Battle of Los Angeles 1942- Mysterious raid of unknown objects.
With Pearl Harbor fresh in the nation’s mind, and war jitters at a fever pitch, Los Angelenos were jarred out of their comfy beds early on the morning of February 25, 1942 by the sound of air raid sirens and anti-aircraft fire. It was the first time in history that an airborne enemy had been engaged in the continental U.S., but officials and civilian witnesses were not entirely sure about what they had seen beginning at about 2 :15 AM.
It wouldn't be until another 5 years that the term "Flying Saucer" would hit the minds of Americans after Kenneth Arnold's sighting.
Army observers looking at the celestial fracas through binoculars from atop a tower in Culver City thought they saw a group of silvery objects which they assumed were airplanes. All witnesses agreed that the things came in from the northwest (probably from the ocean) near Santa Monica and moved southwest in a leisurely fashion until they disappeared somewhere south of Long Beach. Because all lights in the city had been turned off, stars shined on the moonless night with an intensity most had never seen.
Just before the firing started, a woman identified only as “Katie” said that she received a call from the local air raid warden at her home near Santa Monica, telling her to look out the window and see if she could report anything. “It was huge! It was just enormous! And it was practically right over my house. I had never seen anything like it in my life!” she said. “It was just hovering there in the sky and hardly moving at all. It was a lovely pale orange and about the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. I could see it perfectly because it was very close. It was big!”
When the “attack” began, powerful searchlights lit up the early morning sky, converging on the object (or group of objects) so that the gun batteries could get a good bead on the thing. The UFO never changed direction or speed, even with the combined firing of hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, many of which scored direct hits the craft never came down. The whole thing lasted for about an hour and 1,400 shells were fired at the objects, but the “mystery planes” took their sweet time traveling 20 or so miles across the night sky.
In addition to several buildings damaged by friendly fire, four to five civilians were killed by the anti-aircraft fire, and another three died of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long bombardment. The incident was front-page news along the U.S. Pacific coast, and earned some mass media coverage throughout the nation.
In 1983, 40 years later, the Air Force official history concluded it was "meteorological balloons" that caused the panic.
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