Feburary 24th marks the 80th anniversary of the incident that was known contemporaneously as the Bat

Feburary 24th marks the 80th anniversary of the incident that was known contemporaneously as the Battle of Los Angeles. In early 1942, rumours of an attack on Los Angeles by the Imperial Japanese armed forces sent the inhabitants into a panic, leading to defence forces firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the sky… At an attack that didn’t exist.

Just three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, understandably the general public in the US was on edge, and following an attack on the Ellwood Oil Fields near Santa Barbara on Feburary 23rd, Los Angelenos were even more so.

So when the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) on the 24th issued a warning that there was potentially an imminent attack that was going to take place on mainland California… folk when bananas when the US army announced that there were hostile aircraft approaching, leading to the air raid alarms to go off in Los Angeles as lights searched for enemy planes and anti-aircraft crews pumped over a 1000 rounds of ammunition into the sky.

Embarrassingly though, there were no actual aircraft, with a commission later concluding that it was a false alarm, with any supposed sightings being caused by misplaced weather balloons illuminated by searchlights that people mistook for planes. This explanation, naturally, lead to both contemporary newspapers accusing the government of trying to cover-up a potential attack… in addition to the the whole affair later being seized by the UFOlogy community, who claimed that the aircraft or lights folks claimed to see in one of the main photos of the event (see main image) where actually alien visitors.

In any case, even if the attack wasn’t real the damage that came afterwards certainly was, with numerous buildings and cars getting destroyed by shell debris that dropped back to Earth in addition to the three people who died in car accidents in the ensuing panic and additional two who died of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hours-long cacophony of gunfire and sirens.