History's Greatest Mysteries (2020) s05e07 Episode Script
The Battle of Los Angeles
Tonight, a terrifying event
in the skies over Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is one of the
most critically important
war defense cities in
the entire country.
All hell is breaking loose.
There are reports of
a Japanese aircraft
shot down in Hollywood.
No lights anywhere,
no street lights,
no lights in buildings,
no house lights.
Complete and utter
darkness, it's as if LA
has just been wiped off the map.
This is absolute pandemonium.
The only lights are
the search lights
and the anti-aircraft
guns firing.
When the smoke clears,
the incident becomes
known as the Battle of LA
and is veiled in
secrecy and lies.
The army says that there
was something in the sky.
The Navy then says
there was actually
nothing in the sky at all.
Angelenos are
committed to the fact
that they have seen something.
Is the government actually
covering something up?
Now, we explore the
top theories surrounding
this mysterious occurrence.
In the middle of a
blackout, in pitch dark,
it's a lot harder to
separate facts from fiction.
What really triggered the
so-called Battle of Los Angeles?
February 24th,
1942, Los Angeles, California.
It's less than three months
since the Japanese
Imperial Fleet
launched a surprise attack
on American forces
at Pearl Harbor,
killing 2,400
and bringing the United States
fully into World War II.
On the home front,
the possibility of another
attack on American soil
is now very real,
especially in the nation's
biggest coastal cities.
There's widespread fear
that Japan will attack
the US mainland next,
and the US military has vowed
never to be caught
off guard again.
Not only does Los Angeles
lead American cities
when it comes to
aircraft production
with Douglas, Lockheed and
North American Aviation,
but in San Pedro Bay,
it also houses a
huge naval armada.
With a vulnerable location
on the Pacific Ocean,
plus major metropolitan area
and a population
of over 1 million,
city makes for a great
target and they know it.
So to bolster its defenses,
anti-aircraft guns have been
placed all around the city,
bunkers have been built
and air raid protocols
have been drilled
into the population.
After Pearl Harbor,
the United States has been
practicing blackout drills
in every coastal city out
of fear of an aerial attack.
The purpose of these blackouts
is so that enemy planes can't
see the lights of the city.
The enemy might
send 100s of bombers
to fly towards American cities
and drop bombs almost
indiscriminately
across any urban zone.
At night, it's very hard to
engage in aerial navigation.
However, the lights of a city
could make it very obvious
if you were near your target.
By now, Los Angeles has been
through so many blackouts,
the LA Times has nicknamed
it the City of Shadows.
The city's ordeal begins
with a typical blackout drill,
on the night of
February 24th, 1942.
No lights anywhere,
not a cigarette is allowed
to be lit on the street
for fear of giving away
any type of location
to a potential enemy.
Even all the radio stations
in LA go completely silent.
At 10:23 PM,
the blackout is lifted
and Angelenos go to bed thinking
it was just another drill.
But at 2:21 in the morning,
LA residents wake to the
scream of air raid sirens,
and the city is again
thrust into darkness.
Search lights start
sweeping over the skies
and you have all of
these people starting
to run out of their
homes trying to see
what it is that
they're looking at.
It's becoming
increasingly clear.
Whatever's happening
in Los Angeles
isn't just another drill.
At 3:06 AM, the search
lights converge
on a target over Culver
City and Los Angeles erupts.
The 37th Coast artillery
brigade starts firing
12 pounder guns that
lob three inch shells
up into the atmosphere.
The sound is enormous.
A lot of the people mistake it
for the impact of bombs
striking the earth
from enemy attack.
You can only
imagine what this sky
had to have looked
like that night.
You've got these orange
tracer lights in the air,
bursts in the sky.
No one had ever seen anything
like this in the United States.
To a lot of people
in Los Angeles,
it seems like it's the end of
the world, like it's Doomsday.
Phone calls flood
the city's information lines
with wildly differing accounts
of sightings in the sky.
Eyewitness reports
start pouring in
to military authorities.
We have reports of 100s of
enemy aircraft flying overhead.
We have reports of
aircraft crashing
throughout the Los Angeles area,
presumably shot down
by air defenses.
The only lights you've
got are the search lights
and the anti-aircraft
guns firing,
which just add to the sense
that they are in a war zone.
The anti-aircraft artillery lobs
almost nine tons of
ordinance into the skies.
100s of buildings and
vehicles are damaged
by the fragments of the falling
shells coming back to earth.
This is absolute pandemonium.
A lot of people are just trying
to get the hell out of there.
They're piling into
cars and driving.
There's gridlock, five
people are killed.
Three fatalities as a
result of traffic accidents
in the chaos,
and two people die of stress
induced heart attacks,
and it's pitch black.
But nothing's been shot down,
no bombs have been dropped.
What's the story? What
actually happened?
Military command
orders a ceasefire at 4:14 AM.
They officially lift
the blackout at 7:25 AM.
Daylight brings more
questions than answers,
as local newspapers print a
flurry of conflicting reports.
The most iconic
image from this event
is a photograph that
appears in the newspaper
with eight spotlights
shining up into the sky
on this object that's
floating in the middle.
You can't really make
out what the object is,
because it's brightened
up by all the spotlights.
But not even
the military can agree
on what, if anything, was there.
The Secretary of
the Navy, Frank Knox,
came out immediately after
the Battle of Los Angeles
and announced that
the air defense guns
had been firing at nothing.
He says this is a result of
rising panic, of jittery nerves,
that those manning the
coastal defense batteries
were also scared.
But then Henry Stimson,
the Secretary of War,
gives a press
conference and he says,
"No, there were planes present
and they weren't United
States aircraft."
Less than 48 hours before
the Battle of Los
Angeles, area residents
feel their vulnerability
for the first time.
As President Roosevelt
is about to deliver
his fireside chat,
a giant Japanese submarine
rises out of the sea
about 10 miles northwest
of Santa Barbara
and takes aim at the
Elwood oil fields.
The submarine took
shots at the piers
and it shot at the fuel
storage on top of the bluff.
It miraculously managed to miss
just about everything
it shot at.
But Santa Barbara's only 90
miles north of Los Angeles.
If they're going to
attack Santa Barbara,
couldn't Los Angeles be next?
So there's this really
heightened sense of fear
of what's coming.
Around 7:00
PM on February 24th,
Naval intelligence
instructs coastal defenses
to prepare for an attack
within the next 10 hours.
The entirety of Southern
California is under
this blackout and general alert.
There's the concern
that Japanese submarines
might still be out there
looking for trouble.
But nothing really happens,
so that alert is
canceled around 10:30.
People are going to bed,
they think everything
might be okay.
Just when it looks like
nothing is gonna happen,
right before 2:00 AM, a radar
station near Santa Monica
picks up what appears to be
a formation of aircraft.
Two more radar
installations report
that they too have
detected something
moving towards the
American coastline.
At 2:15 AM,
the military issues
its highest level alert,
ordering the 37th
coastal artillery
to engage enemy targets
as soon as they appear.
There are anti-aircraft
batteries distributed
all over the city
and there's a concern
that Japanese aircraft
are soon to attack Los Angeles.
At 2:27 AM,
the target is tracked
to within three miles
of the Los Angeles area
and then disappears.
At the same time
information centers
are flooded with reports
of enemy planes overhead.
The reports of
seeing these planes,
they're not just coming
from people on the street
who are panicking,
these are trained
military personnel.
There's an artillery colonel
that sees 25 airplanes
in formation.
There's another report that
there's 12 airplanes
in formation.
Someone else reports that
they see a single aircraft.
So there's total confusion here
about what people are seeing.
But military
witnesses are certain
they've spotted
aircraft overhead,
and the top brass believes them.
It's not just the Secretary
of War, Henry Stimson,
who's saying the
aircraft were real.
It's George Marshall,
FDR's Army chief of staff,
and he writes a memo
to FDR and he says,
"Yeah, there were
aircraft present."
But whatever the Coast Defense
Brigade is firing towards
is not shooting back.
And there are so many
unanswered questions
about these planes, like, where
would they have launched from?
There's no Japanese
aircraft carriers
within range of Los Angeles.
There are rumors of
downed Japanese aircraft,
but that turns out
to be just rumors.
There are rumors that
bombs were dropped,
but again, no
bombs were dropped,
so there's a little
bit of a mystery.
In his memo, Marshal posits
a possible explanation for
the lack of enemy fire.
Marshall's memo states
that access pilots
could have flown commercial
aircraft over Los Angeles,
not as a bombing mission,
but as a surveillance tool
to spot enemy aircraft positions
and also spread fear and panic.
But if the enemy had access
to commercial planes,
where were they keeping them?
There's speculation
from Secretary Stimson
and General Marshall that
the axis may have established
a secret base in Mexico,
and used it to launch aircraft
to fly over Los Angeles.
That sounds like
crazy person talk,
but there's actually
something to it.
And the reason why is that
during the First World War,
the German government
made some advances,
attempting to recruit
the Mexican government
to join World War I on the
side of the central powers
against the allies that
included the United States,
and there was an awareness that
Mexican commercial airliners
were operating aircraft that
had been made in Germany,
that could be easily
converted from
civilian commercial transport
into aircraft that were
capable of carrying bombs
or paratroopers.
American authorities devote
an enormous amount of
resources searching
for secret access bases
both in northern Mexico
and throughout
Southern California.
However, there's no evidence
that there's a secret base.
The American public
wants answers
and Secretary Stimson is
not going to supply them.
Stimson just says, "Well, we
don't have definitive answers
to this, but maybe it's
better to be too alert
than not alert enough."
For days after
the so-called Battle
of Los Angeles,
residents still struggle to
make sense of what happened.
So whatever happened that night
turns out to be a solitary event
and there are much
bigger concerns
happening in Europe
and the Pacific.
As World War II rages on,
the mysterious air raid
fades in importance.
But after the wars end, the US
Coastal Artillery Association
shows renewed interest in
the mysterious 1942 event.
The Coastal
Artillery Association
is essentially a
veterans organization
made up of units
that were responsible
for coastal and harbor
defenses in the United States.
So they start reviewing
the Battle of LA,
documenting it for posterity,
and what they discover
puts a whole new
spin on the event.
It turns out that at 1:00 AM,
so just really two hours before
the Battle of Los
Angeles commences,
two weather balloons were
launched in the Hollywood area
and it becomes clear that
they may not be the only ones
to have been
launched that night.
Weather balloons
are critical to the war effort,
both on the battlefield,
and on the home front.
Coastal artillery units
constantly release balloons
to collect meteorological data,
things like airspeed,
and precipitation,
and atmospheric conditions.
This actually helps the guns
on the ground be more accurate.
If there is enemy
aircraft coming,
it is imperative that they get
these balloons up in the air
as soon as possible.
In order to track the balloons,
they added a small candle
that they put in a glass
jar underneath the balloon,
because the balloon has
a kind of a silvery skin,
that light is able to reflect
as far as 25,000 feet.
At about 3:00 AM,
about 40 minutes after
the first sirens go off,
the 203rd Coastal Artillery Unit
launches two further
weather balloons.
One's launched from Westwood
and the other one from
Battery D in Santa Monica.
The lieutenant in charge
of Battery D's
meteorological operations
notifies his commander of
the balloon's departure.
The timing couldn't be worse.
Guners are scouring the sky,
looking for enemy aircraft
and almost immediately,
Battery D notices
that their balloons
are coming under fire.
There is no controlling
system such that
when one unit releases balloons
into the sky over Los Angeles,
other units would know
where those balloons are
or when they were released.
So while one unit is releasing
balloons to collect data
for its own accuracy,
another unit might be
mistaking those balloons
for enemy targets.
Colonel Ray Watson is commanding
Battery D of the 203rd
and he basically says,
"Don't fire, these
are our balloons.
Don't fire, don't shoot."
So even though Colonel
Watson is warning people,
the order comes back from
high command, "No, shoot."
The 203rd Coast Artillery
probably triggered
this entire incident by
releasing weather balloons,
but interestingly,
this is a battery
that did not fire that night,
because the the battalion
commander decided
that there was
nothing in the sky.
Colonel Ray Watson is
relieved of his duty immediately
and the story about the balloons
in Battery D that
night remains hidden
for a number of years.
Nevertheless, questions remain,
particularly about the
earlier radar sightings.
Is it possible that something
far simpler is to blame?
In the years since,
we have learned that the
military's weather balloons
weren't the only things
floating in the sky that night.
In the 1960s, two full
decades after the events
of the Battle of Los Angeles,
a former air defense
artillery crewman claimed
that his unit was desperate
to test their own
radar capabilities,
and because there were
no aircraft available
for that very type of test,
they obtained some
children's balloons,
loaded them full of
hydrogen for buoyancy,
suspended some foil
streamers underneath them
to create a radar return, and
released them into the sky.
And lo and behold, it worked.
They were able to see these
balloons on the radar.
But as the night
wears on, the winds change
and an onshore
breeze starts pushing
the balloons back
towards the city.
Prevailing winds make
it almost impossible
to conceive of radar picking up
some of these children's
balloons with foil beneath them
100 miles west of the
city, out at sea.
However, if a radar were to
pick up that kind of a return,
if the balloon popped, the
return would disappear
from the screen
almost immediately.
Maybe a combination
of radar balloons
and weather balloons tricked
the city of Los Angeles
into believing that
they were under attack.
So this information
might fill in
some puzzle pieces from 1942,
but people still find it
odd that 1,400 rounds shot
into the air couldn't bring
down a single balloon.
Eyewitnesses
recall seeing an object floating
in the dark skies over Los
Angeles on February 25th, 1942.
Something moving ominously slow,
practically hovering overhead.
Many historians believe
they could have been
weather balloons
or toy balloons used
for radar testing,
but even if true,
it leaves more than a
few unanswered questions.
One of the biggest
problems with this theory
is in relation to the
size of the balloons.
Kids' balloons are not
exactly airplane size
and military weather
balloons back in the day
were around four
feet in diameter,
but there is another
kind of balloon
that could explain
what witnesses claim
to have seen overhead.
The Japanese were absolutely
desperate to find ways
to attack the United States.
There was no possibility of
bringing their aircraft carriers
within range of
land-based air power,
so they start looking
at other mechanisms.
In 1933, almost 10 years
before that terrifying
air raid signal went off,
a Japanese general begins
a new weapons program
called The Fu-Go.
The Japanese will
ultimately launch
a major offensive operation
against the United States
using intercontinental weapons,
in the form of a
series of balloons.
They discover
that high altitude air currents
can deliver a balloon
across the Pacific
in as little as 30 hours.
These are 33 foot wide balloons
made of laminated paper.
They're capable of
holding a massive amount
of hydrogen inside of them
and lofting high explosive
and incendiary bombs.
When released from the
Japanese home islands
and put into what we now
know as the jet stream,
they can effectively blow over
the North American continent.
What the Japanese were
hoping to accomplish
was that they would hit
the Pacific Northwest
at a time when it's being
swept by intense winds,
when everything's dry,
and that they will
then rain down balloons
that will start forest fires.
And the thought was that if
we can suddenly give them
this epidemic of forest fires,
we will use our resources
trying to put those fires out,
rather than trying to attack
the Japanese home islands.
These things are a little
bit more sophisticated
than people realize.
There's a mechanism
once the balloons
get into the jet stream
to make sure that
it maintains height.
If it gets too low,
it drops a sandbag and then
that keeps the height up
until it gets over the land.
And they don't need to
be particularly well aimed
as long as they hit a
rural area with dry tinder.
The prevailing wind
patterns of the jet stream
in February of 1942 would have
essentially blown balloons
from the Japanese home islands
directly towards Los Angeles.
The Fu-Go balloon could explain
the sudden blips on the radar,
the scattered reports
of a zeppelin,
and the oddly slow speed
at which it left the city.
But Japanese
documents discovered
after the war revealed
that the Fu-Go
was mass produced
starting in 1944,
2 years after the Battle
of Los Angeles incident.
But could this have been a
test run of an early prototype?
Perhaps.
The documents also revealed
that many of these
floating bombs
successfully made
it to North America.
From November of '44
until March of 1945,
they launched over
9,000 Fu-Go balloons.
At least 300 of them
actually reach the mainland
of the United States and Canada.
Most of the payloads fizzle out,
but one actually got through
and knocked out the power
to the very facility that
was producing the plutonium
that would be used
in the atomic bomb
that was later
dropped on Nagasaki.
And just four
months before the war's end,
one of them reveals its
full destructive potential.
May 5th, 1945, Bly, Oregon.
Reverend Archie Mitchell
and his pregnant wife Elsie
take five of their Sunday
school students on a picnic
in the nearby mountains.
When one of the kids,
a 13-year-old girl, find
some fabric sprawled out
on the forest floor,
she calls over Elsie
and the other kids
to come investigate.
Elsie calls to her
husband back at the car,
"Look what we found, it's
some kind of balloon."
The balloon gondola
had experienced
a failure of its
triggering system,
the system that would've
dropped the incendiary charge
and dropped the bomb.
Instead, the entire
gondola comes down
with the incendiary device
and the bomb still intact.
Just as the reverend tells
his wife not to touch it,
boom, there's a huge explosion.
The reverend goes running
to give aid to Elsie
and the five kids, but
there's nothing he can do.
They've all been
killed instantly.
Some people are convinced
that a balloon like this
is actually what drifted
into LA's airspace
and started the
so-called Battle of LA.
Even so, questions remain.
So as hard as it is to believe
that the United States military
could not shoot down
a weather balloon,
it's harder still
to even fathom that
they couldn't shoot
down this larger object
with an explosive payload.
Whatever that iconic
photo is showing
in the Los Angeles Times,
whether it's something
like a balloon
or a more traditional aircraft,
you'd think that artillery fire
would've at least taken it down,
or at the very least,
sent it reeling.
More than 80 years since the sky disrupted
over Los Angeles,
the so-called Battle of
LA remains an enigma.
No one from the military,
or the government
can say for certain what entered
the city's airspace that night,
nor will they explain why the
city's anti-aircraft batteries
failed to take anything down.
In the absence of any
definitive answers,
a new theory takes hold,
one that confounds
experts to this day.
As interested sleuths
start to comb through
all the documentation
and witness statements,
they begin to think
that the official story
has swept a lot of the
eerie details under the rug.
In particular, people
fixate on the iconic photo
of search lights
that are all shining
on some unidentifiable
object in the sky.
It's disc shape, but it's
appearing to glow as well.
Now you can say, well,
it would, wouldn't it?
I mean, it's illuminated
by search lights.
But again, they
picked up something.
There's gotta be something there
for this thing to be glowing.
In 1950,
a former Marine Corps
aviator named Donald Keyhoe
makes an interesting connection.
Keyhoe suggests that the
unexplained aerial phenomenon
was extraterrestrial in nature,
not the government's explanation
of Japanese planes or balloons.
With all due respect
to the Air Force,
I believe that some of
them will prove to be
of interplanetary origin.
In 1942, the concept
of a flying saucer
isn't really part of the
American lexicon at all.
However, investigators
looking back
on the battle of Los Angeles,
essentially backdate that idea
into the story surrounding
what might have
happened that night.
Some of the
eyewitness statements
help fuel this theory
that this is a UFO,
because of this strange ability
to be very slow on the radar
and then suddenly it speeds up,
that it's maybe hovering,
then suddenly it's
moving very fast,
that it's at a low altitude
and then it's at
a high altitude.
All of these help fuel this idea
that maybe this is some
kind of unknown aircraft
from another planet that's
coming down to Earth.
There're going to be questions
from the highest
ranks of leadership,
and command in the military
and civilian government,
and reports about this incident
go all the way to
the Secretary of War.
They go all the way to US Army
chief of staff, George Marshall,
and they have to report to the
president what happened in LA.
Proponents of the UFO theory
point to a series of
unauthenticated memos.
There are a number of
documents floating around,
purporting to be
from George Marshall
to FDR talking about the
recovery of two craft.
One of these was
apparently recovered
off the coast between Los
Angeles and Catalina Island,
the other in the San
Bernardino mountains.
Marshall also goes on
to allegedly explained
to FDR in these memos that the
objects that were recovered
didn't resemble any
conventional aircraft
and he presumes that
whatever these objects were,
were of an
interplanetary origin.
The eyewitness
reports that come in
the night of the air raid
include many descriptions
of unusual aircraft.
The US will encounter even more
unidentified flying objects
as the war continues.
Towards the end of World War II,
allied pilots begin to
describe being followed
by very strange lights
over the skies in Europe
and they nicknamed
them, "foo fighters".
Whatever these objects were,
it was said that they
would usually shine
in red, yellow, and green.
They would fly alongside
the allied aircraft
at speeds up to
200 miles an hour.
Sometimes there would be one,
sometimes there could
be several of them.
Some ufologists
speculate that FDR himself
was a believer in
extraterrestrial life.
Allegedly, this
unauthenticated memo
written by FDR in
February of 1944
is sent to a special committee
on non-terrestrial
science and technology.
Supposedly in this memo,
FDR is slowly coming
to grips with the idea
that the planet Earth
is not the only one
that's able to house
intelligent life.
He says that, "We will take
advantage of these wonders
that have come to us
after we've won the war."
There are many
people who believe
the Battle of Los Angeles
was really Earth's
first big encounter
with extraterrestrials,
and of course, there's an
equally large number of people
who think that's
complete nonsense.
Under particular scrutiny
are the unauthorized documents
between Roosevelt and Marshall.
Experts question
their credibility.
There is a lot of
controversy about this.
There are many, many
documents circulating
in the UFO community
that are frankly bogus.
There are big question
marks over this.
In addition, analysis
of the infamous LA Times
photograph from 1942
raises even more questions.
Retouching of
photographs was something
that occurred commonplace
in the 1930s and 1940s.
Newspapers at the time,
it was very common
for them to create
a more of a contrast with
the black and the white.
When they look at the
negative of this photo
versus what's published,
they discovered that this photo
has been touched up quite a bit.
There are details that
are in the foreground
toward the bottom
of the photograph,
where they can see they
brought out the mountain ranges
that are seen in the background.
They also blow out some of the
overexposed components of it.
The skyline has been darkened,
the searchlight beams
have been enhanced,
and what's actually lens flare
has been altered to make it
look as if it's explosions.
The photograph
makes people think
that there was
something in the sky.
But what if there
actually wasn't something
in the sky that night?
Whatever terror
the people of Los Angeles
endure on February 25th, 1942,
is soon matched by
frustration and anger.
There are so many questions
about what happens on
this night in Los Angeles
and the government doesn't
seem to be very forthcoming
with any real information.
One thing the public
still can't understand
is why there wasn't a
single American aircraft
in the sky that night.
It is understandable to
not wanna try to fly a plane
over a densely populated city
when shells are raining down,
but what a lot of people
still have trouble
coming to grips with,
is that when the blip
showed up on the radar,
why wasn't one
military plane sent up
to intercept the object,
or at least just to
check out what it was?
The fact that aircraft
weren't scrambled
in response to
this radar return,
suggests to some
people that they knew
there was nothing there,
that the whole thing was some
sort of deception operation
organized by the government.
Representative
Leland Ford demands
a congressional
investigation into this.
He wants answers
because he feels that
the government hasn't been
very forthcoming about
what really happened.
Leland Ford is concerned
that there might be a
reason for this deception.
He thinks it's possible that
the government might be laying
the ground for moving some
of the defense infrastructure
and industry away
from Los Angeles.
If you wanted to
persuade people to move,
having some sort of dummy
raid might just scare them
into saying, "Okay
then, we'll move."
Since the beginning of the war,
there has been discussion of
moving LA's oil, ship building,
and aviation industries inland,
to protect them against
possible Japanese attack.
Some people at senior
level in the government
do think it's prudent
to move these industries
and Leland Ford is concerned.
His view is, "Look, these
industries are essential
to the economy of California.
We don't want to move them.
If they're at risk,
we protect them."
The greatest thing to
happen to the economy
after the Great Depression
is World War II.
Suddenly, everyone
is back to work
and manufacturing's
at an all time high,
so no one wants to see
the sudden booming economy
of the war industries
leave Southern California.
Before the shelling begins,
there are reports of
these flashing lights
and these flares
that are showing up
near these defense
plants around the city,
and during the shelling,
there are reports of
these objects in the air
that are following a route
that would've taken them over
the highly sensitive areas
of Douglas, Lockheed,
and North American Aviation.
News coverage
immediately after the air raid
suggests that whatever phantoms
were in the sky that night,
they seem to show an interest
in defense industry targets.
Some people start to
question whether or not
the attack was staged or
at least maybe exaggerated.
But some historians suspect
there may be an even
more sinister reason
to orchestrate a giant
false flag operation
throughout Los Angeles.
At the beginning of
the Second World War.
There was really, no real
concern about the loyalty
of Japanese-Americans.
After Pearl Harbor,
as time goes on
into January and February,
there is continued war
propaganda coming out.
There's more dehumanization
of the Japanese people.
Even though the Commander
of Western Defense command,
Major General John Dewitt,
reported that there were no acts
of Japanese-Americans
sabotaging American industry
or other aspects
of the war effort,
he still also recommended
that Japanese citizens
be moved away from
the West Coast
and its vital defense plans.
The initial hope is that
they will very quickly
evacuate themselves to
these internment camps.
It didn't take long for
the president to realize,
well, that's not gonna work,
'cause who's gonna
wanna do that?
Nobody, absolutely nobody.
On February 19th, 1942,
President Roosevelt issues
executive order 9066.
Executive order 9066
authorizes the removal
of anyone that
could be considered
a danger to the war effort.
It's vague language,
but it is clearly pointing
to Japanese people,
particularly Japanese people
who live on the West Coast.
To Roosevelt, in early 1942,
just 80 days after the
attack on Pearl Harbor,
the world looked very
scary and intimidating,
and unfortunately,
he made this decision
to deprive American
citizens of their rights.
The Battle of Los Angeles
came out really only five days
after FDR signed the
infamous executive order
to do with the internment
of Japanese people
in the United States
and this was controversial.
It arguably went against
his political instincts,
but on the other hand,
there was a feeling
that this was necessary,
and therefore did
something get staged
that would really make
everyone go along with this,
and say, "Yeah, we get
why this is needed"?
Was it all part of hyping
up the Japanese threat,
not just the threat
from invasion,
but the threat from within?
After the smoke clears,
after the blackout
order has been lifted,
there's no evidence that
there's actually been an attack,
yet the military arrests
20 Japanese-Americans
for colluding with the enemy.
This makes no sense,
because how could they
collude with planes,
when at least part of
the official narrative,
is there were no planes?
And the suspicion is
that this is perhaps
something aimed at driving
forward and accelerating
the pace of the
internment program.
When Secretary
of the Navy, Frank Knox,
first dismisses the so-called
Battle of Los Angeles
as a false alarm, many
citizens are outraged.
But as time passes,
even Angelenos
begin to question what they saw.
One of the big questions
about this Battle of Los Angeles
is why are there so many
different conflicting stories?
People report a wide
variety of things
and I think that's really an
indication of the type of panic
and utter fear that is
driving people in this moment.
For every person
that comes forward
and says that they did see
something in the night sky,
whether it was a plane
or a floating object,
other people come forward,
like Pulitzer Prize winning
journalist Ernie Pyle,
and says, "They saw
nothing that night
except for flashing lights,
tracer fire, smoke in the sky."
Some military historians claim
that the combination of things
that happened that night
led people to see things
that actually weren't there.
All of the elements
leading up to mass hysteria
are in place in Los Angeles
in February of 1942.
You have the attack on the
oil fields north of the city.
You have the aftermath of
the Pearl Harbor attack.
You have war
preparedness movements
and the assignment of
civil air defense wardens.
All of these elements combine
to make people afraid,
to make people nervous, to
make people jumping at shadows.
We already knew
how easily excitable
the American population was
from an event from 1938.
I'm speaking from the roof
of broadcasting
building, New York City.
The bells you hear are ringing
to warn the people to evacuate
the city as Martians approach.
Orson Welles and his radio
broadcast dramatization
of the War of the Worlds,
it was done in a false
documentary style
as if it was actually happening.
A shockingly large
number of people thought
they were listening to
an actual broadcast,
announcing the arrival of
extraterrestrial aliens
who were making war
with the planet Earth.
The American public, although
it likes to think of itself
as very sophisticated
and intelligent,
is not immune to the
effects of mass hysteria.
They flooded
telephone switchboards
for their local police forces
and their local media
demanding assistance
and demanding answers
about what was happening
in the alien invasion
of the United States.
Less
than 2.5 years later,
in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor
with the country on edge,
it's not just the
American public
who fall prey to
their own fears.
In the period after Pearl
Harbor, scared American aviators
and naval personnel
constantly file reports
that are alleging
that Japanese warships
are off the western coast
of the United States.
There are reports of aircraft
carriers, battleships,
massive flotillas of the
Imperial Japanese Navy.
Typically, they turn
out to be cargo craft,
elements of the US Navy,
or even in a couple
of instances,
floating debris like logs.
And the radar systems
that sparked the
Battle of Los Angeles
are far less reliable
than most people realize.
A lot of the technology
that we take for granted today
in regards to air defense
was in its infancy
at the beginning
of World War II.
Radar's a new technology
here, so it's not foolproof.
There's mistakes, there's
inconsistencies with radar.
A bird could show
up on the radar
and you might
think it's a plane.
Maybe that's why the object
just suddenly disappeared
off of radar screens
a few miles from downtown LA.
Because there was
nothing ever there.
Sometimes what you perceive
outweighs your own experience
and it causes you
to draw conclusions
that don't really fit the facts.
In the case of the
Battle of Los Angeles,
people who had no wartime
experience see flashing lights,
they see explosions,
and they want to assume
that there's a
purpose behind them.
When we're in a moment of war,
when we're in a moment of fear
where the world
feels upside down
and the unknown is happening,
people's minds play
tricks on them.
On February 25th, 1942,
the helplessness and fear
Angelenos felt was very real,
even if an imminent
invasion was not.
We may never know what
triggered the barrage,
be it a phantom aircraft
or a case of nerves.
Either way, The
Battle of LA remains
one of World War II's
enduring unsolved mysteries.
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
thank you for watching
History's Greatest Mysteries.
in the skies over Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is one of the
most critically important
war defense cities in
the entire country.
All hell is breaking loose.
There are reports of
a Japanese aircraft
shot down in Hollywood.
No lights anywhere,
no street lights,
no lights in buildings,
no house lights.
Complete and utter
darkness, it's as if LA
has just been wiped off the map.
This is absolute pandemonium.
The only lights are
the search lights
and the anti-aircraft
guns firing.
When the smoke clears,
the incident becomes
known as the Battle of LA
and is veiled in
secrecy and lies.
The army says that there
was something in the sky.
The Navy then says
there was actually
nothing in the sky at all.
Angelenos are
committed to the fact
that they have seen something.
Is the government actually
covering something up?
Now, we explore the
top theories surrounding
this mysterious occurrence.
In the middle of a
blackout, in pitch dark,
it's a lot harder to
separate facts from fiction.
What really triggered the
so-called Battle of Los Angeles?
February 24th,
1942, Los Angeles, California.
It's less than three months
since the Japanese
Imperial Fleet
launched a surprise attack
on American forces
at Pearl Harbor,
killing 2,400
and bringing the United States
fully into World War II.
On the home front,
the possibility of another
attack on American soil
is now very real,
especially in the nation's
biggest coastal cities.
There's widespread fear
that Japan will attack
the US mainland next,
and the US military has vowed
never to be caught
off guard again.
Not only does Los Angeles
lead American cities
when it comes to
aircraft production
with Douglas, Lockheed and
North American Aviation,
but in San Pedro Bay,
it also houses a
huge naval armada.
With a vulnerable location
on the Pacific Ocean,
plus major metropolitan area
and a population
of over 1 million,
city makes for a great
target and they know it.
So to bolster its defenses,
anti-aircraft guns have been
placed all around the city,
bunkers have been built
and air raid protocols
have been drilled
into the population.
After Pearl Harbor,
the United States has been
practicing blackout drills
in every coastal city out
of fear of an aerial attack.
The purpose of these blackouts
is so that enemy planes can't
see the lights of the city.
The enemy might
send 100s of bombers
to fly towards American cities
and drop bombs almost
indiscriminately
across any urban zone.
At night, it's very hard to
engage in aerial navigation.
However, the lights of a city
could make it very obvious
if you were near your target.
By now, Los Angeles has been
through so many blackouts,
the LA Times has nicknamed
it the City of Shadows.
The city's ordeal begins
with a typical blackout drill,
on the night of
February 24th, 1942.
No lights anywhere,
not a cigarette is allowed
to be lit on the street
for fear of giving away
any type of location
to a potential enemy.
Even all the radio stations
in LA go completely silent.
At 10:23 PM,
the blackout is lifted
and Angelenos go to bed thinking
it was just another drill.
But at 2:21 in the morning,
LA residents wake to the
scream of air raid sirens,
and the city is again
thrust into darkness.
Search lights start
sweeping over the skies
and you have all of
these people starting
to run out of their
homes trying to see
what it is that
they're looking at.
It's becoming
increasingly clear.
Whatever's happening
in Los Angeles
isn't just another drill.
At 3:06 AM, the search
lights converge
on a target over Culver
City and Los Angeles erupts.
The 37th Coast artillery
brigade starts firing
12 pounder guns that
lob three inch shells
up into the atmosphere.
The sound is enormous.
A lot of the people mistake it
for the impact of bombs
striking the earth
from enemy attack.
You can only
imagine what this sky
had to have looked
like that night.
You've got these orange
tracer lights in the air,
bursts in the sky.
No one had ever seen anything
like this in the United States.
To a lot of people
in Los Angeles,
it seems like it's the end of
the world, like it's Doomsday.
Phone calls flood
the city's information lines
with wildly differing accounts
of sightings in the sky.
Eyewitness reports
start pouring in
to military authorities.
We have reports of 100s of
enemy aircraft flying overhead.
We have reports of
aircraft crashing
throughout the Los Angeles area,
presumably shot down
by air defenses.
The only lights you've
got are the search lights
and the anti-aircraft
guns firing,
which just add to the sense
that they are in a war zone.
The anti-aircraft artillery lobs
almost nine tons of
ordinance into the skies.
100s of buildings and
vehicles are damaged
by the fragments of the falling
shells coming back to earth.
This is absolute pandemonium.
A lot of people are just trying
to get the hell out of there.
They're piling into
cars and driving.
There's gridlock, five
people are killed.
Three fatalities as a
result of traffic accidents
in the chaos,
and two people die of stress
induced heart attacks,
and it's pitch black.
But nothing's been shot down,
no bombs have been dropped.
What's the story? What
actually happened?
Military command
orders a ceasefire at 4:14 AM.
They officially lift
the blackout at 7:25 AM.
Daylight brings more
questions than answers,
as local newspapers print a
flurry of conflicting reports.
The most iconic
image from this event
is a photograph that
appears in the newspaper
with eight spotlights
shining up into the sky
on this object that's
floating in the middle.
You can't really make
out what the object is,
because it's brightened
up by all the spotlights.
But not even
the military can agree
on what, if anything, was there.
The Secretary of
the Navy, Frank Knox,
came out immediately after
the Battle of Los Angeles
and announced that
the air defense guns
had been firing at nothing.
He says this is a result of
rising panic, of jittery nerves,
that those manning the
coastal defense batteries
were also scared.
But then Henry Stimson,
the Secretary of War,
gives a press
conference and he says,
"No, there were planes present
and they weren't United
States aircraft."
Less than 48 hours before
the Battle of Los
Angeles, area residents
feel their vulnerability
for the first time.
As President Roosevelt
is about to deliver
his fireside chat,
a giant Japanese submarine
rises out of the sea
about 10 miles northwest
of Santa Barbara
and takes aim at the
Elwood oil fields.
The submarine took
shots at the piers
and it shot at the fuel
storage on top of the bluff.
It miraculously managed to miss
just about everything
it shot at.
But Santa Barbara's only 90
miles north of Los Angeles.
If they're going to
attack Santa Barbara,
couldn't Los Angeles be next?
So there's this really
heightened sense of fear
of what's coming.
Around 7:00
PM on February 24th,
Naval intelligence
instructs coastal defenses
to prepare for an attack
within the next 10 hours.
The entirety of Southern
California is under
this blackout and general alert.
There's the concern
that Japanese submarines
might still be out there
looking for trouble.
But nothing really happens,
so that alert is
canceled around 10:30.
People are going to bed,
they think everything
might be okay.
Just when it looks like
nothing is gonna happen,
right before 2:00 AM, a radar
station near Santa Monica
picks up what appears to be
a formation of aircraft.
Two more radar
installations report
that they too have
detected something
moving towards the
American coastline.
At 2:15 AM,
the military issues
its highest level alert,
ordering the 37th
coastal artillery
to engage enemy targets
as soon as they appear.
There are anti-aircraft
batteries distributed
all over the city
and there's a concern
that Japanese aircraft
are soon to attack Los Angeles.
At 2:27 AM,
the target is tracked
to within three miles
of the Los Angeles area
and then disappears.
At the same time
information centers
are flooded with reports
of enemy planes overhead.
The reports of
seeing these planes,
they're not just coming
from people on the street
who are panicking,
these are trained
military personnel.
There's an artillery colonel
that sees 25 airplanes
in formation.
There's another report that
there's 12 airplanes
in formation.
Someone else reports that
they see a single aircraft.
So there's total confusion here
about what people are seeing.
But military
witnesses are certain
they've spotted
aircraft overhead,
and the top brass believes them.
It's not just the Secretary
of War, Henry Stimson,
who's saying the
aircraft were real.
It's George Marshall,
FDR's Army chief of staff,
and he writes a memo
to FDR and he says,
"Yeah, there were
aircraft present."
But whatever the Coast Defense
Brigade is firing towards
is not shooting back.
And there are so many
unanswered questions
about these planes, like, where
would they have launched from?
There's no Japanese
aircraft carriers
within range of Los Angeles.
There are rumors of
downed Japanese aircraft,
but that turns out
to be just rumors.
There are rumors that
bombs were dropped,
but again, no
bombs were dropped,
so there's a little
bit of a mystery.
In his memo, Marshal posits
a possible explanation for
the lack of enemy fire.
Marshall's memo states
that access pilots
could have flown commercial
aircraft over Los Angeles,
not as a bombing mission,
but as a surveillance tool
to spot enemy aircraft positions
and also spread fear and panic.
But if the enemy had access
to commercial planes,
where were they keeping them?
There's speculation
from Secretary Stimson
and General Marshall that
the axis may have established
a secret base in Mexico,
and used it to launch aircraft
to fly over Los Angeles.
That sounds like
crazy person talk,
but there's actually
something to it.
And the reason why is that
during the First World War,
the German government
made some advances,
attempting to recruit
the Mexican government
to join World War I on the
side of the central powers
against the allies that
included the United States,
and there was an awareness that
Mexican commercial airliners
were operating aircraft that
had been made in Germany,
that could be easily
converted from
civilian commercial transport
into aircraft that were
capable of carrying bombs
or paratroopers.
American authorities devote
an enormous amount of
resources searching
for secret access bases
both in northern Mexico
and throughout
Southern California.
However, there's no evidence
that there's a secret base.
The American public
wants answers
and Secretary Stimson is
not going to supply them.
Stimson just says, "Well, we
don't have definitive answers
to this, but maybe it's
better to be too alert
than not alert enough."
For days after
the so-called Battle
of Los Angeles,
residents still struggle to
make sense of what happened.
So whatever happened that night
turns out to be a solitary event
and there are much
bigger concerns
happening in Europe
and the Pacific.
As World War II rages on,
the mysterious air raid
fades in importance.
But after the wars end, the US
Coastal Artillery Association
shows renewed interest in
the mysterious 1942 event.
The Coastal
Artillery Association
is essentially a
veterans organization
made up of units
that were responsible
for coastal and harbor
defenses in the United States.
So they start reviewing
the Battle of LA,
documenting it for posterity,
and what they discover
puts a whole new
spin on the event.
It turns out that at 1:00 AM,
so just really two hours before
the Battle of Los
Angeles commences,
two weather balloons were
launched in the Hollywood area
and it becomes clear that
they may not be the only ones
to have been
launched that night.
Weather balloons
are critical to the war effort,
both on the battlefield,
and on the home front.
Coastal artillery units
constantly release balloons
to collect meteorological data,
things like airspeed,
and precipitation,
and atmospheric conditions.
This actually helps the guns
on the ground be more accurate.
If there is enemy
aircraft coming,
it is imperative that they get
these balloons up in the air
as soon as possible.
In order to track the balloons,
they added a small candle
that they put in a glass
jar underneath the balloon,
because the balloon has
a kind of a silvery skin,
that light is able to reflect
as far as 25,000 feet.
At about 3:00 AM,
about 40 minutes after
the first sirens go off,
the 203rd Coastal Artillery Unit
launches two further
weather balloons.
One's launched from Westwood
and the other one from
Battery D in Santa Monica.
The lieutenant in charge
of Battery D's
meteorological operations
notifies his commander of
the balloon's departure.
The timing couldn't be worse.
Guners are scouring the sky,
looking for enemy aircraft
and almost immediately,
Battery D notices
that their balloons
are coming under fire.
There is no controlling
system such that
when one unit releases balloons
into the sky over Los Angeles,
other units would know
where those balloons are
or when they were released.
So while one unit is releasing
balloons to collect data
for its own accuracy,
another unit might be
mistaking those balloons
for enemy targets.
Colonel Ray Watson is commanding
Battery D of the 203rd
and he basically says,
"Don't fire, these
are our balloons.
Don't fire, don't shoot."
So even though Colonel
Watson is warning people,
the order comes back from
high command, "No, shoot."
The 203rd Coast Artillery
probably triggered
this entire incident by
releasing weather balloons,
but interestingly,
this is a battery
that did not fire that night,
because the the battalion
commander decided
that there was
nothing in the sky.
Colonel Ray Watson is
relieved of his duty immediately
and the story about the balloons
in Battery D that
night remains hidden
for a number of years.
Nevertheless, questions remain,
particularly about the
earlier radar sightings.
Is it possible that something
far simpler is to blame?
In the years since,
we have learned that the
military's weather balloons
weren't the only things
floating in the sky that night.
In the 1960s, two full
decades after the events
of the Battle of Los Angeles,
a former air defense
artillery crewman claimed
that his unit was desperate
to test their own
radar capabilities,
and because there were
no aircraft available
for that very type of test,
they obtained some
children's balloons,
loaded them full of
hydrogen for buoyancy,
suspended some foil
streamers underneath them
to create a radar return, and
released them into the sky.
And lo and behold, it worked.
They were able to see these
balloons on the radar.
But as the night
wears on, the winds change
and an onshore
breeze starts pushing
the balloons back
towards the city.
Prevailing winds make
it almost impossible
to conceive of radar picking up
some of these children's
balloons with foil beneath them
100 miles west of the
city, out at sea.
However, if a radar were to
pick up that kind of a return,
if the balloon popped, the
return would disappear
from the screen
almost immediately.
Maybe a combination
of radar balloons
and weather balloons tricked
the city of Los Angeles
into believing that
they were under attack.
So this information
might fill in
some puzzle pieces from 1942,
but people still find it
odd that 1,400 rounds shot
into the air couldn't bring
down a single balloon.
Eyewitnesses
recall seeing an object floating
in the dark skies over Los
Angeles on February 25th, 1942.
Something moving ominously slow,
practically hovering overhead.
Many historians believe
they could have been
weather balloons
or toy balloons used
for radar testing,
but even if true,
it leaves more than a
few unanswered questions.
One of the biggest
problems with this theory
is in relation to the
size of the balloons.
Kids' balloons are not
exactly airplane size
and military weather
balloons back in the day
were around four
feet in diameter,
but there is another
kind of balloon
that could explain
what witnesses claim
to have seen overhead.
The Japanese were absolutely
desperate to find ways
to attack the United States.
There was no possibility of
bringing their aircraft carriers
within range of
land-based air power,
so they start looking
at other mechanisms.
In 1933, almost 10 years
before that terrifying
air raid signal went off,
a Japanese general begins
a new weapons program
called The Fu-Go.
The Japanese will
ultimately launch
a major offensive operation
against the United States
using intercontinental weapons,
in the form of a
series of balloons.
They discover
that high altitude air currents
can deliver a balloon
across the Pacific
in as little as 30 hours.
These are 33 foot wide balloons
made of laminated paper.
They're capable of
holding a massive amount
of hydrogen inside of them
and lofting high explosive
and incendiary bombs.
When released from the
Japanese home islands
and put into what we now
know as the jet stream,
they can effectively blow over
the North American continent.
What the Japanese were
hoping to accomplish
was that they would hit
the Pacific Northwest
at a time when it's being
swept by intense winds,
when everything's dry,
and that they will
then rain down balloons
that will start forest fires.
And the thought was that if
we can suddenly give them
this epidemic of forest fires,
we will use our resources
trying to put those fires out,
rather than trying to attack
the Japanese home islands.
These things are a little
bit more sophisticated
than people realize.
There's a mechanism
once the balloons
get into the jet stream
to make sure that
it maintains height.
If it gets too low,
it drops a sandbag and then
that keeps the height up
until it gets over the land.
And they don't need to
be particularly well aimed
as long as they hit a
rural area with dry tinder.
The prevailing wind
patterns of the jet stream
in February of 1942 would have
essentially blown balloons
from the Japanese home islands
directly towards Los Angeles.
The Fu-Go balloon could explain
the sudden blips on the radar,
the scattered reports
of a zeppelin,
and the oddly slow speed
at which it left the city.
But Japanese
documents discovered
after the war revealed
that the Fu-Go
was mass produced
starting in 1944,
2 years after the Battle
of Los Angeles incident.
But could this have been a
test run of an early prototype?
Perhaps.
The documents also revealed
that many of these
floating bombs
successfully made
it to North America.
From November of '44
until March of 1945,
they launched over
9,000 Fu-Go balloons.
At least 300 of them
actually reach the mainland
of the United States and Canada.
Most of the payloads fizzle out,
but one actually got through
and knocked out the power
to the very facility that
was producing the plutonium
that would be used
in the atomic bomb
that was later
dropped on Nagasaki.
And just four
months before the war's end,
one of them reveals its
full destructive potential.
May 5th, 1945, Bly, Oregon.
Reverend Archie Mitchell
and his pregnant wife Elsie
take five of their Sunday
school students on a picnic
in the nearby mountains.
When one of the kids,
a 13-year-old girl, find
some fabric sprawled out
on the forest floor,
she calls over Elsie
and the other kids
to come investigate.
Elsie calls to her
husband back at the car,
"Look what we found, it's
some kind of balloon."
The balloon gondola
had experienced
a failure of its
triggering system,
the system that would've
dropped the incendiary charge
and dropped the bomb.
Instead, the entire
gondola comes down
with the incendiary device
and the bomb still intact.
Just as the reverend tells
his wife not to touch it,
boom, there's a huge explosion.
The reverend goes running
to give aid to Elsie
and the five kids, but
there's nothing he can do.
They've all been
killed instantly.
Some people are convinced
that a balloon like this
is actually what drifted
into LA's airspace
and started the
so-called Battle of LA.
Even so, questions remain.
So as hard as it is to believe
that the United States military
could not shoot down
a weather balloon,
it's harder still
to even fathom that
they couldn't shoot
down this larger object
with an explosive payload.
Whatever that iconic
photo is showing
in the Los Angeles Times,
whether it's something
like a balloon
or a more traditional aircraft,
you'd think that artillery fire
would've at least taken it down,
or at the very least,
sent it reeling.
More than 80 years since the sky disrupted
over Los Angeles,
the so-called Battle of
LA remains an enigma.
No one from the military,
or the government
can say for certain what entered
the city's airspace that night,
nor will they explain why the
city's anti-aircraft batteries
failed to take anything down.
In the absence of any
definitive answers,
a new theory takes hold,
one that confounds
experts to this day.
As interested sleuths
start to comb through
all the documentation
and witness statements,
they begin to think
that the official story
has swept a lot of the
eerie details under the rug.
In particular, people
fixate on the iconic photo
of search lights
that are all shining
on some unidentifiable
object in the sky.
It's disc shape, but it's
appearing to glow as well.
Now you can say, well,
it would, wouldn't it?
I mean, it's illuminated
by search lights.
But again, they
picked up something.
There's gotta be something there
for this thing to be glowing.
In 1950,
a former Marine Corps
aviator named Donald Keyhoe
makes an interesting connection.
Keyhoe suggests that the
unexplained aerial phenomenon
was extraterrestrial in nature,
not the government's explanation
of Japanese planes or balloons.
With all due respect
to the Air Force,
I believe that some of
them will prove to be
of interplanetary origin.
In 1942, the concept
of a flying saucer
isn't really part of the
American lexicon at all.
However, investigators
looking back
on the battle of Los Angeles,
essentially backdate that idea
into the story surrounding
what might have
happened that night.
Some of the
eyewitness statements
help fuel this theory
that this is a UFO,
because of this strange ability
to be very slow on the radar
and then suddenly it speeds up,
that it's maybe hovering,
then suddenly it's
moving very fast,
that it's at a low altitude
and then it's at
a high altitude.
All of these help fuel this idea
that maybe this is some
kind of unknown aircraft
from another planet that's
coming down to Earth.
There're going to be questions
from the highest
ranks of leadership,
and command in the military
and civilian government,
and reports about this incident
go all the way to
the Secretary of War.
They go all the way to US Army
chief of staff, George Marshall,
and they have to report to the
president what happened in LA.
Proponents of the UFO theory
point to a series of
unauthenticated memos.
There are a number of
documents floating around,
purporting to be
from George Marshall
to FDR talking about the
recovery of two craft.
One of these was
apparently recovered
off the coast between Los
Angeles and Catalina Island,
the other in the San
Bernardino mountains.
Marshall also goes on
to allegedly explained
to FDR in these memos that the
objects that were recovered
didn't resemble any
conventional aircraft
and he presumes that
whatever these objects were,
were of an
interplanetary origin.
The eyewitness
reports that come in
the night of the air raid
include many descriptions
of unusual aircraft.
The US will encounter even more
unidentified flying objects
as the war continues.
Towards the end of World War II,
allied pilots begin to
describe being followed
by very strange lights
over the skies in Europe
and they nicknamed
them, "foo fighters".
Whatever these objects were,
it was said that they
would usually shine
in red, yellow, and green.
They would fly alongside
the allied aircraft
at speeds up to
200 miles an hour.
Sometimes there would be one,
sometimes there could
be several of them.
Some ufologists
speculate that FDR himself
was a believer in
extraterrestrial life.
Allegedly, this
unauthenticated memo
written by FDR in
February of 1944
is sent to a special committee
on non-terrestrial
science and technology.
Supposedly in this memo,
FDR is slowly coming
to grips with the idea
that the planet Earth
is not the only one
that's able to house
intelligent life.
He says that, "We will take
advantage of these wonders
that have come to us
after we've won the war."
There are many
people who believe
the Battle of Los Angeles
was really Earth's
first big encounter
with extraterrestrials,
and of course, there's an
equally large number of people
who think that's
complete nonsense.
Under particular scrutiny
are the unauthorized documents
between Roosevelt and Marshall.
Experts question
their credibility.
There is a lot of
controversy about this.
There are many, many
documents circulating
in the UFO community
that are frankly bogus.
There are big question
marks over this.
In addition, analysis
of the infamous LA Times
photograph from 1942
raises even more questions.
Retouching of
photographs was something
that occurred commonplace
in the 1930s and 1940s.
Newspapers at the time,
it was very common
for them to create
a more of a contrast with
the black and the white.
When they look at the
negative of this photo
versus what's published,
they discovered that this photo
has been touched up quite a bit.
There are details that
are in the foreground
toward the bottom
of the photograph,
where they can see they
brought out the mountain ranges
that are seen in the background.
They also blow out some of the
overexposed components of it.
The skyline has been darkened,
the searchlight beams
have been enhanced,
and what's actually lens flare
has been altered to make it
look as if it's explosions.
The photograph
makes people think
that there was
something in the sky.
But what if there
actually wasn't something
in the sky that night?
Whatever terror
the people of Los Angeles
endure on February 25th, 1942,
is soon matched by
frustration and anger.
There are so many questions
about what happens on
this night in Los Angeles
and the government doesn't
seem to be very forthcoming
with any real information.
One thing the public
still can't understand
is why there wasn't a
single American aircraft
in the sky that night.
It is understandable to
not wanna try to fly a plane
over a densely populated city
when shells are raining down,
but what a lot of people
still have trouble
coming to grips with,
is that when the blip
showed up on the radar,
why wasn't one
military plane sent up
to intercept the object,
or at least just to
check out what it was?
The fact that aircraft
weren't scrambled
in response to
this radar return,
suggests to some
people that they knew
there was nothing there,
that the whole thing was some
sort of deception operation
organized by the government.
Representative
Leland Ford demands
a congressional
investigation into this.
He wants answers
because he feels that
the government hasn't been
very forthcoming about
what really happened.
Leland Ford is concerned
that there might be a
reason for this deception.
He thinks it's possible that
the government might be laying
the ground for moving some
of the defense infrastructure
and industry away
from Los Angeles.
If you wanted to
persuade people to move,
having some sort of dummy
raid might just scare them
into saying, "Okay
then, we'll move."
Since the beginning of the war,
there has been discussion of
moving LA's oil, ship building,
and aviation industries inland,
to protect them against
possible Japanese attack.
Some people at senior
level in the government
do think it's prudent
to move these industries
and Leland Ford is concerned.
His view is, "Look, these
industries are essential
to the economy of California.
We don't want to move them.
If they're at risk,
we protect them."
The greatest thing to
happen to the economy
after the Great Depression
is World War II.
Suddenly, everyone
is back to work
and manufacturing's
at an all time high,
so no one wants to see
the sudden booming economy
of the war industries
leave Southern California.
Before the shelling begins,
there are reports of
these flashing lights
and these flares
that are showing up
near these defense
plants around the city,
and during the shelling,
there are reports of
these objects in the air
that are following a route
that would've taken them over
the highly sensitive areas
of Douglas, Lockheed,
and North American Aviation.
News coverage
immediately after the air raid
suggests that whatever phantoms
were in the sky that night,
they seem to show an interest
in defense industry targets.
Some people start to
question whether or not
the attack was staged or
at least maybe exaggerated.
But some historians suspect
there may be an even
more sinister reason
to orchestrate a giant
false flag operation
throughout Los Angeles.
At the beginning of
the Second World War.
There was really, no real
concern about the loyalty
of Japanese-Americans.
After Pearl Harbor,
as time goes on
into January and February,
there is continued war
propaganda coming out.
There's more dehumanization
of the Japanese people.
Even though the Commander
of Western Defense command,
Major General John Dewitt,
reported that there were no acts
of Japanese-Americans
sabotaging American industry
or other aspects
of the war effort,
he still also recommended
that Japanese citizens
be moved away from
the West Coast
and its vital defense plans.
The initial hope is that
they will very quickly
evacuate themselves to
these internment camps.
It didn't take long for
the president to realize,
well, that's not gonna work,
'cause who's gonna
wanna do that?
Nobody, absolutely nobody.
On February 19th, 1942,
President Roosevelt issues
executive order 9066.
Executive order 9066
authorizes the removal
of anyone that
could be considered
a danger to the war effort.
It's vague language,
but it is clearly pointing
to Japanese people,
particularly Japanese people
who live on the West Coast.
To Roosevelt, in early 1942,
just 80 days after the
attack on Pearl Harbor,
the world looked very
scary and intimidating,
and unfortunately,
he made this decision
to deprive American
citizens of their rights.
The Battle of Los Angeles
came out really only five days
after FDR signed the
infamous executive order
to do with the internment
of Japanese people
in the United States
and this was controversial.
It arguably went against
his political instincts,
but on the other hand,
there was a feeling
that this was necessary,
and therefore did
something get staged
that would really make
everyone go along with this,
and say, "Yeah, we get
why this is needed"?
Was it all part of hyping
up the Japanese threat,
not just the threat
from invasion,
but the threat from within?
After the smoke clears,
after the blackout
order has been lifted,
there's no evidence that
there's actually been an attack,
yet the military arrests
20 Japanese-Americans
for colluding with the enemy.
This makes no sense,
because how could they
collude with planes,
when at least part of
the official narrative,
is there were no planes?
And the suspicion is
that this is perhaps
something aimed at driving
forward and accelerating
the pace of the
internment program.
When Secretary
of the Navy, Frank Knox,
first dismisses the so-called
Battle of Los Angeles
as a false alarm, many
citizens are outraged.
But as time passes,
even Angelenos
begin to question what they saw.
One of the big questions
about this Battle of Los Angeles
is why are there so many
different conflicting stories?
People report a wide
variety of things
and I think that's really an
indication of the type of panic
and utter fear that is
driving people in this moment.
For every person
that comes forward
and says that they did see
something in the night sky,
whether it was a plane
or a floating object,
other people come forward,
like Pulitzer Prize winning
journalist Ernie Pyle,
and says, "They saw
nothing that night
except for flashing lights,
tracer fire, smoke in the sky."
Some military historians claim
that the combination of things
that happened that night
led people to see things
that actually weren't there.
All of the elements
leading up to mass hysteria
are in place in Los Angeles
in February of 1942.
You have the attack on the
oil fields north of the city.
You have the aftermath of
the Pearl Harbor attack.
You have war
preparedness movements
and the assignment of
civil air defense wardens.
All of these elements combine
to make people afraid,
to make people nervous, to
make people jumping at shadows.
We already knew
how easily excitable
the American population was
from an event from 1938.
I'm speaking from the roof
of broadcasting
building, New York City.
The bells you hear are ringing
to warn the people to evacuate
the city as Martians approach.
Orson Welles and his radio
broadcast dramatization
of the War of the Worlds,
it was done in a false
documentary style
as if it was actually happening.
A shockingly large
number of people thought
they were listening to
an actual broadcast,
announcing the arrival of
extraterrestrial aliens
who were making war
with the planet Earth.
The American public, although
it likes to think of itself
as very sophisticated
and intelligent,
is not immune to the
effects of mass hysteria.
They flooded
telephone switchboards
for their local police forces
and their local media
demanding assistance
and demanding answers
about what was happening
in the alien invasion
of the United States.
Less
than 2.5 years later,
in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor
with the country on edge,
it's not just the
American public
who fall prey to
their own fears.
In the period after Pearl
Harbor, scared American aviators
and naval personnel
constantly file reports
that are alleging
that Japanese warships
are off the western coast
of the United States.
There are reports of aircraft
carriers, battleships,
massive flotillas of the
Imperial Japanese Navy.
Typically, they turn
out to be cargo craft,
elements of the US Navy,
or even in a couple
of instances,
floating debris like logs.
And the radar systems
that sparked the
Battle of Los Angeles
are far less reliable
than most people realize.
A lot of the technology
that we take for granted today
in regards to air defense
was in its infancy
at the beginning
of World War II.
Radar's a new technology
here, so it's not foolproof.
There's mistakes, there's
inconsistencies with radar.
A bird could show
up on the radar
and you might
think it's a plane.
Maybe that's why the object
just suddenly disappeared
off of radar screens
a few miles from downtown LA.
Because there was
nothing ever there.
Sometimes what you perceive
outweighs your own experience
and it causes you
to draw conclusions
that don't really fit the facts.
In the case of the
Battle of Los Angeles,
people who had no wartime
experience see flashing lights,
they see explosions,
and they want to assume
that there's a
purpose behind them.
When we're in a moment of war,
when we're in a moment of fear
where the world
feels upside down
and the unknown is happening,
people's minds play
tricks on them.
On February 25th, 1942,
the helplessness and fear
Angelenos felt was very real,
even if an imminent
invasion was not.
We may never know what
triggered the barrage,
be it a phantom aircraft
or a case of nerves.
Either way, The
Battle of LA remains
one of World War II's
enduring unsolved mysteries.
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
thank you for watching
History's Greatest Mysteries.