How a UFO caught Southern California in a wartime panic

ILLUSTRATION by BOB AUL

Nobody knew exactly what it was up there, and that’s what terrified them: a shapeless orb hanging lifelessly off the coast—poised, it seemed, to obliterate Los Angeles. Some feared it was the Japanese; others felt it was something a bit more extraterrestrial. Nobody knew for certain because it was dark that night—the entire LA basin shut down by a mandatory wartime blackout. What residents learned as dawn broke Feb. 25, 1942, was that the Battle of Los Angeles was already over. But no one ever figured out what really happened that night.

The Unidentified Flying Object first appeared on radar screens about 120 miles west of Los Angeles as a slow-moving blip invisible to those on the ground. As it approached the coast, however, residents started seeing something and call centers were inundated with reports of enemy aircraft. Some people claimed to have seen a group of planes circling over Long Beach and San Pedro; a coastal artillery colonel said he saw a cluster of as many as 25 planes.

Eventually it became impossible to ignore all those alarming reports, so soldiers were alerted and anti-aircraft batteries readied while searchlights began scanning the sky. And they found it, that strange silver mass floating its way past Santa Monica down towards Long Beach. According to news accounts, once the searchlights all converged on that ominous object, “the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.”

Just after 3 a.m., four coastal defense cannons opened fire on the unidentified object—and they seemed to hit something. Other cannons quickly joined in but gunners struggled to find their target, which was obscured by the clouds of war.

The batteries at San Pedro’s Fort MacArthur and elsewhere fired around 1,400 shells at the object—but nothing brought it down. All that fell from the sky was shrapnel—and lots of it. One civilian death was reported as a result of the curled shards, while the rest lay scattered about Southland beaches like washed-up seaweed. When dawn broke, children bagged up the charred bits of metal and contributed them to the wartime scrap drives.

Until dawn, however, there was panic. Cars skidded out of control in the darkness, blocking roads as far away as Arcadia. Reports of downed airplanes came in throughout LA, the worst from civilians claiming to have seen a plane go down in flames near Hollywood.

But there were no enemy planes and, as the military would later claim, no real threat, either. There were no military casualties, but by the end of the Battle of Los Angeles, at least six civilians were dead as a result of the panic and the fear.

Nowhere was that fear worse than on Terminal Island, where residents—most of them Japanese-American—viewed the conflict with the uneasiest of eyes. By February 1942, Terminal Island was already a military zone, its exits blockaded and its residents carefully monitored. After the attack on Pearl Harbor two months earlier, the government quickly fingered the island’s population as a threat to the nation’s security. Residents must have known something was in the wind: Executive Order 9066—the decree that would justify the wartime internment of thousands of Japanese Americans—had come from President Franklin Roosevelt only six days prior to the Battle of Los Angeles.

As shells exploded overhead, Terminal Islanders could do nothing but wait in fear. It wasn’t long before their anxiety manifested itself in swarms of government-issued Jeeps. FBI agents and other officials raided the island. Residents were rounded up, photographed—first a frontal, then a profile—and sent to holding areas, then shipped off to the isolation and relocation centers where most would spend the remainder of the war.

Once the Battle of Los Angeles ended, all of Terminal Island’s roughly 3,000 residents had been locked up—and all because of a UFO. It wasn’t until four decades later that the American government apologized for the internment.

When the sun finally rose on the morning of Feb. 25, the unidentified object had disappeared somewhere off the coast of Orange County. With its absence came even more confusion. Newspapers wrote extensively about the event, the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Daily Examiner both dedicating huge front-page space to the mysterious air raid. But no one could pin down what exactly happened.

The military was quick to dismiss reports that the object was of Japanese or extraterrestrial origin—proclaiming it a weather balloon instead. In the days following, newspapers across the country attacked the military’s over-eager attitude that night, sparking a bitter back-and-forth that drew responses from officials as highly placed as Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox.

The argument still lingers today. With no downed planes, no clear sightings and no definitive accounts, most see the Battle of Los Angeles as a mixed-up result of the usual wartime jitters. But some still cling to the event’s uncertainty. For them, all that’s left are the photos. And those are as uncertain as anything: views of a bright, amorphous object trapped in the glowing gaze of a handful of searchlights. It could have been anything.

Tags: battle of los angeles, flying saucers, internment, Long Beach, San Pedro, terminal island, ufo