Did Aliens Start the Battle of Los Angeles?

I love episodes like this. You read a brief overview of the story and are like “ok, fine” then you delve a bit deeper into the conspiracy side and are like “hmm, ok, whatever”, then you happen upon some more information and are like “WHAT!”

This story encompasses unidentified flying objects, wartime paranoia and government cover-ups. Thanks to Discord user Excelsius for the suggestion, and just to make it clear, we’re not talking about the Rage Against the Machine album here, although god knows sometimes the sentiments overlap. Now let’s get into it.

The Battle of Los Angeles

Time for some scene-setting. And because it’s the home of Hollywood and it’s in the 1940s, I feel like some kind of old-timey rapid-fire newscaster-style is appropriate here.

Los Angeles, 1942. Citizens were thrown into a panic in the early hours of February 25th when rumours of a Japanese aerial attack started to circulate. Blackout orders were issued and the artillery brigade fired over a thousand anti-aircraft shells into the sky. No enemy shots were fired and the public can rest assured that the US is fully prepared to repel any sort of invasion of our great nation.

And scene.

OK, that’s how I imagined a news report might go in the immediate aftermath of the event but let’s fill in the gaps. This apparent air-raid happened only shortly after the US had officially entered the Second World War in December 1941. After the Japanese launched their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and their submarines successfully attacked numerous merchant ships in the Pacific, anti-Japanese sentiment was massively high and there was a huge nervousness about some sort of attack on mainland America.

Just a day before the Battle of Los Angeles started, Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-17 attacked an area of the Ellwood oil field in the Santa Barbara Channel. Unsuccessfully aiming for fuel tanks, the attack didn’t end up producing a lot of damage but did have a huge effect on the psyche of the American public and military, with hundreds of people fleeing from the coast in case a full-scale attack was about to happen, and creating further impetus for the internment of people of Japanese descent which had started a couple of weeks before. In fact, this firing of a few shells marked the first naval bombardment of the United States by a foreign power since 1814 so it was little wonder that everyone suddenly got a bit nervous. That was on February 23rd.

On 7.18pm on February 24th 1942, the alert was suddenly given by naval intelligence that coastal California should brace itself for a potential attack by Japan. Imagine the panic that would ensue. At 10.23pm the alert was lifted and people could carry on with whatever they were doing, the end of life as they knew it, thankfully averted. Artillery batteries remained on high alert, however.

At 2am on the 25th of February, activity some 120 miles off the coast of Los Angeles was picked up by radar with the military immediately issuing blackout notices. This was promptly ignored, however, because the sirens woke everyone up so they all turned on their lights and went out into the streets to see what all the fuss was about. Anti-aircraft units assembled and, at 3.07am, after having been given permission to fire on sight, the anti-aircraft guns in Santa Monica and then Los Angeles started blasting the hell out of the sky.

Eyewitness accounts of what was seen that night varied greatly. According to an article on the Museum of the City of San Francisco’s website:

In any case, the next three hours produced some of the most imaginative reporting of the war: ‘swarms’ of planes (or, sometimes, balloons) of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000 and flying at speeds which were said to have varied from ‘very slow’ to over 200 miles per hour, were observed to parade across the skies.

Not much consensus there, then. Whatever was up there, the artillery fire lasted for about an hour and over 1400 anti-aircraft rounds were fired. At about 4.14am the all-clear was given. None of the supposed enemy aircraft had fired any shots or dropped any bombs but there were at least 5 deaths associated with the battle: three in car crashes caused by the panic and two of stress-related heart attacks.

When the sun finally rose on the morning of the 25th, there were no downed enemy aircraft to be found, only damage caused by the shrapnel of the US guns. Later on the same day, Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, held a press conference to say the entire incident had been a false alarm and put it down to “war nerves”. A plausible explanation maybe, but was it the truth? Secretary of War Henry Stimson backed up the Army’s version that between one and five planes had been in the LA skies that night and might have been either domestic commercial aircraft taken over by enemy forces or else they were Japanese planes launched from submarines.

So what had been in the sky over LA? Also, just a note here that “The Battle of Los Angeles”, also known as “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid” is actually a sarcastic moniker, as the event was very one-sided with no apparent enemy engagement. For once it’s not Americans trying to big themselves up.

OK, so we’ve got a mysterious, unspecified number of things in the sky that worried the military enough that they spent an hour and a lot of ammunition trying to blast them down. Where’s the Decoding the Unknown angle here? Oh, here we go.

The UFO Conspiracy

Oh no! It’s one of these! Simon I’m really sorry but it is a pretty good story.

On February 26th, the day after the battle, the Los Angeles Times ran a front page story with the headline “Searchlights and Anti-Aircraft Guns Comb Sky During Alarm” featuring a very striking picture. At least 8 huge searchlights are coming together in the sky, highlighting an object that looks very much like our old friend, the flying saucer.

At the same time, Army chief of staff George Marshall contacted President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a bombshell report saying that they believed the mystery aircraft “are in all probability of interplanetary origin”. It seems that the US Government then covertly investigated this angle, with traces of extraterrestrial crafts being recovered from the LA and San Bernardino areas. A memo from Roosevelt on the 27th of February to Marshall states in part:

I have considered the disposition of the material in possession of the Army that may be of great significance toward the development of a super weapon of war. I disagree with the argument that such information should be shared with our ally the Soviet Union. Consultation with Dr. Bush and other scientists on the issue of finding practical uses for the atomic secrets learned from study of celestial devices precludes any further discussion and I therefore authorize Dr.

Bush to proceed with the project without further delay. This information is vital to the nation’s superiority and must remain within the confines of state secrets.

A few days later, on the 5th of March 1942, Marshall sent a memo back to Roosevelt headed “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit”. The document is quite old and has a big blotchy scuff down the middle which makes it hard to read but it says in part: “regarding the air raid over Los Angeles it was learned by Army G2 that Rear Admiral Anderson recovered an unidentified airplane off the coast of California with no bearing on conventional explanation”.

If you’re wondering why you have never heard of this before it’s because it was a COVER UP, you fool, you weren’t supposed to know about it! These documents and a trove of others came to light in 1987 and gave some background on a secret group known as Majestic 12 which had come together in 1947 under President Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt. Majestic 12 was basically involved with all things alien.

The Majestic 12 Documents

The Majestic 12 documents were originally leaked in 1984 when someone dropped a roll of 35mm film through ufologist Jaime Shandera’s door. Together with fellow ufo researcher, Bill Moore, they developed the film and found it contained photos of document pages, including the memos we just mentioned. Perhaps the biggest smoking gun was the “eyes only” Eisenhower Briefing Document from November 1952. Eisenhower succeeded Truman, by the way.

This report explained the existence of the program to the president and also named the members of the team. It explains to the President that “Operation Majestic-12 is a TOP SECRET research and development / intelligence operation responsible directly and only to the President of the United States. Operations of the project are carried out under control of the Majestic-12 (Majic-12) Group which was established by special classified executive order of President Truman on 24 September, 1947, upon recommendation by Dr.

Vannevar Bush and Secretary James Forrestal.” It then goes on to name the 12 members of the group, which included such luminaries as theoretical astrophysicist Donald Menzel, biophysicist Detlev Bronk and Director of the CIA amongst other things, Hoyt Vandenberg.

The document then gives details about the Roswell incident of 1947, including the facts that an extraterrestrial wreck with four dead aliens inside had indeed been recovered by the US and the term “extra-terrestrial Biological Entities” or “EBEs” was coined. It also references another brush with aliens in 1950, and details how disinformation was given out to the public and press. It ends with:

Implications for the National Security are of continuing importance in that the motives and ultimate intentions of these visitors remain completely unknown. In addition, a significant upsurge in the surveillance activity of these craft beginning in May and continuing through the autumn of this year has caused considerable concern that new developments may be imminent. It is for these reasons, as well as the obvious international and technological considerations and the ultimate need to avoid a public panic at all costs, that the Majestic-12 Group remains of the unanimous opinion that imposition of the strictest security precautions should continue without interruption into the new administration. At the same time, contingency plan MJ-1949 -04P/78 (Top Secret - Eyes Only) should be held in continued readiness should the need to make a public announcement present itself.

There are pages of memos and reports detailing what Majestic 12 was up to but Shandera and Moore didn’t blow this thing wide open, then just kept it between themselves and a few other close friends. While rumblings of the existence of the documents filtered through the Ufology community, it wasn’t until a few years later, in 1987, that Timothy Good, a British author and, yes, another ufo-nut, also anonymously received his own set of documents. Apparently not being someone to keep these things on the down-low, he promptly published a book the same year, detailing the secret documents called “Above Top Secret: The Worldwide U.F.O.

Cover-up”. So now the documents, and the idea that governments were deliberately covering up evidence of extraterrestrials, hit the mainstream. You would have thought this would be good news for the conspiracy-minded UFO crowd, finally, proof they’d been right all along!

But no, it turned into a Shandera cohort versus a Timothy Good cohort with the authenticity of the documents becoming collateral damage.

I know we’ve strayed away from the original Battle of Los Angeles here so let’s remind ourselves how we got here. In amongst all the later documents talking about Roswell, detailing cover-up missions and memos flying back and forth between the highest echelons of the US government, secret service and military, the two earliest dated documents were about the events of the 25th of February 1942 a.k.a. The Battle of Los Angeles. It seems that this event kickstarted what eventually became the Majestic-12 Group when it was found that we - or rather, the US government - could use alien technology for our - or rather, their - own ends.

Decoding the Conspiracy

Whoops, spoiler alert, but hey, you know what channel this is. It’s decoding time. Let’s hoick this beast back around to the original subject matter before we completely go off the rails. The Battle of Los Angeles, remember that? It was quite a mysterious event in its own, terrestrial, right, never mind chucking some poor little green men into the mix.

Witness reports varied wildly over what had or hadn’t been seen, hundred and hundreds of rounds of big-ass anti-aircraft ammo was used up and different branches of the military publically contradicted each other over what had been in the sky that night. So what had started the air raid sirens a-wailing and led all those Angelinos to turn on their lights and rush out into the streets in the middle of the night in the exact opposite action you are supposed to take during a blackout air raid? Initially, everyone thought the Japanese were attacking but that’s one thing we can definitively rule out. After the war ended, Japan confirmed they had never flown planes over LA and why would they bother lying about that?

If it wasn’t an overseas enemy, could it have been an over-planetary one? The photo from the Los Angeles Times does look kind of like your common or garden flying saucer trapped in the piercing glare of multiple anti-aircraft searchlights. However, on later investigation of the original negative of the picture, it was established that it had definitely been retouched for its front page debut, with the contrast between light and dark having been increased. And why, you might ask, when something resembling an alien craft is splashed across the news, did that whole angle not get more press at the time?

Was it this whole cover up thing that Majestic-12 perpetrated? Well, I suppose Majestic-12 was involved but not in the way you’d think.

The whole reason aliens weren’t a big thing following the Battle of Los Angeles is that literally nobody thought of it at the time. Sure, the photo looks vaguely like there might be a shape caught in the searchlights but the headline wasn’t “Alien Ship Seen Over LA” or even “UFO Buzzes Terrified Angelinos”. No reference was made to any type of aircraft at all, in fact, as there wasn’t yet a definitive explanation for what had happened.

This whole offshoot conspiracy theory only came about after the publication of the Majestic-12 documents, some 40 plus years after the event. So were they the real thing, actual proof of secret government programs that tested alien technology, studied extra-terrestrial bodies and sowed seeds of disinformation over the media and the general public? Er, no.

Sorry folks, but it seems that the Majestic-12 documents may have been one big disinformation project all of their own. What do you get when you leak supposedly classified documents about ufos and aliens to an alien enthusiast? You would usually get a lot of attention from the rest of the conspiracy network and at least some attention from the media, either positive or negative.

What if nothing really happens so you leak it to another alien enthusiast instead? Now you get more than enough attention from the conspiracy theorists and the public at large, generating belief, disbelief, arguments, counter-arguments, derision and in-fighting. Instead of trying to examine and corroborate the two sets of documents they received, Jaime Shandera and Timothy Good tried to denounce each others’ documents as fakes which didn’t help either cause.

As Brian Dunning from Skeptoid puts it: “When infighting among adversarial bamboozlers does all the work revealing each others’ hoaxes, it makes the legitimate investigator’s job so much easier.”

While on the face of it, the copies of the documents look quite authentic, it’s super easy to fake age and wear and tear on paper. Remember having to dunk a piece of paper in some cold tea or whatever to create an old looking parchment at school? It’s pretty easy to fake. And they never had the original documents anyway, just photos of them.

If you investigate further into the documents, other little hints show up. There are a few typos which I saw, but apparently this adds to the authenticity rather than detracts but what do I know, I’m just someone who can spell.

There is also apparently one memo where it’s clear that Truman’s signature was just stuck on pre-photocopying but I wasn’t able to find that particular example myself. Another memo supposedly written by President Eisenhower’s assistant Robert Cutler couldn’t have been written by him as he was found to have been out of the country at the time.

And another hint that these classified papers might not be totally kosher is that they exist to be looked at in the public domain at all. Most were labeled with things like “Top secret” and “eyes only” so surely anyone caught disseminating them would be swiftly scooped up and, erm, given a stern talking to until they promised not to do it again.

The FBI was alerted to the Majestic-12 documents and their response was pretty hilarious. A search for the documents on vault.fbi.gov brings up a sample of 24 pages, most of which just have the word “BOGUS” scrawled across them in large black letters.

So what was the point of them? There are a couple of theories, none of which can be 100% substantiated, I might add, but let’s hear them anyway.

Theory one is that these documents were indeed a hoax, but only to bring attention to the actual real cover-ups of extraterrestrial activity and to encourage the real people involved to come forward now the cat was out of the bag. That didn’t happen and I don’t think this theory really holds much water.

Theory two is that this was a disinformation campaign perpetrated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) to get UFO enthusiasts all hot and bothered about what they considered their righteous crusade against the government while simultaneously keeping real-life secret military aircraft projects under wraps. In the decades after the second world war, conspiracy theorists were really getting bees in their bonnets about things such as the Roswell cover up, leading many people to stake out and take covert photographs around military bases.

Brian Dunning states: “During the early days of the cold war, the Air Force became concerned that such UFO groups might conceivably collect actual sensitive information about classified Air Force capabilities. It stood to reason that Soviet spies — who were no dummies — might reasonably attempt to infiltrate such groups. It was perfectly plausible that the UFO groups on stakeout formed a pipeline of classified information to Soviet spies. And so in an ironic twist, the UFO groups, who intended to support national security by revealing what they thought was an alien threat, actually became the national security threat themselves.”

So discrediting the ufologists was the name of the game. If people said they were looking at alien aircraft and not top secret military planes, spies from other countries might not take their information seriously and maybe wouldn’t bother investigating further. The US government cynically used people in quite diabolical games to, yes, cover up information. Although it wasn’t actually related to extraterrestrials. As Brian Dunning puts it at the end of his piece “The Secret History of Majestic-12”:

They were classic disinformation, false documents created to play a role in real national security. They were designed and written for specific marks who did with them exactly what they were meant to. They took advantage of well-meaning patriots who wanted enhanced national security, and who, by being easy to fool, ended up providing exactly that.

Kind of sad, really. But let’s get back to the Battle of Los Angeles again. Since the mentions of it in the Majestic-12 documents, questions about alien UFOs have plagued any subsequent news about the event. Every year, the Fort MacArthur Museum in San Pedro, near LA has an event called “The Great LA Air Raid of 1942”.

At the 75th Anniversary in 2017, Stephen Nelson, the director of the museum, gave his opinion on the whole alien angle. He’s not a believer. He was writing a book about the battle at the time and when asked about his dealings with the UFO crowd he said “The general gist is that I’m part of the conspiracy. You think that I and these soldiers … they’re all going to keep that secret?

It defies logic, but whatever.”

Exactly, Stephen, exactly. It defies logic, but whatever.

So let’s get on with decoding the blooming thing, shall we?

What Was Going on in the Battle of Los Angeles?

We’ve established it was not an attacking hoard of Japanese planes. It was not an alien spacecraft. So what did scare the living daylights out of LA that night? Again, there are a few ideas but the most probable is that it was a weather balloon.

Aah, that old chestnut. Because the city was on high alert following the wimpy but effective attack from the Japanese sub on the coast of California, searchlights and spotters might have picked up a reflection from the balloon or just not realized what it was in the panic of the moment. Tensions were running high and seeing something unfamiliar near a large, populous area with a military largely staffed with volunteer units who weren’t used to this kind of thing, it’s easy to see how, once the “fire at will” command had already been given, things …ballooned.

All the planes that people reported seeing were later put down to smoke clouds and trails from the artillery or just peoples’ imaginations running wild. If you don’t think that’s very convincing, I was once at a train station and turned around to see a pigeon flying straight at my face. I screamed and crouched down only to stand back up and realize it was a cloud of smoke from someone’s cigarette just hanging in the air.

Kind of embarrassing. But I saw something in the air, I knew there were pigeons at the station and my mind filled in the rest. Even more embarrassing was that former English rugby player Jeremy Guscott was there and I’d already made a fool of myself by asking if he was Jeremy Guscott.

He was kind of testy. My friend Katrina and I also then saw an unattended briefcase which we were sure was his but decided that there was no way Jeremy Guscott would bomb a train station. We didn’t think he might have accidentally left it there, our minds went straight to bombs.

Then the pigeon thing happened so it was an eventful wait for a train all round.

Originally, Secretary of War Henry Stimson had backed up the Army’s report of several planes in the air but later backpedaled and admitted it had probably been an illusion from the smoke. The “ufo” caught in the spotlights in the photo was also just smoke in the air.

Multiple eyewitnesses had also reported a large balloon shape at the time so it seems likely that for a nation on edge, it didn’t take much to set it off. The whole event was kind of jeered at shortly after the facts became known i.e. the military had spent an hour and hundreds of rounds of ammo shooting at nothing. It also led to larger questions. Three days after the so called “battle”, the New York Times asked:

If the batteries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson declares, why were they completely ineffective? Why did no American planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them? … What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?

The answer to all these questions is that the US was woefully underprepared for any sort of aerial assault.

Conclusion

Finally, we know what happened. It wasn’t aliens or invaders, it was probably a meteorological balloon and a whole lot of smoke. The Battle of Los Angeles or the Great LA Air Raid was not a battle or an air raid but thanks to some hoax classified documents, we know that the government did go on to cover up a lot of activity. It just wasn’t alien.

Really, the Majestic-12 hoax was the whole reason this alien story got attached to the Battle of Los Angeles in the first place. And all those memos to and from various presidents we read earlier? I guess they were all, as the FBI likes to put it, BOGUS. So to answer the question that is the title of the episode: did aliens start the battle of Los Angeles? It defies logic but, whatever.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Battle of Los Angeles?

The Battle of Los Angeles was an incident on February 25, 1942, where citizens of Los Angeles were thrown into a panic due to rumors of a Japanese aerial attack. The artillery brigade fired over a thousand anti-aircraft shells into the sky, but no enemy shots were fired, and no enemy aircraft were found.

What triggered the Battle of Los Angeles?

The Battle of Los Angeles was triggered by radar activity picked up some 120 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, leading to blackout notices and the firing of anti-aircraft guns.

What were the eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Los Angeles?

Eyewitness accounts varied greatly, with reports of ‘swarms’ of planes or balloons of all possible sizes, traveling at different altitudes and speeds. Some reported seeing a large balloon shape.

What was the official explanation for the Battle of Los Angeles?

The official explanation was a false alarm due to ‘war nerves.’ Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox attributed it to nervousness and overreaction, while Secretary of War Henry Stimson initially backed the Army’s report of planes but later admitted it was likely an illusion from the smoke.

What is the UFO conspiracy theory related to the Battle of Los Angeles?

The UFO conspiracy theory suggests that the objects in the sky were extraterrestrial in origin. This theory gained traction with the release of the Majestic-12 documents, which claimed that the U.S. government had recovered extraterrestrial crafts and bodies.

What are the Majestic-12 documents?

The Majestic-12 documents are a set of supposedly classified documents that were leaked in 1984 and 1987. They claim to detail a secret U.S. government program involved with extraterrestrial activity, including the recovery of alien crafts and bodies.

What is the most probable explanation for the Battle of Los Angeles?

The most probable explanation is that the incident was triggered by a weather balloon. The city was on high alert, and searchlights and spotters might have picked up a reflection from the balloon or misidentified it in the panic.

What was the public reaction to the Battle of Los Angeles?

The public reaction was one of panic and confusion. Citizens turned on their lights and went out into the streets, contrary to blackout orders. There were at least five deaths associated with the battle, including car crashes and stress-related heart attacks.

What was the impact of the Battle of Los Angeles on military preparedness?

The Battle of Los Angeles highlighted the U.S. military’s lack of preparedness for aerial assaults. It led to questions about the military’s competence and readiness to defend against real air raids.

What is the significance of the Majestic-12 hoax?

The Majestic-12 hoax is significant because it attached the alien conspiracy theory to the Battle of Los Angeles. The documents were likely created as a disinformation campaign to distract from real military projects and to discredit UFO enthusiasts.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Did Aliens Start the Battle of Los Angeles?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.