July 10, 2021 • 36 mins
In the wee hours of February 25th, 1942, air raid sirens resounded across LA. Anti-aircraft guns fired the better part of 1500 shells at something. To many people, that mysterious UFO has yet to be identified, more than half a century later. So what really happened?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Los Angeles. You know today it's known for Hollywood, right,
it's it's a manufacturer of one of the US's most
successful global exports, culture and entertainments. But did you know
that once upon a time, hundreds thousands of people in
the city were convinced that they had seen aliens over
(00:22):
the skies of l A and they had watched the
military attack. Said extraterrestrials. What. Yeah, it's it's very like
an Independence Day level situation. Maybe not quite, but it's
got some parallels. So lend us your ear and give
a listen to did Aliens Appear over Los Angeles? And
(00:42):
also stay tuned because we have more UFO episodes on
the way. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't grant you to know.
M Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
(01:13):
my name is Nolan, my name has been your you.
And when all of us joined forces together that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. It basically
formed like Vultron. I'm the hat a vultra, a shadowy
Vultron that would appear on the X Files, and today
we're going to talk about, uh something historical, something obscure,
(01:36):
something that might be related to UFOs. And as you
guys know, I'm really excited every time we can check
out one of these episodes. Something that was made into
a film in the two thousand's well has a title.
This is something that has always bugged me and probably
bugs a lot of other people as well, when they
say the following events are the following motion picture is
(02:00):
based on a right like Chainsaw Massacre is based on
ed Gain I believe his name was, but very very
very very very very loosely. And the fact that they
had a lot of barbecue in Texas. Oh boy. With
those two things combined they made the Vultron of movies.
(02:22):
That is how do we miss that in the Cannibalism episode?
That was That's a good point. This this time, what
we're talking about occurs in in the wee hours February.
Technically it's the twenty five February one am in l
(02:44):
a air raid sirens sound across Los Angeles County and
this was a signal for what was initially taken to
be an attack by Japanese air forces. Yeah, an attack
over a populated area, so the authorities the order to
shack out through the entire or most of the county
in that area to reduce visibility for bombers precisely. Now,
(03:06):
if I'm a bomber going over, I can't see exactly
where I'm going now, or at least not as easily.
So then at three sixteen in the morning, the thirty
seventh Coast Artillery Brigade began firing fifty caliber machine guns
and twelve point eight pound anti aircraft shells into the
air at reported aircraft. The artillery fire continued into the night,
(03:29):
well morning, rather the wee hours. Let's say, almost fifteen
hundred shells were fired, so pilots from the fourth Interceptor
Command were alerted is very important, but their aircraft remained
on the grounds. After about an hour of this intense
shelling that Knoll's describing, the all clear was sounded, the
blackout order was lifted. It was seven one in the morning.
(03:52):
This is a crazy day. What's that about, right, That's
that's me that's awakened by this any artillery fire, and
then you wake up in the morning and it's like
nothing to see here. What's what's going on, moving on.
We're gonna get into it, but the tensions are super
high for even civilians who were just living there in
that area, and we'll get into why. But yeah, you
(04:14):
can imagine this would be a terrifying moment being in
your house as you're hearing this overhead. I probably downpladed
a little bit. It would be a little more than
what's that. Yeah, I don't know. You know, when that
when that latest how unfortunate it is to say it
this way. When that latest string of failed coordinated bombings
(04:34):
occurred in New York, when that dumpster exploded and Chelsea,
a lot of the New Yorkers interviewed were saying like, yeah,
and they're closing down the road. I got stuff to do.
You know that buddy of mine was at Barnes and
Noble a couple of blocks away and said he just
thought it was thunder. I didn't think anything of it. Yeah,
then imagine that happening above your head approximately, you know,
(04:55):
hundreds and thousands of times, right, those sounds that exactly.
So let's look at the aftermath. So wake up seven
one am. You know, the lights are back on, people
are wandering out to work checking damage. Several vehicles and
buildings were damaged by fragments, but shell fragments from the
(05:16):
anti aircraft shelves, not wreckage from some aircraft. And there
were people who died, but luckily less than you the
less than you would think, according to the official story. Yeah,
because of the blackouts. There were still vehicles on the road,
and there were I believe three car accidents or at
least three fatalities involved with car accidents. And there were
(05:40):
also a few fatal heart attacks or something something really
with a heart to heart attacks. Yeah. Uh. And the
incident was front page news along the U. S. Pacific coast.
They earned some mass media coverage throughout the nation in
later days, and then people were asking exactly what you said,
you like, what happened? What? What? What the hell? Guys,
you know, it's three in the morning. And they went
(06:03):
to Uncle Sam So the secretary of the Navy at
the time, a guy called Frank Knox. How the press conference, um,
and the message delivered to those in attendance was that
this had been a false alarm due to anxiety and
war nerves. Nerves. Yeah, well sure, war nerves, because thank you,
(06:31):
I like that sound a lot. But this was contradicted
by the Army the next day in a statement relaying
General George C. Marshall's belief that the incident may have
been caused by commercial planes, airplanes that were being used
as some kind of psychological warfare campaign to generate panic
amongst the citizens. Yeah, the Army initially stated there were
(06:51):
possibly five light enemy aircraft launched from secret bases within California,
Mexico or from off were submarines. Furthermore, there were thousands
of on the ground witnesses, along with what would become
a notorious photograph, and as we said, inevitably media began
to pick up the story. Some contemporary press outlets suspected
(07:14):
a cover up. In the Long Beach Independent, the editor wrote,
as a mysterious reticence about the whole of fan it
seems that some form of censorship is trying to halt
discussion on the matter. See Yeah, I don't think he
said see at the end. But speculation was rampant, and
there were several different theories about this, right. So, needless
(07:34):
to say, there was a whole lot of speculation going
on because these different statements didn't really give the general
public a whole hell of a lot to go on,
especially from two of the major military arms that are
giving conflicting stuff totally contradictory, and just the idea that
something of this magnitude could happen, you know, as a
(07:55):
result of nerves, that's pretty terrifying in and of itself.
That would put me, uh in a very good state
of mind, when, as you know, Pearl Harbor had happened
not terribly long before this, so people were probably already
a little on edge about the potential of that happening again,
um under the cover of night. And then the fact
that their own government isn't giving them much actual information.
(08:20):
I do not think that created a particularly confident public.
The speculation wasn't something relegated to the fringes of society,
you know. It wasn't some group of people gathered in
smoky room with one line around them going I don't
think the story was true. It's like the l a Times,
It's like the newspapers of note. And so what were
(08:42):
some of these theories, What was some of the speculation
some of these musing yes, some of these musics do them.
I will I will play this reindeer game. First, the
word theories, as we mentioned, about stuff like a secret
base in northern Mexico, so not in the US but
on the continent, right, because logically be very difficult to
(09:04):
smuggle in the requisite hardware to create a secret military base.
But that was an idea, wasn't it. And that was
one of the ideas yet. And then there is something else,
the idea that there were Japanese submarines stationed offshore with
the capability of carrying planes, which sounds so from a
technological standpoint, amazing, right, But as you can imagine, it
(09:26):
is still pretty difficult to do. And that was compounded
by the fact that a Japanese submarine did surface off
the Pacific earlier before, so people were pretty spooked about it.
Others speculated that the incident was either staged or exaggerated,
a false flag attack, perhaps to give coastal defense industries
(09:47):
an excuse to move further inland. So that's a corporate motivation,
you know, profit and safety motivation. But this went all
the way to government officials calling for a congressional investing.
As a representative from Santa Monica, Congressional Representative leland Ford
called for an investigation, saying, quote, none of the explanations
(10:09):
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 two million people, or
a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to lay a
political foundation to take away Southern California's war industries. You say,
any I think it's some kind of raid. It's some
(10:29):
kind of raid, but for what I don't know. So
what happened? We'll get to that after a quick word
from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Even in
(10:50):
the modern day, or we're recording this in ten even
in the modern day, you will hear several different theories
regarding what really happened. I'm of in that finger quote
sound effect. No, it's perfect. Uh, what really happened in
those in in those late hours in the most popular
alternative theories today involve either a Japanese covered up attack
(11:13):
that you know, they were embarrassed about they didn't want
to admit, or the emergence of some kind of top
secret aircraft, you know, something that came straight out of
Nevada somewhere in a secret test facility, or that perhaps
these were extraterrestrials, maybe not, maybe just the UFO. But
you know that alien specter remains. When I first saw
(11:33):
that the idea that like it was they would cover
up a Japanese attack, I was like, that's ridiculous. Why
would you keep your citizens in the dark. But but
you make a good point. Maybe it didn't want to
admit that they had been they got got Yeah, no,
really that's legitimate. So if this turned out to be true,
it would be not only an astonishing moment in US history,
(11:56):
but one of the largest cover ups in recent history
as well. There's an important note that I'll reiterate here.
Uh As, As you guys have pointed out, this occurred
very soon after the Pearl Harbor attack. Pearl Harbor occurred
on December seventh. This occurred February two, So, uh As,
(12:17):
as we've pointed out before in this in this show, civilians,
military officials in the media like to believe the West
Coast would be the next target. The day before this
attack occurred, a Japanese submarine had surface near Santa Barbara.
So there are all these anti aircraft batteries along the
(12:39):
West coast. They were on high alert. They were told
to be ready at any given moment, told to be
on the lookout for anything unusual, and they were working
as active stations, ready to fire at any moment, and
they were taught that they were supposed to expect an
attack at any moment. These people were as sure that
(13:00):
something terrible was going to happen. In psychologically, we'll see
that that's very important, could be a deciding factor. Let's
look at those three most popular theories about what happened.
When I say popular, I don't necessarily mean the one
that Uncle Sam accepts, because there is one that Uncle
Sam believes is the true, is the official narrative. Uh so,
(13:23):
what what's the first one? So, Japan did in fact
have a secret air based weapons program in the US
during w W two. It was called the FuGO bombing
balloons like actually like balloons. Yeah, yeah, So their existence
was kind of kept under wraps until a balloon bomb
killed six people having a nice picking nick in Oregon.
(13:44):
But if these balloon bomb devices had somehow reached Los Angeles,
neither the US nor Japan have any records to show
that this was the case. But again, double Butt, These
were only launched against him from nineteen forty four onwards,
so far as we know. So that would mean that
(14:04):
there's a problem with the timeline. Right If this attack
occurs in nineteen four two, and everything we know about
these bombs says that they don't exist intil nineteen four,
then they couldn't have had it. But there's another kicker here.
They weren't the only other army with this sort of plan.
The United Kingdom was using a similar tactic and earlier,
(14:25):
so their first evaluation of when of whether these bombs
could be used on balloons occurs in like nineteen thirty seven.
So in nineteen forty two, the concept of some sort
of balloon weapon assilit as it might sound, was definitely around.
It was like in the zeitgeist. Governments were thinking about it.
So just to kind of paint the picture here, these
(14:46):
are pretty interesting by today's standards. Rudimentary bombing devices is
basically a hydrogen balloon with a series of cords or
wires or ropes attached around the mid section of the
balloon going down to a point. Then there's a ring
with the payload I guess you could say, in the center,
and then a series of sandbags around it. And then
(15:07):
you were saying that there were different regulators altimeters, I
believe that could determine what altitude the balloon was in
and then cut chords for sandbags to get it to
go higher, and then once it reached a certain altitude,
it would release a charge that would drop the payload. Right. Yeah,
it was on a timer system, so after it, if
(15:29):
it went too high, would event hydrogen, so it would descend,
drop sandbags to us end to keep it in this
range of altitude, and then when it hit its timeline,
then it would drop everything, including the bombs. So very clever.
It does seem a little rudimentary in our modern age
of drones. Hard to target, right right, hard to target,
(15:52):
and not necessarily uh effective in in the larger scheme
of war. But a small number had been recorded, right,
and they were and even somewhere shot down by fighter aircraft.
But there's a worrying thing about these is that they
were they had a high altitude, and they had a
(16:13):
surprisingly fast speed That was the main difficulty for fighter aircraft.
So it is possible that a weaponized balloon could have
been there. But there's another theory. While we're on balloons,
So speaking of these balloons, the US official position is
that these were UFOs. They're unidentified flying objects. But they
(16:34):
were wait for it'stop me if you've heard this one,
meteorological balloons, weather balloons, Oh, weather balloons making a return appearance,
and swamp gas. Yeah no, no, it's just there swamp
gas of weather balloons. Yet and this comes from a
little bit more recent, uh circumstances. Almost fifty years later,
(16:56):
the Office of Air Force History concluded that a careful
buddy of the evidence suggests that these meteorological balloons known
to have been released over Los Angeles may well have
caused the initial alarm. This theory is supported by the
fact that anti aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for
(17:16):
having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to
have been airplanes. So weather balloons were released from each
of the approximately dozen anti aircraft positions around the city
every six hours. And if we look at this from
a unpacking or slightly if we look at the timeline
(17:38):
and sequence of events, here's what we find. So these
these balloons, these weather balloons, they say, were illuminated from
below by an enclosed candle and was designed to reflect
off the silver lining of the balloon to ensure that
you could see it. So reports suggests that the gunners
from all but one battery must stook the balloons for
planes and open fire sounds. You know. It sounds like
(18:02):
the old argument of incompetence versus malevolence, right, So, I
don't know, you gotta think of the mentality of the
time where people you know, were understandably on edge, and
as you said, there was this, uh, this overarching idea,
this notion that an attack was eminent, you know. And
I'm not making excuses for you, but I think they
should be trained and they should be able to react accordingly.
(18:23):
But I don't find this particular explanation to be too
much of a stretch. It also has to do with
with communication that's occurring between the different arms of the military,
like depending on who released the balloons, if it's army
personnel who are shooting at these things, but it's air
force personnel that released the balloons or you know, naval personnel,
(18:45):
and there wasn't good communication about when they're being launched
and where. And it may even go further. That's a
good point because these anti aircraft positions, uh were these
anti aircraft positions were probably not communicating very well with
each other there. So the only gun battery that did
not fire was the D Battery of the two third
Coast Artillery Regiment, and that was also directly in the
(19:09):
flight path of this alleged aircraft. This was also the
company that most recently launched its balloons at three am
whunder the firing starts at three sixteen and afterwards, the
staff at D Battery were instructed not to mention these
balloons and the officer in charge of Colonel Ray Watson
was given up pension, which this could make sense, and
(19:32):
that means it would still be a cover up, but
it was a cover up to avoid embarrassment. And furthermore,
why the question is like, well, why did this go
so crazy? Then? If it was just a weather balloon,
why did everybody end up shooting it. Why didn't somebody
say stop, stop, that's a balloon or why didn't the
balloon pop? That's a heck of a question. So many
(19:53):
of the shell burst for people who believe this story,
including the including the Navy, many of the shell bursts
were mistaken for other aircraft and so this would lead
some of a different battery position to say, oh, crap,
I gotta get this one Okay, So I shoot one
shell into the air. It explodes, Nol sees it and
(20:14):
he thinks, oh, what the heck was that he shoots?
And then it's just this fun little cycle. That's just
how I roll. Man. I shoot first and asked questions later.
Now you shot second, Buddy, Han shot first? Okay, all right,
and this shows the wildly this shows, you know, this
could explain rather the wildly fluctuating reports on the number
of aircraft, the speed, their altitude. And then we get
(20:37):
to my my favorite of these series, Do do do do? Do?
Do? Do Do? Now? Bad? Now that don't that's misleading. It
could just be could be a lot of things, could
be more of a bing b now things that really
bing back then sounds to me like an old sailing Sure, sure,
(21:01):
I like the I like to think that's the noise
it makes as it flies through. Or it could could
be the classic. So here we go. I want to
deal with this. What I mean, you know, I couldn't
the balloon, as you mentioned, already be considered a UFO.
Excellent point. Excellent point, because every time we do this,
(21:22):
we will get letters, will get letters from folks who
will write in and say, uh, this is definitely an
extraterrestrial or this is not. And it's because we'll use
the phrase UFO, but UFO stands for, as we all know,
unidentified flying object. Yeah, unidentified flying object. And that's exactly
the point that Noel is making. A balloon that you
(21:44):
don't recognize as a balloon is a UFO until you say, oh,
that's a balloon. An alien spacecraft is a UFO because
if one appears, people will have no idea what it
looks like or what it is, and it will behave
differently we would assume, especially it's space worthy. If there
is a secret spy plane like the B two bomber
(22:05):
or something, then that is also a UFO. If there
is uh a Horton how two, which is the which
is the fixed wing aircraft that the Nazi powers working
on before the fall of Nazi Germany, if that thing's
in the air, that's also a UFO. Or even a
larger like nowadays, a larger drone that perhaps you don't
(22:27):
know exactly what it is, that could be a UFO. Yeah,
one of those creepy surveillance blimps to which are a
real thing. So those who believe the incident was caused
by an actual, yet unidentified craft. Have several pretty valid
questions for the people who buy the balloon story as
well as the people who sell the story. Uh number one,
(22:48):
which I jumped the gun on earlier. Here, wouldn't a
balloon pop when you hit it with an artillery shell?
You certainly think so, right the UF I'll just argue
that a balloon subject to shelling would have pop. But
there's evidence from other comparisons we can make that that
might be less certain than you would think. Kind of
(23:11):
similar to how in the movies anything happens to a
car and it explodes giant fireball destruction, and it's really
difficult to make cars do that in real life. You
have to know what you're doing, and it's it's not
just shooting at a gas tank most times. So the
MythBusters on that, Yeah, I think there was. Yeah. And
(23:33):
then there's always Sunny in Philadelphia where Mac and Charlie
throw a grenade into the car because they think it
will explode. It just mess really messes up there. What
about that, Not to get too off topic, what about
that old trick where you take a rag so coun
in gas put it in the gas tank. And light
it like a fuse and then run away. That can work,
I can work. Yeah, Uh, that was not what happened here.
(23:56):
That was not what happens here. And don't ever do that.
So we we have to we have to draw comparisons
to the closest thing that we we have at the time.
So at the time, they're also Zeppelin type airships, right,
and that would be another kind of balloon similar to
(24:16):
So these rigid and semi rigid aircraft are not like
the FuGO balloons that we're talking about because those relied
on over pressure to sustain their shape. But so, yeah,
if anything punctures it, it's gone. Well, if anything punctures it,
it will it won't necessarily pop the middle. Yeah, it
(24:39):
might deflate and slowly go down. The flexibility of a
balloon or blimps gas bag gives some protection from explosive fire. Uh.
The skin will dent and distort to absorb the impact
and may not actually puncture. And we see experimental spy
blomps like the one I mentioned the l m v
(25:00):
UH may be able to sustain damage and not be
shot down immediately. And also to that point about cars,
it's not guaranteed that something even hydrogen powered will or
hydrogen filled rather will ignite when hit by normal bullets
in World War One, and this was on a This
(25:21):
was a pretty interesting comparison I found on a site
that believes this is the case. During World War One,
a zeppelin called the L thirty three was hit by
anti aircraft fire, but it didn't catch a flame. Instead,
it just was forced to crash land. And so the
way that fighter aircraft began to be able to really
light up a zeppelin is when they switched from normal
(25:44):
AMMO to explosive and phosphorous incendiary bullets. So a combination
of these would ignite the hydrogen. So it's possible, according
to the people who believe this part, that trapnel from
the batteries would not have destroyed the balloon but would
have punctured it goes into the ocean. But that's not
(26:06):
a guaranteed explanation. The second question for the UFO folks, right,
for those who believe in the UFO theory, why does
that famous photo that we mentioned earlier show a saucer
rather than a spherical shape, Because if you look at
the photograph, it definitely does not look like a weather balloon. Yeah,
but it also kind of looks like a saucer, right,
(26:28):
I mean that's one of the big things here. Like
it the shape looks a bit round of whatever is
being illuminated. But it's also so overblown that it's really
hard to get any type of shape out of it
unless you unless you mess with a photo a lot.
Looking at it now, and I mean there's a whole
(26:50):
bunch of searchlights trained on it, and if it was
a weather balloon, like we said before, those can be
quite reflective. I could see it definitely a grainy photo
like this having some issues with perspective. You know, it
does look a little more oblong, but maybe we're seeing
the top of it, you know, maybe we're just like
(27:10):
the perspective is everything. It's interesting though. It's a neat picture.
It does. It's a very very compelling picture. I just
don't know if we're able to see exactly what it is.
So this photo that we're discussing here is pretty famous.
There are several versions of it that have been retouched
over the years. Um it appeared in in the l
(27:32):
A Times. But you know, it's it's very common before
you when you take a photo like this and then
you want to put it in the newspaper, so you
take it to the print, right, the big press. It's
very common, or it was and it still is today
to retouch photographs to make sure you get the best
image that you possibly can that will look the best
in that black and white format. And we even have
(27:53):
a quote from the l A Times with an update
about this photo. In the retail version, many light beams
were lightened and widened with white paint, while other beams
were eliminated. In earlier years, was common for newspapers to
use artists to retouch images due to poor reproduction. Basically
ten shades of gray if you were lucky. Thus my conclusion,
(28:15):
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.
And that's a statement by Scott Harrison over the Times.
So altered but not altered to uh deceive people, not necessarily,
but still it's I mean, they're putting white paint onto
(28:36):
the image, right, it's a super compelling photo that white
paint acts to great effect, and those lights of those
beams of lights are super stark, and they're all kind
of converging on this form in the sky. And I
mean it it looks like, um, a saucer shaped sort
of like an elliptical shaped thing. And you know, I
(28:59):
could see how people could definitely latch onto that. It's
a very very cool, compelling image. But I can also
see the idea of taking that paint and making it more,
you know, pop kind of more. I mean, we're used
to that now, you know, with like Instagram, you can
have a four year old take a picture and slap
on Instagram filter on, and all of a sudden it
looks compelling. But this is very interesting for the time.
(29:23):
So this is a representation of what happened. We know
that there were a ton of human beings probably, I mean,
I can imagine some people are outside looking up, or
at least in the window, looking up as they're taking
shelter from all this noise. What did witnesses say they saw?
So you'll hear people who want to push their own agenda,
(29:46):
whether they believe it was a weather balloon, whether they
believe it was some kind of craft, whether they believe
it was nothing. There's a bad habit people can sometimes
have wherein they will say, okay, out of these, ten thousand,
out of these, but eventually two million people. Uh the
thousand who say that they saw this are the ones
(30:08):
who are clearly right, because that's what I believe. So also,
as we know these multiple there are multiple accounts from
the evening that widely contradict one another, and unfortunately, eyewitnesses
are incredibly unreliable. So there are many many eyewitnesses who
(30:29):
say they saw some sort of sucer shaped thing that
was flying in a way they had never seen a
craft fly before. There are many many eyewitnesses who say
that they saw multiple things fighting in the air, of
of war between humans and aliens, or war between the
Japanese and the Allied forces or the Japanese in the US.
(30:51):
At this point, should we should throw in there really fast?
But with the multiple aircraft and multiple things fighting in
the air, the military they were using tracer and munition,
so you could see the bullets flying through the air,
and you can imagine what that might look like to
an untrained eye, all these beams of light essentially going across.
And so here we are toward the modern day. The
(31:14):
current official stance here in the US remains the same
as the nine three investigation concluded, and that stances that
UH tensions were high, people had war nerves, and routine
meteorological or weather balloons deployed around three AM prompted an
attack because the city was already on high alert with
(31:38):
the air raid siren going off at one However, it's
not likely the American public will ever consider this entirely solved,
regardless of what the government says, unless more evidence emerges.
We're stuck within official explanation that many people think is
malarkey or at the very least murky malarkey. Malurkey, yes, alurky.
(32:02):
And there's the lasting consequences to this, regardless of what
you are convinced happened, and regardless how many people do
or don't agree with you. One of the lasting consequences
which stays today is accelerated UH state discrimination against innocent
American civilians, particularly in this case, Japanese American residents. At
(32:23):
the time, the US government was already actively UH interning
people and and detaining them would be a good word.
And this also descends to you know, descends down to
the modern day when we have we have people with
legitimate concerns that one day a federal power will simply
(32:46):
decide that they are a risk and then boom bag
over your head, shipped you off somewhere, and that that
belief is the result of occurrences like this. But I
have to ask you, guys, what do you think now?
Certainly think it was one of the in my opinion,
one of the coolest pieces of the past dealing with
(33:07):
the UFO, just because of the image. I think that image,
like you said, no, it's everything. It conjures so much,
so many other thoughts in my head about what it
would be like if an extra tricks terrestrial craft descended
on a city, and like, what what how do we
react in that immediate moment if one comes down in
(33:28):
the military is ready to go already, and the government
response was so overtly shady and just like non informative.
You know it just it It allows your mind to
kind of run wild a little bit, especially when you
pair it with an image like that. Well, it's also
the immediate response of shooting the absolute crap of whatever
it is that's overhead before confirming what it is. You
(33:51):
know it is that we don't know what it is
in the sky. But it's in our airspace and we
have all these weapons, so shoot that thing down that
happens today that well, no, that's what I mean. Like,
but that's a very human thing. I think of your
encroaching on my my territory and already war. Yeah, well
you shouldn't have been there. Sorry. There's also the yeah,
(34:12):
the inherent distrust. Imagine when you're a kid if your
parents tell you two completely different things, right, Uh, what
happened to our dog? Oh he's at the doctor. No,
don't trust your dad, he's dead. Or at the farm.
That's that's what I heard, right, Yeah, at the farm. Uh,
(34:33):
at the dead dog farm. So with this in mind,
we want to hear your opinions. What do you think happened?
Do you have new information that you think should come
to light? Uh? Do you know someone who witnessed this,
maybe a maybe a parent or a grandparent or something,
and if so, what is their account of the events.
We're gonna head out now, but in the meantime, if
(34:56):
you enjoyed this episode, of course, we'd love to hear
from you, and we'd love it if you we left
a review somewhere. Not only that, I want to point
out that we haven't been doing Shoutout Corner quite as
much lately, and that's because we are amassing a veritable
treasure trove of shoutouts that will get their own episode.
That's true. That's true, and if you have written to
us on Facebook, Twitter, or email, then you may well
(35:18):
be in that episode with stuff that your fellow listeners
need to know. You can find us on Facebook and
Twitter where we are Conspiracy Stuff hs W were on
Instagram as Conspiracy Stuff Show. You can find every single
podcast we have ever done at our website. Let me
take a breath. Stuff they don't want you to know
(35:39):
dot com. And if you don't want to do any
of that stuff and you still want to contact us,
shoot us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at how Stuff Works dot com
Los Angeles. You know today it's known for Hollywood, right,
it's it's a manufacturer of one of the US's most
successful global exports, culture and entertainments. But did you know
that once upon a time, hundreds thousands of people in
the city were convinced that they had seen aliens over
(00:22):
the skies of l A and they had watched the
military attack. Said extraterrestrials. What. Yeah, it's it's very like
an Independence Day level situation. Maybe not quite, but it's
got some parallels. So lend us your ear and give
a listen to did Aliens Appear over Los Angeles? And
(00:42):
also stay tuned because we have more UFO episodes on
the way. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't grant you to know.
M Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
(01:13):
my name is Nolan, my name has been your you.
And when all of us joined forces together that makes
this stuff they don't want you to know. It basically
formed like Vultron. I'm the hat a vultra, a shadowy
Vultron that would appear on the X Files, and today
we're going to talk about, uh something historical, something obscure,
(01:36):
something that might be related to UFOs. And as you
guys know, I'm really excited every time we can check
out one of these episodes. Something that was made into
a film in the two thousand's well has a title.
This is something that has always bugged me and probably
bugs a lot of other people as well, when they
say the following events are the following motion picture is
(02:00):
based on a right like Chainsaw Massacre is based on
ed Gain I believe his name was, but very very
very very very very loosely. And the fact that they
had a lot of barbecue in Texas. Oh boy. With
those two things combined they made the Vultron of movies.
(02:22):
That is how do we miss that in the Cannibalism episode?
That was That's a good point. This this time, what
we're talking about occurs in in the wee hours February.
Technically it's the twenty five February one am in l
(02:44):
a air raid sirens sound across Los Angeles County and
this was a signal for what was initially taken to
be an attack by Japanese air forces. Yeah, an attack
over a populated area, so the authorities the order to
shack out through the entire or most of the county
in that area to reduce visibility for bombers precisely. Now,
(03:06):
if I'm a bomber going over, I can't see exactly
where I'm going now, or at least not as easily.
So then at three sixteen in the morning, the thirty
seventh Coast Artillery Brigade began firing fifty caliber machine guns
and twelve point eight pound anti aircraft shells into the
air at reported aircraft. The artillery fire continued into the night,
(03:29):
well morning, rather the wee hours. Let's say, almost fifteen
hundred shells were fired, so pilots from the fourth Interceptor
Command were alerted is very important, but their aircraft remained
on the grounds. After about an hour of this intense
shelling that Knoll's describing, the all clear was sounded, the
blackout order was lifted. It was seven one in the morning.
(03:52):
This is a crazy day. What's that about, right, That's
that's me that's awakened by this any artillery fire, and
then you wake up in the morning and it's like
nothing to see here. What's what's going on, moving on.
We're gonna get into it, but the tensions are super
high for even civilians who were just living there in
that area, and we'll get into why. But yeah, you
(04:14):
can imagine this would be a terrifying moment being in
your house as you're hearing this overhead. I probably downpladed
a little bit. It would be a little more than
what's that. Yeah, I don't know. You know, when that
when that latest how unfortunate it is to say it
this way. When that latest string of failed coordinated bombings
(04:34):
occurred in New York, when that dumpster exploded and Chelsea,
a lot of the New Yorkers interviewed were saying like, yeah,
and they're closing down the road. I got stuff to do.
You know that buddy of mine was at Barnes and
Noble a couple of blocks away and said he just
thought it was thunder. I didn't think anything of it. Yeah,
then imagine that happening above your head approximately, you know,
(04:55):
hundreds and thousands of times, right, those sounds that exactly.
So let's look at the aftermath. So wake up seven
one am. You know, the lights are back on, people
are wandering out to work checking damage. Several vehicles and
buildings were damaged by fragments, but shell fragments from the
(05:16):
anti aircraft shelves, not wreckage from some aircraft. And there
were people who died, but luckily less than you the
less than you would think, according to the official story. Yeah,
because of the blackouts. There were still vehicles on the road,
and there were I believe three car accidents or at
least three fatalities involved with car accidents. And there were
(05:40):
also a few fatal heart attacks or something something really
with a heart to heart attacks. Yeah. Uh. And the
incident was front page news along the U. S. Pacific coast.
They earned some mass media coverage throughout the nation in
later days, and then people were asking exactly what you said,
you like, what happened? What? What? What the hell? Guys,
you know, it's three in the morning. And they went
(06:03):
to Uncle Sam So the secretary of the Navy at
the time, a guy called Frank Knox. How the press conference, um,
and the message delivered to those in attendance was that
this had been a false alarm due to anxiety and
war nerves. Nerves. Yeah, well sure, war nerves, because thank you,
(06:31):
I like that sound a lot. But this was contradicted
by the Army the next day in a statement relaying
General George C. Marshall's belief that the incident may have
been caused by commercial planes, airplanes that were being used
as some kind of psychological warfare campaign to generate panic
amongst the citizens. Yeah, the Army initially stated there were
(06:51):
possibly five light enemy aircraft launched from secret bases within California,
Mexico or from off were submarines. Furthermore, there were thousands
of on the ground witnesses, along with what would become
a notorious photograph, and as we said, inevitably media began
to pick up the story. Some contemporary press outlets suspected
(07:14):
a cover up. In the Long Beach Independent, the editor wrote,
as a mysterious reticence about the whole of fan it
seems that some form of censorship is trying to halt
discussion on the matter. See Yeah, I don't think he
said see at the end. But speculation was rampant, and
there were several different theories about this, right. So, needless
(07:34):
to say, there was a whole lot of speculation going
on because these different statements didn't really give the general
public a whole hell of a lot to go on,
especially from two of the major military arms that are
giving conflicting stuff totally contradictory, and just the idea that
something of this magnitude could happen, you know, as a
(07:55):
result of nerves, that's pretty terrifying in and of itself.
That would put me, uh in a very good state
of mind, when, as you know, Pearl Harbor had happened
not terribly long before this, so people were probably already
a little on edge about the potential of that happening again,
um under the cover of night. And then the fact
that their own government isn't giving them much actual information.
(08:20):
I do not think that created a particularly confident public.
The speculation wasn't something relegated to the fringes of society,
you know. It wasn't some group of people gathered in
smoky room with one line around them going I don't
think the story was true. It's like the l a Times,
It's like the newspapers of note. And so what were
(08:42):
some of these theories, What was some of the speculation
some of these musing yes, some of these musics do them.
I will I will play this reindeer game. First, the
word theories, as we mentioned, about stuff like a secret
base in northern Mexico, so not in the US but
on the continent, right, because logically be very difficult to
(09:04):
smuggle in the requisite hardware to create a secret military base.
But that was an idea, wasn't it. And that was
one of the ideas yet. And then there is something else,
the idea that there were Japanese submarines stationed offshore with
the capability of carrying planes, which sounds so from a
technological standpoint, amazing, right, But as you can imagine, it
(09:26):
is still pretty difficult to do. And that was compounded
by the fact that a Japanese submarine did surface off
the Pacific earlier before, so people were pretty spooked about it.
Others speculated that the incident was either staged or exaggerated,
a false flag attack, perhaps to give coastal defense industries
(09:47):
an excuse to move further inland. So that's a corporate motivation,
you know, profit and safety motivation. But this went all
the way to government officials calling for a congressional investing.
As a representative from Santa Monica, Congressional Representative leland Ford
called for an investigation, saying, quote, none of the explanations
(10:09):
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 two million people, or
a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to lay a
political foundation to take away Southern California's war industries. You say,
any I think it's some kind of raid. It's some
(10:29):
kind of raid, but for what I don't know. So
what happened? We'll get to that after a quick word
from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. Even in
(10:50):
the modern day, or we're recording this in ten even
in the modern day, you will hear several different theories
regarding what really happened. I'm of in that finger quote
sound effect. No, it's perfect. Uh, what really happened in
those in in those late hours in the most popular
alternative theories today involve either a Japanese covered up attack
(11:13):
that you know, they were embarrassed about they didn't want
to admit, or the emergence of some kind of top
secret aircraft, you know, something that came straight out of
Nevada somewhere in a secret test facility, or that perhaps
these were extraterrestrials, maybe not, maybe just the UFO. But
you know that alien specter remains. When I first saw
(11:33):
that the idea that like it was they would cover
up a Japanese attack, I was like, that's ridiculous. Why
would you keep your citizens in the dark. But but
you make a good point. Maybe it didn't want to
admit that they had been they got got Yeah, no,
really that's legitimate. So if this turned out to be true,
it would be not only an astonishing moment in US history,
(11:56):
but one of the largest cover ups in recent history
as well. There's an important note that I'll reiterate here.
Uh As, As you guys have pointed out, this occurred
very soon after the Pearl Harbor attack. Pearl Harbor occurred
on December seventh. This occurred February two, So, uh As,
(12:17):
as we've pointed out before in this in this show, civilians,
military officials in the media like to believe the West
Coast would be the next target. The day before this
attack occurred, a Japanese submarine had surface near Santa Barbara.
So there are all these anti aircraft batteries along the
(12:39):
West coast. They were on high alert. They were told
to be ready at any given moment, told to be
on the lookout for anything unusual, and they were working
as active stations, ready to fire at any moment, and
they were taught that they were supposed to expect an
attack at any moment. These people were as sure that
(13:00):
something terrible was going to happen. In psychologically, we'll see
that that's very important, could be a deciding factor. Let's
look at those three most popular theories about what happened.
When I say popular, I don't necessarily mean the one
that Uncle Sam accepts, because there is one that Uncle
Sam believes is the true, is the official narrative. Uh so,
(13:23):
what what's the first one? So, Japan did in fact
have a secret air based weapons program in the US
during w W two. It was called the FuGO bombing
balloons like actually like balloons. Yeah, yeah, So their existence
was kind of kept under wraps until a balloon bomb
killed six people having a nice picking nick in Oregon.
(13:44):
But if these balloon bomb devices had somehow reached Los Angeles,
neither the US nor Japan have any records to show
that this was the case. But again, double Butt, These
were only launched against him from nineteen forty four onwards,
so far as we know. So that would mean that
(14:04):
there's a problem with the timeline. Right If this attack
occurs in nineteen four two, and everything we know about
these bombs says that they don't exist intil nineteen four,
then they couldn't have had it. But there's another kicker here.
They weren't the only other army with this sort of plan.
The United Kingdom was using a similar tactic and earlier,
(14:25):
so their first evaluation of when of whether these bombs
could be used on balloons occurs in like nineteen thirty seven.
So in nineteen forty two, the concept of some sort
of balloon weapon assilit as it might sound, was definitely around.
It was like in the zeitgeist. Governments were thinking about it.
So just to kind of paint the picture here, these
(14:46):
are pretty interesting by today's standards. Rudimentary bombing devices is
basically a hydrogen balloon with a series of cords or
wires or ropes attached around the mid section of the
balloon going down to a point. Then there's a ring
with the payload I guess you could say, in the center,
and then a series of sandbags around it. And then
(15:07):
you were saying that there were different regulators altimeters, I
believe that could determine what altitude the balloon was in
and then cut chords for sandbags to get it to
go higher, and then once it reached a certain altitude,
it would release a charge that would drop the payload. Right. Yeah,
it was on a timer system, so after it, if
(15:29):
it went too high, would event hydrogen, so it would descend,
drop sandbags to us end to keep it in this
range of altitude, and then when it hit its timeline,
then it would drop everything, including the bombs. So very clever.
It does seem a little rudimentary in our modern age
of drones. Hard to target, right right, hard to target,
(15:52):
and not necessarily uh effective in in the larger scheme
of war. But a small number had been recorded, right,
and they were and even somewhere shot down by fighter aircraft.
But there's a worrying thing about these is that they
were they had a high altitude, and they had a
(16:13):
surprisingly fast speed That was the main difficulty for fighter aircraft.
So it is possible that a weaponized balloon could have
been there. But there's another theory. While we're on balloons,
So speaking of these balloons, the US official position is
that these were UFOs. They're unidentified flying objects. But they
(16:34):
were wait for it'stop me if you've heard this one,
meteorological balloons, weather balloons, Oh, weather balloons making a return appearance,
and swamp gas. Yeah no, no, it's just there swamp
gas of weather balloons. Yet and this comes from a
little bit more recent, uh circumstances. Almost fifty years later,
(16:56):
the Office of Air Force History concluded that a careful
buddy of the evidence suggests that these meteorological balloons known
to have been released over Los Angeles may well have
caused the initial alarm. This theory is supported by the
fact that anti aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for
(17:16):
having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to
have been airplanes. So weather balloons were released from each
of the approximately dozen anti aircraft positions around the city
every six hours. And if we look at this from
a unpacking or slightly if we look at the timeline
(17:38):
and sequence of events, here's what we find. So these
these balloons, these weather balloons, they say, were illuminated from
below by an enclosed candle and was designed to reflect
off the silver lining of the balloon to ensure that
you could see it. So reports suggests that the gunners
from all but one battery must stook the balloons for
planes and open fire sounds. You know. It sounds like
(18:02):
the old argument of incompetence versus malevolence, right, So, I
don't know, you gotta think of the mentality of the
time where people you know, were understandably on edge, and
as you said, there was this, uh, this overarching idea,
this notion that an attack was eminent, you know. And
I'm not making excuses for you, but I think they
should be trained and they should be able to react accordingly.
(18:23):
But I don't find this particular explanation to be too
much of a stretch. It also has to do with
with communication that's occurring between the different arms of the military,
like depending on who released the balloons, if it's army
personnel who are shooting at these things, but it's air
force personnel that released the balloons or you know, naval personnel,
(18:45):
and there wasn't good communication about when they're being launched
and where. And it may even go further. That's a
good point because these anti aircraft positions, uh were these
anti aircraft positions were probably not communicating very well with
each other there. So the only gun battery that did
not fire was the D Battery of the two third
Coast Artillery Regiment, and that was also directly in the
(19:09):
flight path of this alleged aircraft. This was also the
company that most recently launched its balloons at three am
whunder the firing starts at three sixteen and afterwards, the
staff at D Battery were instructed not to mention these
balloons and the officer in charge of Colonel Ray Watson
was given up pension, which this could make sense, and
(19:32):
that means it would still be a cover up, but
it was a cover up to avoid embarrassment. And furthermore,
why the question is like, well, why did this go
so crazy? Then? If it was just a weather balloon,
why did everybody end up shooting it. Why didn't somebody
say stop, stop, that's a balloon or why didn't the
balloon pop? That's a heck of a question. So many
(19:53):
of the shell burst for people who believe this story,
including the including the Navy, many of the shell bursts
were mistaken for other aircraft and so this would lead
some of a different battery position to say, oh, crap,
I gotta get this one Okay, So I shoot one
shell into the air. It explodes, Nol sees it and
(20:14):
he thinks, oh, what the heck was that he shoots?
And then it's just this fun little cycle. That's just
how I roll. Man. I shoot first and asked questions later.
Now you shot second, Buddy, Han shot first? Okay, all right,
and this shows the wildly this shows, you know, this
could explain rather the wildly fluctuating reports on the number
of aircraft, the speed, their altitude. And then we get
(20:37):
to my my favorite of these series, Do do do do? Do?
Do? Do Do? Now? Bad? Now that don't that's misleading. It
could just be could be a lot of things, could
be more of a bing b now things that really
bing back then sounds to me like an old sailing Sure, sure,
(21:01):
I like the I like to think that's the noise
it makes as it flies through. Or it could could
be the classic. So here we go. I want to
deal with this. What I mean, you know, I couldn't
the balloon, as you mentioned, already be considered a UFO.
Excellent point. Excellent point, because every time we do this,
(21:22):
we will get letters, will get letters from folks who
will write in and say, uh, this is definitely an
extraterrestrial or this is not. And it's because we'll use
the phrase UFO, but UFO stands for, as we all know,
unidentified flying object. Yeah, unidentified flying object. And that's exactly
the point that Noel is making. A balloon that you
(21:44):
don't recognize as a balloon is a UFO until you say, oh,
that's a balloon. An alien spacecraft is a UFO because
if one appears, people will have no idea what it
looks like or what it is, and it will behave
differently we would assume, especially it's space worthy. If there
is a secret spy plane like the B two bomber
(22:05):
or something, then that is also a UFO. If there
is uh a Horton how two, which is the which
is the fixed wing aircraft that the Nazi powers working
on before the fall of Nazi Germany, if that thing's
in the air, that's also a UFO. Or even a
larger like nowadays, a larger drone that perhaps you don't
(22:27):
know exactly what it is, that could be a UFO. Yeah,
one of those creepy surveillance blimps to which are a
real thing. So those who believe the incident was caused
by an actual, yet unidentified craft. Have several pretty valid
questions for the people who buy the balloon story as
well as the people who sell the story. Uh number one,
(22:48):
which I jumped the gun on earlier. Here, wouldn't a
balloon pop when you hit it with an artillery shell?
You certainly think so, right the UF I'll just argue
that a balloon subject to shelling would have pop. But
there's evidence from other comparisons we can make that that
might be less certain than you would think. Kind of
(23:11):
similar to how in the movies anything happens to a
car and it explodes giant fireball destruction, and it's really
difficult to make cars do that in real life. You
have to know what you're doing, and it's it's not
just shooting at a gas tank most times. So the
MythBusters on that, Yeah, I think there was. Yeah. And
(23:33):
then there's always Sunny in Philadelphia where Mac and Charlie
throw a grenade into the car because they think it
will explode. It just mess really messes up there. What
about that, Not to get too off topic, what about
that old trick where you take a rag so coun
in gas put it in the gas tank. And light
it like a fuse and then run away. That can work,
I can work. Yeah, Uh, that was not what happened here.
(23:56):
That was not what happens here. And don't ever do that.
So we we have to we have to draw comparisons
to the closest thing that we we have at the time.
So at the time, they're also Zeppelin type airships, right,
and that would be another kind of balloon similar to
(24:16):
So these rigid and semi rigid aircraft are not like
the FuGO balloons that we're talking about because those relied
on over pressure to sustain their shape. But so, yeah,
if anything punctures it, it's gone. Well, if anything punctures it,
it will it won't necessarily pop the middle. Yeah, it
(24:39):
might deflate and slowly go down. The flexibility of a
balloon or blimps gas bag gives some protection from explosive fire. Uh.
The skin will dent and distort to absorb the impact
and may not actually puncture. And we see experimental spy
blomps like the one I mentioned the l m v
(25:00):
UH may be able to sustain damage and not be
shot down immediately. And also to that point about cars,
it's not guaranteed that something even hydrogen powered will or
hydrogen filled rather will ignite when hit by normal bullets
in World War One, and this was on a This
(25:21):
was a pretty interesting comparison I found on a site
that believes this is the case. During World War One,
a zeppelin called the L thirty three was hit by
anti aircraft fire, but it didn't catch a flame. Instead,
it just was forced to crash land. And so the
way that fighter aircraft began to be able to really
light up a zeppelin is when they switched from normal
(25:44):
AMMO to explosive and phosphorous incendiary bullets. So a combination
of these would ignite the hydrogen. So it's possible, according
to the people who believe this part, that trapnel from
the batteries would not have destroyed the balloon but would
have punctured it goes into the ocean. But that's not
(26:06):
a guaranteed explanation. The second question for the UFO folks, right,
for those who believe in the UFO theory, why does
that famous photo that we mentioned earlier show a saucer
rather than a spherical shape, Because if you look at
the photograph, it definitely does not look like a weather balloon. Yeah,
but it also kind of looks like a saucer, right,
(26:28):
I mean that's one of the big things here. Like
it the shape looks a bit round of whatever is
being illuminated. But it's also so overblown that it's really
hard to get any type of shape out of it
unless you unless you mess with a photo a lot.
Looking at it now, and I mean there's a whole
(26:50):
bunch of searchlights trained on it, and if it was
a weather balloon, like we said before, those can be
quite reflective. I could see it definitely a grainy photo
like this having some issues with perspective. You know, it
does look a little more oblong, but maybe we're seeing
the top of it, you know, maybe we're just like
(27:10):
the perspective is everything. It's interesting though. It's a neat picture.
It does. It's a very very compelling picture. I just
don't know if we're able to see exactly what it is.
So this photo that we're discussing here is pretty famous.
There are several versions of it that have been retouched
over the years. Um it appeared in in the l
(27:32):
A Times. But you know, it's it's very common before
you when you take a photo like this and then
you want to put it in the newspaper, so you
take it to the print, right, the big press. It's
very common, or it was and it still is today
to retouch photographs to make sure you get the best
image that you possibly can that will look the best
in that black and white format. And we even have
(27:53):
a quote from the l A Times with an update
about this photo. In the retail version, many light beams
were lightened and widened with white paint, while other beams
were eliminated. In earlier years, was common for newspapers to
use artists to retouch images due to poor reproduction. Basically
ten shades of gray if you were lucky. Thus my conclusion,
(28:15):
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.
And that's a statement by Scott Harrison over the Times.
So altered but not altered to uh deceive people, not necessarily,
but still it's I mean, they're putting white paint onto
(28:36):
the image, right, it's a super compelling photo that white
paint acts to great effect, and those lights of those
beams of lights are super stark, and they're all kind
of converging on this form in the sky. And I
mean it it looks like, um, a saucer shaped sort
of like an elliptical shaped thing. And you know, I
(28:59):
could see how people could definitely latch onto that. It's
a very very cool, compelling image. But I can also
see the idea of taking that paint and making it more,
you know, pop kind of more. I mean, we're used
to that now, you know, with like Instagram, you can
have a four year old take a picture and slap
on Instagram filter on, and all of a sudden it
looks compelling. But this is very interesting for the time.
(29:23):
So this is a representation of what happened. We know
that there were a ton of human beings probably, I mean,
I can imagine some people are outside looking up, or
at least in the window, looking up as they're taking
shelter from all this noise. What did witnesses say they saw?
So you'll hear people who want to push their own agenda,
(29:46):
whether they believe it was a weather balloon, whether they
believe it was some kind of craft, whether they believe
it was nothing. There's a bad habit people can sometimes
have wherein they will say, okay, out of these, ten thousand,
out of these, but eventually two million people. Uh the
thousand who say that they saw this are the ones
(30:08):
who are clearly right, because that's what I believe. So also,
as we know these multiple there are multiple accounts from
the evening that widely contradict one another, and unfortunately, eyewitnesses
are incredibly unreliable. So there are many many eyewitnesses who
(30:29):
say they saw some sort of sucer shaped thing that
was flying in a way they had never seen a
craft fly before. There are many many eyewitnesses who say
that they saw multiple things fighting in the air, of
of war between humans and aliens, or war between the
Japanese and the Allied forces or the Japanese in the US.
(30:51):
At this point, should we should throw in there really fast?
But with the multiple aircraft and multiple things fighting in
the air, the military they were using tracer and munition,
so you could see the bullets flying through the air,
and you can imagine what that might look like to
an untrained eye, all these beams of light essentially going across.
And so here we are toward the modern day. The
(31:14):
current official stance here in the US remains the same
as the nine three investigation concluded, and that stances that
UH tensions were high, people had war nerves, and routine
meteorological or weather balloons deployed around three AM prompted an
attack because the city was already on high alert with
(31:38):
the air raid siren going off at one However, it's
not likely the American public will ever consider this entirely solved,
regardless of what the government says, unless more evidence emerges.
We're stuck within official explanation that many people think is
malarkey or at the very least murky malarkey. Malurkey, yes, alurky.
(32:02):
And there's the lasting consequences to this, regardless of what
you are convinced happened, and regardless how many people do
or don't agree with you. One of the lasting consequences
which stays today is accelerated UH state discrimination against innocent
American civilians, particularly in this case, Japanese American residents. At
(32:23):
the time, the US government was already actively UH interning
people and and detaining them would be a good word.
And this also descends to you know, descends down to
the modern day when we have we have people with
legitimate concerns that one day a federal power will simply
(32:46):
decide that they are a risk and then boom bag
over your head, shipped you off somewhere, and that that
belief is the result of occurrences like this. But I
have to ask you, guys, what do you think now?
Certainly think it was one of the in my opinion,
one of the coolest pieces of the past dealing with
(33:07):
the UFO, just because of the image. I think that image,
like you said, no, it's everything. It conjures so much,
so many other thoughts in my head about what it
would be like if an extra tricks terrestrial craft descended
on a city, and like, what what how do we
react in that immediate moment if one comes down in
(33:28):
the military is ready to go already, and the government
response was so overtly shady and just like non informative.
You know it just it It allows your mind to
kind of run wild a little bit, especially when you
pair it with an image like that. Well, it's also
the immediate response of shooting the absolute crap of whatever
it is that's overhead before confirming what it is. You
(33:51):
know it is that we don't know what it is
in the sky. But it's in our airspace and we
have all these weapons, so shoot that thing down that
happens today that well, no, that's what I mean. Like,
but that's a very human thing. I think of your
encroaching on my my territory and already war. Yeah, well
you shouldn't have been there. Sorry. There's also the yeah,
(34:12):
the inherent distrust. Imagine when you're a kid if your
parents tell you two completely different things, right, Uh, what
happened to our dog? Oh he's at the doctor. No,
don't trust your dad, he's dead. Or at the farm.
That's that's what I heard, right, Yeah, at the farm. Uh,
(34:33):
at the dead dog farm. So with this in mind,
we want to hear your opinions. What do you think happened?
Do you have new information that you think should come
to light? Uh? Do you know someone who witnessed this,
maybe a maybe a parent or a grandparent or something,
and if so, what is their account of the events.
We're gonna head out now, but in the meantime, if
(34:56):
you enjoyed this episode, of course, we'd love to hear
from you, and we'd love it if you we left
a review somewhere. Not only that, I want to point
out that we haven't been doing Shoutout Corner quite as
much lately, and that's because we are amassing a veritable
treasure trove of shoutouts that will get their own episode.
That's true. That's true, and if you have written to
us on Facebook, Twitter, or email, then you may well
(35:18):
be in that episode with stuff that your fellow listeners
need to know. You can find us on Facebook and
Twitter where we are Conspiracy Stuff hs W were on
Instagram as Conspiracy Stuff Show. You can find every single
podcast we have ever done at our website. Let me
take a breath. Stuff they don't want you to know
(35:39):
dot com. And if you don't want to do any
of that stuff and you still want to contact us,
shoot us a good old fashioned email. We are conspiracy
at how Stuff Works dot com
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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