What happened
On the night of February 24–25, 1942, a day after a Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, radar detected an unidentified target over the Pacific. At 2:25 a.m. sirens sounded in Los Angeles and a blackout was ordered. A few minutes after three, anti-aircraft batteries opened fire and by dawn had fired more than 1,400 shells. Witnesses described objects caught in the searchlights, and the “Los Angeles Times” published a photograph of crisscrossing beams of light. No aircraft was shot down and not a single bomb fell, but shell fragments damaged buildings, and five people died in accidents and from heart attacks. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox called the whole event a false alarm.
Witnesses
Thousands of Los Angeles residents, soldiers manning the anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights, journalists.
Explanations and hypotheses
From the outset the military disagreed about the cause: the Army spoke of aircraft, the Navy of war nerves. In 1983 Air Force historians concluded that the alarm had been triggered by a weather balloon and that the continued firing was fueled by shell bursts and smoke lit up by the searchlights. UFO proponents point to the famous photograph, but it is known to have been heavily retouched before publication. Researchers regard the event as the result of wartime panic.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
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