The Los Angeles air raid

Of all the numerous and well-authenticated UFO sightings in modern times, there is one account that stands out. It shows how a government can restrict the flow of UFO information to the public and deny that they are doing so. It is an episode that almost beggars belief.

To use a familiar cliche, truth is stranger than fiction. This is not science fiction.... but science fact. We go back over 57years to 25th February 1942, five years before the term "Flying Saucer" was coined by the famous sighting of Kenneth Arnold in 1947, and less then three months before America entered the Second World War.

It was night time, and a large formation of unidentified flying objects appeared over the west coast city of Los Angeles, and silently hovered there. These objects were detected straight away by military observers. Thinking that it might be a Pearl Harbour-style attack by the Japanese, and assuming that the visitors were hostile, they lost no time in unleashing considerable fire power from anti-aircraft guns that formed the city's air defences.

It was shoot first and ask questions later. For twenty minutes a barrage of heavy gunfire was aimed at the craft peacefully hovering some 1,000 feet above Los Angeles. During that period some 1,500 anti-aircraft shells were fired, and according to local residents who witnessed the event, shells were seen exploding against the hulls and all around the objects without having any effect. One journalist on the Los Angeles Herald Express was on the scene and stated that he saw many shells exploding directly in the middle of the craft without any effect.

After this ballistic onslaught, the formation of craft proceeded at what was described as a leisurely pace over the coastal communities between Santa Monica and Long Beach and was last seen heading out to sea.

By morning the next day there was near total confusion as it become apparent that there had been no Japanese invasion fleet lying off shore. Indeed, eyewitness accounts from Californian residents maintained that what they had seen were not conventional aircraft anyway. However, in the wake of the so-called invasion many homes and public buildings were left severely damaged by unexploded shells and falling ordnance, with six civilian lives lost during this truly bizarre encounter.

So what was this large object and smaller ones which had accompanied it? All across the city of Los Angeles people were asking the same question. High-ranking military officials had difficult questions to answer and must have searched long and hard for an explanation that would satisfy the residents of Los Angeles.

A month later a statement was issued by US Navy Secretary John Knox announcing that there had been no unidentified objects over the west coast on the night of 25th February and that the barrage of anti-aircraft gun fire was triggered by a false alarm.

This announcement only served to incense public opinion and local media lost no time in condemning it as a piece of crude and unconvincing war propaganda. As journalists attempted to probe deeper into this air-raid-that-never-was they became more and more frustrated. As an editorial in the Long Beach Independent commented at the time: "There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion of the matter".

The Long Beach Independent was right in its assessment. In 1974 a hitherto secret memorandum was released under the US Freedom of Information Act. Written by General George C. Marshall, US Chief of Staff to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 26th February 1942 (the day after), it stated that unidentified flying objects had been sighted and fired upon the previous night, though the Department of Defence had been at a loss to explain the nature and origin of the airborne vehicles.

That incident in 1942 was a watershed in the policy of governments around the world. It marked the beginning of official attempts to hide from the public evidence of UFO activity in the skies above our own planet – a trend that was to continue for many years.