Perhaps the weirdest, most inexplicable event in [World War II] was a Japanese air raid on Los Angeles in the early morning hours of February 25, 1942. Or at least that's what people thought it was. Radar operators saw an unidentified intruder on their screens, terrified civilians reported seeing formations of enemy planes, and the personnel manning anti-aircraft batteries lit up the night sky with a horrific barrage of fire. When the smoke and the confusion cleared, however, there was no evidence that the enemy had ever been there. Adding to the mystery, a bizarre photo appeared on an inside page of the Los Angeles Times the next day, showing searchlights converging on what the caption described as an object" in the sky over Culver City, a suburb of LA. It's an image that has been studied ever since by UFOologists. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox told reporters at a press conference that the attack had been a false alarm. One ET-oriented web site offers a suspiciously blurry copy of what is purported to be a memorandum from Army chief of staff George C. Marshall to FDR, in which Marshall supposedly concludes that, "...the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly, and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin."
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