UFOs and the Battle of Los Angeles
The most astounding battle of World War II may not have been a proper battle at all, but just a bit of a misunderstanding. And although recognized as having occurred in and above Los Angeles on February 24–25, 1942, the real “battle”— such as it was—took place a day before, on February 23. That is when, shortly after 7:00 p.m., a lone Japanese submarine surfaced some twenty-five hundred yards off the coast of Ellwood, a tiny California crossroads located eight miles north of Santa Barbara. Onshore storage tanks kept by the Barnsdall Oil Company made a tempting target, and so the submarine’s cannon devoted twenty minutes to shelling the tanks and beach. In the end, although nobody was hurt, and damage amounted to a paltry $500, the shelling was unusually brazen, particularly because the Coast Guard and other military—a mere ten weeks after the confidence-rattling Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—were on the alert for suspicious activity in American waters. Whether the Japanese command timed this bad behavior to coincide with a presidential radio broadcast by Franklin Roosevelt is hard to say, but the fact is that just as FDR emphasized the danger facing the nation, an enemy sub surfaced, unmolested, and lobbed shells at a California beach.
When authorities became aware of what happened at Ellwood, Highway 101 was closed. Radio stations were ordered to suspend programming so that the authorities could make clear that a real alert, not a test, was underway. A few bombers went up to look for the sub, but they found nothing. Authorities lifted the alert after four hours.
Although the attack amounted to a gesture, the Japanese submarine had not been accounted for. People on the California coast wondered about that. What if the sub hadn’t come alone? Maybe enemy soldiers are lurking about. Maybe, somehow, the Japanese had sent planes.
The remainder of the night and the daylight hours of the next day remained quiet, but then another evening alert went up, at about a quarter after seven on February 24. Someone had seen “unidentified objects” in the sky. Defense plants went on alert, but nothing further was reported, and city authorities lifted the general alert a little before 10:30 p.m.
Tick tock.
At 2:15 a.m. on February 25, coastal radar picked up an airborne object over the Pacific, about 120 miles from Los Angeles and moving toward the city.
When a citywide blackout was ordered at 2:21, the nerves of Angelenos frayed all over again. Citizens began calling the police to report lights and other objects in the sky. Soldiers and sailors tensed. A few minutes past 3:00 a.m., ground watchers spotted a delta-shaped formation of bright objects flying at thousands of feet, apparently on their way to L.A. defense plants and munitions factories.
The original object seen on radar had fallen off the screen, but that hardly mattered. Air raid sirens went off across the city. Civil defense workers grabbed their helmets and flashlights, and pushed into the streets, shouting at people to get inside and kill the lights. Some puzzled people looked at the sky from windows, rooftops, and balconies. Others tried to return to their families. Others just wanted to get indoors, now. The streets rang with screams and shouts. Cars that had doused their headlamps began to run into each other. Horns honked.
What a damnable mess. And then the batteries of antiaircraft guns opened up.
During the next hour and fifteen minutes, the largest city on America’s West Coast was a bedlam. The reports from the hotly firing antiaircraft guns—thirty- seven-millimeter and three-inchers—shook buildings and rattled windows. The darkened streets and docks were flash-illuminated by shells exploding thousands of feet above. Stabbing, moving fingers of searchlights clawed the night sky.
Shrapnel rained back onto the streets, panicking more people and encouraging the ack-ack gunners to fire more fiercely.
The gunners had targets, and civilians later insisted they’d seen moving balls of light periodically caught in the searchlights’ glare. People would talk about that for weeks. The gunners kept at their work, and citizens braced for something catastrophic.
Waning ammunition or a lack of targets or both finally had an effect, and by 4:15 a.m. the guns were mostly silent. Three hours later, the blackout imposed from San Obispo to the Mexican border was lifted. Nothing had been bombed or strafed, but in the violent confusion and, perhaps, the rain of shrapnel, five lives on the ground had been lost.
Washington quickly offered an explanation, but instead of reassuring people, “false alarm” only made them mad. What the heck does that mean? Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox—known afterwards as the “false-alarm” man—said that no planes had been aloft over Los Angeles. A day later, Secretary of War Henry Stimson explained that planes had been in the sky, fifteen American aircraft, flying over L.A. at between nine thousand and fifteen thousand feet. Despite the vigorous antiaircraft fire, no American planes had been damaged, and no airmen had been hurt.
Naturally enough, Angelenos who had seen aircraft concluded that if no American planes had been up, then enemy planes had been. The officers and enlisted men of the antiaircraft batteries saw, variously, planes, things “too big to be planes,” and “meteorological balloons.” Guesses at altitude ranged between eight thousand and thirty thousand feet. (Stimson’s altitude estimate of nine thousand to fifteen thousand feet meant that the ack-ack guns, good beyond thirty-one thousand feet, should have brought down multiple aircraft—and they did not.) Gunners could not agree, either, on the numbers of planes: ten, ventured some; thirty, said others.
Knox and Stimson shortly came under pressure from local L.A. authorities and, worse, Congress. Charges of ineptitude rang out. The general disorder of the Battle of Los Angeles, and those five lost lives, loomed large. Some politicians wondered, along with California and the rest of America, if the Japanese had established secret bases in Mexico. (The Japanese had not.) In their 1968 book Mysteries of the Skies: UFOs in Perspective, NICAP staffers Gordon Lore and Harold Deneault Jr. note that men’s magazines and other pulps “explained” the activity as a response to a Japanese air raid. But those claims are spurious, as became clear during interrogation of Japanese command officers in the fall of 1945, after the war. No Japanese planes had been over Los Angeles on February 24. (And anyway, the very few Japanese planes that ever ventured close to American shores had to come singly, or perhaps as a pair, as they were collapsible aircraft carried by submarines.) Lore and Deneault dismiss one theory that gained a bit of traction: the whole event had been staged by the U.S. military as a test of urban military and civil defense. No evidence to support that idea has emerged.
Although much about the Battle of Los Angeles defies logic, a mere moment of rational thought suggests that the official explanations are inadequate. Debate about what was in the sky that night continues—and almost nobody argues for Japanese or American airplanes.
