At 2:25 AM on February 25, 1942, just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the city of Los Angeles was suddenly plunged into war panic. Radar detected an “unidentified object” moving approximately 8 kilometers above Santa Monica, prompting the U.S. military to activate a full-scale air raid alert.

📍 Location	📅 Date	🔍 Category
Los Angeles, California, USA	1942-02-25	WWII UFO Incident

At 2:15 AM, soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 37th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade began firing fiercely into the sky. Officers reported seeing a huge, circular object emitting an orange-red glow, moving at a “slow and steady” speed from Santa Monica toward Long Beach. The artillery fired over 1,400 shells in total, but the object was never hit. Streetlights and shop windows across Los Angeles were shattered by the gunfire, with more than five tons of shell casings scattered throughout the city.

The headline of the Daily Herald Express newspaper at the time read: “LA Area Riddled by AA Shells; Plane Not Hit.” The Los Angeles Times reported the same day, stating directly that “no enemy aircraft were found in the sky.”

After the incident, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox immediately held a press conference, claiming that the events of February 25 were merely a “false alarm”—he attributed it to “war nerves” and “weather factors” causing radar errors. However, internal military reports from the same day showed that at least three independent radar stations had simultaneously tracked the same object, making it far from a simple misidentification.

Interestingly, contemporary military documents noted that the shape and movement patterns of the “flying object” did not match any known aircraft. These objects could remain completely stationary and then move at extremely high speeds—a capability far beyond the technological level of 1942.

Later declassified WWII archives revealed that the Japanese government also denied sending any aircraft near Los Angeles that day. In fact, Japanese submarines were active off the California coast, but there are no records of them deploying any aircraft.

The Battle of Los Angeles remains a subject of debate among UFO historians and military historians. In 2015, the U.S. National Archives released related original military documents, but they provided no clear explanation.

📚 Sources

• Los Angeles Times Archives (February 25-26, 1942)
• U.S. Army Anti-Aircraft Command, “Report on Los Angeles Blackout” (1942)
• National Archives, “Air Raid on Los Angeles” declassified records
• Gulyas, A.J. “The Battle of Los Angeles: A History” (2018), McFarland