Replies

Radio News Report: News Clip

An editorial in the Long Beach Independent wrote, "There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter."

It is an intersesting case as there really was an object according to a 1983 Air Force report on the incident. They claim it was a weather balloon - that fighters and anti-aircraft artillery could not destroy.

"An alert called at 1918 [7:18 p.m., Pacific time] was lifted at 2223, and the tension temporarily relaxed. But early in the morning of the 25th renewed activity began. Radars picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Antiaircraft batteries were alerted at 0215 and were put on Green Alert—ready to fire—a few minutes later. The AAF kept its pursuit planes on the ground, preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force. Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of "enemy planes, " even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted "about 25 planes at 12,000 feet" over Los Angeles. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon "the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano." From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance." -- pp. 277-286, Washington, D.C. : Office of Air Force History

It is interesting that the USAF lied about sending US Army fighters to intercept the aircraft in their official history when multiple contemporaneous reports including the one above states they did.

Now this is interesting, my mom and dad were driving in LA when this happen, they're story seems to differ from the reports. When the sirens went off they and several other pulled over and went lights out. My father who was a pilot at the time said there was no doubt it was a small plane going west to east and trying to maneuver to avoid the AA. The next morning there were reports of a military surveillance plane going down east of LA. This was also about the time a Japanese sub was was shelling a refinery off the coast of Santa Monica. Dads convinced we shot down one of our own planes as it was returning from the sea in an attempt to locate the sub.

This incident is discussed a bit in Dolan’s “UFOs and the National Security State, 1941-1973”. He indicates that DOD denied the existence of the entire episode until 1974. At that time a memo from George Marshall to FDR on the incident was declassified.

Marshall told FDR that the UFOs were “commercial sources, operated by enemy agents for the purposes of spreading alarm, disclosing locations of antiaircraft positions, and slowing production through blackout.”

What is so ironic is that during the war and post war period authorities of all countries blamed the flights of the “foo fighters” on the enemy, whoever that might be.

Marshall had no evidence for his statements. Advice from Presidential advisors hasn’t gotten a lot better since those days.