ALIEN: Battle of Los Angeles

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On October 30th, 1938, people all across the country turned on their radios to hear what sounded like a pretty scary news report.

It claimed that an unknown object, seemingly alien, had fallen on a farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

As the updates continued, it led audiences to believe the United States was physically under attack by extraterrestrial forces. None of this was actually happening, of course.

It was actually a radio play by Orson Welles called The War of the Worlds.

But for the people who tuned in late and didn't hear the disclaimers, was it all fake? Well, I can only imagine how freaking terrifying that must have been.

The next day, there were headlines like, fake radio war stirs terror through the U.S.

Reports spoke of families jumping into their cars and fleeing the invasion, which probably showed the government if this ever happened for real, we have to be prepared for two things.

Fight back and keep it under wraps. Cut to four years later, February 24th, 1942, That night, a large, unidentified object appeared over Los Angeles.

The military acted swiftly, firing over a thousand rounds at this UFO. And while it didn't fire back, they didn't manage to shoot it down.

They couldn't keep it from the public like they'd hoped either. So the military called it everything from a weather balloon to an attack from Japanese forces.

But after looking at all the evidence, or rather, lack thereof, Orson Welles' story about an alien invasion seems closer to the truth. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is So Supernatural.

Welcome back. I'm Yvette Gentile.

And I'm her sister, Rasha Pecarrero.

And y'all know that Rasha and I love a good UFO case, but the Battle of Los Angeles stands out from all the others for one reason.

It led to a full-blown firefight as the military tried to shoot it out of the sky.

Plus, there were thousands of eyewitnesses, a picture of the unidentified object that ran in the paper, and an alleged government memo that suggested the top U.S.

officials knew the truth about what was happening in the skies that night.

But in order to tell today's story, we need to travel back to World War II.

To a very important date in history, one that will live in infamy, December 7th, 1941, where more than 2,400 Americans died in the Pearl Harbor attacks, including members of the military as well as civilians.

Growing up in Hawaii, especially in Honolulu, you couldn't not be affected by the Pearl Harbor tragedy.

Mom even said that when I was a baby, Anytime we would drive past Pearl Harbor on the freeway, she said I would cry and cry and cry.

And she was absolutely convinced that I possibly lived a past life at Pearl Harbor. Yeah, I remember when mom and I first arrived in Hawaii, we went there, you know, to pay our respects.

And the moment that we stepped on those grounds, I remember just being so incredibly emotional.

You could feel just all the pain, you know, from what everybody had gone through, you know, during that time.

Really, really an emotional place. And I highly recommend that if you're ever in Hawaii, to go there and to experience it for yourselves.

Growing up on Oahu, the impact of Pearl Harbor affects every single person.

So understandably, in 1942, the year after the attacks, Most Americans were still reeling from the tragedy.

While the war was mostly being fought in Europe and Asia, it was now obvious that even the United States wasn't safe. The Axis could strike again at any moment.

The U.S. government was especially worried about an attack on Los Angeles, California.
It was already a massive city with a population of 1.5 million people.

And since it was on the West Coast, it was much closer to Japan than potential targets that were further inland. The good news was that California officials were taking steps to keep LA safe.

They cooperated with the Army's Western Defense Command, which was a division responsible for keeping the whole West Coast safe from invasion.

They built bomb shelters all over the city where locals could flee in the event of an attack. They also set up anti-aircraft guns so they could shoot down invaders if they were spotted in the air.

These things were pretty wild too. Think of a big, huge pallet that's large enough for three or four people to stand comfortably.
And it has this huge gun mounted on it.

They set these up on rooftops all across Los Angeles. They were manned with servicemen at all times.

They were also doing regular blackout drills all across the city. So this means that at night, Angelinos were encouraged to turn off every light in the city.

Home lights, street lights, neon signs at stores, even the radio stations had to shut down. People weren't even allowed to go outside with lit cigarettes.

The idea was that if enemy airplanes were flying overhead, they'd have a harder time identifying the target if they couldn't see anything in the city.

And Los Angeles had these drills almost every night, which is how LA eventually earned a new nickname, the city of Shadows.

Now, there hadn't been any confirmed reports of Japanese airplanes flying over California yet, but the city still did these drills regularly because of course it doesn't hurt to be prepared.

In fact, there's a blackout drill on the evening of February 24th, 1942.

It starts at 7.18 p.m. and lasts until 10.23 p.m., which is pretty typical.
These blackouts tend to last for a few hours, but it can vary from night to night.

Except four hours later, at 2.21 a.m., there's another one.

Radio broadcasters announce what's going on right before they go silent. Air raid sirens wail in Los Angeles.
But it's not just there. Warnings stretch down all the way to the Mexican border.

In geographical terms, this is the largest blackout yet, which suggests this is not a drill or a test. It's actually the real deal.

See, just a few minutes earlier at 2.15 a.m., radar technicians in Los Angeles detected something over the Pacific Ocean.

They could see that it was headed their way, but they couldn't tell what it actually was.

At that time, they issued what's called a green alert. which meant they weren't sure yet if they were actually in danger or not.

But they wanted all of the anti-aircraft gunmen across the city to be prepared to fire if necessary.

Within the next six minutes, that object travels more than 120 miles. And the whole time it's headed east, right toward Los Angeles.
But so far, no one has seen the craft with their own eyes.

That's true of the army soldiers and for the civilians, many of whom woke up when they heard the sirens and went outside to look up. At that point, officials only have radar reports to work off of.

They still don't know what the thing actually is, though out of an abundance of caution, the military warns that it could be a Japanese plane.

Except right when the vessel is supposed to reach land, it completely vanishes from the radar screen. Like it just teleported away.

Now, if this were to happen today, people might assume that that plane had some kind of advanced stealth technology. But that technology doesn't exist during World War II.

It won't be invented until the 1970s. So needless to say, everyone is on high alert.
But since nobody has spotted the plane and since it's not on radar anymore, there's not much to do.

The service members just have to wait for it to reappear again.

And they end up waiting for 20 minutes. The first new reports come out of Long Beach at 2.43 a.m.
And that's a beachfront city just south of LA.

There's a naval base and shipyard down there, and the servicemen say that finally they've spotted multiple planes.

They ask the officials with Western Defense Command for permission to fire on the strange vehicles. But before they get a response, another report comes through.

This one comes from military men back in Los Angeles who say they see no fewer than 25 planes flying overhead. Here's the thing though.

These planes haven't hurt or attacked anything yet, and nobody can prove that they're actually from Japan, let alone that they pose a threat.

There also shouldn't be any American planes above Los Angeles at this time.

If it had taken off from a commercial airport or a local base, the pilot would have contacted the army to explain what was going on, but they weren't getting any calls over the radio.

And if these planes aren't American and they're not Japanese, it's hard to say who else they could belong to.

But still, the city's defenders don't want to shoot innocent people out of the sky, so they wait. 20 more minutes pass, and by 3.06 a.m., they still don't have answers.

There are still reports of something over L.A.

If this was an ordinary plane, you'd think it would have made it past the city by now.

Unless it's circling or hovering, but no one can get clear answers about what's going on.

Until suddenly, the sounds of gunfire begin echoing throughout the entire city.

Even though no one gave the order, one of those anti-aircraft soldiers shot at what appeared to be a red flare in the sky.

No one knows who is the first to shoot, but once the bullets start flying, all of the other anti-aircraft personnel follow suit.

All across Los Angeles, servicemen are firing into the sky, even though they can't really see what's up there and they don't know where to aim.

One contemporary report describes the situation by saying, quote, the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.

And that's pretty accurate because explosions from the artillery are lighting up the sky.

The noise is waking up everyone who slept through the sirens and civilians are wandering into the streets to get a view of the firefight.

And that's when plenty of people spot it.

There. amongst the flashes and the chaos, a glimpse of something in the sky.
And the reports suggest it's not an ordinary airplane.

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In the early hours of February 25th, 1942, the U.S. Army spotted one or more unidentified flying objects over Los Angeles.

Soldiers with Army's Western Defense Command assumed they were Japanese attack planes, so they opened fire, sending more than 1,400 rounds of ammunition rocketing into the air.

For the next hour, the city is in absolute chaos. No one's entirely sure what's going on, but rumors are spreading fast.
Some say it's just one or two planes.

Others report massive fleets of 50 vessels or more.

One anonymous witness claims to see three Japanese planes get shot down over the ocean. There are also reports of something going on in downtown Hollywood.

An artilleryman named Charles Patrick is stationed there, and he says he distinctly spots six planes in the sky, which the Americans fire at relentlessly.

There was even a report of a Japanese plane crashing in the streets of Hollywood. And he remembers it because when the command to fire came through, the anti-aircraft personnel all cheered.

But we should mention there's a lot of discrepancy from one eyewitness to the next. One lieutenant who's stationed on a rooftop in downtown LA says that he spots 20 to 30 planes in total.

But when he shouts to three guards who are on the lookout with him, they peer up through their binoculars and they see nothing at all.

However, all four of them do agree that there are audible engine sounds coming from the sky. Another sergeant who's stationed just a few blocks away says he spots five aircraft.

But multiple other officers say, no, there were only three planes, which were flying in a perfect V formation.

And y'all know we have talked about these perfect V formations a lot on So Supernatural.

So there are also several civilians who say they don't know how many planes there are in total because they're just too high up in the air.

They actually look like birds and they're too far for anyone to make out the sounds of their engines. Plus, it's in the middle of the night.
during a blackout, so it's extremely hard to see.

You guys get it. I could go on and on, but the point is that the reports are extremely conflicting.

Nobody knows exactly what's happening, which only makes things scarier for everybody.

And this chaos lasts for another hour.

During that time, it seems like the vehicles are either hovering or circling over the city. But finally, at 4.14 a.m., the military issues a ceasefire.

They say that the skies are finally clear, the attackers are gone, and they've saved LA.

Or at least most of LA.

Tragically, a small number of people actually died in all of the chaos. The reports from the time are contradictory, so it's hard to get too detailed here.

But it sounds like there's around three to five casualties. At least three of them are civilians.
None of them were shot by the invaders, though.

Instead, the deaths were all due to heart attacks or car crashes as a result of all the chaos.

In addition, a whole bunch of people got injured, particularly from shrapnel that had come from the Army's artillery fire.

But again, none of the injuries were caused by the unidentified flying object or objects.

There's no sign that they fired at anyone or anything.

So of course, the people of Los Angeles, the press, and the rest of the military now have one burning question on their minds. What flew over the city?

And if it wasn't there to attack, what was it doing there?

Well, the big Whigs in the army decline to give a straight answer, at least for the time being.

They say they need to gather more information and review their findings before they can say anything for sure.

In the meantime, the story of the strange flying objects hits the newspapers. The sun hasn't even risen yet, but it's making headlines all across the country.

And by morning, the event is known as the Battle of Los Angeles.

But just wait. This is where things get strange.

The next day, military recovery teams go out searching for the Japanese airplanes they reportedly shot down over the ocean. But there's no sign of wreckage anywhere in the water.

And there's definitely no sign of any downed aircraft in the middle of the city either. And remember how there was a report of a plane that crashed down in downtown Hollywood?

Well, by the next day, there's zero sign that this ever happened.

Things only get weirder from there when the Secretary of the Navy announces that the Battle of Los Angeles was

A false alarm. According to him, the troops in LA were super stressed and on high alert.
They were so afraid of a Japanese attack that they just imagined one was going on.

Once a few people started firing their anti-aircraft guns, other personnel got in on the action too.

And when these kinds of ammunition go off in the air, they release bursts of orange light and smoke. Some leave a tail behind them, kind of like what you would see behind a comet.

This in turn can create strange shadows, which from the ground could look like an airplane flying overhead, especially if it's dark and if you're a little freaked out and already expecting to see a jet.

Meaning, Army soldiers and civilians alike were, I guess, all just falling for optical illusions?

Okay, to me, this explanation is hard to swallow for a couple of different reasons.

First, the anti-aircraft gunmen in Los Angeles were used used to seeing strange things in the sky, and they didn't need to panic when this happened.

In fact, a few months before the Battle of Los Angeles, there was a real false alarm. It was Wednesday, December 10th, 1941.

Some servicemen with the Western Defense Command thought they saw an unidentified plane a little south of Los Angeles. So they called for a blackout.

A few American fighter pilots took to the sky to find the possible invader. The anti-aircraft personnel manned their stations.

And then, a few hours later, they confirmed that the skies were clear and there were no Japanese planes. That was it.

Okay, no bullets were fired, no mass panic attack, nothing like the Battle of Los Angeles.

In total, between December 8th, 1941 and October 8th, 1943, defenders spotted 611,877

different unidentified flying objects in American airspace. That's insane.
Yeah, it is. And each time, they just kept their cool.

They determined that there wasn't a threat and they went about their day without firing into the air or hallucinating that there were, you know, 20, 30 airplanes up there.

On top of that, there's a lot of physical evidence that shows the objects in the sky were real.

First of all, there's the radar readings, which were recorded before shots were ever fired. Clearly, the Army technicians didn't hallucinate those.

There's also a photograph of one of the unidentified flying objects.

It was taken by a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, and it clearly shows some kind of flying vehicle with eight spotlights trained on it.

And if you google this image, it'll come right up and it is striking. It absolutely looks real and we'll post it here in the show notes.

But if you haven't had a chance to see it yet, all you need to know is that there's clearly something hovering above the Hollywood Hills. It's covered in lights and it seems to be roughly circular.

Dare I even say, saucer shaped. What's interesting is that the photo shows what looks like other balls of light hovering nearby it as well.
Now, I do have to acknowledge that this photo is edited.

The LA Times confirmed that they touched it up when they published it. But to be clear, they didn't add anything that wasn't already there.

They just said that they brightened the photo so it would be a little easier to see what was going on in it.

Well, it sounds like something must have set everyone off during the Battle of Los Angeles.

Something like an actual vehicle or a whole fleet of them in the sky that night.

And apparently, there were some government officials who agreed there really was an attack on Los Angeles, including the Secretary of War at the time. His name was Henry Stimpson.

And just a few days later in late February, he made a public statement that disagreed with the Navy's secretary. In fact, he's confident that there really were Japanese airplanes over the city.

Well, he doesn't say why he's so confident. He says there were about 15 planes in total, and he acknowledges that none of them fired on Los Angeles.

But Stimpson says that because the Japanese Army was attempting psychological warfare, their goal was to make us panic and turn on one another.

But then one week later, Stimson makes a different statement. He basically says, never mind, I never thought there were real Japanese airplanes.
There was no attack.

Okay.

Yeah, he completely walks back his original claim. And right around that same time, A new theory starts appearing in the newspapers all across the country, almost like it was planted there.

The New York Times writes an editorial on the Battle of Los Angeles and demands an explanation.

They mention the witnesses who saw multiple planes flying in formation and the people who said there were dozens of vessels in the sky. But they also say the flying object was,

And y'all, we have said this many times before too,

a balloon. Here we go again.

In March, another Times article goes so far as to say that Hollywood is the home of movie magic.

So therefore, anyone who saw planes or anything else must have fallen for, quote, just another illusion.

Yeah, I do not buy that. Anyway, Sometime later, an LA-based reporter publishes an interview with an anonymous man, and he tells a story that supports the balloon theory.

Apparently, on the night of February 24th, a group of radar technicians stationed in Santa Monica, just south of the city of LA, wanted to test their equipment.

They set up these experiments that attached metal wires to helium balloons and then released them into the sky. They hoped the metal would trigger their radar devices.

But then a breeze picked them up and blew the balloons inland toward the city.

The military forces there also detected the balloons in the wires, mistook them for Japanese planes, and in a panic, shot down the balloons. Okay, so when I hear this story, I have one big question.

If it really was a radar test gone bad,

why wouldn't the technicians just call it out on the radio? Agreed. Right?

I mean, how do you end up in a situation where people are firing for an hour straight without saying, uh, hello, wait a minute, that's just our balloons.

Not to mention, I don't see why Stimpson and the Secretary of the Navy would have such a hard time keeping their story straight.

If it really was something that simple and straightforward, it just doesn't add up.

Especially when you hear that in 1983, 41 years after the Battle of Los Angeles, the Air Force acknowledged that the firefight wasn't kicked off by wire-covered helium balloons.

Though the explanation they offered now was just as ridiculous. Get this.
They said the flying vessels were weather balloons.

Researchers released them to test the wind conditions, and that's what kicked off the panic. But even in that case, Many of my questions still stand.

Who is shooting at balloons for an hour with nobody calling it out? And if it is that simple, I mean, come on, why did it take four decades for anyone to learn the truth?

Okay, Rasha, I just don't buy it. Yep, I don't buy it either.
And each time the military changes their story, people,

obviously, keep asking the same question.

Why are the officials promoting theories that seem so obviously fake? It's almost like they're trying to cover something up.

And according to one Army memo, that something may have been visitors from another planet.

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On February 25th, 1942, the United States Army believed that Japanese airplanes were attacking Los Angeles. So they fired into the sky for over an hour, trying to protect their citizens.

By the next day, the military had released a statement saying the people of Los Angeles had merely imagined the attackers.

A few days after that, the Secretary of War argued that actually the Japanese invaders were very real.

By the end of the week, the Army's Chief of Staff, George Marshall, had allegedly sent a confidential memo to President Roosevelt, and it had a separate third theory written into it.

According to this supposed memo, the Army had evidence that the ships over Los Angeles were real,

but they weren't Japanese airplanes. They were from outer space.

Now, this memo comes from the majestic documents, which we've talked about on this show in the past, meaning the authenticity of them has been questioned.

If it is real,

it doesn't get into a ton of detail about the event. But in the memo, George Marshall does note that the Army managed to recover two flying vessels that were shot down over Los Angeles.

He says that one of them crashed in the mountains outside of the city. The other one plummeted into the ocean before it could make it to land.

Which is really interesting because that's consistent with what the eyewitnesses' statements said when they saw a plane crash into the Pacific.

George also goes on to describe the wreckage by saying, quote,

the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly, and according to secret intelligence sources, they are in all probability, interplanetary in origin.

George finishes the memo by saying he's putting together a team that's going to investigate further and learn the truth behind these UFOs.

Okay, assuming this is all true, I'm not surprised the Army would want to keep that information quiet.

Like Ashley mentioned at the top of the episode, Orson Welles accidentally terrified ordinary Americans with his War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938.

By 1942, it's been nine years since the airing, and given that the U.S. is now at war, another mass panic is the last thing government officials need.

So of course, they try to explain real alien ships away with stories about weather balloons and hallucinations. There's just one problem with that theory.

No one has ever been able to verify if that memo to President Roosevelt is actually real.

To this day, government officials insist that the majestic documents were a hoax created to fool UFO enthusiasts, though others think that's just a cover-up to debunk the leaked information.

Okay, there's other evidence besides the memo. Let's talk about the first clue that kicked everything off, the radar readings.

Like we mentioned before, they showed the craft traveling about 120 miles in six minutes, headed right toward Los Angeles.

For context, that means that it was moving at a speed of 1,200 miles per hour. And certainly, no balloon could have done that.

In fact, in 1942, there wasn't an airplane on Earth that was capable of those speeds. In 1945, the Nazis came close.

That's when they had begun working on a supersonic fighter that could go 1,118 miles per hour. But during the Battle of Los Angeles, get this, you guys, that plane hasn't even been dreamed up yet.

And there's nothing quite as fast as whatever's showing up on the radar. And here's where it gets wild.

According to some witnesses, this unidentified object also came to a complete stop and hovered in midair.

And then it rocketed from high altitudes to very low ones and back up again, which even planes can't do today.

There's also the fact that these ships disappeared from the radar screens when they got close to land. And like we mentioned before, nobody on Earth had developed stealth technology yet.

Meaning, the vessels in the sky couldn't be airplanes, but

they could have been alien ships.

Let's talk about the fact that the fleet, or at least according to the rumor, most of it, managed to hover above the city for about an hour without getting shot down.

Now, the artillerymen who were firing those rounds were damn good at what they did.

And there's no way they could have missed all of these flying objects unless the vessels had advanced armor of some kind, something that kept the anti-aircraft shells from damaging them, which again, didn't exist in any airplanes at the time.

So that could be more evidence that these were actually

objects from outer space.

The problem is that no one at that time really came to that conclusion. And that may be because alien invaders and flying saucers hadn't really hit the mainstream yet.

In fact, the phrase flying saucer wouldn't get coined until the year 1947. five years after the Battle of Los Angeles.
With the world at war, their first thought was enemy planes.

That was a much more obvious and natural conclusion than beings from another planet. But after the war ended, there was a huge uptick in UFO sightings, particularly in 1947.

That's the year of the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
In that year alone, there were an estimated 800 to 1,000 UFO sightings in the United States.

Which reminds me of a statistic that Yvette mentioned earlier, that during the war, there were 611,877 unidentified crafts spotted in the United States.

I have to wonder how many of those might have been from other planets as well.

I gotta say, it's really worth asking what was going on in the mid-1940s to attract so much attention from outer space. And I guess one possible explanation is clear.

Maybe they were focused on our nuclear weapons. I don't know.
What do you think, Rush?

That's definitely a possibility.

There have been countless stories of military personnel spotting UFOs over nuclear weapon testing sites. missile silos and atomic research labs.

As a matter of fact, there have been sightings reported at every major nuclear facility in the United States.

Every single one.

And over the years, there have been a ton of incidents near New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratories, aka the home of the Manhattan Project.

and the site where the first nuclear bombs were designed and built. Witnesses spotted green orbs in the sky above the facility in 1948 and flying saucers there in 1950.

Unidentified flying objects were so common at Los Alamos that a few employees were assigned to permanent UFO spotting duty in the 1940s and 50s.

In the same vein, there are a ton of unexplained sightings over Montana's Maelstrom Air Force Base. In the 1950s and 60s, that's where the Air Force stored a whole arsenal of nuclear missiles.

On March 24th, 1967, Air Force officer Robert Salas saw a red light hover over the base. It sat there for a while, but it didn't land or fire or attempt to communicate.

But after the thing flew away, Robert learned that all of the nukes at the site had been deactivated.

So in his mind, there was only one way to interpret this. He thought that the aliens were pacifists, that they must have been disarming our arsenals to try and bring peace to the world.

Plus, there are plenty of people who claim to have spoken to aliens, and many of them said they were warned by these visitors about nuclear weapons and their fallout.

Take one of Ashley's favorite episodes of all time, for example, the story of Valiant Thor.

He supposedly spent time in the Pentagon trying to convince government officials to stop their nuclear programs. It's definitely worth a listen.

Basically, there's a lot of evidence that suggests aliens might be interested in nuclear weaponry and preventing us from using it.

But in 1942, there weren't any nukes in Los Angeles or anywhere for that matter, because the first bomb wouldn't be built or detonated until 1945.

However, the Manhattan Project was just getting started in 1942.

Only a few months after the Battle of Los Angeles, 130,000 Americans would pour into sites around the country, including the Los Alamos facilities. to begin their research on the world's first nukes.

And it's worth mentioning that Los Alamos is roughly 900 miles east of Los Angeles. So maybe the UFOs that triggered the Battle of Los Angeles weren't trying to torment the city of angels.

Maybe they were just passing over it on their way to New Mexico so they could actually monitor the new home of the American nuclear program.

The point is, it sounds very, very possible that the Battle of Los Angeles featured an actual visit from outer space.

And they might have come to try and warn us about the dangers of nuclear weapons.

If so, unfortunately, it didn't work. The world was at war.
Everyone was terrified of an attack. And the U.S.
military proceeded with the Manhattan Project.

It ended with them setting off bombs in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. These blasts killed an estimated 120,000 people in an instant.

And that's not counting tens of thousands of later deaths due to cancer and the long-term effects from radiation. And look,

I know that these days, it can feel like history is repeating itself, especially with all of the political unrest.

But if aliens do exist, and yes, I believe that they might, then maybe someone out there has already figured out what we haven't yet.

Peace, progress, purpose.

It's possible that they've faced their own moments of division and made it through to the other side, which means we can too.

Getting there won't be easy, though.

As great as it would be, an extraterrestrial savior probably won't be coming to solve humanity's problems anytime soon, which means any solution has to come here on Earth from us.

But if we work together, I feel like anything is possible.

This is So Supernatural, an audio chuck original produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at SoSupernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com.

Join Rasha and me next Friday for an all-new episode.

I think Chuck would approve.

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