Last week, three red lights hovering in a triangular formation appeared over Lafeyette, Colorado and spooked residents and sparked rumors of aliens - as to be expected. The UFOs made no noise at all as bystanders caught the incident on tape. Lester Valdez, a witness and local, said "I've never witnessed anything like that... they all just kind of got into a pattern..." The objects in the sky eventually flew off in a northeast direction.
Witnesses seem to agree that the formation was not made up of airplanes, helicoptors or satellites. The FAA declined to comment. Without any answers, the possibility remains that the whole thing was staged as a hoax.
Until now I had no idea that Battle:Los Angeles was based on an actual event. Yikes. Shame on me. Books, tv shows and other movies stemmed from the same real-life event that occured in 1942, several months after the United States entered into World War II following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Where have I been?
The difference between the movie and the event that took place on February 24th/early February 25th 1942, is a big one -- no aliens touched down and took over Los Angeles and other cities. In fact, the government actually called what is termed The Great Los Angeles Air Raid a "false alarm".
Los Angeles Times Feb. 26th 1942
Here's what happened. The night of Feb. 24th, air raid alarms signaled citizens all throughout Los Angeles county, followed by a complete blackout. At 3:16 a.m., the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade fired 12.8 pound anti-aircraft shells into the sky at reported unidentified aircraft. Fourteen-hundred shells were fired.
AT WHAT!?!? No one knew. But plenty of witnesses saw something in the sky.
Air fire continued until 4:14 a.m. and then the "All Clear" was given and the blackout lifted around 7:20 a.m. Three citizens died of heart attacks due to stress, three other civilians were killed by friendly fire.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox held a press conference shorlty after and announced that the whole ordeal was the result of war nerves and there was never an attempted attack by any nation against the United States that night. Representative Leland Ford of Santa Monica called for a Congressional investigation, stating, "...none of the explanations so far offered removed the episode from the category of 'complete mystification' ... this was either a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into 2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to lay a political foundation to take away Southern California's war industries."
As usually happens following a loosely-explainable situation involving the military, many people suspected a cover-up. Therein lies the basis for the alien invasion theories, books and other media involving Los Angeles, and the recent film Battle: Los Angeles, which takes place in modern times.
Why the alien theory? An unidentified object did appear in the sky for up to an hour that night. The photo and video above shows a mysterious object in the sky, converged on by search lights. Later explanations included a possible weather balloon and an atmospheric illusion.
Scott Harrison of the LA Times commented on the original photo as well as a more recently discovered retouched photo found in the LA Times archives. “In the retouched version, many light beams were lightened and widened with white paint, while other beams were eliminated. In earlier years, it was common for newspapers to use artists to retouch images due to poor reproduction — basically 10 shades of gray if you were lucky. Thus my conclusion: the retouching was needed to reproduce the image. But man, I wish the retouching had been more faithful to the original. With our current standards, this image would not be published.” (Visit the above link to see a looped version of the original photo and the retouched photo).
