"SEEKING OUT OBJECT - Scores of searchlights built a wigwam of light beams over Los Angeles early yesterday morning during the alarm. This picture was taken during blackout; shows nine beams converging on an object in sky in Culver City area. The blobs of light which show at apex of beam angles were made by anti- aircraft shells."- Original Caption which acompanied the photo.
Here also an original news report from the period:
Glendale News Press Wednesday, Feb. 25, 1942
ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNS BLAST AT L.A. MYSTERY INVADER
Raid Scare Blacks Out Southland, but Knox Claims 'False Alarm'
Washington(AP)-Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said today that there were no planes over Los Angeles last night. "That's our understanding," he said. He added that " none have been found and a very wide reconnaissance has been carried on." He added, "it was just a false alarm."
Anti-aircraft guns thundered over the metropolitan area early today for the first time in the war, but hours later what they were shooting at remained a military secret. An unidentified object moving slowly down the coast from Santa Monica was variously reported as a balloon and an airplane.
No bombs were dropped and no planes were shot down during the anti-aircraft firing in the Los Angeles area, the western defense command said in San Francisco.
"Cities in the Los Angeles area were blacked out at 2:25 a.m. today on orders from the fourth interceptor command when unidentified aircraft were reported in the area," the western defense command said.
"Although reports are conflicting and every effort is being made to ascertain the facts, it is clear that no bombs were dropped and no planes were shot down."
"There was a considerable amount of anti-aircraft firing. The all-clear signal came at 7:25 a.m."
Army Scofts at Civilian Reports
Army intelligence, although uncommunicative, scoffed at reports of civilian observers that as many as 200 planes were over the area.
There were no reports of dropping bombs, but several instances of damaged property from anti-aircraft shells. A garage door was ripped off in a Los Angeles residential district and fragments shattered windows and tore into a bed where a few moments before Miss Blanch Sedgewick and her niece, Josie Duffy had been sleeping.
A santa Monica bomb squad was dispatched to remove an unexploded anti-aircraft shell in a driveway there.
Wailing air raid sirens at 2:25 a.m. awakened most of the metropolitan's three million citizens. A few minutes later they were treated to a gigantic Fourth-of-July-like display as huge searchlights flashed along a 10-mile front to the south, converging on a single spot high in the sky.
Anti-Aircraft Guns Open Fire
Moments later the anti-aircraft guns opened up, throwing a sheet of steel skyward.
Tracer bullets and exploding shells lit the heavens.
Three Japanese, two men and a woman, were seized at the beach city of Venice on suspicion of signaling with flashlights near the pier. They were removed to FBI headquarters, where Richard B. Hood, local chief, said, "at the request of Army authorities we have nothing to say."
A Long Beach police sergeant, E. Larsen 59, was killed in a traffic accident while in route to an air raid post.
Henry B. Ayers, 63-year-old state guardsman, died at the wheel of an ammunition truck during the black-out. Physicians said a heart attack was apparently responsible.
Rumors of Planes Downed Spiked
Police ran down several reports that planes had been shot down, but said all were false alarms.
Aircraft factories continued operation behind blackened windows, while ack-ack guns rattled from batteries stationed near-by.
A Japanese vegetable man, John Y. Harada, 25, was one of three persons arrested on charges of violating a county black ordinance. Sheriff's Capt. Ernest Sichler said Harada, driving to the market with a load of cauliflower, refused to extinguish his truck lights.
Others held on similar charges were Walter E. Van Der Linden, Norwalk dairy man, accused of failing to darken his milking barns, and Giovouni Ghigo, 57, nabbed while driving to market with a truckload of flowers.
Traffic Snarl Follows All Clear Signal
Soon traffic was snarled. Thousand of southern Californians were an hour or more late to their jobs.
There were isolated incidences of failure to comply with black-out regulations. Neon signs were glowing inside stores. Traffic signals continued to flash in some areas.
Radio stations went off the air with the first alert, and were not permitted to resume broadcasting until 8:23 a.m.
There was speculation, that the unidentified object, might have been a blimp-although veteran lighter-then-air-experts in Akron, O., the nations center of such construction, said Japan was believed to have lost interest in such craft following experiments in World War I. These sources said inability to obtain fire proof helium caused discarding of such plans.
Observers lent some credence to the blimp theory by pointing out that the object required nearly thirty minutes to travel 20 or 25 miles-far slower then an airplane.
Unidentified Planes Pass Over Harbor AN official source which declined to be quoted directly told The Associated Press in Los Angeles that United States Army Planes quickly went into action. Later however, another official said no United States craft had taken off because of possible danger from the army's own anti-aircraft fire.
A newspaper man at San Pedro said airplanes passed over the Los Angeles-Long Beach harbor area. The craft were not identified.
There were no reports of any attempt to bomb southern California from the air although many war-vital factories, shipyards and other defense industries were on the route the object followed.
Although some watchers said they saw airplanes in the air, semi-official sources said they probably were the United States Army's pursuits.
All the action, clearly spotlighted for ground observers by 20 or so searchlights, was just a few miles west of Los Angeles proper.
Object Disappears Over Signal Hill
Observers said the object appeared to be 8000 ft or higher.
Firing, first heard at 3 a.m., ceased suddenly at 3:30 a.m., after the object disappeared south of Signal Hill, at the east edge of Long Beach. Anti-aircraft guns fired steadily for two minute periods, were silent for about 45 seconds, and continued that routine for nearly a half an hour.
All of southern California from the San Juaquin valley to the Mexican border was blacked out. Los Angeles doused its lights first, at 2:25 a.m.. San Diego, just 17 miles from the border did not receive its lights out order until 3:05 a.m.
When daylight and the all-clear signal came, Long Beach took on the appearance of a huge easter egg-hunt. Kiddies and even grown-ups scrambled through the streets and vacant lots, picking up and proudly comparing chunks of shrapnel fragments as if they were the most prized possession they owned. Is it possible that something was shot down on the 25th February 1942, and subsequently recovered by the US Military?
The following 'leaked' documents were received by Tim Cooper - along with hundreds of pages of MJ-12 and related documents, from multiple sources between 1992-1999* - and, if genuine, cast a new light on this historic event.
First, a memo from FDR to George C Marshal, dated the 27th February, just two days after the "Battle for LA", which references; "..the material in possession of the Army", and "...atomic secrets learned from study of celestial devices".
A hand written note from the source ("S2") at the bottom of the page reads "This is a retyped version of FDR's Memo..."
In what may be a reply to the document above (or just part of a longer exchange?) Marshall writes;
".... regarding the air raid over Los Angeles it was learned by Army G2 that Rear Admiral Anderson ... recovered an unidentified airplane off the coast of California ... with no bearing on conventional explanation ... This Headquarters has come to the determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin."
In fact, the document appears to reference two separate recoveries!
Unfortunately neither of these documents are original so they can not be conclusively dated. That said there are a few tantalizing clues.
For instance, The Memo from FDR contains the phrase; "..this new wonder" which seems consistent with the time period. It is also possible to compare the linguistics with other known writings from FDR, but this has not been done yet, to my knowledge.
The second document contains a reference to the "Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit" which looks to have been added later, indeed Dr Wood has proposed that this memo may have been the order which established the IPU. Significantly, the existence of a group called the "Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit" was confirmed in a FOIA response to UFO researcher Richard Hall, in 1980. See: http://www.majesticdocuments.com/pdf/guild-hall-ipu.pdf Here is an mp3 of the CBS News Report that was used in the youtube video (but without that frakking music): http://www.mediafire.com/?zfd0glhy0yj
UFO on nuclear sites
UFO researcher Robert Hastings discussed declassified documents, as well as witness testimony that confirms UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites, weapons laboratories, and bomb test sites. UFO activity accelerated after WWII, around the time that the testing and deploying of nuclear weapons began in America. Initially, the premise was that the unidentified craft were Soviet devices, though Hastings became convinced "we're dealing with multiple races from multiple worlds."
He said he's had contact with over 100 military employees who knew of UFO activity that occurred when they worked at various facilities between 1964 and 1996. There was an incident at Malmstrom AFB in March 1967 where a large red disc-shaped object was seen over the missile area, and all 10 missiles simultaneously went offline. The guidance and control systems were affected, and the hardware had to be replaced, he detailed. This technological display of shutting off the missiles seemed to be sending a message or "wagging a finger," he commented.
Conversely, missiles suddenly went into launch mode at Minot AFB when a bright object was seen over the launch site. A similar episode in Soviet Ukraine occurred in October 1982, when missiles were suddenly activated at an ICBM base while a saucer-shaped object was observed nearby. A 1964 test of a nuclear missile sent across the Pacific Ocean was said to be thwarted in progress by a UFO, and the incident was purportedly captured on film. For more, see Hasting's 'Big Sur' report (PDF file).
The order came straight out of the Cold War manual: “Arm all weapons and fire on sight.” For Lieutenant Milton Torres, an American jet fighter pilot based in Britain, it was the first and last time that he had received such a chilling instruction.
As soon as he scrambled his Sabre jet from RAF Manston in Kent and headed eastwards, he saw the blip on his radar, indicating the presence of an aircraft the size of a B52 about 15 miles away, and he prepared to close in for the kill with a salvo of rockets. But the “aircraft”, judged to be hostile and probably Russian, simply vanished. The blip on the radar disappeared.
The 24-year-old American pilot's extraordinary experience on the night of May 20, 1957, which he was officially ordered never to reveal to anyone, has come to light after the declassification of another batch of Ministry of Defence files relating to reported incidents of unidentified flying objects appearing in British airspace — in this case the only known example of a jet fighter pilot being ordered to shoot down a UFO.
Mr Torres, now 77 and a retired professor of civil engineering living in Miami, told The Times that the day after he was scrambled from RAF Manston he received a visit from an American in a trenchcoat who waved a National Security Agency identity card at him and warned him that, if he ever revealed what had happened, he would never fly again.
He took the warning to heart and said nothing until 1988 when, through a solicitor with an interest in ufology, he sent the Ministry of Defence a report giving a full account of the incident. Today his narrative is released by the National Archives.
“I shall never forget it, and for the last 50 years I have been waiting for an explanation, but I've never had one. On that night I was ordered to open fire even before I had taken off. That had never happened before,” Mr Torres said. “I was ready to hit the target with all 24 rockets: it would have been like buckshot out of a shotgun. I asked for authentication of the order to fire and I received it.”
Neither Lieutenant Torres nor his wingman, flying another Sabre behind him, actually saw what was making the strong blip on their radars. In the years since he has become more convinced that the object, travelling at speed and performing manoeuvres beyond the capability of any known aircraft at that time, was an alien UFO.
The airman climbed to 32,000ft and then flattened out, travelling at Mach 0.92, about as fast as the F86D Sabre could go. “The blip was burning a hole in the radar with its incredible intensity. It was similar to a blip I had received from B52s and seemed to be a magnet of light. It had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier,” he wrote.
The only possible explanation, according to David Clarke, a UFO expert and lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University, is that in the 1960s it emerged that the CIA had been engaged in a secret project codenamed Palladium, in which advanced equipment was used to create simulated radar blips close to Soviet airspace.
Dr Clarke said that he thought it was linked to clandestine flights over the Soviet Union of the American U2 spy plane. “But this doesn't explain why Milton Torres was scrambled and ordered to open fire,” he said.
The 19 files made available online by the National Archives and covering sightings between 1986 and 1992 include:
— A passenger jet coming in to land at Heathrow nearly colliding with a UFO. The captain of the Alitalia airliner reported seeing a brown missile-shaped object pass overhead near Lydd in Kent in 1991. The MoD ruled out the object being a missile, weather balloon or space rocket and closed an inquiry by the Civil Aviation Authority and the military
— An MoD request that Army and Navy helicopters should not take photographs of crop circles, for fear of undermining the official line that the military did not investigate unexplained phenomena
— A letter from a woman claiming to be from the Sirius system who said her spacecraft — containing two “Spectrans”, pictured below — crashed in Britain during the Second World War
An appeal to Obama:
...............................
Don’t try selling Milton Torres on the idea of launching another public study of UFOs. He says the genie's been out of the bottle forever.
“The one I chased didn’t follow classic Newtonian mechanics. It made a right turn almost on a dime,” he tells De Void from his home in Kendall, Fla. “The (Royal Air Force radar) scope had a range of 250 miles. And after two sweeps, which took two seconds, it was gone. And I was flying almost at Mach 1, at .92.”
Bottom line for Torres: Any military organization that isn’t interested in this sort of elusive high technology is incompetent.
If you’ve been following this stuff, you’ll recall how the retired USAF major broke a 51-year silence last October about his potentially lethal UFO scramble. The British Ministry of Defence had just released another batch of dusty UFO files through its National Archives, and the sexiest of the lot occurred on April 27, 1957. That’s when an unnamed Yank with the American 406th Fighter Wing operating out of RAF Manston in Kent was dispatched with specific orders to blast a UFO out of the late-night sky.
Torres, now 77, promptly stepped forward and owned up (“It was such a relief!”) to being the guy assigned to shoot it down. Climbing to 32,000 feet in his F-86 Sabrejet along with a wingman, Torres couldn’t see the bogey, but he got a strong radar lock-on some 15 miles out. With just seconds to go before closing to within missile range, things got freaky. The blip on his scope flashed to a 6 o’clock position, then 3 o’clock, then 12 o’clock, and 11 o’clock. Then it was gone. Ground control lost it, too.
End of chase, but not the story.
Back on the deck, Torres says he was bullied by a member of the U.S. National Security Agency, and told that if he breathed a word of what happened — even to his own commander — his flying days were over.
“What the hell did I know? I was just a pilot, I didn’t have any information,” he said. “The thought of losing my flight status was unacceptable.”
So Torres put a cork in it and went on to complete a 20-year USAF career. He earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering, and taught at Florida International University.
Contrasting the threats he received with the routine manner in which that information was released, Torres is struck by the arbitrary nature of state secrecy. And it jams him up, because he’s heard from other military pilots reluctant to go public.
“They’ve told me about getting scrambled, and how what they’re chasing left ‘em standing there like they weren’t even moving,” says the former college professor. “They don’t know what’s it is, but somebody sure does.”
Impressed by President Obama’s executive order directing federal bureaucracies to err on the side of transparency when dealing with public information requests, Torres says it’s time to pony up.
“I want Obama to open it up, to declassify this UFO material,” he says. “This has gone on for too long.”
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