by Mack Maloney
One thing was for certain: These were not Americans flying over the city. Though the pilots of the nearby Fourth Interceptor Command had been alerted, no U.S. aircraft — fighter planes, bombers or blimps — were sent aloft that night, simply because the antiaircraft fire was so intense, the chance of a friendly aircraft being shot down was just too high.
Still, some people swore they saw dogfights between enemy airplanes and U.S. fighter aircraft, though illumination rounds fired from antiaircraft guns were probably mistaken by some people for aerial combat. Others claimed they saw strings of red lights that looked like illuminated kites fluttering in the sky. Some people even theorized these lighted kites were launched by Japanese American saboteurs signaling the approaching enemy aircraft to guide them to their targets.
At least 1,400 antiaircraft rounds were fired over Los Angeles during the “battle,” hitting nothing. Not a single bomb was dropped on the city and not a scrap of any aircraft was ever recovered. The only casualties were caused by unexploded ordnance that rained down on the area. This debris damaged many homes and cars throughout the city and killed three people. Three elderly residents also reportedly died of heart attacks during the incident.
At 4:14 A.M., the cease-fire order was given and the “Battle of Los Angeles” was over. But the controversy was just beginning, because at the height of the incident, an extraordinary flying object had been caught in a photograph taken by the Los Angeles Times.
And even to nonbelievers, its distinctive saucerlike profile looks a lot like a UFO.
* * *
As with the scareships and the ghost fliers, it’s easy to determine what the object photographed over LA that night was not.
A Japanese aircraft? The answer is definitely no. At the time Japan did not have any aircraft carriers capable of sailing close to the United States, nor any airplanes able to reach California from Japan. Some speculated the object might have been a seaplane launched from a Japanese submarine lurking offshore. But the object caught by the Los Angeles Times photographer is definitely not a seaplane.
George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff at the time, wrote a memorandum to President Roosevelt after the incident in which he speculated that the “unidentified planes” might have been commercial aircraft flown over Los Angeles by Japanese agents. Why? To spread alarm among the city’s residents. Other reasons for the Japanese to attempt such a brash plan: to pinpoint locations of the area’s antiaircraft batteries and possibly to test the effectiveness of the city’s blackout procedures.
And where would these commercial planes have flown from? The army speculated the Japanese might have a secret base in Mexico.
But this scenario was disproved at the end of the war when the Japanese divulged that they did not have any planes over the area at the time of the incident.
Could the object photographed over Los Angeles have been a blimp or a barrage balloon? The British used barrage balloons to ensnare low-flying enemy planes during the London Blitz. But while LA did have three of its own barrage balloons, they were all accounted for that night.
As UFO writer Frank Warren has pointed out, it’s important to note that the object in the photograph is taking direct hits from antiaircraft fire. So, the question must be asked: What, in 1942, could achieve flight, was elliptical in shape, was silvery in color and could survive direct hits from three-inch antiaircraft guns?
All this eventually led to speculation that whatever was flying over Los Angeles on February 25 was not of earthly origin — and the famous photo seems to bear this out. It shows an object of definite saucer shape caught in searchlights and surrounded by exploding antiaircraft shells. Physicist Bruce Maccabee, who wrote a detailed report about the LA incident, concluded that based on estimates of altitude and the spread of the searchlight beams, the object in the photo could have measured up to 300 feet across!
* * *
Whether the U.S. military had quick access to the Los Angeles Times photo is unknown. But the following day, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox said the whole “LA Raid” incident was a false alarm, something that could be attributed to “jittery nerves.” (Early 1942 was a nervous time for Southern Californians. Just the day before, a Japanese submarine had surfaced off the town of Goleta about an hour north of LA and fired on an oil refinery there.)
Yet many doubted Knox’s explanation, including the U.S. Army, which later issued a statement saying some kind of aircraft were over Los Angeles that night.
The press was also skeptical. An editorial appearing in the Long Beach Independent soon after the incident stated, “There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter.”
There may be some truth to this. Until the release of that Marshall memorandum some thirty years later, the Defense Department claimed it had no record of the event. No congressional investigation was ever conducted, nor any reasonable explanation given by any government agency as to what happened.
Just about the only thing everyone agrees on is that in the predawn hours of February 25, 1942, something saucerlike and huge, something that couldn’t be damaged by antiaircraft fire, something that was seen by almost a million people, flew over the city of Los Angeles.
5
The Mystery of the Foo Fighters
Someone Was Watching
It all began in either March or June 1942.
That no one knows the date for sure indicates on the grand scale of things how unimportant it seemed at the time.
Total war was raging around the world: Europe, North Africa and Asia were in flames. The Atlantic and the Pacific were killing zones. Millions of men were under arms; thousands of noncombatants were being slaughtered every day. The democracies against totalitarianism. Good versus evil. Freedom or slavery. This was World War II. And in 1942, the outcome was far from certain.
That spring, Germany was bombing Britain, and Britain was bombing Nazi-occupied Europe. The relentless two-way battle put numerous airplanes in the air, especially at night. Antiaircraft fire, bombs exploding, flaming debris, planes being shot down — it added up to a lot of confusion in the sky.
But among it all, riding on the same airstreams as the Heinkels and Messerschmitts flying west and the Wellingtons and Lancasters flying east, there was something else. Strange airborne things were seen by many: glowing green balls, luminous disks, cigar-shaped objects, weird flying craft — some of gigantic sizes — that displayed incredible speed, impossible maneuverability and for lack of a better explanation, a bizarre curiosity about what was going on in earth’s war-torn skies. “Strange Company” is how UFO author Keith Chester so aptly described them in his outstanding book of the same name.
They would also become known as the “foo fighters.”
* * *
The first detailed report of a foo fighter encounter came from Flight Lieutenant Roman Sabinski. A member of the 301 Squadron of a Polish division attached to the Royal Air Force (RAF), on either March 25 or June 25, 1942 (no exact report exists), Sabinski was flying a Wellington bomber over the Zuiderzee, off the coast of Holland. He and his crew were heading west, returning home from a bombing mission over Germany.
The flight had been routine until Sabinski’s rear gunner called him on the plane’s interphone. Some kind of flying object was approaching their plane from behind. Disk shaped and luminous, it seemed to be several miles away. Still, even at that distance it looked larger than the full moon.
Sabinski assumed the object was some type of enemy aircraft, so he directed the rear gunner to open fire as soon as it came in range. When the strange disk got within 200 yards of Sabinski’s aircraft, the gunner did just that. Firing both tracer and standard machine gun rounds, he hit the target, but — in shades of the strange flying object that had appeared over Los Angeles earlier that year — his barrage had no effect. The rounds simply disappeared once they struck the disk.
This went on for about two minutes — th
e gunner firing but with no results. Then the object zoomed ahead, taking up a position about 200 yards off the Wellington’s left wing. Now both the front and rear machine gunners were firing at it. But again, the object seemed impervious to bullets.
Sabinski began a series of evasive maneuvers, trying to shake whatever this thing was. But the object kept pace with him, always staying in the same position relative to his aircraft. Finally Sabinski gave up trying to elude it. His gunners made one last attempt to destroy their pursuer, but this failed as well.
A few moments later, the object moved to a point in front of the Wellington, remained there briefly, then shot straight up at tremendous speed and disappeared.
* * *
Shaken by the strange encounter, Sabinski nevertheless managed to return to base, getting his crew and plane home safely. As was standard procedure, he was immediately debriefed by his unit’s intelligence officer. But when the Polish pilot revealed what he’d seen, the intelligence officer’s only response was to ask Sabinski if he’d been drinking.
Later on, Sabinski talked with other members of his squadron and discovered that the crew of a Wellington traveling behind his plane had seen the strange flying object, too. But, fearing the same kind of ridicule that Sabinski had endured, this crew had not reported it.
Thus began what would become regular sightings by Allied airmen of unexplained aerial objects, flying not just over war-torn Europe but in the Pacific theater as well. They would have many names until christened foo fighters two years later. “Unconventional aircraft.” “Meteors.” “Rockets.” “Suspected secret weapons.”
Whatever the label, though, and no matter how many attempts were made to explain the objects, they became a perplexing mystery, and in some cases, a dangerous distraction to the people who were in charge of winning the war.
* * *
There were scattered reports of similarly strange aerial encounters during the rest of 1942. British bomber crews witnessed weird lights over Aachen, Germany, on the night of August 11, then again over Osnabrück on August 17 and over the Somme in occupied France in December.
Then, in January 1943, U.S. bomber crews began reporting unusual aerial phenomena, too. On January 11, a B-17 crew saw something in the sky that one witness described as a smoke ball, and another as a swarm of bees.
Four days later, on January 15, during a U.S. raid over Cherbourg, France, several U.S. aircrews saw large numbers of projectiles — by one description resembling schools of flying fish — coming at them.
The intelligence officers of the bomber units reporting these things were baffled. Of course, the first thought was that the strange aerial objects were new German weapons, being thrown at Allied bomber formations — and indeed, the Germans were always experimenting, at times somewhat desperately, with various kinds of new antiaircraft weapons, such as AA shells packed with loose shrapnel or even small glass globes containing the explosive thermite.
But unusual AA shells could not account for sightings of huge cylindrical disks, large “rockets” that turned on a dime, or gigantic cigar-shaped objects complete with portholes — again, descriptions that would be heard over and over from RAF and U.S. bomber crews as the war ground on.
Plus, of the many fantastic objects being reported by these same crews, none of them had shown any sort of aggression toward Allied airmen. No shots fired, no blowing up of Allied planes in flight, as would have happened if, as some Allied military people insisted, every strange flying thing encountered was a highly advanced Nazi wonder weapon.
So whatever these really strange objects were, they didn’t appear hostile. But that didn’t mean Allied intelligence officers weren’t concerned about them — or how to report them and to whom.
“There was a lot of science fiction around before and during the war,” Strange Company author Keith Chester told us in an interview. “Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers — that kind of stuff. When a crew would report one of these weird encounters, it put their squadron intelligence officers in an uneasy position. These men didn’t want to write something in an intelligence report that would sound like crazy science fiction to someone higher up the command chain. But at the same time they couldn’t ignore the fact that so many aircrews were seeing these things — and eventually, neither could the higher-ups.”
There were hundreds of these encounters reported during the war. And because of the ridicule factor as experienced by Lieutenant Sabinski, and again, the prevalent feeling among some in the Allied command structure that they just had to be some kind of German wizardry, undoubtedly many more incidents went unreported or misreported, being labeled as unusual antiaircraft fire and such.
So while the actual number will probably never be known, to those men who saw them, in both the European and Pacific theaters, foo fighters were real, they were mysterious, and a lot of times, they were frightening.
With special thanks to Keith Chester, Timothy Good, Jerome Clark and Lucius Farish, a list follows of some of the most unusual foo fighter episodes of the war.
The Ray Smith Incident
On the night of May 27, 1943, an RAF Halifax bomber was heading to Essen, Germany, as part of a massive bombing raid. Ray Smith of the Royal Canadian Air Force was at the controls.
Smith had no trouble finding his target. Essen had already been bombed earlier that evening; indeed, more than five hundred RAF planes would hit the heavily industrialized city this night. The fires created by the preceding wave of bombers had lit up the target area with a bright hellish glow.
Flying at nearly 19,000 feet, Smith’s Halifax arrived over the target to find heavy antiaircraft fire being unleashed by the German defenders below. As he was preparing for his bombing run, and with AA fire exploding all around him, Smith suddenly noticed a strange object flying off to his left. It was huge! Long and cylindrical, and much bigger than his Halifax, the silver and gold object was moving through the flak-filled sky at the same speed and about the same altitude as the bomber.
Smith called out to his crew, and five of them spotted the object, too. Incredibly, they could all see portholes ringing the entity, rounded apertures evenly spaced along its length.
The astonished crewmembers watched the object for almost a minute before it abruptly sped away. Climbing at an impossibly high speed of 4,000 miles per hour, it disappeared into the stars overhead.
Smith managed to complete his bombing run and then turn for home. Landing safely at their base, the Halifax crew was debriefed by their squadron’s intelligence officers. But whereas the crew was certain the intel men would be astonished by what had transpired, they were met with the opposite reaction. The intelligence officers seemed unimpressed by their fantastic story and steered the conversation toward other topics, like the amount of flak the bomber had encountered or how many enemy fighters the crew had seen. Smith and the others were left with the impression that the intelligence officers were intentionally downplaying the strange sighting.
This was no surprise. Evidence suggests that as early as 1943, Allied intelligence officers were sending somewhat sanitized details of “aerial phenomena” up to the higher authorities, while at the same time trying to keep the whole idea of these unknowns out of the minds of their aircrews, so they could concentrate on the matter at hand: beating the Nazis.
In other words, when it came to reporting these mysterious flying objects over Europe, a system of benign deception was already in place.
The Mysterious Silver Disks
The German city of Stuttgart was one of the most heavily defended targets of the European war.
Located in southwest Germany, the city housed factories capable of building engines for Hitler’s combat aircraft and troop vehicles. Several key military bases were also located near the city. Most important, though, Stuttgart was one of the major hubs for Nazi Germany’s railway system. For these reasons, the city was bombed more than fifty times during the war; as many as 850 bombers took part in some of these bombing raids, raining down tons of
explosives on the place. Still, the Germans defended it almost to the end.
On September 6, 1943, more than 350 U.S. B-17s set out to attack the city. Though many had to turn back for various reasons, of those that actually made it over the target, 45 were shot down, catastrophic losses for the American Eighth Air Force.
The air battle over the city was chaotic and bloody as Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf fighters relentlessly shot up the incoming B-17s and hundreds of AA guns fired up at them once they were over the target.
But in the midst of all this, something else had happened.
Just as the B-17s arrived over the city, two crews reported seeing hundreds of silver disks, the size of half-dollars, floating down from the sky above them. The witnesses said the objects descended in a tight cluster that moved unusually slowly. This cluster was reported to be as big as 75 feet long and 20 feet wide.
In the heat of the battle some witnesses thought they saw some of the mysterious disks land on the wing of one B-17 and start it burning. But that plane didn’t return from the disastrous raid, so this was impossible to verify.
What was for certain, at the time the strange disks appeared, was that there were no enemy aircraft above or anywhere near the American bombers.
So if the disks weren’t dropped on the B-17s, where did they come from?
When a “Rocket” Isn’t a Rocket
On the night of January 2, 1944, an RAF Mosquito night fighter operating over Germany had a strange encounter with an unidentified aerial object.
An extraordinarily fast airplane because it was made mostly of wood, this particular Mosquito was flying over the German town of Halberstadt when the pilot and his navigator saw what would be later described as a “rocket” following them. They reported the extraordinarily fast “rocket” overtook them, at one point turning 90 degrees to reach a course parallel with them. The crew watched this “rocket” for about a minute, until it finally disappeared.
