@thedisclosurefile: The Battle of Los Angeles, February 25, 1942 In the early hours of February 25, 1942 — two nights after a Japanese submarine shelled the Ellwood oil field near Santa Barbara — Los Angeles blacked out, and anti-aircraft batteries fired 1,440 rounds into the sky over the city. Nothing was brought down, no bombs fell, and five civilians died in the chaos on the ground. The Secretary of the Navy called it a false alarm born of war nerves; the Army's Chief of Staff held, in public, that real planes — possibly commercial aircraft flown by enemy agents — had been over the city. Japan later stated it never flew a plane over Los Angeles during the war. The official readings of 1949 and 1983 blamed a weather balloon, stray flares, and shell bursts caught in the searchlights and mistaken for aircraft. The photograph that defined the night — searchlights converging on a brilliant object, published in the Los Angeles Times on February 26, 1942 — was heavily retouched before publication: white paint sharpened the beams where they met, and the shell bursts were blobs of paint. That was routine newsprint practice for the era, and this episode shows both versions: the famous print, and the untouched original that survived in the Times' photographic archive at UCLA and was published by the paper in 2011. What sits at the center of the original — cloud, shell smoke, or something solid — remains genuinely unsettled. Visuals in this episode are period photographs and newspaper pages only. No motion footage of the barrage itself is known to survive in any public archive, and none is shown or implied here. Narration is our own synthesis of the public record. Sources: Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1942, and the Times' "Framework" re-examination of the photograph (March 2011; original print, LA Times Photographic Archive, UCLA); U.S. Office of Air Force History account of the Los Angeles air raid (1983); U.S. Coast Artillery Association analysis (1949). #ufo #uap #battleoflosangeles #disclosure #ufotok

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Monday 26 October 2026 20:28:34 GMT