Original subtitles

- Tonight, a terrifying event

in the skies over Los Angeles.

- Los Angeles is one of the most critically important

war defense cities in the entire country.

- All hell is breaking loose.

There are reports of a Japanese aircraft

shot down in Hollywood.

- No lights anywhere, no street lights,

no lights in buildings, no house lights.

Complete and utter darkness, it's as if LA

has just been wiped off the map.

- This is absolute pandemonium.

The only lights are the search lights

and the anti-aircraft guns firing.

- When the smoke clears,

the incident becomes known as the Battle of LA

and is veiled in secrecy and lies.

- The army says that there was something in the sky.

The Navy then says

there was actually nothing in the sky at all.

(canon firing)

- Angelenos are committed to the fact

that they have seen something.

Is the government actually covering something up?

- Now, we explore the top theories surrounding

this mysterious occurrence.

- In the middle of a blackout, in pitch dark,

it's a lot harder to separate facts from fiction.

(guns firing)

- What really triggered the so-called Battle of Los Angeles?

(dramatic music)

- [Laurence] February 24th, 1942, Los Angeles, California.

It's less than three months

since the Japanese Imperial Fleet

launched a surprise attack

on American forces at Pearl Harbor,

(bombs exploding)

killing 2,400

and bringing the United States fully into World War II.

On the home front,

the possibility of another attack on American soil

is now very real,

especially in the nation's biggest coastal cities.

- There's widespread fear

that Japan will attack the US mainland next,

and the US military has vowed

never to be caught off guard again.

- Not only does Los Angeles lead American cities

when it comes to aircraft production

with Douglas, Lockheed and North American Aviation,

but in San Pedro Bay,

it also houses a huge naval armada.

With a vulnerable location on the Pacific Ocean,

plus major metropolitan area

and a population of over 1 million,

city makes for a great target and they know it.

So to bolster its defenses,

anti-aircraft guns have been placed all around the city,

bunkers have been built

and air raid protocols have been drilled

into the population.

- After Pearl Harbor,

the United States has been practicing blackout drills

in every coastal city out of fear of an aerial attack.

- [Laurence] The purpose of these blackouts

is so that enemy planes can't see the lights of the city.

- The enemy might send 100s of bombers

to fly towards American cities

and drop bombs almost indiscriminately

across any urban zone.

At night, it's very hard to engage in aerial navigation.

However, the lights of a city could make it very obvious

if you were near your target.

- By now, Los Angeles has been through so many blackouts,

the LA Times has nicknamed it the City of Shadows.

- [Laurence] The city's ordeal begins

with a typical blackout drill,

on the night of February 24th, 1942.

- No lights anywhere,

not a cigarette is allowed to be lit on the street

for fear of giving away

any type of location to a potential enemy.

Even all the radio stations in LA go completely silent.

- [Laurence] At 10:23 PM, the blackout is lifted

and Angelenos go to bed thinking it was just another drill.

But at 2:21 in the morning,

LA residents wake to the scream of air raid sirens,

(sirens wailing)

and the city is again thrust into darkness.

- Search lights start sweeping over the skies

and you have all of these people starting

to run out of their homes trying to see

what it is that they're looking at.

- [Laurence] It's becoming increasingly clear.

Whatever's happening in Los Angeles

isn't just another drill.

At 3:06 AM, the search lights converge

on a target over Culver City and Los Angeles erupts.

(guns firing)

- The 37th Coast artillery brigade starts firing

12 pounder guns that lob three inch shells

up into the atmosphere.

The sound is enormous.

(guns firing) A lot of the people mistake it

for the impact of bombs striking the earth

from enemy attack.

- You can only imagine what this sky

had to have looked like that night.

You've got these orange tracer lights in the air,

bursts in the sky. (bomb exploding)

No one had ever seen anything like this in the United States.

To a lot of people in Los Angeles,

it seems like it's the end of the world, like it's Doomsday.

- [Laurence] Phone calls flood the city's information lines

with wildly differing accounts of sightings in the sky.

- Eyewitness reports start pouring in

to military authorities.

We have reports of 100s of enemy aircraft flying overhead.

We have reports of aircraft crashing

throughout the Los Angeles area,

presumably shot down by air defenses.

- The only lights you've got are the search lights

and the anti-aircraft guns firing,

which just add to the sense that they are in a war zone.

- The anti-aircraft artillery lobs

almost nine tons of ordinance into the skies.

100s of buildings and vehicles are damaged

by the fragments of the falling shells coming back to earth.

- This is absolute pandemonium.

A lot of people are just trying to get the hell out of there.

They're piling into cars and driving.

There's gridlock, five people are killed.

Three fatalities as a result of traffic accidents

in the chaos,

and two people die of stress induced heart attacks,

and it's pitch black.

- But nothing's been shot down, no bombs have been dropped.

What's the story? What actually happened?

(guns firing)

- [Laurence] Military command orders a ceasefire at 4:14 AM.

They officially lift the blackout at 7:25 AM.

Daylight brings more questions than answers,

as local newspapers print a flurry of conflicting reports.

- The most iconic image from this event

is a photograph that appears in the newspaper

with eight spotlights shining up into the sky

on this object that's floating in the middle.

You can't really make out what the object is,

because it's brightened up by all the spotlights.

- [Laurence] But not even the military can agree

on what, if anything, was there.

- The Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox,

came out immediately after the Battle of Los Angeles

and announced that the air defense guns

had been firing at nothing.

He says this is a result of rising panic, of jittery nerves,

that those manning the coastal defense batteries

were also scared.

- But then Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War,

gives a press conference and he says,

"No, there were planes present

and they weren't United States aircraft."

(dramatic music)

- [Laurence] Less than 48 hours before

the Battle of Los Angeles, area residents

feel their vulnerability for the first time.

- As President Roosevelt

is about to deliver his fireside chat,

a giant Japanese submarine rises out of the sea

about 10 miles northwest of Santa Barbara

and takes aim at the Elwood oil fields.

- The submarine took shots at the piers

and it shot at the fuel storage on top of the bluff.

It miraculously managed to miss

just about everything it shot at.

- But Santa Barbara's only 90 miles north of Los Angeles.

If they're going to attack Santa Barbara,

couldn't Los Angeles be next?

So there's this really heightened sense of fear

of what's coming.

- [Laurence] Around 7:00 PM on February 24th,

Naval intelligence instructs coastal defenses

to prepare for an attack within the next 10 hours.

- The entirety of Southern California is under

this blackout and general alert.

There's the concern that Japanese submarines

might still be out there looking for trouble.

- But nothing really happens,

so that alert is canceled around 10:30.

People are going to bed,

they think everything might be okay.

- Just when it looks like nothing is gonna happen,

right before 2:00 AM, a radar station near Santa Monica

picks up what appears to be a formation of aircraft.

- Two more radar installations report

that they too have detected something

moving towards the American coastline.

- [Laurence] At 2:15 AM, the military issues

its highest level alert,

ordering the 37th coastal artillery

to engage enemy targets as soon as they appear.

- There are anti-aircraft batteries distributed

all over the city

and there's a concern that Japanese aircraft

are soon to attack Los Angeles.

(air raid siren wailing) - [Laurence] At 2:27 AM,

the target is tracked to within three miles

of the Los Angeles area and then disappears.

At the same time information centers

are flooded with reports of enemy planes overhead.

- The reports of seeing these planes,

they're not just coming from people on the street

who are panicking,

these are trained military personnel.

There's an artillery colonel

that sees 25 airplanes in formation.

There's another report that

there's 12 airplanes in formation.

Someone else reports that they see a single aircraft.

So there's total confusion here

about what people are seeing.

- [Laurence] But military witnesses are certain

they've spotted aircraft overhead,

and the top brass believes them.

- It's not just the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson,

who's saying the aircraft were real.

It's George Marshall, FDR's Army chief of staff,

and he writes a memo to FDR and he says,

"Yeah, there were aircraft present."

- But whatever the Coast Defense Brigade is firing towards

is not shooting back.

- And there are so many unanswered questions

about these planes, like, where would they have launched from?

There's no Japanese aircraft carriers

within range of Los Angeles.

- There are rumors of downed Japanese aircraft,

but that turns out to be just rumors.

There are rumors that bombs were dropped,

but again, no bombs were dropped,

so there's a little bit of a mystery.

- [Laurence] In his memo, Marshal posits

a possible explanation for the lack of enemy fire.

(dramatic music)

- Marshall's memo states that access pilots

could have flown commercial aircraft over Los Angeles,

not as a bombing mission,

but as a surveillance tool

to spot enemy aircraft positions

and also spread fear and panic.

- [Laurence] But if the enemy had access

to commercial planes,

where were they keeping them?

- There's speculation from Secretary Stimson

and General Marshall that the axis may have established

a secret base in Mexico,

and used it to launch aircraft to fly over Los Angeles.

- That sounds like crazy person talk,

but there's actually something to it.

And the reason why is that during the First World War,

the German government made some advances,

attempting to recruit the Mexican government

to join World War I on the side of the central powers

against the allies that included the United States,

and there was an awareness that Mexican commercial airliners

were operating aircraft that had been made in Germany,

that could be easily converted from

civilian commercial transport

into aircraft that were capable of carrying bombs

or paratroopers.

- American authorities devote

an enormous amount of resources searching

for secret access bases both in northern Mexico

and throughout Southern California.

However, there's no evidence that there's a secret base.

The American public wants answers

and Secretary Stimson is not going to supply them.

- Stimson just says, "Well, we don't have definitive answers

to this, but maybe it's better to be too alert

than not alert enough."

- [Laurence] For days after

the so-called Battle of Los Angeles,

residents still struggle to make sense of what happened.

- So whatever happened that night

turns out to be a solitary event

and there are much bigger concerns

happening in Europe and the Pacific.

- [Laurence] As World War II rages on,

the mysterious air raid fades in importance.

But after the wars end, the US Coastal Artillery Association

shows renewed interest in the mysterious 1942 event.

- The Coastal Artillery Association

is essentially a veterans organization

made up of units that were responsible

for coastal and harbor defenses in the United States.

- So they start reviewing the Battle of LA,

documenting it for posterity,

and what they discover

puts a whole new spin on the event.

- It turns out that at 1:00 AM, so just really two hours before

the Battle of Los Angeles commences,

two weather balloons were launched in the Hollywood area

and it becomes clear that they may not be the only ones

to have been launched that night.

(dramatic music)

- [Laurence] Weather balloons are critical to the war effort,

both on the battlefield, and on the home front.

- Coastal artillery units constantly release balloons

to collect meteorological data,

things like airspeed, and precipitation,

and atmospheric conditions.

This actually helps the guns on the ground be more accurate.

- If there is enemy aircraft coming,

it is imperative that they get these balloons up in the air

as soon as possible.

In order to track the balloons, they added a small candle

that they put in a glass jar underneath the balloon,

because the balloon has a kind of a silvery skin,

that light is able to reflect as far as 25,000 feet.

- At about 3:00 AM,

about 40 minutes after the first sirens go off,

the 203rd Coastal Artillery Unit

launches two further weather balloons.

One's launched from Westwood

and the other one from Battery D in Santa Monica.

- [Laurence] The lieutenant in charge

of Battery D's meteorological operations

notifies his commander of the balloon's departure.

The timing couldn't be worse.

- Guners are scouring the sky, looking for enemy aircraft

and almost immediately, Battery D notices

that their balloons are coming under fire.

(guns booming)

- There is no controlling system such that

when one unit releases balloons

into the sky over Los Angeles,

other units would know where those balloons are

or when they were released.

So while one unit is releasing balloons to collect data

for its own accuracy,

another unit might be mistaking those balloons

for enemy targets.

- Colonel Ray Watson is commanding

Battery D of the 203rd and he basically says,

"Don't fire, these are our balloons.

Don't fire, don't shoot."

So even though Colonel Watson is warning people,

the order comes back from high command, "No, shoot."

(guns firing)

- The 203rd Coast Artillery probably triggered

this entire incident by releasing weather balloons,

but interestingly, this is a battery

that did not fire that night,

because the the battalion commander decided

that there was nothing in the sky.

- Colonel Ray Watson is relieved of his duty immediately

and the story about the balloons

in Battery D that night remains hidden

for a number of years.

- [Laurence] Nevertheless, questions remain,

particularly about the earlier radar sightings.

Is it possible that something far simpler is to blame?

- In the years since,

we have learned that the military's weather balloons

weren't the only things floating in the sky that night.

(dramatic music)

(guns firing)

- In the 1960s, two full decades after the events

of the Battle of Los Angeles,

a former air defense artillery crewman claimed

that his unit was desperate

to test their own radar capabilities,

and because there were no aircraft available

for that very type of test,

they obtained some children's balloons,

loaded them full of hydrogen for buoyancy,

suspended some foil streamers underneath them

to create a radar return, and released them into the sky.

- And lo and behold, it worked.

They were able to see these balloons on the radar.

- [Laurence] But as the night wears on, the winds change

and an onshore breeze starts pushing

the balloons back towards the city.

- Prevailing winds make it almost impossible

to conceive of radar picking up

some of these children's balloons with foil beneath them

100 miles west of the city, out at sea.

However, if a radar were to pick up that kind of a return,

if the balloon popped, the return would disappear

from the screen almost immediately.

- Maybe a combination of radar balloons

and weather balloons tricked the city of Los Angeles

into believing that they were under attack.

So this information might fill in

some puzzle pieces from 1942,

but people still find it odd that 1,400 rounds shot

into the air couldn't bring down a single balloon.

- [Laurence] Eyewitnesses recall seeing an object floating

in the dark skies over Los Angeles on February 25th, 1942.

Something moving ominously slow,

practically hovering overhead.

Many historians believe

they could have been weather balloons

or toy balloons used for radar testing,

but even if true,

it leaves more than a few unanswered questions.

- One of the biggest problems with this theory

is in relation to the size of the balloons.

Kids' balloons are not exactly airplane size

and military weather balloons back in the day

were around four feet in diameter,

but there is another kind of balloon

that could explain what witnesses claim

to have seen overhead.

- The Japanese were absolutely desperate to find ways

to attack the United States.

There was no possibility of bringing their aircraft carriers

within range of land-based air power,

so they start looking at other mechanisms.

- [Laurence] In 1933, almost 10 years

before that terrifying air raid signal went off,

a Japanese general begins

a new weapons program called The Fu-Go.

- The Japanese will ultimately launch

a major offensive operation against the United States

using intercontinental weapons,

in the form of a series of balloons.

(dramatic music)

- [Laurence] They discover that high altitude air currents

can deliver a balloon across the Pacific

in as little as 30 hours.

- These are 33 foot wide balloons

made of laminated paper.

They're capable of holding a massive amount

of hydrogen inside of them

and lofting high explosive and incendiary bombs.

When released from the Japanese home islands

and put into what we now know as the jet stream,

they can effectively blow over the North American continent.

- What the Japanese were hoping to accomplish

was that they would hit the Pacific Northwest

at a time when it's being swept by intense winds,

when everything's dry,

and that they will then rain down balloons

that will start forest fires.

And the thought was that if we can suddenly give them

this epidemic of forest fires,

we will use our resources trying to put those fires out,

rather than trying to attack the Japanese home islands.

- These things are a little bit more sophisticated

than people realize.

There's a mechanism once the balloons

get into the jet stream

to make sure that it maintains height.

If it gets too low,

it drops a sandbag and then that keeps the height up

until it gets over the land.

- And they don't need to be particularly well aimed

as long as they hit a rural area with dry tinder.

The prevailing wind patterns of the jet stream

in February of 1942 would have essentially blown balloons

from the Japanese home islands directly towards Los Angeles.

- The Fu-Go balloon could explain

the sudden blips on the radar,

the scattered reports of a zeppelin,

and the oddly slow speed at which it left the city.

- [Laurence] But Japanese documents discovered

after the war revealed that the Fu-Go

was mass produced starting in 1944,

2 years after the Battle of Los Angeles incident.

- But could this have been a test run of an early prototype?

Perhaps.

- [Laurence] The documents also revealed

that many of these floating bombs

successfully made it to North America.

- From November of '44 until March of 1945,

they launched over 9,000 Fu-Go balloons.

At least 300 of them actually reach the mainland

of the United States and Canada.

- Most of the payloads fizzle out,

but one actually got through and knocked out the power

to the very facility that was producing the plutonium

that would be used in the atomic bomb

that was later dropped on Nagasaki.

(explosion booming)

- [Laurence] And just four months before the war's end,

one of them reveals its full destructive potential.

May 5th, 1945, Bly, Oregon.

Reverend Archie Mitchell and his pregnant wife Elsie

take five of their Sunday school students on a picnic

in the nearby mountains.

- When one of the kids,

a 13-year-old girl, find some fabric sprawled out

on the forest floor, she calls over Elsie

and the other kids to come investigate.

Elsie calls to her husband back at the car,

"Look what we found, it's some kind of balloon."

- The balloon gondola had experienced

a failure of its triggering system,

the system that would've dropped the incendiary charge

and dropped the bomb.

Instead, the entire gondola comes down

with the incendiary device and the bomb still intact.

- Just as the reverend tells his wife not to touch it,

boom, there's a huge explosion.

(explosion booming)

The reverend goes running to give aid to Elsie

and the five kids, but there's nothing he can do.

They've all been killed instantly.

Some people are convinced that a balloon like this

is actually what drifted into LA's airspace

and started the so-called Battle of LA.

- [Laurence] Even so, questions remain.

- So as hard as it is to believe that the United States military

could not shoot down a weather balloon,

it's harder still to even fathom that

they couldn't shoot down this larger object

with an explosive payload.

- Whatever that iconic photo is showing

in the Los Angeles Times,

whether it's something like a balloon

or a more traditional aircraft,

you'd think that artillery fire

would've at least taken it down,

or at the very least, sent it reeling.

would've at least takeneruptedn,

over Los Angeles,

the so-called Battle of LA remains an enigma.

No one from the military, or the government

can say for certain what entered the city's airspace that night,

nor will they explain why the city's anti-aircraft batteries

failed to take anything down.

In the absence of any definitive answers,

a new theory takes hold,

one that confounds experts to this day.

- As interested sleuths start to comb through

all the documentation and witness statements,

they begin to think that the official story

has swept a lot of the eerie details under the rug.

- In particular, people fixate on the iconic photo

of search lights that are all shining

on some unidentifiable object in the sky.

- It's disc shape, but it's appearing to glow as well.

Now you can say, well, it would, wouldn't it?

I mean, it's illuminated by search lights.

But again, they picked up something.

There's gotta be something there for this thing to be glowing.

- [Laurence] In 1950,

a former Marine Corps aviator named Donald Keyhoe

makes an interesting connection.

- Keyhoe suggests that the unexplained aerial phenomenon

was extraterrestrial in nature,

not the government's explanation of Japanese planes or balloons.

- With all due respect to the Air Force,

I believe that some of them will prove to be

of interplanetary origin.

(dramatic music)

In 1942, the concept of a flying saucer

isn't really part of the American lexicon at all.

However, investigators looking back

on the battle of Los Angeles,

essentially backdate that idea into the story surrounding

what might have happened that night.

- Some of the eyewitness statements

help fuel this theory that this is a UFO,

because of this strange ability

to be very slow on the radar

and then suddenly it speeds up,

that it's maybe hovering,

then suddenly it's moving very fast,

that it's at a low altitude

and then it's at a high altitude.

All of these help fuel this idea

that maybe this is some kind of unknown aircraft

from another planet that's coming down to Earth.

- There're going to be questions

from the highest ranks of leadership,

and command in the military and civilian government,

and reports about this incident

go all the way to the Secretary of War.

They go all the way to US Army chief of staff, George Marshall,

and they have to report to the president what happened in LA.

- [Laurence] Proponents of the UFO theory

point to a series of unauthenticated memos.

- There are a number of documents floating around,

purporting to be from George Marshall

to FDR talking about the recovery of two craft.

One of these was apparently recovered

off the coast between Los Angeles and Catalina Island,

the other in the San Bernardino mountains.

- Marshall also goes on to allegedly explained

to FDR in these memos that the objects that were recovered

didn't resemble any conventional aircraft

and he presumes that whatever these objects were,

were of an interplanetary origin.

- [Laurence] The eyewitness reports that come in

the night of the air raid

include many descriptions of unusual aircraft.

The US will encounter even more unidentified flying objects

as the war continues.

- Towards the end of World War II,

allied pilots begin to describe being followed

by very strange lights over the skies in Europe

and they nicknamed them, "foo fighters".

- Whatever these objects were,

it was said that they would usually shine

in red, yellow, and green.

They would fly alongside the allied aircraft

at speeds up to 200 miles an hour.

Sometimes there would be one,

sometimes there could be several of them.

- [Laurence] Some ufologists speculate that FDR himself

was a believer in extraterrestrial life.

- Allegedly, this unauthenticated memo

written by FDR in February of 1944

is sent to a special committee

on non-terrestrial science and technology.

Supposedly in this memo,

FDR is slowly coming to grips with the idea

that the planet Earth is not the only one

that's able to house intelligent life.

He says that, "We will take advantage of these wonders

that have come to us after we've won the war."

(guns firing)

- There are many people who believe

the Battle of Los Angeles

was really Earth's first big encounter

with extraterrestrials,

and of course, there's an equally large number of people

who think that's complete nonsense.

- [Laurence] Under particular scrutiny

are the unauthorized documents between Roosevelt and Marshall.

Experts question their credibility.

- There is a lot of controversy about this.

There are many, many documents circulating

in the UFO community that are frankly bogus.

There are big question marks over this.

- [Laurence] In addition, analysis

of the infamous LA Times photograph from 1942

raises even more questions.

- Retouching of photographs was something

that occurred commonplace in the 1930s and 1940s.

- Newspapers at the time,

it was very common for them to create

a more of a contrast with the black and the white.

When they look at the negative of this photo

versus what's published,

they discovered that this photo has been touched up quite a bit.

- There are details that are in the foreground

toward the bottom of the photograph,

where they can see they brought out the mountain ranges

that are seen in the background.

They also blow out some of the overexposed components of it.

- The skyline has been darkened,

the searchlight beams have been enhanced,

and what's actually lens flare

has been altered to make it look as if it's explosions.

- The photograph makes people think

that there was something in the sky.

But what if there actually wasn't something

in the sky that night?

- [Laurence] Whatever terror the people of Los Angeles

endure on February 25th, 1942,

is soon matched by frustration and anger.

- There are so many questions

about what happens on this night in Los Angeles

and the government doesn't seem to be very forthcoming

with any real information.

- One thing the public still can't understand

is why there wasn't a single American aircraft

in the sky that night.

- It is understandable to not wanna try to fly a plane

over a densely populated city when shells are raining down,

but what a lot of people still have trouble

coming to grips with,

is that when the blip showed up on the radar,

why wasn't one military plane sent up

to intercept the object,

or at least just to check out what it was?

- The fact that aircraft weren't scrambled

in response to this radar return,

suggests to some people that they knew

there was nothing there,

that the whole thing was some sort of deception operation

organized by the government.

(dramatic music)

Representative Leland Ford demands

a congressional investigation into this.

- He wants answers because he feels that

the government hasn't been very forthcoming about

what really happened.

- Leland Ford is concerned

that there might be a reason for this deception.

He thinks it's possible that the government might be laying

the ground for moving some of the defense infrastructure

and industry away from Los Angeles.

If you wanted to persuade people to move,

having some sort of dummy raid might just scare them

into saying, "Okay then, we'll move."

- [Laurence] Since the beginning of the war,

there has been discussion of moving LA's oil, ship building,

and aviation industries inland,

to protect them against possible Japanese attack.

- Some people at senior level in the government

do think it's prudent to move these industries

and Leland Ford is concerned.

His view is, "Look, these industries are essential

to the economy of California.

We don't want to move them.

If they're at risk, we protect them."

- The greatest thing to happen to the economy

after the Great Depression is World War II.

Suddenly, everyone is back to work

and manufacturing's at an all time high,

so no one wants to see the sudden booming economy

of the war industries leave Southern California.

- Before the shelling begins,

there are reports of these flashing lights

and these flares that are showing up

near these defense plants around the city,

and during the shelling,

there are reports of these objects in the air

that are following a route that would've taken them over

the highly sensitive areas of Douglas, Lockheed,

and North American Aviation.

- [Laurence] News coverage immediately after the air raid

suggests that whatever phantoms were in the sky that night,

they seem to show an interest in defense industry targets.

- Some people start to question whether or not

the attack was staged or at least maybe exaggerated.

- [Laurence] But some historians suspect

there may be an even more sinister reason

to orchestrate a giant false flag operation

throughout Los Angeles.

- At the beginning of the Second World War.

There was really, no real concern about the loyalty

of Japanese-Americans.

- After Pearl Harbor, as time goes on

into January and February,

there is continued war propaganda coming out.

There's more dehumanization of the Japanese people.

- Even though the Commander of Western Defense command,

Major General John Dewitt, reported that there were no acts

of Japanese-Americans sabotaging American industry

or other aspects of the war effort,

he still also recommended that Japanese citizens

be moved away from the West Coast

and its vital defense plans.

- The initial hope is that they will very quickly

evacuate themselves to these internment camps.

- It didn't take long for the president to realize,

well, that's not gonna work,

'cause who's gonna wanna do that?

Nobody, absolutely nobody.

- [Laurence] On February 19th, 1942,

President Roosevelt issues executive order 9066.

- Executive order 9066 authorizes the removal

of anyone that could be considered

a danger to the war effort.

It's vague language,

but it is clearly pointing to Japanese people,

particularly Japanese people who live on the West Coast.

- To Roosevelt, in early 1942,

just 80 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor,

the world looked very scary and intimidating,

and unfortunately, he made this decision

to deprive American citizens of their rights.

- The Battle of Los Angeles came out really only five days

after FDR signed the infamous executive order

to do with the internment of Japanese people

in the United States

and this was controversial.

It arguably went against his political instincts,

but on the other hand,

there was a feeling that this was necessary,

and therefore did something get staged

that would really make everyone go along with this,

and say, "Yeah, we get why this is needed"?

Was it all part of hyping up the Japanese threat,

not just the threat from invasion,

but the threat from within?

- After the smoke clears,

after the blackout order has been lifted,

there's no evidence that there's actually been an attack,

yet the military arrests 20 Japanese-Americans

for colluding with the enemy.

- This makes no sense,

because how could they collude with planes,

when at least part of the official narrative,

is there were no planes?

And the suspicion is that this is perhaps

something aimed at driving forward and accelerating

the pace of the internment program.

- [Laurence] When Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox,

first dismisses the so-called Battle of Los Angeles

as a false alarm, many citizens are outraged.

But as time passes, even Angelenos

begin to question what they saw.

- One of the big questions about this Battle of Los Angeles

is why are there so many different conflicting stories?

People report a wide variety of things

and I think that's really an indication of the type of panic

and utter fear that is driving people in this moment.

- For every person that comes forward

and says that they did see something in the night sky,

whether it was a plane or a floating object,

other people come forward,

like Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ernie Pyle,

and says, "They saw nothing that night

except for flashing lights,

tracer fire, smoke in the sky."

Some military historians claim

that the combination of things that happened that night

led people to see things that actually weren't there.

(dramatic music)

- All of the elements leading up to mass hysteria

are in place in Los Angeles in February of 1942.

You have the attack on the oil fields north of the city.

You have the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack.

You have war preparedness movements

and the assignment of civil air defense wardens.

All of these elements combine to make people afraid,

to make people nervous, to make people jumping at shadows.

- We already knew how easily excitable

the American population was from an event from 1938.

- [Orson] I'm speaking from the roof

of broadcasting building, New York City.

The bells you hear are ringing

to warn the people to evacuate the city as Martians approach.

- Orson Welles and his radio broadcast dramatization

of the War of the Worlds,

it was done in a false documentary style

as if it was actually happening.

- A shockingly large number of people thought

they were listening to an actual broadcast,

announcing the arrival of extraterrestrial aliens

who were making war with the planet Earth.

- The American public, although it likes to think of itself

as very sophisticated and intelligent,

is not immune to the effects of mass hysteria.

They flooded telephone switchboards

for their local police forces

and their local media demanding assistance

and demanding answers about what was happening

in the alien invasion of the United States.

- [Laurence] Less than 2.5 years later,

in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor with the country on edge,

it's not just the American public

who fall prey to their own fears.

- In the period after Pearl Harbor, scared American aviators

and naval personnel constantly file reports

that are alleging that Japanese warships

are off the western coast of the United States.

There are reports of aircraft carriers, battleships,

massive flotillas of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

Typically, they turn out to be cargo craft,

elements of the US Navy,

or even in a couple of instances,

floating debris like logs.

(radar whirring)

- [Laurence] And the radar systems

that sparked the Battle of Los Angeles

are far less reliable than most people realize.

- A lot of the technology that we take for granted today

in regards to air defense was in its infancy

at the beginning of World War II.

- Radar's a new technology here, so it's not foolproof.

There's mistakes, there's inconsistencies with radar.

A bird could show up on the radar

and you might think it's a plane.

- Maybe that's why the object

just suddenly disappeared off of radar screens

a few miles from downtown LA.

Because there was nothing ever there.

(dramatic music)

- Sometimes what you perceive outweighs your own experience

and it causes you to draw conclusions

that don't really fit the facts.

In the case of the Battle of Los Angeles,

people who had no wartime experience see flashing lights,

they see explosions, and they want to assume

that there's a purpose behind them.

- When we're in a moment of war,

when we're in a moment of fear

where the world feels upside down

and the unknown is happening,

people's minds play tricks on them.

(dramatic music)

- On February 25th, 1942,

the helplessness and fear Angelenos felt was very real,

even if an imminent invasion was not.

We may never know what triggered the barrage,

be it a phantom aircraft or a case of nerves.

Either way, The Battle of LA remains

one of World War II's enduring unsolved mysteries.

I'm Laurence Fishburne,

thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.

(dramatic music)