DECLASSIFIED FILE // CEC-4219, 2026
Los Angeles, 1942. The War Had Already Started.
Two months after Pearl Harbor, at 3:16 a.m. on February 25, 1942, the air raid sirens of Los Angeles began to sound. The city went into full alert. Coastal defense searchlights lit up the sky. And the anti-aircraft artillery opened fire.
What They Saw
Radar operators detected an object 120 miles off the coast. When searchlights located it over Los Angeles, it was slow, luminous, and behaving unlike any known aircraft. The artillery fired more than 1,400 anti-aircraft shells over the course of an hour. The object was not brought down. It continued along its path and disappeared.
The Casualties
Three people died of heart attacks during the alarm. Three more died in accidents related to the blackout. There was property damage from artillery shells falling on the city. The object they were shooting at: untouched.
The Official Explanations
The next day, Secretary of War Henry Stimson said it was an enemy aircraft. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said it was a false alarm, weather balloons. Roosevelt gave no statement. In 1983, the Army’s Center of Military History published an analysis that concluded: the cause of the alarm was never identified with certainty.
The Photograph
An iconic photograph from that night shows searchlights converging on a point in the sky, the trails of artillery shells visible in the exposure. Something is there. Decades of analysis have not reached a consensus on what, exactly, that something was.
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