The Smoking (Anti-Aircraft) Guns (of Los Angeles, 1942)

reply to post by bugstomper


This trailer is better, more info on the actual historical event.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

I admit that I honestly skipped everything beyond the first page and last couple. Your explanation Arbitrageur seems very reasonable to me. It's the simplest explanation and it doesn't involve aliens from outer space coming here in their fancy spaceships. Personally, I think people looking for that kind of explanation aren't coming here to find evidence. That's just my opinion. Let history tell the story, but I know people will make up their own minds despite whatever history tells us.

We still don't know for sure about some UFO videos and witness accounts, true. There're only a handful, however. It's just that with the great majority explained it's hard to buy the argument that the last few unexplained cases are proof that there's intelligent life from elsewhere visiting earth. I know that the mind wants to go in this direction and lots of people do just that. It's so enticing to believe in the idea that ET is here and we're too dumb to notice. However, the better part of me, the part of me that stands up for what is right and what is reasonable, has to decline that impulse and do what is responsible. Occams Razor demands that we seek the simplest and least complicated explanations. It has proven to work for science ever since its inception. So, essentially, I do not believe we're being visited and I believe that the odds are that any remaining unexplained cases have natural explanations and we do not need to invent beings from other worlds to fill in the empty spots.

I believe that when ET is finally here, there won't be any room for debate about it.

Just my 2 coppers.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
reply to post by Phage

 

You mean like this one?
www.combinedfleet.com...
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/880e6f2d7fae.gif[/atsimg]

The Aichi M6A1 Seiran had the performance of carrier-based bombers, yet it was operated from a submarine.

Yes and the speed estimates of the offshore object vary a bit, but some of the speed estimates don't seem outside realm of capabilities for an aircraft of the time. So I wouldn't rule out a Japanese reconnaissance plane though I have no idea if it might have been that one or another model. The Imperial Japanese Navy actually had 7 different types of subs capable of carrying aircraft according to this:

www.combinedfleet.com...

However I never found a submarine picture much better than this one:

I-400 beside submarine tender USS Proteus after the war. Note the large hangar and forward catapult.

It would be interesting to get a closer look at the engineering of the hangar, like how wide it is and how it manages to stay watertight with presumably large hangar doors. I'm guessing that big thing on top of the forward third of the sub is the catapult.

*jaw drops*

I had no idea. I constantly learn new things about WWII. Crafty engineers back then!

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
reply to post by FireMoon

 

reply to post by Phage

 

..............

www.militarymuseum.org...

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.

Whatever they were shooting at wasn't moving at 300 mph, I think everyone agrees with that. So why does anyone think the object they shot at was the same object that was supposedly traveling offshore at 300 mph (if that figure is correct and that's a big IF)?

There were many mistakes back then, despite all of the obvious awesomeness. People give them too much credit, and, ironically even, not enough respect. Essentially, everyone needs to be a lot more skeptical and at the same time, not put words into the mouths of those who served our country. We need people who have real world experience as they can really give us an idea what goes on. I don't trust academics or people who just google this stuff. Too much BS results from it.

Back to watching the birds fight for food outside my window.

Originally posted by WitnessFromAfar
I'm going to step away again for a while now...

I'm not dead. Though it may take me a while, I will return here to clarify this situation...

-WitnessFromAfar

Does anyone happen to know if WitnessFromAfar still plans on returning to this thread he started?

He hasn't participated on ATS, nor logged on to ATS, in quite a while.

While I disagree with many (probably most) of the views he appears to have held in this thread, he was following up a few avenues that I'm interested in. For example, he posted several times about a FOIA request he made - but only posted the initial reply indicating that the request had been passed on to the relevant agency.

All the best,

Isaac

I think the MIB's got to him Isaac

The LA Times recently published a photo comparison of the original negative and the retouched version that they had printed. They painted the searchlights white and the objects shape is more pronounced. Even though you can't see the shape of the object as well in the original, I still believe there is an object there otherwise the search beams would pass through each other and continue on through that point.

framework.latimes.com...

There's also some other photos of the damage that occurred.


Re-touched version


Original version

The next day, on Feb. 26, The Times published a photo page with a retouched version of the above searchlight photo and seven other images of damage from falling anti-aircraft shells. This six-photo gallery includes two versions of the searchlight photo. The first was recently found at the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive at UCLA by Simon Elliott, researcher in the Department of Special Collections at UCLA. The second version — retouched — was published in 1942. The second version exists as a copy negative also at UCLA.

And here's another photo from the battle that LIFE magazine printed.



The white streaks in the sky are stars, and there's a gap in them because the photographer closed the shutter at one point during the long exposure.

books.google.com...

Originally posted by freelance_zenarchist
framework.latimes.com...

There's also some other photos of the damage that occurred.

Thanks for the link. Some of the other photos there answered some questions I had, like:

Would the AA shells have shot down a balloon right away?

Look at the AA shell before and after explosion:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f53bb51314d9.jpg[/atsimg]
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/6506b1f15320.jpg[/atsimg]
The first thing I'd note is some of those fragments would probably kill you if they hit you falling from 15,000 feet, or at least give you a very bad day. But they are huge fragments, it looks like maybe roughly 15 of them or so might make up the entire shell.

So if the shell explodes say 25 meters away from a balloon (which would be excellent shooting to get that close using the crude radar and equipment they had), we can calculate the surface area of a 25m sphere using 4*pi*25m^2 = 7,854 sqare meters.

If there are 15 fragments from the shell, that's one fragment for every 523 square meters.

If the weather balloon has a cross sectional area of one square meter, then we can calculate the probability of shooting down a balloon from a distance of 25 meters as one in 523. This would explain why the balloons they were shooting at didn't get shot down immediately, though since they took more than 523 shots I suspect eventually they did get shot down, but only if they managed to hit the balloons before they ascended out of the altitude range of the guns, which the balloons were capable of doing. If you think my estimates are off you can plug in your own estimates but I think you can see from this math it's not as easy to shoot down a balloon with these huge fragments, as some people seem to think.

A plane would be a little easier target than a balloon simply because it has a larger cross-sectional area than a standard meteorological balloon, but even as large as the plane is, it would still take some luck and multiple shots to hit a plane if the shell exploded at 25 meters from the plane.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Would the AA shells have shot down a balloon right away?

I would hope so



Anyway, here's a vid of some dudes trying to recreate it and shooting down a balloon pretty quickly.

Originally posted by freelance_zenarchist
I would hope so

Anyway, here's a vid of some dudes trying to recreate it and shooting down a balloon pretty quickly.

Hoping don't make it so. Yeah that show is about entertainment, not serious investigation.

Did you notice they referred to over 1400 rounds of ammo? That was a reference to the 3" shells like in the photos I posted, but that's not what they used in their recreation. Sure if a balloon is close enough you can hit it with a bullet which is what they did, not a recreation of the 1400 rounds at all which weren't bullets but 3" shells which were fired using a 3" gun and very clumsy radar compared to today's radar. Please don't tell me you can't see the huge difference in the ammo in the LA times link you posted, and the ammo they used in that show?

And how did they account for the altitude of the weather balloons ascending to over 25000 feet which was out of the range of even the 3" shells? They didn't.

Their spotlight recreation was very lame too. They converged spotlights. Then when they put pyrotechnics in the sky, they didn't re-aim the beams at the smoke. The whole question would be what would the beams look like if they mistook the puffs of smoke for an object and focused the beams of light on the puffs of smoke. Why the heck didn't they try that in their recreation? They had everything set up for it.

Very lame and completely incompetent, I used to watch that show but I gave up on it when I realized they weren't serious.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


That show is totally ridiculous and lame, I don't think they got anything accurate with their re-creation.

I was reading some of the links you've posted and saw this:

The 4-foot-diameter balloons were released by each of the dozen or so anti-aircraft regiments around the Los Angeles area every six hours.

The balloons were only 4 feet wide! This whole time I was picturing huge balloons like a hot air balloon (they show a photo of a blimp in that Fact or Faked show ), so it's no wonder they were having trouble shooting them down. Sorry for the confusion.

Originally posted by freelance_zenarchist
The balloons were only 4 feet wide! This whole time I was picturing huge balloons like a hot air balloon (they show a photo of a blimp in that Fact or Faked show

), so it's no wonder they were having trouble shooting them down. Sorry for the confusion.

Yes exactly! Thanks for the followup post!

I had something like that 4' figure guesstimated into my estimate of the size of the balloons, when I said they had a cross sectional area of maybe 1 meter squared. It was a decent guess rounded, but the actual figure using a 4 foot diameter or 2 foot radius, would be 1.167 square meters.
Pi* r^2
Pi* (.6096m)^2 = 1.167 square meters

It's a relatively small target for a nearby exploding 3" shell that doesn't make all that many fragments.

And I don't think it's a balloon in the LA times famous photo, my guess is that it's smoke, like they showed in fact or faked episode, but failed to focus the light beams on the smoke to see what happened. (or maybe they tried it but didn't show the result because it ended up looking too much like the LA times photo? Why wouldn't they try it, that seems like the whole point?).

I think the show was criticized for debunking too much so if they wanted to maintain their viewership they had to rule in favor of some mysteries, so if they actually did point the searchlights at the smoke and failed to show it, that would be their motivation, but of course I'm speculating, though I don't think it's wild speculation since I can't think of a good reason they wouldn't try to duplicate what actually happened with the spotlights being shined onto the puffs of smoke. There is no reason all the spotlights would converge on an empty point in space like fact or faked showed, that was beyond ridiculous.

Bump

This recent post discusses the retouching of the original photo:
www.notaghost.com...

Analysis of original Battle of LA photo negative

Seems the classic photo everyone is familiar with is not the original. Below is a link to an article about recent analysis of the original negative. The conclusions is that there is no aircraft of any sort, but rather a cloud or smoke at the nexus of the searchlight beams.

analysis of Battle of LA photo


For the record this site is run by long-time debunker of UFO picture hoaxes and matters of the paranormal. Definitely not every ATS member's cup of tea, but it is worth perusing to get an alternate view. My own feeling is that the guy is a bit of a debunking zealot, but he is not what I would call a debunking ideologue either. His analyses and those of others that highlights strike me as well done.

Originally posted by MrInquisitive
Analysis of original Battle of LA photo negative

Seems the classic photo everyone is familiar with is not the original. Below is a link to an article about recent analysis of the original negative. The conclusions is that there is no aircraft of any sort, but rather a cloud or smoke at the nexus of the searchlight beams.

analysis of Battle of LA photo


For the record this site is run by long-time debunker of UFO picture hoaxes and matters of the paranormal. Definitely not every ATS member's cup of tea, but it is worth perusing to get an alternate view. My own feeling is that the guy is a bit of a debunking zealot, but he is not what I would call a debunking ideologue either. His analyses and those of others that highlights strike me as well done.

They noticed a moving cloud and started to shoot at it? And there were spotlights on the UFO. How is that logical to say that they were shooting at a cloud? They even said that the object moved off to the shores and dissappeared out of nowhere.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
reply to post by FireMoon

 

reply to post by Phage

 

Originally posted by FireMoon
The airplane on board the submarine was almost 100% certain, a Yokosuka E14Y

Well I guess even you have some doubt or you wouldn't have inserted the word "almost" in that statement. If the offshore radar returns had anything to do with that plane, the radar based speed estimates had to be off, not impossible considering the poor training of the radar operators. But with the speed discrepancy (I think the low end of the radar based speed estimates was about 260mph), it's not a slam dunk either, which brings us back to my original statement:


No, being British i was being polite and not assuming that just because every Japanese sub that was recorded as carrying a plane, at that point in the war that there isn't a 0.00001 % chance this particular sub had another make of plane on board.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
I never said the object tracked offshore was a weather balloon. Nobody knows what that object was.

So I'm still saying nobody knows for sure what it was. I'm not ruling out a Japanese plane but I really don't know how likely that possibility is. I will say it's not unlikely enough for me to rule it out. For one thing the speed estimate doesn't really hold up to scrutiny:

www.historynet.com...

When an air raid defense radar picked up a mysterious contact shortly before 2 a.m. on February 25, the unknown contact was approximately 100 miles southwest of Los Angeles.

Anti-aircraft guns from the IV Interceptor Command opened fire at 3:16 a.m.

If it was really traveling at somewhere between 260-330 mph as I have seen various estimates claim, then why would it take over an hour to go 100 miles? Even according to the Army's report, the thing they were shooting at was barely moving, not going 300 mph so I still don't see why some people connect the offshore radar contact with the later shooting, the speed profile doesn't match, and the radar tracking was lost 3 miles offshore when it should have been the strongest return.

But I'm not sure it's critical to this case to even identify the offshore radar contact, as I don't think it came onshore based on the above observations.

www.militarymuseum.org...

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.

Whatever they were shooting at wasn't moving at 300 mph, I think everyone agrees with that. So why does anyone think the object they shot at was the same object that was supposedly traveling offshore at 300 mph (if that figure is correct and that's a big IF)?

Too slow? want to know a story about aircraft being too slow that cost the German's the world's most advanced battle ship the Bismark? The Brits sent old "Stringbags" Fairy Swordfish against the Bismark carrying one torpedo each. The anti aircraft guns on board the Bismark couldn't hit them because they were calibrated such, as to not allow accurate targeting on the Stringbag puttering along flat out into a headwind at 60-70 MPH. It was one of the Stringbags that hit the Bismark's rudder and allowed the Royal Navy to catch her and sink her as she, impotently, went round in circles. WW2 Float planes often flew at little more than a stall speed if there is anything like a head wind . Ergo, the idea they were "too slow" is a specious one. That is also totally ignoring that the winds were in the wrong direction for any balloons to have found their way over LA>

[edit on 28-7-2010 by Arbitrageur]

Originally posted by HazyChestNutz
They noticed a moving cloud and started to shoot at it? And there were spotlights on the UFO. How is that logical to say that they were shooting at a cloud?

Well it has a lot of features of a cloud, it was moving about the same speed as a cloud. But whether it was a natural cloud, or smoke from previous detonations of AA shells is debatable. There is no doubt that the AA shell detonations produced clouds of smoke. To me it seems quite plausible that they would fire at those puffs of smoke as targets once they were illuminated by the spotlights.

In fact, some people admitted to firing their guns into the air even though they didn't have any target in sight at all, not even a puff of smoke. It's a psychological phenomenon called "war nerves". It may not be easy to understand if you're sitting safe at home typing at your computer; maybe you have to be in a war to understand it? Because normally people wouldn't fire into the air at absolutely nothing, but some people did and they admitted it. So if they would fire with no target at all, why not fire at a puff of smoke or a cloud?

I think it we had sent up our own aircraft, they probably would have fired at our own aircraft. They would have fired at anything as far as I can tell, and some of them don't deny that. I think you shouldn't make the assumption that people with a bad case of "war nerves" will behave logically. Actually some people did behave more logically than others, and did withhold their fire because they refused to shoot at a balloon which is what the others were shooting at initially, and later, puffs of smoke from AA shells.

They even said that the object moved off to the shores and dissappeared out of nowhere.

They who? Name, source?

The problem is, there are probably over 80 different versions of what happened if you ask 100 different people. The only consistency to eyewitness accounts seems to be before the shooting started.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by HazyChestNutz
They noticed a moving cloud and started to shoot at it? And there were spotlights on the UFO. How is that logical to say that they were shooting at a cloud?

Well it has a lot of features of a cloud, it was moving about the same speed as a cloud. But whether it was a natural cloud, or smoke from previous detonations of AA shells is debatable. There is no doubt that the AA shell detonations produced clouds of smoke. To me it seems quite plausible that they would fire at those puffs of smoke as targets once they were illuminated by the spotlights.

In fact, some people admitted to firing their guns into the air even though they didn't have any target in sight at all, not even a puff of smoke. It's a psychological phenomenon called "war nerves". It may not be easy to understand if you're sitting safe at home typing at your computer; maybe you have to be in a war to understand it? Because normally people wouldn't fire into the air at absolutely nothing, but some people did and they admitted it. So if they would fire with no target at all, why not fire at a puff of smoke or a cloud?

I think it we had sent up our own aircraft, they probably would have fired at our own aircraft. They would have fired at anything as far as I can tell, and some of them don't deny that. I think you shouldn't make the assumption that people with a bad case of "war nerves" will behave logically. Actually some people did behave more logically than others, and did withhold their fire because they refused to shoot at a balloon which is what the others were shooting at initially, and later, puffs of smoke from AA shells.

They even said that the object moved off to the shores and dissappeared out of nowhere.

They who? Name, source?

The problem is, there are probably over 80 different versions of what happened if you ask 100 different people. The only consistency to eyewitness accounts seems to be before the shooting started.

A radio host at the time, Can be found on youtube. Also jet pilots who were "pursuing the object" and the man on the Ancient Aliens episode. Just use a search engine :/

You know how ack ack worked back then don;t you? Unless an object was caught in the searchlights they would simply lob as much ordinance into the air set to explode at a certain height, as they could. They didn't aim it really at all. They set the fuse to the given height and just fired for effect. The idea being to lay a carpet of shrapnel so thick as to not allow a bomber to fly straight and flat for its' bombing run to be accurate. To start talking about firing at puffs of smoke it to show complete ignorance of how it all worked. They fired at a height given to them, in effect, as pointed out, if there wasn't an object tracked by searchlights they just chucked as much up there over the whole of LA as they possibly could, end of

From memory, truly accurate proximity fuses didn't come in till about 1943. A friend of mine's father had an ack ack shell go straight through the wing of his Lancaster bomber and explode a few hundred feet higher, cos the fuse had been set wrong,he survived the war. The crews of the ack ack guns around LA did exactly the job they were trained to do and anyone claiming they didn't simply has no understanding of what ack ack could and couldn't actually do back then and how it was used as area fire not specific fire in over 90% of cases.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

Originally posted by freelance_zenarchist
I would hope so

Anyway, here's a vid of some dudes trying to recreate it and shooting down a balloon pretty quickly.

Hoping don't make it so. Yeah that show is about entertainment, not serious investigation.

Did you notice they referred to over 1400 rounds of ammo? That was a reference to the 3" shells like in the photos I posted, but that's not what they used in their recreation. Sure if a balloon is close enough you can hit it with a bullet which is what they did, not a recreation of the 1400 rounds at all which weren't bullets but 3" shells which were fired using a 3" gun and very clumsy radar compared to today's radar. Please don't tell me you can't see the huge difference in the ammo in the LA times link you posted, and the ammo they used in that show?

And how did they account for the altitude of the weather balloons ascending to over 25000 feet which was out of the range of even the 3" shells? They didn't.



Very lame and completely incompetent, I used to watch that show but I gave up on it when I realized they weren't serious.

No more lame and incompetent than your understanding of a 3 inch Archie shell. Ack Ack was area effect weapon and the shells fragmented into hundreds of razor sharp pieces, only one of which had to hit something important to bring down a plane let alone, rip through the flimsy fabric of a balloon's envelope One hundred yards would often often be close enough to obtain a hit on an aircraft. Ack Ack exploding 20-30 yards from a target was laible to tear damn great holes in anything within the sphere of it's blast.

The tone of your whole argument seems to be suggesting they were firing aimed solid shot at the supposed targets and they weren't . LA if it say had 10 batteries of ack ack surrounding with 5 guns each, would have had each battery with its' own *virtual box* in the sky. When an air raid happened it was each batteries job to fill their box with ack ack fire UNLESS they were given a specific target or the searchlights in THEIR box acquired one.

It was standard practice in every theatre of war, should an air raid siren go for ack ack to let lose if a target was spotted often within 20 miles of the battery. This was because, it was always possible other planes had slipped through, that the Radar had not picked up and rather than wait for aircraft to arrive the idea was to put them off even trying to enter the area. As usual people have seen too many war films and tend to base their assumptions on fiction not actual military practices.

Those truly interested in understanding what the ack ack guns around LA were doing should read something like Len Deighton's superb book *Bomber* , which while fictional, is based on factual operational procedures. The guns of LA didn't just let loose out of panic they followed the laid down operational procedure. They were not shooting blind in the sense that 90% of ack ack was actually fillnig it's given box in the sky, because that's how it worked.