Blind Spot: The Great Los Angeles Air Raid and the Secret Memos of Majestic 12

At a little after three in the morning on February 25th, 1942, the height of World War II, anti-aircraft batteries stationed around defense plants on the coast of California began firing and didn’t let up for almost an hour, discharging 1,433 explosive shells. This incident had its beginnings the previous day, when naval intelligence had warned that an attack might be expected sometime during the next 10 hours. Expectation turned to official alert after blinking lights and flares were spotted near defense plants, but eventually the alert was rescinded. Then, in the early morning of the 25th, radar picked up something 120 miles off coast headed toward Los Angeles. At 2:15 a.m., artillery batteries readied themselves to fire, and at 2:21 a.m., with the object closing the distance to only a few miles, L.A. went into a blackout. If this was an air raid, they were not about to light up targets for enemy bombers.

Strangely, the object then disappeared from radar, but a number of reports of aircraft had artillerymen on edge, and a sighting of a balloon with a red flare over Santa Monica caused some batteries to open fire. After that, the skies were filled with bursting shells and smoke, and the city came awake to the “ACK-ACK” sound of heavy ordnance shattering the quiet night. No one was thinking straight; they turned on their lights despite the blackout, and they went out of doors to search the skies. Some claimed to see swarms of planes moving at high speeds, while others saw slow moving balloons. The artillery men, meanwhile, searched the maelstrom above for their UFO target, and believing they saw it, fired… only to find their shells had no effect on whatever it was they thought they had seen.

Nevertheless, destruction did ensue, below if not above. There were five deaths and numerous injuries, and reports indicated that the wreckage of downed aircraft had fallen into the streets. Within an hour, the artillery fire relented, and eventually, by the light of dawn, the devastation could be surveyed. But that bright morning light showed something unexpected. There had been no downed enemy planes, only fallen shells. Deaths had been from car crashes—people driving in a blackout with their eyes on the sky instead of the road—and one from a heart attack in the panic. Most injuries were the same, clumsy accidents during the blackout: air raid wardens falling off roofs, policemen breaking the glass of bright storefronts to extinguish lights, radio announcers running smack into buildings in their excitement.

A police officer reaching into a hole caused by a dud that fell in Santa Monica, via the Los Angeles Times

When all was said and done, evaluations of the incident varied wildly. The Navy came to the conclusion that there had been no aircraft or any other objects over the city that morning, attributing the entire episode to rattled nerves in wartime. Listeners may liken this to the recent scare experienced by Hawaiians when they received a warning of an incoming missile that didn’t actually exist. During that terror-filled time before the alert was withdrawn, most assumed the missile had been launched by North Korea after all the recent juvenile posturing between our leaders. In the same way, in Los Angeles during Word War II, fears of attack were profound and paranoia was running high, so there is certainly a case for this explanation. To illustrate the paranoia that had gripped the nation, not even a week earlier, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order allowing the Secretary of War and other commanders to designate military areas, from which any individuals deemed to be threats to national security might be excluded—an infamous decision that led to the internment of Japanese-, German-, and Italian-Americans in concentration camps. Indeed, during the supposed air raid itself, the sheriff actually detained Japanese gardeners on suspicion of signaling enemy aircraft. And the fact that naval intelligence had alerted coastal personnel to the possibility of an imminent attack on the 24th also supports the war nerves theory. Everyone was expecting something to happen that night, and for good reason, as the day before, in response to a Presidential speech, a Japanese submarine had surfaced off the coast north of Santa Barbara and shelled an oil refinery. This act of provocation had caused some Japanese-Americans to predict an imminent attack on L.A., perhaps setting the entire chain of imagined events into motion. While insisting there had been no attack, Frank Knox, the Secretary of the Navy, did indicate that the threat of just such an air raid remained very real, prompting him to recommend moving industries vital to the war effort inland. This has since led to conspiracy theories that the entire episode had been staged to demonstrate a credible threat and make clear the need to move defense plants away from the coasts, but this proposition doesn’t withstand scrutiny as no further proof of a threat was needed. A Japanese raider surfacing off our shores and shelling a gasoline plant important to the military surely would have been evidence enough that coastal targets were vulnerable.

Japanese propaganda depicting the shelling of near Santa Barbara, via California State Military Museums

Then the War Department weighed in, reporting to the President—perhaps to save face or perhaps in earnest consideration of eyewitness testimony—that there had indeed been unidentified planes over L.A. on the morning of the 25th. Then why had they dropped no bombs, and why had some been reported to travel at slow speeds? Why, because they must’ve been commercial aircraft flown by foreign agents for the purposes of reconnaissance. Then where had these flights originated? Well, perhaps the enemy had a secret airbase in Mexico… or perhaps they had developed a submarine capable of functioning as an aircraft carrier. Now, for the Secretary of War to suggest this, we must have had intelligence regarding such vessels, as the Japanese were indeed developing a submarine aircraft carrier, but they didn’t go into production until 1943 and weren’t completed until 1945, which rules out the possibility that they lay offshore of L.A. that night, launching bombers into the sky. That left the theory of a secret Mexican airbase, which common sense tells us can’t be true, as no further air raids were ever scrambled from this theoretical installation, and if it existed, the Japanese surely would have used it to full advantage before the end of the war.

Regardless of the embarrassingly public suggestion that the entire incident had been a case of nervous trigger fingers and mass hysteria, the atmosphere of paranoia persisted and even grew worse. Within a month, Japanese internment was being enforced. After the war, not surprisingly, the Japanese insisted they had flown no planes over L.A., and the fact that they had proudly owned other attacks, including Pearl Harbor and the shelling near Santa Barbara, leads one to believe them. Eventually, in the 1980s, the U.S. government would offer a third and rather familiar explanation: a weather balloon had touched off the panic, very much the same as it had at Roswell, New Mexico five years later.  But the 80s would see yet another explanation for the so-called Great Los Angeles Air Raid, and this one would better capture the public imagination. That explanation: extraterrestrial spacecraft.

An ostensibly secret document purporting to brief President-Elect Eisenhower on the existence of a Top Secret intelligence and R&D group known as Majestic 12, via Wikimedia Commons

In late 1984, a television producer, Jaime Shandera, received an anonymous brown paper package that contained a roll of 35mm film. This film contained images of official-looking documents that appeared to reveal some extraordinary things: namely the existence of a committee called the Majestic 12 tasked by President Truman with investigating and covering up UFO incidents like the crash at Roswell, recovering and exploiting extraterrestrial technology, and advising the President on how to engage with ETs. Jaime Shandera, the television producer who received them, happened to be friends with ufologists, and instead of going public, he shared it with them. These documents were held close to the vest, and only revealed in small pieces, making the rounds among other ufologists until, in reaction to the intentions of competing ufologists to publish portions of the Majestic 12 papers, Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman, the ufologist friends of Shandera who had all the papers, went public with them as well as with their further research. They had turned up a memo in the National Archives that mentioned Operation Majestic Twelve, seeming to confirm the authenticity of the papers.

Among the many Majestic 12 documents that came out in this time was a memo supposedly written by General George Marshall, head of the armed forces, to President Roosevelt claiming that after the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, two unconventional aircraft were recovered. The document shared the determination that the craft were “not earthly” and probably “of interplanetary origin.” Ever since this time, the Los Angeles air raid has become the Battle of Los Angeles and is now synonymous with UFOs and aliens. A cursory search of the Internet pulls up numerous examinations of the famous photograph from that night, with searchlights trained on one spot in the sky, running it through different filters and enhancements to reveal that a domed saucer can be seen caught in the spotlights.

The only problem is, that photograph has been altered from the original. And the Majestic 12 documents were long ago systematically debunked.

The retouched photo that sparked much speculation among UFO enthusiasts, via the Los Angeles Times

The simple fact that their recipient, television producer Jaime Shandera, was associated with ufologists and contacted them immediately, before he had even developed the film, throws doubt on the documents from the beginning. Then there is the fact that the memo discovered in the National Archives that seemed to authenticate the papers was shown to have been a planted forgery; it showed signs of having been folded and so perhaps carried into the archives in a pocket, it lacked official stamps and watermarks that would have proven it legitimate, it had typewriter-key impressions showing that it was an original rather than the carbon copy it was intended to look like, and its contents described a meeting between President Eisenhower and National Security Advisor Robert Cutler that couldn’t have taken place in that Eisenhower’s appointment books, which recorded even top secret meetings, don’t show it, and Robert Cutler is confirmed to have been out of the country at the time. Most of the work of debunking the Majestic 12 mythos has been done by noted skeptic Phillip J. Klass. His coup de grace, it seems to me, came when he uncovered the fact that one of Shandera’s ufologist friends, Bill Moore, had actually spoken previously about his plans to forge top secret documents to encourage those with real knowledge to come forward. Klass also showed through document analysis that in one case, President Truman’s signature had been cut from a photocopy of a known document and simply pasted onto the forgery. Then through forensic linguistics, he proved that Moore himself had authored at least some of the forgeries, contrasting a date format that appeared on MJ-12 documents with the date format customarily used in military documents of the time and comparing it more favorably with the way Bill Moore had written dates on other documents. Overall, it is hard to take any of the Majestic 12 documents seriously, including the Marshall-Roosevelt memo that indicates an extraterrestrial angle on the Great Los Angeles Air Raid. And in the end, just as during the blackout of that panic-stricken morning, when the spotlights searched the sky blindly only to find roiling clouds of smoke that obscured whatever might be up there, when we look back on the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, we are peering into a blind spot hopelessly shrouded in hoaxes and conflicting information.