Témoignages de Civils
H.C. writes:
I'm a WWII veteran. Just thought I'd let you know that I was an eyewitness to the
event back in February of 1942. I was 14 at the time, living in the Adams and Crenshaw
area of Los Angeles. My family and I observed the entire episode through the large bay
window of our home facing west.The air raid sirens awoke us at 2 AM. There was a period
of silence following that, then the thumping of antiaircraft fire. The northwest sky was
lit up with bursting shells and searchlights. The action was moving south along the
coastline. I remember distinctly the convergence of searchlights reflecting off the
bottom of some kind of slow moving objects, apparently flying in formation. They
seemed to be completely oblivious and impervious to the shells exploding around them.
I was quite the aviation buff back then, as I am now, but I must admit that I had a devil
of a time trying to identify the objects, what with the awe, excitement and speculation
of the moment, the bursting shells, tracers, etc. I was surprised in the days that
followed to discover that with all that aggressive firepower there was no
evidence that we had brought anything down.
I lived on Virginia Road, a half block south of West Adams Boulevard and
one-quarter mile south of what is now the Interstate 10 Santa Monica Freeway;
about 5.5 miles southwest of what is now the Los Angeles Civic Center; and
approximately 10.5 miles due east of the Pacific coastline of Santa Monica.
We were looking in a westward direction from our large living room bay window
which gave us an unobstructed panorama of view facing the northwest, west and
southwest. We then went to our south-facing kitchen and porch windows to
observe the action where it culminated in the south. Ergo, the action followed the
coastline.
It could have been two, or three, or up to six miles away,
I can't recall exactly since it occurred so long ago. But I strongly remember
the searchlights converging on the bottoms of the reddish objects flying in
formation
Scott Littleton writes:
I was an eye-witness to the events of that unforgettable February
morning in February of 1942. I was eight-years-old at the time, and my
parents lived at 2500 Strand in Hermosa Beach, right on the beach. We thus
had a grandstand seat. While my father went about his air-raid warden
duties, my late mother and I watched the glowing object, which was caught in
the glare of searchlights from both Palos Verdes and
Malibu/Pacific/Palisades and surrounded by the puffs of ineffectual
anti-aircraft fire, as it slowly flew across the ocean from northwest to
southeast. It headed inland over Redondo Beach, a couple of miles to the
south of our vantage point, and eventually disappeared over the eastern end
of the Palos Verdes hills, what's today called Rancho Palos Verdes. The
whole incident last, at least from our perspective, lasted about half an
hour, though we didn't time it. Like other kids in the neighborhood, I
spend the next morning picking up of pieces of shrapnel on the beach;
indeed, it's a wonder more people weren't injured by the stuff, as we were
far from the only folks standing outside watching the action.
In any case, I don't recall seeing any truly discernable configuration, just
a small, glowing, slight lozenge-shaped blob light-a single, blob, BTW. We
only saw one object, not several as some witnesses later reported. At the
time, we were convinced that it was a "Jap" reconnaissance plane, and that
L.A. might be due for a major air-raid in the near future. Remember, this
was less than three months after Pearl Harbor. But that of course never
happened. Later on, we all expected "them," that is, the Military, to tell
us what was really up there after the war. But that never happened,
either.
Army Gunners Fire At UFOs Over Los Angeles
Volume 3, Number 8
February 22, 1998
Editor Joseph Trainor
On Wednesday, February 25, 1942, at precisely 2 a.m., diners at the trendy Trocadero
Club in Hollywood were startled when the lights winked out and air raid sirens began to
sound throughout greater Los Angeles.
"Searchlights scanned the skies and anti-aircraft guns protecting the vital aircraft
and ship-building factories went into action. In the next few hours they would fire
over 1,400 shells at an unidentified, slow- moving object in the sky over Los Angeles
that looked like a blimp, or a balloon."
Author Ralph Blum, who was a nine-year-old boy at the time, wrote that he thought "the
Japanese were bombing Beverly Hills."
"There were sirens, searchlights, even antiaircraft guns blamming away into the skies
over Los Angeles. My father had been a balloon observation man (in the AEF) in World
War One, and he knew big guns when he heard them. He ordered my mother to take my baby
sisters to the underground projection room--our house was heavily supplied with
Hollywood paraphernalia--while he and I went out onto the upstairs balcony."
"What a scene! It was after three in the morning. Searchlights probed the western sky.
Tracers streamed upward. The racket was terrific." Shooting at the aerial intruders
were gunners of the 65th Coast Artillery (Anti-Aircraft) Regiment in Inglewood and
the 205th Anti-Aircraft Regiment based in Santa Monica. The "white cigar-shaped object"
took several direct hits but continued on its eastward flight.
Up to 25 silvery UFOs were also seen by observers on the ground.
Editor Peter Jenkins of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported, "I could clearly see
the V formation of about 25 silvery planes overhead moving slowly across the sky toward
Long Beach." Long Beach Police Chief J.H. McClelland said, "I watched what was described
as the second wave of planes from atop the seven-story Long Beach City Hall. I did not
see any planes but the younger men with me said they could. An experienced Navy observer
with powerful Carl Zeiss binoculars said he counted nine planes in the cone of the
searchlight. He said they were silver in color. The (UFO) group passed along from one
battery of searchlights to another, and under fire from the anti-aircraft guns, flew
from the direction of Redondo Beach and Inglewood on the land side of Fort MacArthur,
and continued toward Santa Ana and Huntington Beach. Anti-aircraft fire was so heavy we
could not hear the motors of the planes."
Reporter Bill Henry of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "I was far enough away to see an
object without being able to identify it...I would be willing to bet what shekels I
have that there were a number of direct hits scored on the object."
At 2:21 a.m., Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt issued the cease-fire order, and the
twenty-minute "battle of Los Angeles" was over. (See BEYOND EARTH: MAN'S CONTACT WITH
UFOs by Ralph Blum, Bantam Books, New York, April 1974, page 68. See also the Los
Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the Long Beach Press-Telegram for
February 25, 1942. All newspaper quotes taken from "The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942"
by Terrenz Sword, which appeared in Unsolved UFO Sightings, Spring 1996 issue,
pages 57 through 62.)
Autre témoin
I'm Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. I joined the Oxy Faculty in 1962 and retired at the end of the spring semester, 2002, after forty years of teaching anthropology classes, as well as a variety of Cultural Studies courses and seminars in Oxy's Core Program in the Liberal Arts.
My professional specialties range across a wide spectrum and include comparative Indo-European mythology and folklore, cognitive and symbolic anthropology, urban anthropology, the origin and distribution of the Arthurian and Holy Grail legends, and Japanese culture, both ancient and contemporary, with an emphasis on Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religion. Indeed, I've spent close to three years in Tokyo studying a neighborhood Shinto shrine and its annual matsuri, or festival. I've also had a long-standing interest in the UFO phenomenon and its possible implications for mythology and folklore.
In terms of the current spectrum of anthropological theory and method, I would define myself as a "postmodern materialist," which is a fancy way of saying that I'm extremely eclectic in my approach to the discipline. Indeed, in my humble opinion, one of the most important problems facing contemporary anthropology is an unwillingness on the part of all too many of its practitioners to take seriously theories and methods that lie outside their own narrow specialties.
I'm a native Californian. I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Hermosa Beach, and it was an incident during my growing up years that I want to talk about here: the "Battle of Los Angeles," the night that a UFO was fired upon by the U.S. repeatedly, with no apparent effect. I was an eye witness. What follows is adapted from a chapter in my memoir entitled "2500 Strand: Growing up in Hermosa Beach, California, during World War II." Air-Raid Drills. As 1942 dawned, the war news continued to be bad. We were retreating in the Philippines; the British were retreating in North Africa; and although the Russians had held before Moscow and Leningrad, their chances looked slim.
In Southern California, and particularly in the beach communities, the threat of invasion was still palpable, if not imminent, and a great many folks - including the military - still expected us to be bombed in the near future. For that reason, the whole of Santa Monica Bay, from Malibu to Palos Verdes, was soon ringed with anti-aircraft batteries and searchlight brigades. The guns banged away almost every night, shooting at targets that were towed across the sky over the ocean by specially designed planes. The targets would be pinpointed by the searchlight beams, which also illuminated the exploding shells. It was a grand show that usually lasted about half an hour and rarely continued after 10:00 p.m., out of respect for the local populace.
At first, we'd watch the action with great fascination, but after a few nights in early January the noise of the guns and the exploding shells soon became routine, as predictable as the sound of the waves in the winter. Most people learned to sleep through the cacophony with few problems. It gave us a sense of security; our brave anti-aircraft gunners would quickly save us from any hostile attempt to penetrate our airspace, let alone bomb us.
Meanwhile, the government had also organized the Civil Defense Program, the core of which was a cadre of dedicated air raid wardens. My father joined up shortly before the end of the year, and was soon assigned to monitor the Strand between 27th Street and 22nd Street in case of an air attack. However, he was also expected to enforce the blackout during air raid drills, which we soon began to have regularly, as well the so-called "dim-out," which required those who of us who lived in houses facing the water (both on the Strand and on the hill that rose behind Hermosa Avenue) to keep their front blinds drawn from dusk to dawn. The idea was to reduce the glare against which a tanker or merchant ship would be silhouetted and thus become an easy target for a Japanese submarine. This meant that he went out on "patrol" almost every evening shortly after sundown.
Shortly after Cov joined the program, there were some training sessions in the auditorium at Pier Avenue School, the local junior high school, which I would attend in a couple of years. As you might expect, the new wardens wanted practical instruction in first-aid, fire suppression, and all the other things their London counterparts had had to learn the hard way during the Blitz. They did eventually learn something about these things, but my father always laughed at the fact that the first two sessions were devoted to a learned discourse on the history of the Common Law! It seems that air raid wardens had a limited power of arrest; that is, they could detain persons who refused to pull their drapes or who had no business being on the street during a blackout and refused to go home - Hermosa had its share of the latter, especially in the vicinity of the downtown bars - and the guy who made this presentation was a USC law professor and former Superior Court judge. As my father liked to say, the whole business could have been boiled down to a ten-minute talk, simply laying out the circumstances under which an arrest could be made, and the extent to which force could be used in the processes. They didn't need to know the history of the laws of arrest from the time of Alfred the Great to 1942!
It was precisely this kind of mentality that that caused the system to break down totally in the early morning hours of February 25. Blackout drills, which were always announced well in advance (at least to the wardens), usually went pretty well. My father would get the word, and then an hour later the siren would sound. He'd put on his helmet, grab his flashlight, and start patrolling the Strand. But when the "real thing" came along, the system totally collapsed.
* * *
The Thing in the Sky. The early evening of February 24, 1942, was unremarkable. The guns fired a few practice rounds and then fell silent well before 10:00 p.m. I remember going to bed shortly thereafter, reading for a few minutes by the light of a small flashlight I kept hidden under my bed, and then falling asleep.
Around 3:15 a.m., I awoke to the sound of what I initially assumed was distant thunder. But as I came fully awake, I realized that the guns were firing again. At first, I thought they were simply doing another drill, though it seemed awfully late. Moreover, there was something about the rate and intensity of the bombardment that just didn't seem right, especially after I glanced at my clock.
My small bedroom was directly over the front door and faced south . Thus, my view of the ocean was oblique. However, what I could see of the sky as I lay there was filled with blinding searchlight beams and the bright flashes of exploding rounds. I was, of course, thoroughly familiar with both, thanks to all the target practice I'd witnessed. But heretofore, the searchlights and the explosions had always been well out over the ocean and, for the most part, invisible from my bedroom windows when I was in bed. This time everything seemed much closer. I soon heard my parents talking in the hall, and poked my head out. My father looked worried and said it didn't make any sense. He tried to get through by phone to Civil Defense headquarters, but nobody answered (we later learned that the alert had been called at 2:25 a.m., but nobody bothered to get the word out to the local air raid wardens). So, he put on his gear, and went outside to see what was happening. Somewhere in the distance an air raid siren was wailing.
Cov returned looking even more worried and told my mother to get me, Gagie (my grandmother Littleton), Gaga, and my Grandfather Hotchkiss, who'd been staying with us for a couple of weeks (my Grandmother Hotchkiss had passed away the previous fall), down to the bomb shelter ASAP. Normally, Grandpa Hotchkiss was slower than the Second Coming of Christ in his personal habits. But when my father said "Mr. Hotchkiss, I think this may be the real thing," he was down in the basement in thirty seconds flat!
I was equal parts scared and excited and desperately wanted to know what was going on. By this time, my father was back on the street and, belatedly, over the continuing gunfire, the local siren finally sounded. My mother escorted her in-laws and father down to the fortified dressing rooms, and I followed along, despite the fact that I was dying to slip outside and watch "the real thing."
My mother felt the same way. As she said later, after about ten minutes in such cramped quarters - the benches upon which we sat also contained survival items such as a first-aid kit, water bottles, and some canned food - and surrounded by the halitosis exuded by the older generation, she was ready to brave a Jap bomb or two. Our first thought was that an enemy squadron was overhead, as we began to hear the roar of aircraft engines over the din of the barrage. But they were almost certainly our own pursuit planes.
When she exited the basement through the door that led to the beach, I followed close behind her. Although my mother was apprehensive about my safety, at the same time she understood why I desperately wanted to see what was happening and let me stay.
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, whose bright glow was clearly visible in the searchlight beams that pinpointed it. Although it was a clear, moonlit night, no other details were visible, 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.
As we watched it, open mouthed, the object, apparently none the worse for the plethora of three-inch, 12.8 pound anti-aircraft rounds fired at it, began to move slowly to the southeast over Redondo Beach, where we lost sight of it. Either our gunners were woefully inept, despite all the practice they'd had in recent weeks or it was invulnerable to attack. Years later I read that approximately 1,400 rounds were fired at the object that evening. Could the Japs have come up with some secret weapon that deflected flack? The thought was scary to the max!
But whatever it was, it certainly wasn't acting aggressively. Rather, it simply made its stately way across the sky. Shortly before we lost sight of it - the object subsequently appeared over San Pedro and Long Beach before finally disappearing over the ocean somewhere off southern Orange County - we again heard the unmistakable sound of aircraft engines. By that time, the bombardment had largely petered out, and a flight of Army interceptors, probably based at Mines field (today the site of Los Angeles International Airport), approached from the northeast and buzzed off to the southeast, apparently chasing the object.
It was now almost 4:00 a.m. Precisely how long we'd stood there is anybody's guess, though I suspect that the whole episode, from our leaving the shelter to meeting my father as he returned to house for good, lasted about twenty-five minutes. As I recall, the firing ceased altogether shortly thereafter (the "all clear" didn't actually sound until 7:30 a.m.), but nobody went to bed that night.
The next morning, the Los Angeles Examiner came out with a banner headline: "Air Battle Rages over Los Angeles," followed by "One Plane Reported Downed on Vermont Avenue by Gunfire" in smaller type. The story, which I still have safely tucked away, claimed to be based on a report from the LAPD's 77th Street Division. At the time, this appeared to be pure fantasy, a prime example of the yellow journalism so characteristic of Heart newspapers in those days, as no bombs fell, nor, apparently, was any plane, Japanese or otherwise, shot down anywhere in Southern California that night. However, in retrospect, both the cops and the Examiner seem to have been right about one thing. A plane does appear to have crashed (or crash-landed) on South Vermont Avenue near 180th Street that morning, and from eyewitness accounts collected years later it was almost certainly one of ours, forced down either by the object itself or by "friendly fire." The witness claims to have caught a glimpse of U.S. markings on the fuselage before it was covered up by a tarp and quickly hauled away on a flatbed truck. The military apparently didn't want the public to know that it had possibly shot down one of its own planes. What happened to the pilot is unknown.
There were only a handful of civilian casualties. According to the Times, five people died from heart attacks and automobile accidents, and there were a few injuries from falling shrapnel. There was also some minor property damage, again mostly from shrapnel. Indeed, the beach was littered with the stuff, and the next afternoon some neighborhood kids, including Wayne and Darryl Edgar and the author, picked up several bags of it, took them to school, and donated the contents to the wartime scrap drive.
Yes, there were a great many jangled nerves that morning, but the overall impact of the event was slight compared to other disasters - earthquakes, fires, floods, mud-slides, etc. - that Southern California has experienced over the years.
At the time, it was widely assumed that a high-altitude, carrier-based Japanese observation plane had flown over the Los Angeles basin and that it was perhaps the harbinger of another Pearl Harbor-type attack, this time on the West Coast. Later on, we began to suspect that perhaps one of our own military planes was the culprit. But no 1942 vintage airplanes, military or civilian, Japanese or American, were capable of standing still in the air. The one thing we did learn after the war was that neither the Japanese nor our own people seemed to have any record of one of their aircraft straying over the L.A. basin that morning. Even the presence of our pursuit planes, which was absolutely certain, has been steadfastly denied by the government. Of course, all concerned could be lying, though the probability of such a lie persisting for over sixty years is remote - unless it involved something so profoundly disconcerting that it had to be shrouded in secrecy from then on.
So what precisely did we witness on February 25, 1942?
In recent decades several Ufologists, the people who study the UFO phenomenon, have suggested that it might have been an extraterrestrial craft. If that assessment is correct, it certainly precipitated one of the largest mass UFO sightings in history, as it involved well over a million people. Only the sightings over Mexico City in the late 1990s exceed it in terms of the total number of percipients. It also would account for the cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the episode for the past six and a half decades.
To be sure, no one suggested this idea in February of 1942. It wasn't until five years later, after civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold's landmark sighting of nine "flying saucers" over Mt. Rainer in late June of 1947, which was followed almost immediately by what now appears to have been the crash of a UFO near Roswell, New Mexico, that the notion that spacecraft from other planets might be invading our skies became widespread. But in retrospect, the "Battle of Los Angeles" has all the earmarks of a classic UFO event.
A few years ago, I joined forces with a well-known Ufologist - that is, a person who systematically studies the UFO phenomenon - named Frank Warren to investigate what really happened that morning. With the help of Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an eminent Navy photo-analyst and UFO investigator, Frank and I have pretty well determined the craft's path before it appeared in the sky over Hermosa Beach. It was initially observed by several residents of the Pacific Palisades rising over the Santa Monica Mountains around 2:45 a.m. From there, it seems to have moved southeast across Santa Monica and West L.A. in the direction of the Baldwin Hills, which separate Culver City from Inglewood and the flatlands to the south.
Several residents who lived just north of Baldwin Hills saw it clearly. From their reports, it was round with a slight hump in the middle. A woman named Katie, who observed it from the window of her home, stated that it was huge, elliptical in shape, and suffused with a brilliant, orange glow. Meanwhile, the anti-aircraft barrage had already begun, and the searchlights were following it steadily.
A Los Angeles Times reporter living in the San Gabriel Valley, a dozen miles or so to the east, had been alerted to what was happening by colleagues at the paper. He jumped in his car and began driving west as rapidly as he could toward the sound of the guns, arriving at the northern edge of the Baldwin Hills, in the vicinity of Jefferson and La Cienega, in time to photograph the object as it rose over the ridge line . The image below, which was published in the Times on February 26 , is the only clear picture we have of the craft. As you can see, it's caught in the beams of several searchlights and is surround by white dots created by exploding shells.
Frank Warren
1942: ZEPPELIN-SIZE UFO OVER LOS ANGELES CAUGHT IN THE GLARE OF SEARCHLIGHTS
From the width of the light beams at the point they reached the object, plus the knowledge that at least one of them came from a searchlight battery in Manhattan Beach, some ten miles away (the others appear to have come from Inglewood or El Segundo), Frank Warren has suggested that it was perhaps as large as 800 feet in diameter, and I agree with this estimate. All of the close-up observations Frank and I have collected indicate that the object was huge!
After crossing the Baldwin Hills, it appears to have veered westward toward El Segundo (and the aircraft plants). When it reached the coast, it rose to a higher altitude and slowly followed the edge of the ocean, due south to the point where we first saw it. Then it veered southeastward over Redondo Beach, blithely ignoring everything we were throwing at it, and soon disappeared from sight behind the town's hills.
Although there's never been an "official" explanation of this curious episode, a number of unofficial explanations have been advanced over the years, ranging from an off-course private pilot - although civilian aircraft had been banned from skies of Southern California shortly after the war began - to a barrage balloon that escaped its tether over one of the El Segundo aircraft plants, an errant Army weather balloon, and even a flock of sea birds. However, in light of what we now know about the UFO phenomenon, I strongly suspect that the most efficient explanation, the one that fits all the known facts most completely, is that it was an alien craft. Although my parents and I were only able to tell that it was bright and "bug-like," the aforementioned Times photo, as well as other eyewitness accounts from Santa Monica and Culver City, indicate that it was a huge, saucer-shaped object that had, in addition to an orange glow, a protuberance of some sort on its dorsal, or upper side. This, of course, jibes closely with literally thousands of eyewitness accounts of UFOs, in this country and elsewhere, that have come to light in the course of the last six decades.
But the aspect that clinches the UFO theory, at least in my opinion, is the fact that the object was able to resist the impact of over 1,400 rounds of high explosive, antiaircraft shells. Few contemporary aircraft, let alone any World War II planes, could have withstood that barrage, and I suspect that the object was surrounded by an electromagnetic force field of some sort, which deflected the shells and caused them to explode harmlessly - a capability that is eons beyond the leading edge of human technology, even today. This EMF field could perhaps have caused our planes to lose control and crash when they flew too close to it.
As I've indicated, the probability that what really happened that morning has been covered up by the government for the past sixty-plus years now seems almost certain. In fact, most Ufologists are now convinced, with good reason, that a similar cover-up has been in place re the Roswell crash since 1947, to say nothing of what's been going on at Area 51 in Northern Nevada. So perhaps the government already had a model, based on its response to the 1942 incident, that was brought to bear in hushing up these later episodes. Or perhaps they've simply been in denial for the past six decades.
Maybe someday the truth about the "Battle of Los Angeles" will finally come out, along with the truth about so many other anomalous phenomena that so many people all over the world have seen - and continue to see - in the sky in the years since 1942. UFO skeptics maintain that all such phenomena have mundane, wholly terrestrial explanations. So what we saw that morning might conceivably have been a Japanese observation plane, despite the absence of any official record of one ever having flown over Southern California; one of the largest mass hallucinations ever recorded; a remarkably flack-resistant weather or barrage balloon; an equally invulnerable civilian pilot; or even a flock of badly frightened pelicans. But I'd be willing to bet a bundle that the skeptics are wrong and that it was not of this world.
* * *
Executive Order 9066. But nobody, of course, was thinking that way in February of 1942, and the incident had some nasty "this world" ramifications. As you can imagine, at the time most of us were convinced that it was an enemy aircraft, despite the fact that the 37th Army Anti-Aircraft Brigade hadn't been able to shoot it down. What reinforced this assessment was the fact that a Japanese submarine had shelled the Ellwood Oil Field just north of Santa Barbara less than thirty-six hours earlier.
Thus, after a period of relative calm after the first of the year, war jitters and fear of an imminent Japanese invasion once again increased markedly. And this paranoia contributed significantly to the alacrity with which FDR's decision to "relocate" Japanese-Americans, citizens and non-citizens alike, to what were, in fact if not label, full-fledged concentration camps, was implemented. Although Roosevelt signed the infamous "Executive Order 9066," which authorized this act of "ethnic cleansing," on February 19, once the process began, the well-nigh universal assumption that the "Battle of Los Angeles" involved a Japanese plane, coupled with the submarine attack in Santa Barbara County, meant that folks like us heatiliy approved of getting rid of the "God damned Japs," once and for all. Thus, we cheered mighily as the newspapers depicted them being rounded up and sent to out-of-the-way places like Manzanar, in the Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, the Tule Lake Internment Camp in Northern California, and similar camps in Utah, Idaho, and elsewhere in the Western United States.
Yes, it did happen here, and I must confess that I was as eager to see them go as everybody else. As in Germany, "everybody else" included a great many highly-educated people who were otherwise rational and did not think of themselves as bigots. My parents were typical in this regard. Although they prided themselves on being liberal, hard-core, New-Deal Democrats, who were all for abolishing the laws that segregated white people from "Negroes" in many parts of the country, and were utterly opposed to anti-Semitism, both at home and abroad, this was "different." The Japs were near-sighted, buck-toothed, monkey-like sub-humans who were also sneaky little bastards who were out to get us. Didn't what just happened prove it? They were all spies, no matter how long they'd lived here or whether they were native-born American citizens; it was in their blood. So good riddance!
Thus, we hardly shed a tear when the few Japanese-American kids - there were maybe two or three at the most - at North School suddenly disappeared. Again, good riddance to them and their traitorous families! There'd been rampant anti-Japanese sentiments for decades in California - just as German anti-Semitism didn't begin with Adolf Hitler - and "Executive Order 9066," like the infamous Nuremberg Laws promulgated by Hitler in 1935, simply legitimized long-simmering prejudices.
The Saturday matinees the neighborhood kids and I'd begun to attend at the Fox Hermosa Theater didn't help any. Even those war movies made before we got into the conflict never had anything nice to say about the Japanese; they were always the villains. And it got much worse after December 7, 1941, as Hollywood began to crank out blatantly racist films designed to whip up anti-Japanese sentiments - not simply against the expansionist policies of the Tojo Government, which were certainly despicable, but against the presumed inherent inferiority of the Japanese "race." They were regularly portrayed (usually by Chinese-American actors) as grinning sadists and utterly evil. Moreover, as was happening to Jewish property in Germany, most of the internees' holdings, many of which were agricultural, were sold at auction to greedy land speculators. If all this sounds broadly analogous to what the Nazis did with Jewish property, as well as what they were saying about Jews in Der Stürmer and other Party organs and in propaganda films, it should, because it was cut from the same bigoted cloth.
No, we didn't treat our internees anywhere near as harshly as the Germans treated theirs, even in the least brutal of the Nazi concentration camps. But the fact that they'd been rounded up en masse, native-born citizens as well as resident aliens, is, in retrospect, redolent of the same hysteria that gripped Germany in the 1930s and which we'd heard so much about from our friends the Sommers, (a German-Jewish refugee family my father helped enter the country in early 1941). That we failed to make the connection will forever be a stain on the American character, despite all the apologies and reparations that were subsequently offered to those who survived the camps and their families.
In any case, it did happen here. And it could again if we allow ourselves to fall once again headlong into bigoted hysteria re Muslims per se and other non-Westerners deemed to be "terrorists" and enemies of our vaunted "Christian heritage." In this connection, Gandhi's famous reply when he was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization seems apt: "It would be a nice idea!"
OK, I'm off the soapbox. But as one who's come to have a deep appreciation for Japanese culture, I couldn't help but express my strong feelings about this most unfortunate - and reprehensible - episode in modern American history.
In the weeks following the "Battle of Los Angeles," especially after the Japanese had been rounded up, the renewed threat of an imminent Japanese invasion once again gradually receded, at least in the local imagination. Nevertheless, unfounded rumors were rampant, both in the press and by word of mouth. One of them was that a detailed invasion plan had been found in the home of one Japanese internee that marked Hermosa Beach, between 22nd Street and the Manhattan Beach line, as the principal landing zone. Needless to say, this proved to be a total fantasy. After the war, it became abundantly clear that not a single Japanese-American had spied for Japan.
At the same time, we threw ourselves into the war effort as best we could. I'll have more to say about that in a subsequent chapter entitled "The Home Front."
In any case, my father now commuted daily to the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles (like most Southern Californians of his generation, he habitually pronounced it "Los ANG-les," which, of course, is a tad closer to the original Spanish) and needed the Mercury in his job as a War Production Board investigator. And, as it paid more money, my mother switched from the day shift to the graveyard shift (midnight to 8:00 a.m.) at Douglas. I'm not exactly sure how she got to work, but I do know that it was then that her career as "Rosie the Riveter" began in earnest.
NOTES:
1. Another eyewitness, who lived in Redondo Beach and was five years-old at the time, recalls that it descended as it passed slowly over his family home. His father at first thought it was coming in for a landing, perhaps at the nearby Lomita airstrip, and he and several neighbors jumped into a car and tried to follow the object. But it soon regained altitude and passed over the hills to the south. He also claims that the "stern" of the craft was rectangular, with rounded edges, and very thick.
2. The official tally, from the Army's after-action report, is 1430 rounds. But this figure is probably way too low.
3. In early 1942 night fighters were still experimental, at least in the United States. The first truly effective one, the Northrop P-61 "Black Widow," wasn't fully introduced until 1944. Thus, the decision to send up planes woefully inadequate for night combat underscores how seriously the military took this event.
4. Ufologist Frank Warren tells me that a fairly reliable eyewitness account of another possible plane crash that morning, this time in Hollywood, has recently come to light. And indeed, the Examiner story also mentioned a rumor that at least two additional planes were "shot down" during the event. Again, the downed plane in Hollywood appears to have been covered with a tarp almost immediately and hauled off on a flat-bed truck. The witness also claims to have noticed markings on the fuselage, in this case "Japanese letters," before it was covered up. This is extremely doubtful. The Japanese used Arabic numbers on all of their WWII planes, and he may simply have assumed that it was a Japanese plane, and then perceived the rest of what he saw in terms of that assumption. If a second plane did crash in Hollywood somewhere, it was also almost certainly one of ours.
5. When questioned by reporters, Arnold observed that the craft he'd seen looked like "saucers skipping over water." Thanks to the media, this soon morphed into the label "flying saucers." The label "UFO" - unidentified flying object - didn't become prominent until several years alter.
6. There's some evidence that the military retrieved a crashed UFO near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1941, so the government may already have had some knowledge of the phenomenon by February of 1942. For an interesting discussion of this possibility, as well as a brief overview of the "Battle of Los Angeles" and its implications for ufology, please see Richard M. Dolan's masterful book, UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up 1941-1973 (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2002), p. 3-5; for a more comprehensive account of the event, please see Terrenz Sword, The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942 - The Silent Invasion Begins (Playa Del Rey, CA: Inner Light Publications, 2003), which also frames it in ufological terms.
7. I should emphasize that my mother and I failed to notice either a hump or an orange glow. From our perspective, it was simply a bright, silvery lozenge, with no other discernable features. I suspect that we saw only its ventral, or "belly" side, which was featureless, at least at that altitude.
8. There's been a lot of debate over exactly where the Times reporter took his famous picture. Some have held that he caught the object flying over Palos Verdes. But all indications point to a spot on the ridgeline just east of where La Cienaga Blvd cuts through it. I've investigated this aspect of the matter and am pretty sure that I've found the spot (Plate 28), despite the fact that the terrain has changed in the last sixty-odd years as the area has become more and more developed.
9. Bruce Maccabee, who has subjected the Times photograph to intense photo analysis, estimates that the object was between 100 and 200 feet in diameter. However, given the width of the searchlight beams and the fact that they barely encompass the object, Frank Warren and I have concluded that it must have been considerably larger, that is, around 800 feet in diameter.
10. For comprehensive overviews of the history of the UFO phenomenon, please see Dolan (op. cit.) and Jim Marrs, Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence among Us (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
11. Although the eyewitness in Redondo Beach remembers it as being rectangular.
12. After the war, captured German scientists, who were based at Los Alamos and the White Sands test range in New Mexico, gave us the technology to build sophisticated air-to-air rockets. Modeled on the German Wasserfall missle, these airborne rockets appear to have given us the capability to shoot down UFOs, at least occasionally. This may in part account for the Roswell, Aztec, and other possible UFO crashes in New Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s - as well as why the state has been such a major target of UFO activity over the years.
13. For a comprehensive overview and assessment of the UFO cover-up, from Roswell to the present, please see Stanton T. Friedman's Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-up (New York: Marlow & Company, 2005).
14. It's been asserted on the basis of what in my opinion is some pretty shaky evidence that the craft we saw ultimately crashed in the ocean off San Diego and was recovered by Navy divers. A related - and equally shaky - theory is that it crash-landed on San Clemente Island, the southernmost of the Channel Islands, and was recovered either by the Marines or the Navy, both of which used the island for bombing practice until recently. Perhaps the object had in fact been wounded by the intense anti-aircraft fire. If there's any validity to either of these theories, it would mean that the military already had a fair amount of solid UFO evidence in hand at the time the Roswell crash occurred in July of 1947, in addition any it might have collected before 1942.
15. For brief descriptions of three other possible UFO sightings on my part, both before and after this event, please see Chapter One.
16. For the skeptical position re the UFO phenomenon generally, please see, for example, the late Philip Klass, Ufos: The Public Deceived (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), or Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: Owl Books, 2nd edition, 2002) .
17. Some reports claimed that there were several "enemy" craft in the sky that morning, however I strongly suspect that these accounts were confused and reflected the appearance of Army pursuit planes before the bombardment began in earnest, as well as their return shortly after the object we saw disappeared over Redondo Beach.
18. In all fairness, it should be pointed out that the Japanese also cranked out propaganda films depicting Westerners, and Americans in particular, as savage, sub-human barbarians bent on destroying Japan's sacred heritage. So each side was guilty of portraying the other as inherently inferior.
19. Much of this confiscated Japanese-American land was soon covered with low-cost, housing tracts for the increasing flood of "aircraft workers" I mentioned in the Prologue, a great many of whom were émigrés from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas; that is, the part of the country that figures so prominently in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
20. I should, of course, mention that the Japanese relocation wasn't the only systematic program of "ethnic cleansing" in our history. A similar atrocity was committed a century earlier, in the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson and the rest, backed up by the Army, "relocated" thousands of Native Americans from the Southeast to what was then called "Indian Territory," now Oklahoma, along the infamous "Trail of Tears." Ironically, Oklahoma was to suffer its own diaspora in the late 1930s, although the great majority of those caught up in that economically driven population movement, some of whom settled in Hermosa Beach, were white people rather than Native Americans.
D'autres témoins ont déclarés...
1 le témoin a écouté le moteur d’un avion à plusieurs moments.
2 la forme losange, orange et blanc l’arrière" de l'embarcation était rectangulaire, avec des bords arrondis, et très épais. D’autre témoins nous disent il est rond avec une légère bosse au centre ou encore en plus d'avoir une bosse, il était énorme, elliptiques, de couleur orange vif et lumineux.
3 que l’ovni aurait changés de directions et de hauteur fait du vol stationnaire et un déplacement lent et silencieux.
4 qu’il estime sa taille à 800 pieds (243,84 mètres)
5 que le nombre d’obus tiré aurait été plus important que dit par la suite
6 l’altitude estimée par le témoin entre 4000 et 8000 pieds soit 1,2192 kilomètres et 2,4384 kilomètres
7 qu’un avion ou plusieurs se seraient crachés
8le déplacement
Un témoin nous dit :
commencé à avancer lentement vers le sud, en descendant sur Redondo Beach
L'objet est apparu plus tard sur San Pedro et de Long Beach, avant de disparaître sur l'océan, quelque part au large du sud du comté d'Orange ou le nord du comté de San Diego.
D' autres témoins affirment
déterminé la trajectoire du navire avant qu'il apparaissait dans le ciel de Hermosa Beach. Il a d'abord été observé par plusieurs résidents de la Pacific Palisades hausse sur les montagnes autour de Santa Monica 2:45 am A partir de là, il semble avoir déménagé dans le sud-ouest de Santa Monica et LA dans la direction de l'Baldwin Hills, qui séparent de Culver City Inglewood et la plaine au sud.
Après le passage de la Baldwin Hills, l'objet semble avoir tourné vers l'ouest en direction de El Segundo, Quand il atteint la côte, il est passé à une altitude plus élevée et lentement suivi le bord de la mer, plein sud, au point où nous avons vu la première fois. il bifurque vers le sud de Redondo Beachet disparu de la vue derrière la ville des collines
basses.
I'm a WWII veteran. Just thought I'd let you know that I was an eyewitness to the
event back in February of 1942. I was 14 at the time, living in the Adams and Crenshaw
area of Los Angeles. My family and I observed the entire episode through the large bay
window of our home facing west.The air raid sirens awoke us at 2 AM. There was a period
of silence following that, then the thumping of antiaircraft fire. The northwest sky was
lit up with bursting shells and searchlights. The action was moving south along the
coastline. I remember distinctly the convergence of searchlights reflecting off the
bottom of some kind of slow moving objects, apparently flying in formation. They
seemed to be completely oblivious and impervious to the shells exploding around them.
I was quite the aviation buff back then, as I am now, but I must admit that I had a devil
of a time trying to identify the objects, what with the awe, excitement and speculation
of the moment, the bursting shells, tracers, etc. I was surprised in the days that
followed to discover that with all that aggressive firepower there was no
evidence that we had brought anything down.
I lived on Virginia Road, a half block south of West Adams Boulevard and
one-quarter mile south of what is now the Interstate 10 Santa Monica Freeway;
about 5.5 miles southwest of what is now the Los Angeles Civic Center; and
approximately 10.5 miles due east of the Pacific coastline of Santa Monica.
We were looking in a westward direction from our large living room bay window
which gave us an unobstructed panorama of view facing the northwest, west and
southwest. We then went to our south-facing kitchen and porch windows to
observe the action where it culminated in the south. Ergo, the action followed the
coastline.
It could have been two, or three, or up to six miles away,
I can't recall exactly since it occurred so long ago. But I strongly remember
the searchlights converging on the bottoms of the reddish objects flying in
formation
Scott Littleton writes:
I was an eye-witness to the events of that unforgettable February
morning in February of 1942. I was eight-years-old at the time, and my
parents lived at 2500 Strand in Hermosa Beach, right on the beach. We thus
had a grandstand seat. While my father went about his air-raid warden
duties, my late mother and I watched the glowing object, which was caught in
the glare of searchlights from both Palos Verdes and
Malibu/Pacific/Palisades and surrounded by the puffs of ineffectual
anti-aircraft fire, as it slowly flew across the ocean from northwest to
southeast. It headed inland over Redondo Beach, a couple of miles to the
south of our vantage point, and eventually disappeared over the eastern end
of the Palos Verdes hills, what's today called Rancho Palos Verdes. The
whole incident last, at least from our perspective, lasted about half an
hour, though we didn't time it. Like other kids in the neighborhood, I
spend the next morning picking up of pieces of shrapnel on the beach;
indeed, it's a wonder more people weren't injured by the stuff, as we were
far from the only folks standing outside watching the action.
In any case, I don't recall seeing any truly discernable configuration, just
a small, glowing, slight lozenge-shaped blob light-a single, blob, BTW. We
only saw one object, not several as some witnesses later reported. At the
time, we were convinced that it was a "Jap" reconnaissance plane, and that
L.A. might be due for a major air-raid in the near future. Remember, this
was less than three months after Pearl Harbor. But that of course never
happened. Later on, we all expected "them," that is, the Military, to tell
us what was really up there after the war. But that never happened,
either.
Army Gunners Fire At UFOs Over Los Angeles
Volume 3, Number 8
February 22, 1998
Editor Joseph Trainor
On Wednesday, February 25, 1942, at precisely 2 a.m., diners at the trendy Trocadero
Club in Hollywood were startled when the lights winked out and air raid sirens began to
sound throughout greater Los Angeles.
"Searchlights scanned the skies and anti-aircraft guns protecting the vital aircraft
and ship-building factories went into action. In the next few hours they would fire
over 1,400 shells at an unidentified, slow- moving object in the sky over Los Angeles
that looked like a blimp, or a balloon."
Author Ralph Blum, who was a nine-year-old boy at the time, wrote that he thought "the
Japanese were bombing Beverly Hills."
"There were sirens, searchlights, even antiaircraft guns blamming away into the skies
over Los Angeles. My father had been a balloon observation man (in the AEF) in World
War One, and he knew big guns when he heard them. He ordered my mother to take my baby
sisters to the underground projection room--our house was heavily supplied with
Hollywood paraphernalia--while he and I went out onto the upstairs balcony."
"What a scene! It was after three in the morning. Searchlights probed the western sky.
Tracers streamed upward. The racket was terrific." Shooting at the aerial intruders
were gunners of the 65th Coast Artillery (Anti-Aircraft) Regiment in Inglewood and
the 205th Anti-Aircraft Regiment based in Santa Monica. The "white cigar-shaped object"
took several direct hits but continued on its eastward flight.
Up to 25 silvery UFOs were also seen by observers on the ground.
Editor Peter Jenkins of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported, "I could clearly see
the V formation of about 25 silvery planes overhead moving slowly across the sky toward
Long Beach." Long Beach Police Chief J.H. McClelland said, "I watched what was described
as the second wave of planes from atop the seven-story Long Beach City Hall. I did not
see any planes but the younger men with me said they could. An experienced Navy observer
with powerful Carl Zeiss binoculars said he counted nine planes in the cone of the
searchlight. He said they were silver in color. The (UFO) group passed along from one
battery of searchlights to another, and under fire from the anti-aircraft guns, flew
from the direction of Redondo Beach and Inglewood on the land side of Fort MacArthur,
and continued toward Santa Ana and Huntington Beach. Anti-aircraft fire was so heavy we
could not hear the motors of the planes."
Reporter Bill Henry of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "I was far enough away to see an
object without being able to identify it...I would be willing to bet what shekels I
have that there were a number of direct hits scored on the object."
At 2:21 a.m., Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt issued the cease-fire order, and the
twenty-minute "battle of Los Angeles" was over. (See BEYOND EARTH: MAN'S CONTACT WITH
UFOs by Ralph Blum, Bantam Books, New York, April 1974, page 68. See also the Los
Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the Long Beach Press-Telegram for
February 25, 1942. All newspaper quotes taken from "The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942"
by Terrenz Sword, which appeared in Unsolved UFO Sightings, Spring 1996 issue,
pages 57 through 62.)
Autre témoin
I'm Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. I joined the Oxy Faculty in 1962 and retired at the end of the spring semester, 2002, after forty years of teaching anthropology classes, as well as a variety of Cultural Studies courses and seminars in Oxy's Core Program in the Liberal Arts.
My professional specialties range across a wide spectrum and include comparative Indo-European mythology and folklore, cognitive and symbolic anthropology, urban anthropology, the origin and distribution of the Arthurian and Holy Grail legends, and Japanese culture, both ancient and contemporary, with an emphasis on Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religion. Indeed, I've spent close to three years in Tokyo studying a neighborhood Shinto shrine and its annual matsuri, or festival. I've also had a long-standing interest in the UFO phenomenon and its possible implications for mythology and folklore.
In terms of the current spectrum of anthropological theory and method, I would define myself as a "postmodern materialist," which is a fancy way of saying that I'm extremely eclectic in my approach to the discipline. Indeed, in my humble opinion, one of the most important problems facing contemporary anthropology is an unwillingness on the part of all too many of its practitioners to take seriously theories and methods that lie outside their own narrow specialties.
I'm a native Californian. I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Hermosa Beach, and it was an incident during my growing up years that I want to talk about here: the "Battle of Los Angeles," the night that a UFO was fired upon by the U.S. repeatedly, with no apparent effect. I was an eye witness. What follows is adapted from a chapter in my memoir entitled "2500 Strand: Growing up in Hermosa Beach, California, during World War II." Air-Raid Drills. As 1942 dawned, the war news continued to be bad. We were retreating in the Philippines; the British were retreating in North Africa; and although the Russians had held before Moscow and Leningrad, their chances looked slim.
In Southern California, and particularly in the beach communities, the threat of invasion was still palpable, if not imminent, and a great many folks - including the military - still expected us to be bombed in the near future. For that reason, the whole of Santa Monica Bay, from Malibu to Palos Verdes, was soon ringed with anti-aircraft batteries and searchlight brigades. The guns banged away almost every night, shooting at targets that were towed across the sky over the ocean by specially designed planes. The targets would be pinpointed by the searchlight beams, which also illuminated the exploding shells. It was a grand show that usually lasted about half an hour and rarely continued after 10:00 p.m., out of respect for the local populace.
At first, we'd watch the action with great fascination, but after a few nights in early January the noise of the guns and the exploding shells soon became routine, as predictable as the sound of the waves in the winter. Most people learned to sleep through the cacophony with few problems. It gave us a sense of security; our brave anti-aircraft gunners would quickly save us from any hostile attempt to penetrate our airspace, let alone bomb us.
Meanwhile, the government had also organized the Civil Defense Program, the core of which was a cadre of dedicated air raid wardens. My father joined up shortly before the end of the year, and was soon assigned to monitor the Strand between 27th Street and 22nd Street in case of an air attack. However, he was also expected to enforce the blackout during air raid drills, which we soon began to have regularly, as well the so-called "dim-out," which required those who of us who lived in houses facing the water (both on the Strand and on the hill that rose behind Hermosa Avenue) to keep their front blinds drawn from dusk to dawn. The idea was to reduce the glare against which a tanker or merchant ship would be silhouetted and thus become an easy target for a Japanese submarine. This meant that he went out on "patrol" almost every evening shortly after sundown.
Shortly after Cov joined the program, there were some training sessions in the auditorium at Pier Avenue School, the local junior high school, which I would attend in a couple of years. As you might expect, the new wardens wanted practical instruction in first-aid, fire suppression, and all the other things their London counterparts had had to learn the hard way during the Blitz. They did eventually learn something about these things, but my father always laughed at the fact that the first two sessions were devoted to a learned discourse on the history of the Common Law! It seems that air raid wardens had a limited power of arrest; that is, they could detain persons who refused to pull their drapes or who had no business being on the street during a blackout and refused to go home - Hermosa had its share of the latter, especially in the vicinity of the downtown bars - and the guy who made this presentation was a USC law professor and former Superior Court judge. As my father liked to say, the whole business could have been boiled down to a ten-minute talk, simply laying out the circumstances under which an arrest could be made, and the extent to which force could be used in the processes. They didn't need to know the history of the laws of arrest from the time of Alfred the Great to 1942!
It was precisely this kind of mentality that that caused the system to break down totally in the early morning hours of February 25. Blackout drills, which were always announced well in advance (at least to the wardens), usually went pretty well. My father would get the word, and then an hour later the siren would sound. He'd put on his helmet, grab his flashlight, and start patrolling the Strand. But when the "real thing" came along, the system totally collapsed.
* * *
The Thing in the Sky. The early evening of February 24, 1942, was unremarkable. The guns fired a few practice rounds and then fell silent well before 10:00 p.m. I remember going to bed shortly thereafter, reading for a few minutes by the light of a small flashlight I kept hidden under my bed, and then falling asleep.
Around 3:15 a.m., I awoke to the sound of what I initially assumed was distant thunder. But as I came fully awake, I realized that the guns were firing again. At first, I thought they were simply doing another drill, though it seemed awfully late. Moreover, there was something about the rate and intensity of the bombardment that just didn't seem right, especially after I glanced at my clock.
My small bedroom was directly over the front door and faced south . Thus, my view of the ocean was oblique. However, what I could see of the sky as I lay there was filled with blinding searchlight beams and the bright flashes of exploding rounds. I was, of course, thoroughly familiar with both, thanks to all the target practice I'd witnessed. But heretofore, the searchlights and the explosions had always been well out over the ocean and, for the most part, invisible from my bedroom windows when I was in bed. This time everything seemed much closer. I soon heard my parents talking in the hall, and poked my head out. My father looked worried and said it didn't make any sense. He tried to get through by phone to Civil Defense headquarters, but nobody answered (we later learned that the alert had been called at 2:25 a.m., but nobody bothered to get the word out to the local air raid wardens). So, he put on his gear, and went outside to see what was happening. Somewhere in the distance an air raid siren was wailing.
Cov returned looking even more worried and told my mother to get me, Gagie (my grandmother Littleton), Gaga, and my Grandfather Hotchkiss, who'd been staying with us for a couple of weeks (my Grandmother Hotchkiss had passed away the previous fall), down to the bomb shelter ASAP. Normally, Grandpa Hotchkiss was slower than the Second Coming of Christ in his personal habits. But when my father said "Mr. Hotchkiss, I think this may be the real thing," he was down in the basement in thirty seconds flat!
I was equal parts scared and excited and desperately wanted to know what was going on. By this time, my father was back on the street and, belatedly, over the continuing gunfire, the local siren finally sounded. My mother escorted her in-laws and father down to the fortified dressing rooms, and I followed along, despite the fact that I was dying to slip outside and watch "the real thing."
My mother felt the same way. As she said later, after about ten minutes in such cramped quarters - the benches upon which we sat also contained survival items such as a first-aid kit, water bottles, and some canned food - and surrounded by the halitosis exuded by the older generation, she was ready to brave a Jap bomb or two. Our first thought was that an enemy squadron was overhead, as we began to hear the roar of aircraft engines over the din of the barrage. But they were almost certainly our own pursuit planes.
When she exited the basement through the door that led to the beach, I followed close behind her. Although my mother was apprehensive about my safety, at the same time she understood why I desperately wanted to see what was happening and let me stay.
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, whose bright glow was clearly visible in the searchlight beams that pinpointed it. Although it was a clear, moonlit night, no other details were visible, 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.
As we watched it, open mouthed, the object, apparently none the worse for the plethora of three-inch, 12.8 pound anti-aircraft rounds fired at it, began to move slowly to the southeast over Redondo Beach, where we lost sight of it. Either our gunners were woefully inept, despite all the practice they'd had in recent weeks or it was invulnerable to attack. Years later I read that approximately 1,400 rounds were fired at the object that evening. Could the Japs have come up with some secret weapon that deflected flack? The thought was scary to the max!
But whatever it was, it certainly wasn't acting aggressively. Rather, it simply made its stately way across the sky. Shortly before we lost sight of it - the object subsequently appeared over San Pedro and Long Beach before finally disappearing over the ocean somewhere off southern Orange County - we again heard the unmistakable sound of aircraft engines. By that time, the bombardment had largely petered out, and a flight of Army interceptors, probably based at Mines field (today the site of Los Angeles International Airport), approached from the northeast and buzzed off to the southeast, apparently chasing the object.
It was now almost 4:00 a.m. Precisely how long we'd stood there is anybody's guess, though I suspect that the whole episode, from our leaving the shelter to meeting my father as he returned to house for good, lasted about twenty-five minutes. As I recall, the firing ceased altogether shortly thereafter (the "all clear" didn't actually sound until 7:30 a.m.), but nobody went to bed that night.
The next morning, the Los Angeles Examiner came out with a banner headline: "Air Battle Rages over Los Angeles," followed by "One Plane Reported Downed on Vermont Avenue by Gunfire" in smaller type. The story, which I still have safely tucked away, claimed to be based on a report from the LAPD's 77th Street Division. At the time, this appeared to be pure fantasy, a prime example of the yellow journalism so characteristic of Heart newspapers in those days, as no bombs fell, nor, apparently, was any plane, Japanese or otherwise, shot down anywhere in Southern California that night. However, in retrospect, both the cops and the Examiner seem to have been right about one thing. A plane does appear to have crashed (or crash-landed) on South Vermont Avenue near 180th Street that morning, and from eyewitness accounts collected years later it was almost certainly one of ours, forced down either by the object itself or by "friendly fire." The witness claims to have caught a glimpse of U.S. markings on the fuselage before it was covered up by a tarp and quickly hauled away on a flatbed truck. The military apparently didn't want the public to know that it had possibly shot down one of its own planes. What happened to the pilot is unknown.
There were only a handful of civilian casualties. According to the Times, five people died from heart attacks and automobile accidents, and there were a few injuries from falling shrapnel. There was also some minor property damage, again mostly from shrapnel. Indeed, the beach was littered with the stuff, and the next afternoon some neighborhood kids, including Wayne and Darryl Edgar and the author, picked up several bags of it, took them to school, and donated the contents to the wartime scrap drive.
Yes, there were a great many jangled nerves that morning, but the overall impact of the event was slight compared to other disasters - earthquakes, fires, floods, mud-slides, etc. - that Southern California has experienced over the years.
At the time, it was widely assumed that a high-altitude, carrier-based Japanese observation plane had flown over the Los Angeles basin and that it was perhaps the harbinger of another Pearl Harbor-type attack, this time on the West Coast. Later on, we began to suspect that perhaps one of our own military planes was the culprit. But no 1942 vintage airplanes, military or civilian, Japanese or American, were capable of standing still in the air. The one thing we did learn after the war was that neither the Japanese nor our own people seemed to have any record of one of their aircraft straying over the L.A. basin that morning. Even the presence of our pursuit planes, which was absolutely certain, has been steadfastly denied by the government. Of course, all concerned could be lying, though the probability of such a lie persisting for over sixty years is remote - unless it involved something so profoundly disconcerting that it had to be shrouded in secrecy from then on.
So what precisely did we witness on February 25, 1942?
In recent decades several Ufologists, the people who study the UFO phenomenon, have suggested that it might have been an extraterrestrial craft. If that assessment is correct, it certainly precipitated one of the largest mass UFO sightings in history, as it involved well over a million people. Only the sightings over Mexico City in the late 1990s exceed it in terms of the total number of percipients. It also would account for the cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the episode for the past six and a half decades.
To be sure, no one suggested this idea in February of 1942. It wasn't until five years later, after civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold's landmark sighting of nine "flying saucers" over Mt. Rainer in late June of 1947, which was followed almost immediately by what now appears to have been the crash of a UFO near Roswell, New Mexico, that the notion that spacecraft from other planets might be invading our skies became widespread. But in retrospect, the "Battle of Los Angeles" has all the earmarks of a classic UFO event.
A few years ago, I joined forces with a well-known Ufologist - that is, a person who systematically studies the UFO phenomenon - named Frank Warren to investigate what really happened that morning. With the help of Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an eminent Navy photo-analyst and UFO investigator, Frank and I have pretty well determined the craft's path before it appeared in the sky over Hermosa Beach. It was initially observed by several residents of the Pacific Palisades rising over the Santa Monica Mountains around 2:45 a.m. From there, it seems to have moved southeast across Santa Monica and West L.A. in the direction of the Baldwin Hills, which separate Culver City from Inglewood and the flatlands to the south.
Several residents who lived just north of Baldwin Hills saw it clearly. From their reports, it was round with a slight hump in the middle. A woman named Katie, who observed it from the window of her home, stated that it was huge, elliptical in shape, and suffused with a brilliant, orange glow. Meanwhile, the anti-aircraft barrage had already begun, and the searchlights were following it steadily.
A Los Angeles Times reporter living in the San Gabriel Valley, a dozen miles or so to the east, had been alerted to what was happening by colleagues at the paper. He jumped in his car and began driving west as rapidly as he could toward the sound of the guns, arriving at the northern edge of the Baldwin Hills, in the vicinity of Jefferson and La Cienega, in time to photograph the object as it rose over the ridge line . The image below, which was published in the Times on February 26 , is the only clear picture we have of the craft. As you can see, it's caught in the beams of several searchlights and is surround by white dots created by exploding shells.
Frank Warren
1942: ZEPPELIN-SIZE UFO OVER LOS ANGELES CAUGHT IN THE GLARE OF SEARCHLIGHTS
From the width of the light beams at the point they reached the object, plus the knowledge that at least one of them came from a searchlight battery in Manhattan Beach, some ten miles away (the others appear to have come from Inglewood or El Segundo), Frank Warren has suggested that it was perhaps as large as 800 feet in diameter, and I agree with this estimate. All of the close-up observations Frank and I have collected indicate that the object was huge!
After crossing the Baldwin Hills, it appears to have veered westward toward El Segundo (and the aircraft plants). When it reached the coast, it rose to a higher altitude and slowly followed the edge of the ocean, due south to the point where we first saw it. Then it veered southeastward over Redondo Beach, blithely ignoring everything we were throwing at it, and soon disappeared from sight behind the town's hills.
Although there's never been an "official" explanation of this curious episode, a number of unofficial explanations have been advanced over the years, ranging from an off-course private pilot - although civilian aircraft had been banned from skies of Southern California shortly after the war began - to a barrage balloon that escaped its tether over one of the El Segundo aircraft plants, an errant Army weather balloon, and even a flock of sea birds. However, in light of what we now know about the UFO phenomenon, I strongly suspect that the most efficient explanation, the one that fits all the known facts most completely, is that it was an alien craft. Although my parents and I were only able to tell that it was bright and "bug-like," the aforementioned Times photo, as well as other eyewitness accounts from Santa Monica and Culver City, indicate that it was a huge, saucer-shaped object that had, in addition to an orange glow, a protuberance of some sort on its dorsal, or upper side. This, of course, jibes closely with literally thousands of eyewitness accounts of UFOs, in this country and elsewhere, that have come to light in the course of the last six decades.
But the aspect that clinches the UFO theory, at least in my opinion, is the fact that the object was able to resist the impact of over 1,400 rounds of high explosive, antiaircraft shells. Few contemporary aircraft, let alone any World War II planes, could have withstood that barrage, and I suspect that the object was surrounded by an electromagnetic force field of some sort, which deflected the shells and caused them to explode harmlessly - a capability that is eons beyond the leading edge of human technology, even today. This EMF field could perhaps have caused our planes to lose control and crash when they flew too close to it.
As I've indicated, the probability that what really happened that morning has been covered up by the government for the past sixty-plus years now seems almost certain. In fact, most Ufologists are now convinced, with good reason, that a similar cover-up has been in place re the Roswell crash since 1947, to say nothing of what's been going on at Area 51 in Northern Nevada. So perhaps the government already had a model, based on its response to the 1942 incident, that was brought to bear in hushing up these later episodes. Or perhaps they've simply been in denial for the past six decades.
Maybe someday the truth about the "Battle of Los Angeles" will finally come out, along with the truth about so many other anomalous phenomena that so many people all over the world have seen - and continue to see - in the sky in the years since 1942. UFO skeptics maintain that all such phenomena have mundane, wholly terrestrial explanations. So what we saw that morning might conceivably have been a Japanese observation plane, despite the absence of any official record of one ever having flown over Southern California; one of the largest mass hallucinations ever recorded; a remarkably flack-resistant weather or barrage balloon; an equally invulnerable civilian pilot; or even a flock of badly frightened pelicans. But I'd be willing to bet a bundle that the skeptics are wrong and that it was not of this world.
* * *
Executive Order 9066. But nobody, of course, was thinking that way in February of 1942, and the incident had some nasty "this world" ramifications. As you can imagine, at the time most of us were convinced that it was an enemy aircraft, despite the fact that the 37th Army Anti-Aircraft Brigade hadn't been able to shoot it down. What reinforced this assessment was the fact that a Japanese submarine had shelled the Ellwood Oil Field just north of Santa Barbara less than thirty-six hours earlier.
Thus, after a period of relative calm after the first of the year, war jitters and fear of an imminent Japanese invasion once again increased markedly. And this paranoia contributed significantly to the alacrity with which FDR's decision to "relocate" Japanese-Americans, citizens and non-citizens alike, to what were, in fact if not label, full-fledged concentration camps, was implemented. Although Roosevelt signed the infamous "Executive Order 9066," which authorized this act of "ethnic cleansing," on February 19, once the process began, the well-nigh universal assumption that the "Battle of Los Angeles" involved a Japanese plane, coupled with the submarine attack in Santa Barbara County, meant that folks like us heatiliy approved of getting rid of the "God damned Japs," once and for all. Thus, we cheered mighily as the newspapers depicted them being rounded up and sent to out-of-the-way places like Manzanar, in the Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, the Tule Lake Internment Camp in Northern California, and similar camps in Utah, Idaho, and elsewhere in the Western United States.
Yes, it did happen here, and I must confess that I was as eager to see them go as everybody else. As in Germany, "everybody else" included a great many highly-educated people who were otherwise rational and did not think of themselves as bigots. My parents were typical in this regard. Although they prided themselves on being liberal, hard-core, New-Deal Democrats, who were all for abolishing the laws that segregated white people from "Negroes" in many parts of the country, and were utterly opposed to anti-Semitism, both at home and abroad, this was "different." The Japs were near-sighted, buck-toothed, monkey-like sub-humans who were also sneaky little bastards who were out to get us. Didn't what just happened prove it? They were all spies, no matter how long they'd lived here or whether they were native-born American citizens; it was in their blood. So good riddance!
Thus, we hardly shed a tear when the few Japanese-American kids - there were maybe two or three at the most - at North School suddenly disappeared. Again, good riddance to them and their traitorous families! There'd been rampant anti-Japanese sentiments for decades in California - just as German anti-Semitism didn't begin with Adolf Hitler - and "Executive Order 9066," like the infamous Nuremberg Laws promulgated by Hitler in 1935, simply legitimized long-simmering prejudices.
The Saturday matinees the neighborhood kids and I'd begun to attend at the Fox Hermosa Theater didn't help any. Even those war movies made before we got into the conflict never had anything nice to say about the Japanese; they were always the villains. And it got much worse after December 7, 1941, as Hollywood began to crank out blatantly racist films designed to whip up anti-Japanese sentiments - not simply against the expansionist policies of the Tojo Government, which were certainly despicable, but against the presumed inherent inferiority of the Japanese "race." They were regularly portrayed (usually by Chinese-American actors) as grinning sadists and utterly evil. Moreover, as was happening to Jewish property in Germany, most of the internees' holdings, many of which were agricultural, were sold at auction to greedy land speculators. If all this sounds broadly analogous to what the Nazis did with Jewish property, as well as what they were saying about Jews in Der Stürmer and other Party organs and in propaganda films, it should, because it was cut from the same bigoted cloth.
No, we didn't treat our internees anywhere near as harshly as the Germans treated theirs, even in the least brutal of the Nazi concentration camps. But the fact that they'd been rounded up en masse, native-born citizens as well as resident aliens, is, in retrospect, redolent of the same hysteria that gripped Germany in the 1930s and which we'd heard so much about from our friends the Sommers, (a German-Jewish refugee family my father helped enter the country in early 1941). That we failed to make the connection will forever be a stain on the American character, despite all the apologies and reparations that were subsequently offered to those who survived the camps and their families.
In any case, it did happen here. And it could again if we allow ourselves to fall once again headlong into bigoted hysteria re Muslims per se and other non-Westerners deemed to be "terrorists" and enemies of our vaunted "Christian heritage." In this connection, Gandhi's famous reply when he was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization seems apt: "It would be a nice idea!"
OK, I'm off the soapbox. But as one who's come to have a deep appreciation for Japanese culture, I couldn't help but express my strong feelings about this most unfortunate - and reprehensible - episode in modern American history.
In the weeks following the "Battle of Los Angeles," especially after the Japanese had been rounded up, the renewed threat of an imminent Japanese invasion once again gradually receded, at least in the local imagination. Nevertheless, unfounded rumors were rampant, both in the press and by word of mouth. One of them was that a detailed invasion plan had been found in the home of one Japanese internee that marked Hermosa Beach, between 22nd Street and the Manhattan Beach line, as the principal landing zone. Needless to say, this proved to be a total fantasy. After the war, it became abundantly clear that not a single Japanese-American had spied for Japan.
At the same time, we threw ourselves into the war effort as best we could. I'll have more to say about that in a subsequent chapter entitled "The Home Front."
In any case, my father now commuted daily to the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles (like most Southern Californians of his generation, he habitually pronounced it "Los ANG-les," which, of course, is a tad closer to the original Spanish) and needed the Mercury in his job as a War Production Board investigator. And, as it paid more money, my mother switched from the day shift to the graveyard shift (midnight to 8:00 a.m.) at Douglas. I'm not exactly sure how she got to work, but I do know that it was then that her career as "Rosie the Riveter" began in earnest.
NOTES:
1. Another eyewitness, who lived in Redondo Beach and was five years-old at the time, recalls that it descended as it passed slowly over his family home. His father at first thought it was coming in for a landing, perhaps at the nearby Lomita airstrip, and he and several neighbors jumped into a car and tried to follow the object. But it soon regained altitude and passed over the hills to the south. He also claims that the "stern" of the craft was rectangular, with rounded edges, and very thick.
2. The official tally, from the Army's after-action report, is 1430 rounds. But this figure is probably way too low.
3. In early 1942 night fighters were still experimental, at least in the United States. The first truly effective one, the Northrop P-61 "Black Widow," wasn't fully introduced until 1944. Thus, the decision to send up planes woefully inadequate for night combat underscores how seriously the military took this event.
4. Ufologist Frank Warren tells me that a fairly reliable eyewitness account of another possible plane crash that morning, this time in Hollywood, has recently come to light. And indeed, the Examiner story also mentioned a rumor that at least two additional planes were "shot down" during the event. Again, the downed plane in Hollywood appears to have been covered with a tarp almost immediately and hauled off on a flat-bed truck. The witness also claims to have noticed markings on the fuselage, in this case "Japanese letters," before it was covered up. This is extremely doubtful. The Japanese used Arabic numbers on all of their WWII planes, and he may simply have assumed that it was a Japanese plane, and then perceived the rest of what he saw in terms of that assumption. If a second plane did crash in Hollywood somewhere, it was also almost certainly one of ours.
5. When questioned by reporters, Arnold observed that the craft he'd seen looked like "saucers skipping over water." Thanks to the media, this soon morphed into the label "flying saucers." The label "UFO" - unidentified flying object - didn't become prominent until several years alter.
6. There's some evidence that the military retrieved a crashed UFO near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1941, so the government may already have had some knowledge of the phenomenon by February of 1942. For an interesting discussion of this possibility, as well as a brief overview of the "Battle of Los Angeles" and its implications for ufology, please see Richard M. Dolan's masterful book, UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-up 1941-1973 (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2002), p. 3-5; for a more comprehensive account of the event, please see Terrenz Sword, The Battle of Los Angeles, 1942 - The Silent Invasion Begins (Playa Del Rey, CA: Inner Light Publications, 2003), which also frames it in ufological terms.
7. I should emphasize that my mother and I failed to notice either a hump or an orange glow. From our perspective, it was simply a bright, silvery lozenge, with no other discernable features. I suspect that we saw only its ventral, or "belly" side, which was featureless, at least at that altitude.
8. There's been a lot of debate over exactly where the Times reporter took his famous picture. Some have held that he caught the object flying over Palos Verdes. But all indications point to a spot on the ridgeline just east of where La Cienaga Blvd cuts through it. I've investigated this aspect of the matter and am pretty sure that I've found the spot (Plate 28), despite the fact that the terrain has changed in the last sixty-odd years as the area has become more and more developed.
9. Bruce Maccabee, who has subjected the Times photograph to intense photo analysis, estimates that the object was between 100 and 200 feet in diameter. However, given the width of the searchlight beams and the fact that they barely encompass the object, Frank Warren and I have concluded that it must have been considerably larger, that is, around 800 feet in diameter.
10. For comprehensive overviews of the history of the UFO phenomenon, please see Dolan (op. cit.) and Jim Marrs, Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence among Us (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
11. Although the eyewitness in Redondo Beach remembers it as being rectangular.
12. After the war, captured German scientists, who were based at Los Alamos and the White Sands test range in New Mexico, gave us the technology to build sophisticated air-to-air rockets. Modeled on the German Wasserfall missle, these airborne rockets appear to have given us the capability to shoot down UFOs, at least occasionally. This may in part account for the Roswell, Aztec, and other possible UFO crashes in New Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s - as well as why the state has been such a major target of UFO activity over the years.
13. For a comprehensive overview and assessment of the UFO cover-up, from Roswell to the present, please see Stanton T. Friedman's Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-up (New York: Marlow & Company, 2005).
14. It's been asserted on the basis of what in my opinion is some pretty shaky evidence that the craft we saw ultimately crashed in the ocean off San Diego and was recovered by Navy divers. A related - and equally shaky - theory is that it crash-landed on San Clemente Island, the southernmost of the Channel Islands, and was recovered either by the Marines or the Navy, both of which used the island for bombing practice until recently. Perhaps the object had in fact been wounded by the intense anti-aircraft fire. If there's any validity to either of these theories, it would mean that the military already had a fair amount of solid UFO evidence in hand at the time the Roswell crash occurred in July of 1947, in addition any it might have collected before 1942.
15. For brief descriptions of three other possible UFO sightings on my part, both before and after this event, please see Chapter One.
16. For the skeptical position re the UFO phenomenon generally, please see, for example, the late Philip Klass, Ufos: The Public Deceived (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986), or Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (New York: Owl Books, 2nd edition, 2002) .
17. Some reports claimed that there were several "enemy" craft in the sky that morning, however I strongly suspect that these accounts were confused and reflected the appearance of Army pursuit planes before the bombardment began in earnest, as well as their return shortly after the object we saw disappeared over Redondo Beach.
18. In all fairness, it should be pointed out that the Japanese also cranked out propaganda films depicting Westerners, and Americans in particular, as savage, sub-human barbarians bent on destroying Japan's sacred heritage. So each side was guilty of portraying the other as inherently inferior.
19. Much of this confiscated Japanese-American land was soon covered with low-cost, housing tracts for the increasing flood of "aircraft workers" I mentioned in the Prologue, a great many of whom were émigrés from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas; that is, the part of the country that figures so prominently in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
20. I should, of course, mention that the Japanese relocation wasn't the only systematic program of "ethnic cleansing" in our history. A similar atrocity was committed a century earlier, in the 1830s, when Andrew Jackson and the rest, backed up by the Army, "relocated" thousands of Native Americans from the Southeast to what was then called "Indian Territory," now Oklahoma, along the infamous "Trail of Tears." Ironically, Oklahoma was to suffer its own diaspora in the late 1930s, although the great majority of those caught up in that economically driven population movement, some of whom settled in Hermosa Beach, were white people rather than Native Americans.
D'autres témoins ont déclarés...
1 le témoin a écouté le moteur d’un avion à plusieurs moments.
2 la forme losange, orange et blanc l’arrière" de l'embarcation était rectangulaire, avec des bords arrondis, et très épais. D’autre témoins nous disent il est rond avec une légère bosse au centre ou encore en plus d'avoir une bosse, il était énorme, elliptiques, de couleur orange vif et lumineux.
3 que l’ovni aurait changés de directions et de hauteur fait du vol stationnaire et un déplacement lent et silencieux.
4 qu’il estime sa taille à 800 pieds (243,84 mètres)
5 que le nombre d’obus tiré aurait été plus important que dit par la suite
6 l’altitude estimée par le témoin entre 4000 et 8000 pieds soit 1,2192 kilomètres et 2,4384 kilomètres
7 qu’un avion ou plusieurs se seraient crachés
8le déplacement
Un témoin nous dit :
commencé à avancer lentement vers le sud, en descendant sur Redondo Beach
L'objet est apparu plus tard sur San Pedro et de Long Beach, avant de disparaître sur l'océan, quelque part au large du sud du comté d'Orange ou le nord du comté de San Diego.
D' autres témoins affirment
déterminé la trajectoire du navire avant qu'il apparaissait dans le ciel de Hermosa Beach. Il a d'abord été observé par plusieurs résidents de la Pacific Palisades hausse sur les montagnes autour de Santa Monica 2:45 am A partir de là, il semble avoir déménagé dans le sud-ouest de Santa Monica et LA dans la direction de l'Baldwin Hills, qui séparent de Culver City Inglewood et la plaine au sud.
Après le passage de la Baldwin Hills, l'objet semble avoir tourné vers l'ouest en direction de El Segundo, Quand il atteint la côte, il est passé à une altitude plus élevée et lentement suivi le bord de la mer, plein sud, au point où nous avons vu la première fois. il bifurque vers le sud de Redondo Beachet disparu de la vue derrière la ville des collines
basses.
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