A Massive UFO Incident From 1942: Those Dots You See Around The Craft Are Artillery Bursts

On February 25, 1942, a city wide blackout was ordered as the military opened fire upon a large unknown object hovering over Los Angeles. The event was experienced by 1 million people.

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The picture you see above is of an object that hovered over Los Angeles in the early morning hours of February 25th, 1942. The small white dots around the object are artillery bursts from when the military fired upon the object. An artillery burst is the detonation of an explosive device such as an anti-aircraft artillery shell or a nuclear weapon in the air instead of on contact with the target.

This incident happened only three months after Pearl Harbour (which may have been a false flag event). There was a lot of attention placed on the US, and the country was on high alert at the time this incident occurred.

Several radars detected the object approximately 120 miles west of Los Angeles, and within minutes anti-aircraft batteries were on alert. At around 2:20 am the object was tracked on radar to within a few miles off the coast.

A city wide blackout was ordered. Shortly after 3:00 am the object appeared right over the city and anti-aircraft batteries opened fire. Approximately 1500 rounds were fired into the sky, not over the ocean but directly over the city. The event lasted at least one hour.

Five citizens died from the shelling or complications attributed to the shelling that fell to the ground. Many buildings and homes were also heavily damaged, and multiple car accidents were reported. All of this came from US weaponry and nothing else.

Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an expert in photographic analysis, believed the object to be roughly 100 feet or more in diameter. The event was witnessed by approximately 1 million people.

Just imagine alarms going off in the middle of the night and the sound of heavy weaponry lighting up the sky. Imagine seeing that large object in the sky as you see in the photo below, which is the headline that the Los Angeles Times printed the very next day after the incident.

Scott Littleton, who was a Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, was one of many survivors who recounted their experience of the ordeal.

He explained,

“The two of us stood side by side in front of the house, huddling together in the chill night air and staring up into the sky. The planes we’d heard were not in sight, but what captured our rapt attention was a silvery, lozenge-shaped “bug,” as my mother later described it, that was clearly visible in the searchlight beams that pinpointed it. Although it was a clear moonlit night, no other details could be discerned, despite the fact that when we first saw it the object was hanging motionless almost directly overhead. Its altitude is hard to estimate, especially after all these years but I’d guess that it was somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 feet. This may explain why we didn’t see the orange glow reported by several eyewitnesses in Santa Monica and Culver City where the object was apparently much lower. One witness suggests that this glow may simply have been the reflection of shell bursts against the object’s “silvery” body.”

Littleton also expressed that the object caused a US plane to crash simply from getting within the vicinity of the object.

I found this interesting because. fast forward to today and we know that planes that approach some of these unknown objects lose their ability to operate properly. I put an example from an incident in Iran in this article if you’re interested. There are hundreds of examples of this.

Wilbert B. Smith, a radio engineer and one of the first Canadians to take an interest in the UFO phenomenon, joined the Department of Transport in 1939 and was in charge of establishing a network of ionospheric measurement stations. He told Paul Hellyer, the former Canadian Defence Minister, the following:

“We were informed that although a few of our aircraft had come to an unfortunate end by what they considered the colossal stupidity of our pilots, they (UFOs) were now taking corrective measures to avoid our aircraft.”

I’m reminded of a statement from 1947 made by General Nathan Twining, the former Chief of Staff for the United States Air Force, which reads as follows,

“The phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious...The reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability, (particularly in roll), and actions which must be considered evasive when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar, lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically or remotely.”

The key word there is evasive

The “official” explanation for the event over Los Angeles in 1942 ranged from “nothing happened” to “weather balloons,” to the idea that these were Japanese planes.

Many headlines even claimed to have shot down a few Japanese planes but there was no evidence for this. The military and government explanation did not at all match what many people had seen or experienced, yet they insisted that hundreds of Japanese planes were flying through the sky.

Maybe it’s the truth? It still doesn’t explain the multiple witness accounts and picture you see above, and the fact that no planes, balloons or other objects were brought down as a result of the shootings. Some speculate that the image was retouched and enhanced in some way in order to focus in more on the object, but regardless, witnesses saw what they saw, and radar picked up what it picked up.

There was also a lot of flip flopping with the stories. The Navy declared the entire matter a false alarm but a day later, the War Department presenting the Army's side of the story, claimed at least one and possibly five unidentified aircraft were over the city that night.

Multiple US representatives called for an investigation into the incident. The New York Times claimed that the military and city’s guns had been firing at absolutely nothing at all, that it was a sign of “expensive incompetence.”

The Japanese claimed that they had never sent any planes to the area on that night.

Many journalists noted that it was fitting that the incident had taken place in the home of the film industry. The New York Times also wrote that as the “world’s preeminent fabricator of make-believe,” Hollywood appeared to have played host to a battle that was “just another illusion.”

In the end, decades later, in 1983 the Office of Air Force History outlined the events of the L.A. air raid and noted that meteorological balloons had been released prior to the barrage to help determine wind conditions. Their lights and silver color could have been what first triggered the alerts. Once the shooting began, the disorienting combination of searchlights, smoke and anti-aircraft fire probably led gunners to believe they were firing on enemy planes, even though none were actually present.

If this was the official explanation and they admitted that no planes were present in 1983, why did the government, in 1942, lie? And if that object in the picture was indeed some sort of weather balloon, how did it stay up there with all of that weaponry used against it?

What’s interesting to me, from a UFO researchers perspective, is the fact that this object looks similar to the classic disk/cylindrical shape with a small dome on top. And if this was a mistake, and the armed forces were firing at nothing and had their spotlights concentrated on nothing for over an hour, why was their confirmation of the object from multiple radars and witnesses?

It just doesn’t make any sense.