheers for the link.

a reply to: seagull

Double again, its my mouse i think.

These people on here still cite Wikipedia and push BS about it being a "weather balloon" 😂😂😂

They still think we are stupid enough to believe the weather balloon crap (well some are apparently)

That thing would have been shredded and pieces found.

There were plenty of witnesses at the time that could see an actual craft with the shells having no effect on it at all. Look up William Tompkins and his account of being a first hand witness to this event.

Deny ignorance.

a reply to: BerkshireEntity

These people on here still cite Wikipedia and push BS about it being a "weather balloon" 😂😂😂 They still think we are stupid enough to believe the weather balloon crap (well some are apparently)

The proof isn't absolute but there's no proof of aliens coming to America in February 1942 whatsoever.

The weather balloon being a trigger is based upon official war records not just Wikipedia.

...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.

Source : Page 285 - 286 The Army AIR FORCES In World War II

Another problem with the Battle of LA as a UFO story is that it was not deemed as a UFO case back in the 1950s in the popular UFO literature of the day. NICAPs 1964 Evidence Report makes no mention of anything relating to this event.

Hynek's UFO Experience (1972) does not appear to mention it.

Perhaps Spielberg's movie"1941" (produced in 1979) based around the real events triggered something?

But no it seems "The Battle of LA UFO" did not appear as a UFO tale until the late 1980s in any real detail.

This is after the infamous MJ-12 documents had been released into the wild and revolves around the alleged Marshall/Roosevelt Document.

One of it's claims is

This Headquarters has come to a determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin.

NOTE THE ABOVE IS NOT AN OFFICIALLY RECOGNISED GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT AND HAS BEEN DEEMED FAKE BY THE FBI and many ufologists too

It is this shaky provenance of the UFO story that throws heavy doubt on this story for me.

I live less than 2 miles from where this happened. Up until COVD put a stop to it, the annual re-enactment was a major event here.





I hope they bring it back - it gives you a pretty good idea of how chaotic that night was.

a reply to: underpass61

What do you think about the actual event? Something to it, or people being trigger-happy in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack?

Cheers

a reply to: F2d5thCavv2

I'm pretty certain that something was up there, the "craft' was tracked from Santa Monica to Huntington Beach and fired on most of the way before disappearing over the Pacific.



There's a pretty good account if you scroll down here.

Here’s some nostalgia from the past…..

The Original CBS Radio News Broadcast with Byron Palmer February 26, 1942.

I can’t speak to the graphics or possibly real/fake b&w footage. The audio is more significant.



I find it interesting that Palmer states, not only that the object was said to be observed moving from north to south, but after some time, it headed from the south back to the north……Something I’ve not read or perhaps missed it stated elsewhere.

Enjoy

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To go with my statement above…..and graphics from the vid above in my previous post….



Going from north to south and south to north, to then head over the water…….sounds like the object survived the barrage of anti-aircraft ack ack fire.

The so called Catalina underwater Alien base, as it has been theorized, is not far from the L.A. county coastline. The object could have came from there and returned to it……...jus a thought. Or the object was some type of Japanese surveillance craft, launched and retrieved off the coast.

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Meant to add……

……”Or the object was some type of Japanese surveillance craft, launched and retrieved off the coast from a Japanese submarine.

Japanese motorized balloon….even prior to WWII….


It’s just possible in all the excitement and nervousness and commotion ……the Army proved to be bad shots…….not possibly ever to have been trained in shooting down balloons ….perhaps more so in the shape of the Japanese balloon style shown above for example.

What better way to assess military artillery batteries fortifications up and down a coast line than to use a slow moving motorized and steerable balloon outfitted with Japanese cameras…..

Lol ….the Japanese laughing and thinking the army couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn……

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a reply to: Ophiuchus1

...The Great Air Raid began at 2:25 a.m. on that clear moonlit night when the U.S. Army announced the approach of hostile aircraft, and the city’s air raid warning system went into action for the first time in the war....


LA Times

There were numerous reports of aircraft seen. Even one crashing!!



No American aircraft were launched and, after the war, the Japanese confirmed no attack by their own forces occurred that night.

The conclusion from the same article was

....At war’s end, an Army document explained what had happened:

(1) numerous weather balloons had been released over the area that night. They carried lights for tracking purposes, and these “lighted balloons” were mistaken for enemy aircraft;

(2) shell bursts illuminated by searchlights were mistaken by ground crews for enemy aircraft.

Whatever was picked up by radar at 2:25pm remains unknown. But the radar was fairly primitive and had only recently been installed. The operators were extremely inexperienced too....

....radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of “enemy planes, ” even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted “about 25 planes at 12,000 feet” over Los Angeles.

At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon “the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.” From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance....


SFMuseum.org

Seems to me that the answers to this puzzle are pretty mundane when you actually look at the evidence.