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Los Angeles is a city with an extremely high number of UFO sightings.

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We're looking at the video right now.

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Wow!

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Dude!

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Some believe that the largest mass UFO sighting in history took place here during the Second World War.

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Fire! Fire!

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When hundreds of US soldiers fired on the scariest moving targets during what was called the Battle of Los Angeles.

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This was well before anyone was talking about flying saucers,

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yet we have thousands of witnesses describing very strange occurrences that night.

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Can eyewitness reports?

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Something caught my eye. It was large. I mean, pretty much almost dead on.

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Declassified documents and new evidence.

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There is in fact one thing that I hadn't noticed before.

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Shed new light on an incident that terrified the city of Angeles.

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Unidentified flying objects have been seen in our skies for decades.

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Thousands of UFO sightings have been documented in official government files.

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Most have logical, scientific explanations.

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Yet some cases remain unexplained, classified, unidentified.

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Can newly released files reveal the truth behind these UFO encounters?

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The World of the Airways

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February 25, 1942.

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Something appears in the skies over Los Angeles.

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Only three months after Pearl Harbor, anti-aircraft batteries are scanning the skies for Japanese planes.

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The World of the Airways

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Four-year-old Ray Bingham hears the air raid sirens.

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I remember I was picked up by my father and we went outside.

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I remember the searchlights, definitely.

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And they were kind of not just random.

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They were searching a specific point in the sky.

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Then the anti-aircraft guns started firing.

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Very, very disturbing.

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And there were people lined up from both sides of the street.

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All looking up.

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17-year-old Bill Tompkins claims he saw something over the city that he cannot explain.

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And there was a very large, round vehicle at about 7,000-8,000 feet.

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It just moved in and just stopped right above us.

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There were other vehicles, smaller, that were coming and moving around and moving above them.

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Ray Bingham has no memory of seeing actual objects in the sky, only a sound and light show.

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It was kind of an awesome sight.

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A little bit frightening actually, because everyone was tense.

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Tompkins witnessed something far more specific.

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We could see clearly the shells blowing up on the bottom of this big vehicle,

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making no indication that there was any damage to it.

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Tompkins was one of a few eyewitnesses who reported seeing this strange craft.

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If this sighting is accurate, it's America's first report of a flying saucer.

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But is there any truth to the account?

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What is known is that for about an hour, thousands of civilians watch as American soldiers fire anti-aircraft guns at unidentified targets in the sky.

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The night has become known as the Battle of Los Angeles.

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And the aircraft guns run into action against unidentified aircraft in the Los Angeles area shortly after 3 a.m. Pacific War Time.

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This actual report from CBS Radio, broadcast a few hours after the event,

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clearly shows that the people of Los Angeles believed something was over the city.

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What it actually was is still being disputed.

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It never was clear what actually happened.

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The unidentified object, which some sources thought might be a glimpse,

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moved slowly down the Pacific coast from Santa Monica and disappeared south of Long Beach.

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Former FBI agent and UFO investigator Ben Hansen believes it may be the first and best documented sighting of a Los Angeles UFO.

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The night of February 24, 1942, leading into the early morning hours of the 25th, something incredible happened right here.

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We have thousands of witnesses describing very strange occurrences that night.

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This was well before anyone was talking about the terms UFOs, flying saucers, flying discs.

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This predates Roswell.

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Others believe there was a much simpler explanation.

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In my opinion, I really think it was mass hysteria that set off all that anti-aircraft fire.

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I think they were shooting at Jupiter that night, just a target in the sky, and all hell broke loose.

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Was it a false alarm? Or, as Bill Tompkins says, a flying saucer over L.A.

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Seven decades later, declassified U.S. government and military documents shed new light on what really happened on the morning of February 25, 1942.

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Based on a series of reports written at the time, the history of the 4th Anti-Aircraft Command is the only declassified account of the Battle of Los Angeles.

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On February 23rd, at about 7.30 p.m., Franklin Roosevelt was giving a pep talk to the citizens of the United States.

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We must be set to face a long war against crafty and powerful bandits.

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The attack of oil...

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Simultaneously, one of the Japanese submarines surfaced off the coast of Elwood, which is near Santa Barbara, California,

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and began lobbing shells at the oil fields there.

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California oil wells near Santa Barbara are hit by shells from a Japanese submarine.

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It's the first Japanese attack on mainland USA.

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Eyewitnesses report the submarine is headed south towards Los Angeles.

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Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941.

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Ten weeks later on the west coast, people were panicked.

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This attack cemented the fear of a possible Japanese invasion.

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Tensions mount during the evening of February 24th.

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The 4th Anti-Aircraft Command puts the entire Pacific Coast, from Monterey to the Mexican border, on yellow alert.

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A full-scale attack could be imminent.

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Over 250 anti-aircraft guns point to the skies.

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Inexperienced gunners nervously await a possible invasion.

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The declassified government document reports a sudden change, just before 2 a.m. on the morning of February 25th.

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The reports indicate that radar picked up a target 120 miles off the coast of Los Angeles.

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Right out here, the object comes due west, comes in east towards Malibu,

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and then starts to turn southward, right over here, Santa Monica, towards Los Angeles.

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At 2.21 a.m., as the object appears to approach the city, a blackout is ordered.

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By 2.30, the gunners were told that they were on green alert status one, which is fire at will.

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At 2.43 a.m., an officer reports something in the sky south of downtown Los Angeles.

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Faced with the prospect of another Pearl Harbor, they take no chances.

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One set of gunners thought they saw targets at about 18,000 feet.

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What is that? Got them? Got them? Got them? Target acquired!

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And they fire at will. Fire! Fire!

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Firing 76 millimeter shells into the air like crazy.

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The sky was described in the LA Valley as erupting like a volcano.

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It was total chaos. The anti-aircraft gunners were firing at perceived targets.

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They weren't verified targets.

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We have three intertillery shells, 50 calibers, mortars.

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Shells were coming down into neighborhoods. A number of people were killed.

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Six people are confirmed to have died, making the Battle of Los Angeles the deadliest U of O sighting on record.

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The whole sky lit up, waking people out of bad thinking what is going on.

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The eyewitness reports are wildly inconsistent.

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Some claim they see entire squadrons of heavy bombers in formation.

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Some see bright lights. Others describe seeing a strange, whitish sphere, like a large balloon.

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If you look west, as far as you can see, is where Santa Monica is.

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From those hills is where the object first appeared.

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Slowly meandering, as far inland is Baldwin Hills, Culver City, where we're standing.

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At this point, the object turns and goes back towards the coastline over Long Beach and out towards the ocean.

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At 4.13 a.m., the last sighting is reported.

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Soon after, the targets disappear without a trace.

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No bombs were dropped. No casualties sustained.

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The civilian deaths are not the result of bursting shells, but car crashes and heart attacks attributed to the dramatic events of the night.

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And after firing 1,400 high explosive shells into the sky, the U.S. military doesn't bring down a single enemy target,

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leaving civilians and soldiers unsure of what they had just seen.

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Was it a false alarm? A failed Japanese air raid? Or, as some claim, a mass eyewitness sighting of something that we now call a UFO?

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No, I don't believe it was a UFO, but I did meet people that did believe that. Yes.

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Bill Tompkins is one of these people.

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I never stopped thinking about that night. I knew that it was something extremely important, that something had definitely taken place.

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I felt that some enormous extraterrestrial vehicle had made it pass over Southern California.

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February 25, 1942. Anti-aircraft gunners have just fired over 1,400 shells at a mysterious object floating over the city.

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The object may have been L.A.'s first UFO.

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Over the last 70 years, the city of Angels has been a hotbed of UFO sightings.

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Some of these sightings are from highly experienced military sources, including this one from 1954.

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Over the city of Los Angeles, two test pilots report seeing an object in the sky.

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They describe it as pencil thin, stationary, floating horizontally, and appearing to be solid and metallic.

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This sighting is filed in Project Blue Book, an American Air Force UFO initiative that investigates over 12,000 UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969, when the project is terminated.

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It was an effort by the Air Force to find out what these phenomena may have been and to capture these reports and analyze them and try to figure out if they were a threat to national security.

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They looked at 12,000 and changed separate sighting incidents that they had reports on.

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They developed a way to capture this data and ultimately came to the conclusion that most of these had explainable origins.

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Project Blue Book classifies the great majority of the sightings as simply birds, clouds, airplanes, or stars.

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Some of them still were listed as unexplained.

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Out of the 12,000 cases, 701 remain unidentified. There is no known explanation.

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The Los Angeles 1954 sighting remains on the Air Force's records as unsolved and unidentified.

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12 years earlier, well before Project Blue Book or even the invention of the concept of UFOs, something unidentified appears in the sky over Los Angeles.

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It receives a massive military reaction from the jittery, post Pearl Harbor shore patrols.

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The intensive barrage from over 250 anti-aircraft guns leads to no confirmed hits or down targets.

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The most logical explanation is a Japanese airstrike.

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This declassified secret memo is key evidence to understanding what happened over Los Angeles that night.

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Dated February 26, 1942, the day after the event, it is sent to President Roosevelt from Army Chief of Staff George Marshall.

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Marshall believes unidentified planes, other than American, were fired upon.

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15 airplanes may have been involved, but he's puzzled that no bombs were dropped, no casualties among our troops, and no planes shot down.

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It doesn't fit the profile of a Japanese attack and shows the confusion all the way up to the President's office.

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Army officials declined to comment that the object might have been a blimp.

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However, to this day, there is a dispute over what could have been over Los Angeles that morning.

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Japanese airplanes, nothing at all? Or what some say was an extraterrestrial craft.

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News of the Battle of Los Angeles makes headlines across America, and the hunt for an explanation begins.

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People were wondering what had happened, because no one knew. No one seemed to have any definitive information.

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Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox believes nothing was over Los Angeles.

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He calls it a false alarm due to war nerves and overreaction by inexperienced American soldiers. But the Army disagrees.

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The next morning, the Navy said there were no airplanes in the sky, but the Army said the alert was real.

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So there was a lot of finger pointing going on.

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The Army did exactly what they were told to do. They were ordered to shoot a target during a green status.

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The alert was real. The green status was real. The firing was real.

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How that gets interpreted, you know, oh, there were planes flying over or there were balloons.

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That's where things get a little cloudy.

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The after-action reports from the history of the 4th Anti-Aircraft Command give a clear indication that something was over LA.

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At 2.43 a.m., a gun officer reports unidentified planes between Seal Beach and Long Beach.

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At 3.28 a.m., Battery G of the 78th Coastal Artillery reports 25 to 30 heavy bombers over the Douglas plant.

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At 3.33 a.m., 15 planes are seen flying over Artesia.

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There are 37 reports from soldiers to an officer as high-ranking as a colonel, all claiming they saw targets in the sky.

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Various witnesses are reporting not just one, but up to 20, maybe 200 different types of aircraft.

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Yet there is no evidence that the Japanese had any ability to launch a full-scale air attack near the California coast.

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Within the history of the 4th Anti-Aircraft Command, Wing Commander Milton Durham states,

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the tactical defense was turned over to the anti-aircraft as no fighters were sent up.

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The Army Air Forces held their defense fighters on the ground until they had verifiable targets to attack.

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There are no reports they ever took off.

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If the planes that were spotted were not American, one would expect them to be Japanese.

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But the Japanese submarine which attacked the oil fields the night before is reported to have withdrawn from the area with no further incident.

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Months later, the Japanese deny any involvement in the Battle of Los Angeles.

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It might seem to be simply a case of war jitters, except the radar picked up something.

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It's key evidence as to why the military ordered green alert status 1.

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The official record confirms without a doubt there were three different radar sets that tracked this object off the coast as it came in and down the coastline.

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Official reports show a target first spotted at 144 a.m., 120 miles off the coast.

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For almost 45 minutes, three separate radar operators followed it until, at three miles off the coast, it disappears.

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That means there was something in the sky. We followed it all the way into the coastline.

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This is key evidence that has fueled the UFO believers for decades.

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If the radar did pick up some object, and it's proven without a doubt that no American or enemy planes were in the sky that night, then could the believers be right?

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Could the target that floated over Los Angeles have come from another world?

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What makes this story so extraordinary is that even here, confronted with what looks like solid evidence from radar, there is solid reason for doubt.

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The official record records that radio bee officer says target doubtful. It wasn't a true reading.

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Radar was in its infancy in 1942, easily thrown off by flocks of birds or storm clouds.

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The primitive SCR 268 radar units used in Los Angeles were nowhere near as sophisticated or as accurate as we have come to expect.

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I really think the targets they saw that night were phantoms. They just weren't there.

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At the time, the radar was hard to interpret, and according to the history of the 4th anti-aircraft command, the target mysteriously vanished about 3 miles off the coast.

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So I think it was most likely atmospheric interference.

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Is it possible that the fears of a Japanese attack, combined with a suspicious radar report, were enough to spark panic?

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Besides the eyewitness accounts, there is photographic evidence taken during the battle.

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Printed in the LA Times, this is the most famous and widely recognized photo of the event.

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The first time I saw the photo, I thought, OK, this might be actual proof of a UFO caught in the beams of these searchlights.

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The ban is about to uncover a mystery that until now has never been made public.

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February 25, 1942, as the panicked city watches anti-aircraft light up the sky, army radar tracks something strange overhead, seemingly unharmed by the gunfire.

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It might be the first UFO caught on radar, but it's not the last.

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Los Angeles is a city that continues to get a large number of strange UFO sightings.

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The U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book investigated a 1956 sighting just south of the city in El Toro, California.

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Over an 8-hour period, the UFO is sighted by local residents and tracked by radar.

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70 pages of Blue Book files exist, including over 30 photos of the anomaly caught on radar.

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Helicopters and jets are sent to intercept, but they can't find the unidentified object.

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The investigators conclude the radar blips are caused by some local phenomenon.

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The visual sightings are attributed to overactive imaginations.

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Did the same phenomenon happen in 1942?

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The Los Angeles event has one key piece of evidence that the El Toro sighting doesn't have.

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A photograph published in the LA Times, capturing the dramatic moment when the lights appear to converge on something in the sky.

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UFO investigator Ben Hansen is near the spot he thinks this photo was taken.

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We really don't know much about where this photo was taken.

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It's the only photographic evidence of that night, but most people believe that it happened somewhere near the Baldwin Hills, which are behind me.

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We can see that it matches up pretty well. The profile of the hills, the outline, and it matches what witnesses said about the object coming this far inland before it turned back towards the coast.

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But is there something under the spotlights?

208
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The only way for us to know if there really is an object in this picture is for me to get a hold of the actual negative.

209
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The only person who can help is the archivist of the LA Times collection at UCLA, Simon Elliott.

210
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So here's box 3178 from the Los Angeles Times collection, and this should have the negatives in it that you're looking for.

211
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More than four million historic photos from the LA Times are under Elliott's care.

212
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And then here is the original negative.

213
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This is completely underexposed. Look at this. I had no idea it was going to look so faint.

214
00:22:56,000 --> 00:23:00,000
The searchlight beams are there, but the ridgeline's completely gone.

215
00:23:00,000 --> 00:23:07,000
There's very little else to see, and then this is the photograph as it appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

216
00:23:07,000 --> 00:23:10,000
The original image has been heavily retouched.

217
00:23:11,000 --> 00:23:21,000
In an era before Photoshop, retouching required copying negatives, enlarging details, and even painting directly on the celluloid.

218
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Is this simply to make the photo look better in print?

219
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Was the retouching meant to insert an image of something that really wasn't there, and does the original negative contain details that are hidden in the published version?

220
00:23:35,000 --> 00:23:42,000
Then, before the analysis even begins, archivist Simon Elliott spots something he's never seen before.

221
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There is in fact one thing that I hadn't noticed before, is that you have these notch codes in the edge of the negative.

222
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This one has a completely different notch code in it, so this was clearly taken with a different stock of film.

223
00:23:56,000 --> 00:24:04,000
Out of four million photographs in the LA Times collection, this is the first negative the archivist has seen that's been shot on a different film stock.

224
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It is rather a curiosity, it's not something I've seen in any other negatives in the collection.

225
00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:15,000
The Times photographers all use the same film from the same manufacturer.

226
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This one is so completely different, suggests that maybe the negative was not taken by a Times photographer.

227
00:24:22,000 --> 00:24:24,000
So, where did it come from?

228
00:24:25,000 --> 00:24:28,000
Well, that's a mystery you're going to have to try and work out.

229
00:24:29,000 --> 00:24:36,000
The famous photograph was possibly not taken by an LA Times photographer, and the source of the original negative is in doubt.

230
00:24:36,000 --> 00:24:40,000
If it didn't come from the LA Times, where did it come from?

231
00:24:43,000 --> 00:24:44,000
The first thing I want to do is...

232
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Ben sends high-res scans of the negatives to forensic photo analyst and former LA Times photographer George Reis.

233
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The first thing I think to do is determine whether or not the two images are actually of one exposure or if it's two separate exposures.

234
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George takes the two negatives and overlays them to make sure they are the same image.

235
00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:06,000
It's good to see that they match up.

236
00:25:06,000 --> 00:25:08,000
Yes, they do match up.

237
00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:16,000
The forensic comparison suggests that the doctored photo is enhanced, but not faked. Yet, there are bigger issues.

238
00:25:17,000 --> 00:25:22,000
Most people who study this photo, the biggest question they have is,

239
00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:26,000
is there an object in the center of the convergence of the spotlights?

240
00:25:26,000 --> 00:25:27,000
What do you say?

241
00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:34,000
Well, if we zoom in on the image, and if we adjust the brightness and contrast of it,

242
00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:40,000
we definitely can see that there's more density in this one area of the image,

243
00:25:40,000 --> 00:25:42,000
which indicates that there may be something there,

244
00:25:42,000 --> 00:25:45,000
but we can't determine the size or the shape of it.

245
00:25:45,000 --> 00:25:49,000
It might be something in motion. It might be something translucent.

246
00:25:49,000 --> 00:25:56,000
Rather than solving the issue, the forensics seem to have created more questions and more mysteries.

247
00:25:56,000 --> 00:26:03,000
Another anomaly that a lot of people focus on is the fact that some of these beams seem to kind of go through,

248
00:26:03,000 --> 00:26:09,000
you know, like this one, but the other ones pretty much are stopped right at the convergence point.

249
00:26:09,000 --> 00:26:14,000
This is the key part of the negative that experts have analyzed for years.

250
00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:17,000
Could there be something within the beams reflecting the lights?

251
00:26:17,000 --> 00:26:21,000
We have the lines here that could be reflections.

252
00:26:21,000 --> 00:26:25,000
So it could be that they're hitting an object, some of these lights coming from the side,

253
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and then hitting an object and reflecting outward, and they are brighter towards the center.

254
00:26:30,000 --> 00:26:33,000
And you can notice that they're brighter towards the center and fade out.

255
00:26:33,000 --> 00:26:38,000
And that could be indicative of them hitting an object as well. Yeah, it could be something there.

256
00:26:38,000 --> 00:26:42,000
The beams do appear to be reflecting off something at the convergence point.

257
00:26:42,000 --> 00:26:47,000
Is it an illusion of the negative? Are the reflections from smoke in the air?

258
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:51,000
Or are we seeing an actual object caught in the lights?

259
00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:55,000
There is still one more remaining mystery to solve.

260
00:26:55,000 --> 00:27:02,000
At the archives when I was looking at the negative, I noticed that every collection they had of these negatives

261
00:27:02,000 --> 00:27:06,000
had the same notch codes except for this one.

262
00:27:06,000 --> 00:27:11,000
Can you tell us anything about the notch code that is in this photo and why it's different?

263
00:27:11,000 --> 00:27:18,000
Yes, this image has a single notch. It's kind of a U-shaped notch up in the top right-hand corner.

264
00:27:18,000 --> 00:27:21,000
So this is the notch right here.

265
00:27:21,000 --> 00:27:25,000
So I have a sheet that shows the notch codes.

266
00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:28,000
So we have several different notch patterns.

267
00:27:28,000 --> 00:27:35,000
But the one that looks most significantly like this is the narrow notch of the Kodak Fine Grain Positive Film.

268
00:27:35,000 --> 00:27:39,000
And this would be very indicative of this being a copy negative.

269
00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:46,000
So what you're telling me is this negative is not even the original, but this is a copy?

270
00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:47,000
That's correct.

271
00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:53,000
That is incredible because everyone's research has been based on this being the original negative.

272
00:27:53,000 --> 00:27:54,000
So where is it?

273
00:27:54,000 --> 00:27:57,000
I don't know. It's a mystery to me.

274
00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:01,000
The digital analysis leaves us with as many questions as answers.

275
00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:06,000
Are these light beams reflecting off something solid that's hidden behind the glare?

276
00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:11,000
It's impossible to say for sure because the original negative is missing.

277
00:28:11,000 --> 00:28:13,000
Was it simply lost or misplaced?

278
00:28:13,000 --> 00:28:17,000
Or was it intentionally removed from the archive?

279
00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:19,000
And if so, who took it?

280
00:28:19,000 --> 00:28:26,000
Would the original negative supply any more information or prove conclusively that the object existed?

281
00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:33,000
And finally, if there is indeed an object behind the glare of light, how is it that it wasn't shot down?

282
00:28:33,000 --> 00:28:40,000
Some believe that an object was actually shot down and they say they have proof.

283
00:28:40,000 --> 00:28:44,000
But if something was, what was it?

284
00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:51,000
The day after the Battle of LA, the Secretary of the Navy reported to the press that it was a false alarm.

285
00:28:51,000 --> 00:28:54,000
Simply a case of war jitters.

286
00:28:55,000 --> 00:29:00,000
Military historian Stephen Nelson believes that many of the reports were right.

287
00:29:00,000 --> 00:29:07,000
That guns were firing at an actual object and he thinks he's finally determined exactly what the target was.

288
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:13,000
This is the type of search light that would have been used around the time of the air raid.

289
00:29:13,000 --> 00:29:19,000
And in the famous photograph with all of the search lights, you could see that search lights did converge.

290
00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:23,000
In some cases, it's been argued that they have over illuminated the target.

291
00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:31,000
Documents from the 4th Anti-Aircraft Command reveal what the search lights might have been following buried deep inside the report.

292
00:29:31,000 --> 00:29:35,000
We believe that meteorological balloons were launched according to schedule.

293
00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:39,000
The report reveals the launch of large weather balloons at 3 a.m.

294
00:29:39,000 --> 00:29:43,000
These balloons were sent up to determine weather and wind conditions.

295
00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:50,000
According to the reports, some balloons may have been released over Los Angeles during Green Status 1.

296
00:29:51,000 --> 00:29:56,000
When the balloon goes aloft on Green Status, people take notice of it.

297
00:29:56,000 --> 00:30:00,000
The search light crews took notice of it, the gun crews took notice of it.

298
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:05,000
The controller learned that there was a balloon aloft in Green Status 1.

299
00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:08,000
He orders it destroyed.

300
00:30:08,000 --> 00:30:15,000
In this theory, when the commanding officer realizes the sighting of the weather balloons is causing panic, he orders them destroyed.

301
00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:19,000
Only to cause more panic as gunfire increases.

302
00:30:21,000 --> 00:30:26,000
So the gun crews didn't simply just start firing, you know, pell-mell.

303
00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:38,000
This was a direct order from the area controller to destroy the target, which was known and identified as a balloon at that time.

304
00:30:38,000 --> 00:30:43,000
But there are other interpretations, though, but that is my interpretation.

305
00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:51,000
But this balloon theory, although plausible, does not account for the reported sightings of various aircraft by military personnel.

306
00:30:51,000 --> 00:30:59,000
And the theory doesn't account for the most startling phenomenon of the night, a report of an actual crashed aircraft.

307
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:08,000
The Navy stated they were receiving reports that they had downed aircraft at about 180th Street in Vermont.

308
00:31:08,000 --> 00:31:12,000
This was confirmed by the 77th precinct of the LAPD.

309
00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:21,000
There are numerous reports at night, both from men with a great deal of experience to people with almost no experience.

310
00:31:21,000 --> 00:31:25,000
And they claim to have seen aircraft being shot down.

311
00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:27,000
It's a startling claim.

312
00:31:27,000 --> 00:31:34,000
The Los Angeles Police Department, the U.S. Navy, and the Daily Paper all report a crash in the middle of the city.

313
00:31:34,000 --> 00:31:37,000
But no evidence of a crash ever surfaces.

314
00:31:38,000 --> 00:31:42,000
Stephen Nelson believes there's a simple explanation.

315
00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:49,000
When you have bursting shells in the sky, there are often embers and burning things that come down.

316
00:31:49,000 --> 00:31:56,000
Perhaps, you know, they may have seen that sort of sputtering down from the sky.

317
00:31:56,000 --> 00:32:02,000
As a professional UFO investigator, Ben Hansen suspects there's more to the story.

318
00:32:02,000 --> 00:32:08,000
He believes the reports from the police and Navy can't be so simply dismissed.

319
00:32:08,000 --> 00:32:13,000
Now, it's one thing to say, yeah, we may have hit something, it may have come down.

320
00:32:13,000 --> 00:32:17,000
It's another thing to say, we have it on the ground.

321
00:32:17,000 --> 00:32:26,000
I think that we have enough witnesses and enough people definitively saying we downed some type of craft that maybe somebody came in and scooped it up.

322
00:32:26,000 --> 00:32:30,000
The Japanese claim they had no aircraft over Los Angeles.

323
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:36,000
The Army Air Force didn't order any fighters to intercept the unidentified target.

324
00:32:36,000 --> 00:32:41,000
If these official reports are true, what could have been shot down?

325
00:32:41,000 --> 00:32:46,000
If it wasn't an alien spacecraft, there's another intriguing possibility.

326
00:32:46,000 --> 00:32:54,000
What if it was an experimental American aircraft so classified that its crash could not be acknowledged by the military?

327
00:32:54,000 --> 00:32:59,000
Aviation historian Peter Merlin is an aircraft accident expert.

328
00:32:59,000 --> 00:33:03,000
He's investigated more than 600 crash sites.

329
00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:10,000
Merlin and Ben Hansen explore a crash site from a top secret aircraft that went down in 1953.

330
00:33:10,000 --> 00:33:13,000
Some of the remains are still visible.

331
00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:16,000
They're coming from the south to the north from over here.

332
00:33:16,000 --> 00:33:20,000
The plane exploded and spread debris for a quarter mile.

333
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:22,000
You're seeing this much debris and wreckage.

334
00:33:22,000 --> 00:33:24,000
I mean, this is just strewn all over the place.

335
00:33:24,000 --> 00:33:27,000
Is there anything to identify the actual craft with?

336
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:32,000
Well, some pieces you'll find, part numbers or inspection stamps.

337
00:33:32,000 --> 00:33:44,000
The crash site from 1953 is near one of the most highly secured and top secret facilities in the world, Edwards Air Force Base.

338
00:33:44,000 --> 00:33:48,000
Edwards sits just on the other side of the mountains from Los Angeles.

339
00:33:48,000 --> 00:33:52,000
In 1942, it was called Muroc.

340
00:33:52,000 --> 00:34:00,000
Edwards has been at the forefront of testing virtually every aircraft that was developed for the Air Force Inventory.

341
00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:04,000
From California, the first pictures of the new flying wing.

342
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:19,000
From early innovations to supersonic and hypersonic to more modern-day stealth projects, many revolutionary top secret technologies have been developed at Edwards.

343
00:34:19,000 --> 00:34:26,000
There are a lot of projects which have taken place in the past that are still not declassified and remain a mystery to this day.

344
00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:33,000
But what top secret projects are being developed in 1942 at the time of the Battle of Los Angeles?

345
00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:41,000
The XP-59 was tested at Muroc beginning in 1942 and was followed immediately by the XP-80.

346
00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:48,000
These aircraft were revolutionary and they were highly secret at the time.

347
00:34:48,000 --> 00:34:56,000
Even at Edwards, the line between top secret experimental aircraft and UFOs gets blurred.

348
00:34:56,000 --> 00:35:02,000
Some of the things flying at Edwards are so strange looking that they would easily generate UFO reports.

349
00:35:02,000 --> 00:35:08,000
Does this explain the strange object fired on by anti-aircraft gunners in 1942?

350
00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:14,000
A top secret, experimental craft scrambled during the first reports of an attack.

351
00:35:14,000 --> 00:35:21,000
A craft that crashed and had to be covered up to protect its vital secret for the Japanese and the Nazis?

352
00:35:21,000 --> 00:35:26,000
It's an intriguing theory, but Merlin finds it unlikely.

353
00:35:26,000 --> 00:35:31,000
I don't think there's any chance they would have flown the early jets over the Los Angeles area.

354
00:35:31,000 --> 00:35:37,000
It was such a secret project they could find their activities to the desert ranges where the population was sparse.

355
00:35:37,000 --> 00:35:44,000
Even today, Edwards Air Force Base remains a hotbed of UFO reports, even from seasoned combat veterans.

356
00:35:44,000 --> 00:35:50,000
I called the office and I said, Edwards, you're not going to believe what I'm about to say.

357
00:35:52,000 --> 00:35:56,000
DOB, February 26, 1942

358
00:35:56,000 --> 00:36:03,000
After a night of anti-aircraft fire, citizens of Los Angeles wonder what kind of craft flew over their city.

359
00:36:03,000 --> 00:36:10,000
Could there be any connection to the nearby top secret testing grounds called Murak or Edwards Air Force Base?

360
00:36:10,000 --> 00:36:15,000
Since 1942, Edwards remains a UFO hotspot.

361
00:36:15,000 --> 00:36:23,000
There are a lot of UFO stories surrounding Edwards. Some of them are elaborate to the point of being unbelievable, like UFO landings with visitors.

362
00:36:23,000 --> 00:36:28,000
Others are vague lights in the sky and objects being tracked on radar.

363
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:34,000
The US Air Force's Project Blue Book began documenting UFO sightings connected to the airbase.

364
00:36:36,000 --> 00:36:44,000
1947, according to Project Blue Book, an Edwards test pilot sees an oscillating sphere at 12,000 feet.

365
00:36:44,000 --> 00:36:48,000
Over the next three days, other people at the base also see it.

366
00:36:48,000 --> 00:36:56,000
1951, two F-86 pilots attempt to intercept an unidentified flying object at 55,000 feet.

367
00:36:56,000 --> 00:37:04,000
The sighting is at first attributed to a weather balloon, but the pilot state the craft had wings and could move at incredible speed.

368
00:37:06,000 --> 00:37:13,000
After an investigation, Project Blue Book concluded, contrary to all eyewitness reports, it was a weather balloon.

369
00:37:15,000 --> 00:37:20,000
Bizarre sightings at Edwards Air Force Base continued up to the present day.

370
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:27,000
In 1996, another eyewitness report enters into the realm of the unexplained.

371
00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:28,000
I was solo that night.

372
00:37:28,000 --> 00:37:32,000
Mike Larson is an Air Force Security Officer at Edwards.

373
00:37:32,000 --> 00:37:36,000
And I just pulled over somebody on Mercury Boulevard for speeding.

374
00:37:37,000 --> 00:37:40,000
All right, sir, have a good night. Slow it down, all right?

375
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:48,000
I gave him a warning and I was just walking back to my vehicle. They were leaving and that's when something caught my eye.

376
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:50,000
It was a light off in the distance.

377
00:37:51,000 --> 00:38:00,000
What I saw coming pretty much almost dead on was a triangular shaped, was large, had a center light, just steady, not too bright.

378
00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:04,000
And then on each corner, it had greenish lights on each side.

379
00:38:04,000 --> 00:38:13,000
No blinking, no aviation lights, all the lights were steady on and it moved very slow and it was quiet.

380
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:17,000
There was no engine noise, nothing to identify it as a standard aircraft.

381
00:38:17,000 --> 00:38:19,000
Edwards Police Force?

382
00:38:19,000 --> 00:38:22,000
And so then I called the office and I said, Edwards,

383
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:28,000
I'm not going to believe what I'm about to say. I'm seeing an unidentified flying object.

384
00:38:28,000 --> 00:38:32,000
I asked them to confirm to the tower if we had anything flying tonight.

385
00:38:33,000 --> 00:38:37,000
The tower said that there's no flying and they don't see anything.

386
00:38:37,000 --> 00:38:41,000
And at that point, that's when I said, well, tell them to look to the southeast.

387
00:38:41,000 --> 00:38:48,000
And a few seconds later, then other posts around the bay started calling in saying that they saw something as well.

388
00:38:48,000 --> 00:38:59,000
It came in this direction and slowly moved almost to the south base side and then over towards Boron.

389
00:38:59,000 --> 00:39:04,000
I had 10,000 flight hours. I've been around aircraft, you know, for 20 years.

390
00:39:04,000 --> 00:39:07,000
And to this day, I can't tell you what it is.

391
00:39:08,000 --> 00:39:15,000
Did Officer Mike Larson see an experimental craft so secret even base personnel were unaware of?

392
00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:19,000
Or was it something even stranger?

393
00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:23,000
I know what I saw. I just can't tell you what it is.

394
00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:30,000
What Larson saw remains a mystery and adds to the Edwards UFO lore.

395
00:39:30,000 --> 00:39:35,000
The mystery remains as to what, if anything, was over LA in 1942.

396
00:39:36,000 --> 00:39:42,000
The official army file states something crashed near downtown Los Angeles. What could it have been?

397
00:39:44,000 --> 00:39:48,000
Dr. Robert Wood believes he has definitive evidence.

398
00:39:48,000 --> 00:39:53,000
As an aeronautical engineer, he spent 40 years at Douglas Aircraft Company.

399
00:39:54,000 --> 00:40:01,000
He believes he has documents to prove that something extraordinary crashed in February 1942.

400
00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:07,000
And his mysterious evidence has fanned the flames of conspiracy theories ever since.

401
00:40:07,000 --> 00:40:15,000
I first became interested in the Battle of LA when I got some documents that appeared to be classified.

402
00:40:15,000 --> 00:40:24,000
Five photocopied documents marked Top Secret were delivered to Dr. Wood by what he claims was an anonymous military source.

403
00:40:24,000 --> 00:40:31,000
These mysterious documents appear to be from the 1940s, memos and letters to the President's office.

404
00:40:31,000 --> 00:40:40,000
They excited me a great deal because it seemed as if the documents suggested strongly that we were being attacked by UFOs.

405
00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:45,000
And that we were shooting at the UFOs and that we might have shot a couple of them down.

406
00:40:45,000 --> 00:40:50,000
Every way I looked at them, it seemed to me that they had all the airmarks of authenticity.

407
00:40:51,000 --> 00:40:57,000
One of the four documents is already confirmed and well known among historians.

408
00:40:57,000 --> 00:41:03,000
The memo from George Marshall to President Roosevelt, written the day after the Battle of Los Angeles.

409
00:41:03,000 --> 00:41:07,000
But it's the other four documents that are in question.

410
00:41:07,000 --> 00:41:13,000
When I found out that it looked as if we really had recovered craft, I got very excited.

411
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:23,000
This is a memo one week later from FDR to George Marshall saying that we have actually recovered two craft.

412
00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:28,000
One was recovered in the San Bernardino Mountains and the other was salvaged by the Navy at sea.

413
00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:33,000
This headquarters has come to a determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly

414
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:39,000
and according to secret intelligence sources they are an all probability of interplanetary origin.

415
00:41:40,000 --> 00:41:47,000
So those are the words right in this document in March, one week later, 1942.

416
00:41:47,000 --> 00:41:53,000
Dr. Wood's documents seem incredible, yet there is no other verification or support for these claims

417
00:41:53,000 --> 00:41:59,000
and no other copies besides the mysterious documents that Wood claims he received anonymously.

418
00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:07,000
Even UFO investigator Ben Hansen questions the authenticity of Dr. Wood's documents.

419
00:42:08,000 --> 00:42:14,000
One of the most crucial things in doing forensics on documents is having the original document.

420
00:42:14,000 --> 00:42:18,000
That's my biggest problem with the ones that Dr. Wood presented.

421
00:42:18,000 --> 00:42:26,000
We can't test the paper, we can't test the ink, we can't look for the special qualities that would have been present in that time period.

422
00:42:26,000 --> 00:42:35,000
The mysterious documents are the only official connection of the Battle of Los Angeles with the idea of alien or extraterrestrial spacecraft.

423
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:40,000
Without any reliable source, these documents remain shaky evidence at best.

424
00:42:40,000 --> 00:42:46,000
All that remains are the official files reporting mysterious craft over Los Angeles,

425
00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:50,000
soldiers firing upon unknown targets and eyewitness accounts.

426
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:59,000
Bill Tompkins was one of a few who reported bizarre, disc-like craft, unlike anything they'd seen on Earth.

427
00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:09,000
It's a situation where a massive extraterrestrial military organization came in over our planet

428
00:43:09,000 --> 00:43:12,000
at two months after we went to war with Japan.

429
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:15,000
Others remain skeptical.

430
00:43:15,000 --> 00:43:19,000
I believe there are other advanced civilizations out there, but based on the reports,

431
00:43:19,000 --> 00:43:24,000
there's no documentary evidence that they came and visited on February 25, 1942.

432
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:28,000
I've always found material at every crash site I've been to.

433
00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:31,000
But it's certainly nothing extraterrestrial.

434
00:43:31,000 --> 00:43:41,000
I've certainly never seen any evidence myself of extraterrestrial hesitation, and I'd love to, but it just doesn't seem to be there.

435
00:43:49,000 --> 00:43:53,000
Stephen Nelson prefers a different approach to commemorate the event.

436
00:43:53,000 --> 00:43:59,000
Every February, the actual site of the air-raid guns hosts a celebration of the Battle of Los Angeles

437
00:43:59,000 --> 00:44:04,000
with re-enactors, 1940s music, and World War II veterans.

438
00:44:05,000 --> 00:44:09,000
I don't want to destroy people's theories and their ideas.

439
00:44:09,000 --> 00:44:17,000
I just think that there has been precious little focus on the men that served that night and the circumstances behind it.

440
00:44:17,000 --> 00:44:22,000
Rather than look at it as an embarrassment, we should look at it as a lesson.

441
00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:27,000
And the men that served that night actually went on to do great things in World War II.

442
00:44:27,000 --> 00:44:35,000
And that is the story of the air-raid, I think, much more important than speculation on a UFO or something of that nature.

443
00:44:37,000 --> 00:44:42,000
Ben Hansen believes that despite decades of investigation, the event remains a mystery.

444
00:44:44,000 --> 00:44:51,000
We have hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses who saw some type of strange object over Los Angeles.

445
00:44:51,000 --> 00:44:54,000
As to what it was, we may never know.

446
00:44:54,000 --> 00:45:00,000
On the one hand, we want to determine with a final exact what happened that evening.

447
00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:09,000
But I think with the passage of time and the loss of the eyewitnesses, I think it's forever going to be open for speculation.

448
00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:15,000
The official files clearly show the confusion of the night.

449
00:45:16,000 --> 00:45:23,000
Government reports mention both planes and balloons in the skies, yet there is no conclusive evidence of either.

450
00:45:24,000 --> 00:45:28,000
Eyewitnesses claim bizarre sightings with no evidence to back them up.

451
00:45:30,000 --> 00:45:36,000
Even the famous photograph turns out to be inconclusive, since the original has disappeared.

452
00:45:37,000 --> 00:45:45,000
And the alleged leaked documents of Dr. Wood refer directly to interplanetary aircraft, but their authenticity is seriously questioned.

453
00:45:46,000 --> 00:45:55,000
The events of February 25, 1942 remain a mystery, leaving the case study of the Battle of Los Angeles unidentified.