"The Battle of Los Angeles" - *Audio of original news broadcast linked*

Hmmmm... given the conusion at the time, the weak RADAR by our standards, and what you can clearly see and read as being a state of panic... who the heck knows?

I doubt we'll ever know, but it doesn't strike me as being overly significant except that we were waiting for another attack from that direction.

That people were watching may be the only reason this isn't just another minor UFO event with a few sporadic reports. This is the mystery: With an average speed of less than one mile per hour, it couldn't have been a plane. That leaves balloons or a blimp, neither of which should have survived the shrapnel from the anti-aircraft fire seen exploding all around the object. Given that it was tracked for over a half hour, it seems clear that something real was in the sky that night, but nothing seems to fit the profile. Also, no evidence has ever been produced showing that the Japanese had anything to do with this.

To me it seems unreasonable to assume that a 1400 rounds of fire couldn't get close enough to a balloon moving at less than 1 mph, to damage it beyond flight capability; esp when considering the photo on the front page of the LA Times the next morning. They didn't need a direct hit. Anything in the neighborhood should have been sufficient to take it down.

That depends on the fire... flak wasn't quite as impressive then as it is now, and shooting a balloon with non-fragmenting rounds, at night, with only general radar tracking (not guidance)... I'd say missing more often than not is not hard to imagine at all.

A direct hit though... that would be hard to explain away...

Who said anything about non-fragmenting rounds? One can actually see the rounds bursting in the air. Clearly they were fragmenting. What's more, many people kept fragments as mementos. They were all over the city the next morning.

I'm not arguing against flak being used, it clearly was, I'm just wondering if other rounds were used too, given that AA at the time included... well... some big bullets if you want to put it that way (which I do).

A dirct hit with either should have destroyed ANY balloon, but flak at least has a chance of bursting well off target if the altitude is at all off. Still... it is very odd... it's the only reason I'm reaching for, 'multiple balloons, suspended high above the body caught in searchlights and flashes.'

It could have been a really clever drill, but I admitted before and will again, I doubt we'll evere know. SOMETHING was there, tracked on radar, caught in searchlights, and a hell of a lot of live rounds were expended... it's a mystery to me.

I was an eyewitness to the events of that unforgettable February morning in February of 1942. I was eight-years-old at the time, and my parents lived at 2500 Strand in Hermosa Beach, right on the beach. We thus had a grandstand seat. While my father went about his air-raid warden duties, my late mother and I watched the glowing object, which was caught in the glare of searchlights from both Palos Verdes and Malibu/Pacific/Palisades and surrounded by the puffs of ineffectual anti-aircraft fire, as it slowly flew across the ocean from northwest to southeast. It headed inland over Redondo Beach, a couple of miles to the south of our vantage point, and eventually disappeared over the eastern end of the Palos Verdes hills, what's today called Rancho Palos Verdes. The whole incident lasted, at least from our perspective, about half an hour, though we didn't time it. Like other kids in the neighborhood, I spend the next morning picking up of pieces of shrapnel on the beach; indeed, it's a wonder more people weren't injured by the stuff, as we were far from the only folks standing outside watching the action.

In any case, I don't recall seeing any truly discernable configuration, just a small, glowing, slight lozenge-shaped blob light ---a single blob. We only saw one object, not several as some witnesses later reported. At the time, we were convinced that it was a "Jap" reconnaissance plane, and that L.A. might be due for a major air-raid in the near future. Remember, this was less than three months after Pearl Harbor. But that of course never happened. Later on, we all expected "them," that is, the Military, to tell us what was really up there after the war. But that never happened, either..