Tag: Los Angeles

US Navy Destroyers Swarmed by Mysterious ‘Drones’ Off California in 2019

Article by Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti                                March 23, 2021                                         (thedrive.com)

• On July 14, 2019, a group of US Navy ships were conducting exercises about 100 miles off Los Angeles, near San Clemente island, and south of the Channel Islands off of Ventura/Santa Barbara. Around 10:00 pm, the US Navy destroyer, the USS Kidd logged the sighting of two “UAVs” or ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, more commonly referred to as a ‘drones’. In addition to utilizing some of the most sophisticated sensors on Earth, a “SNOOPIE team” – or ‘Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploitation’ team, ie: a group of sailors with consumer-grade cameras – was deployed to track and record the UAV drones.

• Ten minutes after the initial sighting, the USS Kidd advised the USS Rafael Peralta of the situation, and the second destroyer activated its own SNOOPIE team. Reports of additional sightings were coming in from a third destroyer, the USS John Finn. The USS Rafael Peralta described a ‘white light’ hovering over the destroyer’s helicopter landing pad, matching the ship’s speed at 16 knots (about 18 mph) as it operated in low visibility weather conditions and at night. This continued for over 90 minutes—significantly longer than what commercially available drones can sustain.

• As this was going on, the civilian bulk carrier Bass Strait was situated towards the northern edge of the encounter area. A Liberian-flagged oil tanker, the Sigma Triumph, was just south of the position of the three destroyers. And the 50-foot catamaran, the ORV Alguita, was just off the western tip of San Clemente Island.

• On the following night, July 15th, 2019, the USS Rafael Peralta spotted the drones again at 8:39 pm. By 9:00 pm, the USS Kidd also spotted the drones. This time, the ships were located further south and closer to shore, between San Diego and San Clemente Island. The drones seem to pursue the ships as they maneuvered. By 9:20 pm, the USS Kidd log reads: “Multiple UAVs around ship”.

• At 9:37 pm, the command was issued to man Mark 87 stations – the Mk20 Electro-Optical Sighting System (EOSS) located above the bridge, which provides surveillance and tracking over long distances. At about the same time, logs from the Navy destroyer USS Russell describe the drones dropping in elevation, and apparently moving forward and backward, left and right.

• Meanwhile, the USS Rafael Peralta received a radio call from a passing cruise ship, the Carnival Imagination, notifying the Navy that the drones were not theirs, but they could see as many as five or six drones maneuvering nearby. The incident continued into the night, with the USS Rafael Peralta recording two drones, and then four drones near their own ship. This continued for nearly three hours, but none of the warships were able to identify the drones.

• A formal investigation appears to have been launched on July 17th. By the morning of July 18th, a Navy liaison to the Coast Guard and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) assigned to 3rd Fleet got involved. Their findings would go directly to the commander of the Pacific Fleet and to the Chief of Naval Operations. The initial focus of their investigation was the 50-foot catamaran, the ORV Alguita. While the ORV Alguita did have drones onboard, they were small quadcopter drones with a maximum flight time of 28 minutes and incapable of operating more than a few feet from the ship. Also, they were not operating at the time of the incident. Navy investigators conceded that they needed to keep looking.

• Next, Navy intelligence and the director of the Maritime Intelligence Operations Center sought to rule out the possibility that the drones were operated by the Navy itself. A representative from the Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility based in San Diego clarified that UAV drones were only operated by the Navy in certain limited areas. By the afternoon of July 23rd, the investigators were still grappling with the intent behind the incidents.

• Remarkably, the USS Kidd detected the drones again in the early hours of July 25th and July 30th. Further information continues to emerge from The Drive’s FOIA requests, but based on the available evidence it appears that the initial investigation did not ultimately identify the source of the drones. It remains uncertain if other ships also continued to have drone encounters in July.

• It is unclear why anyone would operate drones near Navy warships in such a brazen manner. Commercially available drones are not usually capable of flying for such long durations across great distances at relatively high speeds. It is estimated that the drones traversed at least 100 nautical miles during the July 14th incident. The drones were able to locate and catch a destroyer traveling at 16 knots in conditions with less than one nautical mile of visibility. Equally baffling, their operators appear to have coordinated at least five to six drones simultaneously.

• Is it possible that the drones were operated from the Navy’s nearby training area on San Clemente Island in an errant test of some kind? No UAV activity was scheduled during July 14th. If there were classified drone exercises, why would the incursions continue after an investigation that reached the highest level of the Navy hierarchy? This is the same area where the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO (and the ‘fleet’ of them according to a Navy pilot’s remark) was seen in 2004.

• If the drones were not operated by the American military, these incidents represent a highly significant security breach. If they were part of some kind of covert action, it is nonetheless unclear why they were flown so openly and so frequently in almost a harassing manner. More troubling still, if a foreign state actor was involved, where exactly were the drones launched from? And was there ever a hard description of these craft beyond ‘lights in the sky’?

 

                   USS Rafael Peralta

In July of 2019, a truly bizarre series of events unfolded around California’s Channel Islands. Over a number of days, groups of unidentified aircraft, which the U.S. Navy simply refers to as ‘drones’ or ‘UAVs,’ pursued that service’s vessels, prompting a high-level investigation.

During the evening encounters, as many as six aircraft were reported swarming around the ships at once. The drones were described as flying for prolonged periods in low-visibility conditions, and performing brazen maneuvers over the Navy warships near a sensitive military

       50-foot catamaran ORV Alguita

training range less than 100 miles off Los Angeles. The ensuing investigation included elements of the Navy, Coast Guard, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The incidents received major attention, including from the Chief of Naval Operations—the apex of the Navy’s chain of command.

                        USS John Finn

The following is our own investigation into these events, during which we discovered these events were far more extensive in scale than previously understood.

A Strange Story Emerges

                            USS Kidd

Last year, documentary filmmaker Dave Beaty uncovered initial details about the events, centering on the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Kidd (DDG-100). That initial account described a tense encounter, culminating in the deployment of onboard intelligence teams.

                   Carnival Imagination

New documents significantly expand the public’s knowledge of the scope and severity of that incident and reveal others that occurred around the same time. These details come largely from our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which resulted in the disclosure of deck logs from the ships involved. Additionally, our investigation utilized hundreds of gigabytes of automatic identification system (AIS) ship location data to forensically reconstruct the position of both military and civilian ships in the area during this strange series of events.

By using the USS Kidd’s position as a starting point, we were able to identify several other ships in close proximity to it during the incidents in question, including U.S. Navy destroyers USS Rafael Peralta, USS Russell, USS John Finn, and the USS Paul Hamilton. Subsequent FOIA requests for these ships’ records allowed us to build a composite picture of the events as a whole.

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That Time ‘UFOs’ Took Over Los Angeles

Listen to “E53 8-4-19 That Time UFOs Took Over Los Angeles” on Spreaker.

Article by Hadley Mears                    July 24, 2019                    (losangeleno.com)

• Early in the morning of February 25th, 1942, a large unidentified object hovered over Los Angeles. While sirens blared and searchlights pierced the sky, 1400 anti-aircraft shells were pumped into the air as citizens cowered and marveled below. One female air warden said, “[I]t was practically right over my house. I had never seen anything like it in my life!” Were these flying saucers that had come to destroy LA?

• Eye-witnesses swore that it certainly was not a plane or a balloon. But the official explanation was that the UFO was two weather balloons released by the Douglas Aircraft Plant in Santa Monica, and from the Sawtelle Veterans Hospital in Westwood. Jittery soldiers, already on high alert due to the recent attack on Pearl Harbor, panicked – and the rest is conspiracy theory history.

• According the LA Times, on February 23rd, 1942, ‘a Japanese submarine surfaced …near Santa Barbara, and pumped 13 rounds of 5 ½ inch shells at oil installations. Minor damage was done to piers and oil wells, but the raider missed a gasoline plant, apparently its actual target.’ A panicked Los Angeles awoke on February 24th to photos of the damage, and news that the enemy submarine was nowhere to be found. That evening, the Navy received word of yet another imminent attack.

• In the early morning hours of February 25th, air raid defense radar tracked an unidentified object approximately 100 miles from LA. Radio silence was ordered and searchlights were trained on the sky. A little after 3 am, a “balloon-like” object appeared over Culver City and Santa Monica. Minutes later, the artillery shelling began. Around 12,000 volunteer air raid wardens took their positions patrolling the streets as shrapnel from the shells rained down on LA.

• People claimed to see many different things — from a blimp to more than 50 planes. Bill Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine, told PR Newswire in 2011 that these UFOs were flying too high to be Japanese bombers. Apparently, not a single artillery shell was able to hit the UFO craft. But most of the danger lay on the ground below where shrapnel rained down. A shipyard worker recalled that as the night shift was leaving and the morning shift was arriving, everyone was collecting the shrapnel that was scattered all around. One witness said, “[S]hrapnel-strewn areas took on the appearance of a huge Easter-egg hunt, [as] youngsters and grownups alike scrambled through streets and vacant lots, picking up and proudly comparing chunks of shrapnel fragments.”

• Up to six people died that morning, some in car accidents and others from heart attacks. Many volunteer wardens were injured by falling shells. And numerous Japanese Americans were arrested for “signaling” to the invaders.

• The next day, the LA Times reported “foreign aircraft flying both large formations and singly flew over Southern California early today and drew heavy barrages of anti-aircraft fire — the first ever to sound over United States continental soil against an enemy invader,” along with a heavily doctored photo of searchlights shining on the unidentified object flying over the city (shown above).

• To make matters more confusing, the Army Chief of Staff initially said there were 15 enemy aircraft over LA, while the Navy said it was just a false alarm. The Navy blamed the Army for being over-eager to shoot at the sky. In response, on February 27th, the LA Times printed an editorial stating: “This Is No Time For Squabbling.”

• There also may have been a cover-up to save officials from the embarrassment of fighting a weather balloon. One soldier recalled being told “there had been seven Japanese planes up there.” He stated, “I was also told that if I repeated my story about shooting at a balloon and not enemy planes, I would be put behind bars.”

• In 1975, LA Times aerospace editor Marvin Miles wrote a memo on the LA incident, relying on the US governments ‘official version’ of events. After the war, it was established that the Japanese had sent no planes to LA during the war. Meteorological balloons known to have been released over Los Angeles may well have caused the initial alarm. Anti-aircraft artillery units were officially criticized for having wasted ammunition on targets which moved too slowly to be airplanes.

• But in the 1970’s and 80’s, the conspiracy theories that the ‘Battle of LA’ was due to extraterrestrial UFOs hovering over the city began to emerge. The theory gained traction in 1987 when some Majestic 12 documents were released, including the ‘Marshall/ Roosevelt Memo of March 5, 1942’, claiming that two alien aircraft had been recovered after the incident. The memo goes on to say, “This Headquarters has come to a determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and according to secret intelligence sources they are in all probability of interplanetary origin.”

• Skeptoid podcast host Brian Dunning writes, “For more than 40 years, not a single person associated with the Battle of Los Angeles entertained any thoughts about extraterrestrial spacecraft or aliens. … The alien spacecraft angle is purely a post-hoc invention by modern promoters of UFO mythology.”

• But the truth behind the Battle of Los Angeles is probably more about human fallibility — bad intel, errant weather balloons and poor training — than anything else. However, the records are so muddled that the true story of The Great Air Raid will forever be fodder for those with conspiratorial minds.

• [Editor’s Note]  The “large UFO” hovering over Los Angeles in February 1942 was actually a cluster of UFOs, each surrounded by a shimmering force field which together looked like one big balloon. However, as noted, two UFO saucers were indeed shot down. One was recovered by the Navy in the Pacific Ocean. The other crashed inland in the San Bernardino Mountains east of LA and was recovered by the Army. Both were taken to Wright Patterson Airfield in Ohio where it was determined that these were unmanned drone craft, not from this planet.  Dr Michael Salla discusses the 1942 LA incident at length in his 2017 book, The US Navy’s Secret Space Program and Nordic Extraterrestrial Alliance.

 

It was the early morning of Feb. 25, 1942. A large unidentified object hovered over a Pearl Harbour-rattled Los Angeles, while sirens blared and searchlights pierced the sky. One thousand and four hundred anti-aircraft shells were pumped into the air as Angelenos cowered and marveled. “It was huge! It was just enormous!” one female air warden allegedly claimed. “And it was practically right over my house. I had never seen anything like it in my life!”

But that wasn’t all. Some Angelenos claimed there were more strange objects in the sky that night, namely dozens of airplanes — or was it flying saucers? — that had come to destroy L.A.

“The obvious thought was that these were Japanese bombers come to attack the United States,” UFO expert Bill Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine, told PR Newswire in 2011. “But it wasn’t. They were flying too high. And the astounding thing was not one artillery shell could hit the craft — out of all the hundreds of shells that were fired. People outside that night swore that it was neither a plane nor a balloon — it was a UFO. It floated, it glided. And to this day, nobody can explain what that craft was, why our anti-aircraft guns couldn’t hit it — it’s a mystery that’s never been resolved.”

That night, befuddled officials would only help the urban legend grow. Many officials now believe two weather balloons released by the 203rd Coast Artillery Regiment from the Douglas Aircraft Plant in Santa Monica and the Sawtelle Veterans Hospital in Westwood may be responsible for the ensuing chaos. Jittery soldiers already on high alert in the early days of World War II panicked and the rest is conspiracy theory history.

All of the pieces were in place, according to the LA Times, “for the confused action known as the ‘battle of Los Angeles.’”
“People outside that night swore that it was neither a plane nor a balloon — it was a UFO. It floated, it glided. And to this day, nobody can explain what that craft was, why our anti-aircraft guns couldn’t hit it — it’s a mystery that’s never been resolved.”

The city was on high alert following the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Rumors of an imminent Japanese invasion were constant.

According to Terrenz Sword, author of The Battle of Los Angeles 1942: The Mystery Air Raid, during one incident, the Navy reportedly received a tip that there were more than 30 enemy ships off the coast. Army pilots took off to find them — only to discover they were nothing more than fishing boats.

Southern California’s worst fears were realized on the night of Feb. 23, 1942. The LA Times described the scene 20 years later:
As President Roosevelt warned a nation-wide radio audience that the oceans “have become endless battlefields on which we are constantly being challenged by our enemies,” a Japanese submarine, I-17, surfaced off-shore at Ellwood, near Santa Barbara, and pumped 13 rounds of 5 ½ in shells at oil installations. Minor damage was done to piers and oil wells, but the raider missed a gasoline plant, apparently its actual target.

A panicked Los Angeles awoke on Feb. 24 to photos of the damage from the shells and news that the enemy submarine was nowhere to be found. That evening, the Navy received word of another imminent attack. In the early morning hours of Feb. 25, air raid defense radar tracked an unidentified object approximately 100 miles from L.A. At 2:25 a.m., air raid sirens blasted. Shortly after, radio silence was ordered and searchlights began to pierce the sky. A little after 3 a.m., a balloon-like object appeared in the sky over Culver City and Santa Monica — the same one that people would later call UFOs or a mysterious aircraft.

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Las Vegas Man’s UFO Story Makes It To the Big Screen

by George Knapp and Matt Adams                   December 12, 2018                      (lasvegasnow.com)

• The world premiere of a new documentary film about UFO whistle blower Bob Lazar was held in Los Angeles on December 3rd, and Las Vegas I-Team Reporter George Knapp was there. The line of eager fans stretched around a city block for the premier. A sellout crowd of 1,600 people filed into the historic United Artists theater to see the film produced and directed by Jeremy Corbell and narrated by Hollywood star, Mickey Rourke.  

• Corbell took the stage at the premier to explain, “The reason I made this film is because I wanted to know the truth.” As the lights dimmed and the projector fired up, the subject of the movie Bob Lazar took a seat alongside other interested parties.

• It was 29 years ago that Lazar came forward, claimed he worked on technology out in the Nevada desert, and suddenly the Area 51 base became known all over the world. A 1989 interview on KLAS TV with George Knapp when Bob Lazar mentioned that there were “nine flying saucers, flying discs out there” at S-4, a camouflaged facility built into a mountain south of Groom Lake, the heart of the Area 51 military base changed things forever for Lazar.

• With Lazar’s revelation, UFO researchers by the busload made the pilgrimage to the Nevada desert, along with major news organizations. The story put Area 51 on the map worldwide, inspired movies, TV shows, and books, led to the creation of the E.T. highway and a namesake professional baseball team.

• In the film, Lazar goes into specific detail about the technology he says he saw, technology that is remarkably similar to the objects seen in videos released one year ago by the Pentagon. These craft can generate gravity and bend space-time, Lazar said nearly three decades ago. Now the topic is once again generating waves of media coverage.

• Audience response to the film’s premiere was overwhelmingly positive enough to coax a visibly uncomfortable Lazar onto the stage with the director to answer a few questions, including the attacks on his credibility. Lazar says he doesn’t blame people for their skepticism. “I understand it is an incredible story and I myself would have a hard time believing it.”  (that’s George Knapp, Bob Lazar and Jeremy Corbell sitting on stage at the event above)

 

2018 was a big year for UFO news. It was a year ago this month when the Pentagon admitted it has been secretly studying unidentified flying objects and also released a few videos recorded by military pilots.

The sudden re-emergence of official interest in these unknown aircraft has also resulted in a closer look at older UFO cases and testimony, including one story that started in Las Vegas.

A new documentary film about UFO whistleblower Bob Lazar is out and there’s no way I-Team Reporter George Knapp would miss the world premiere.

It was 29 years ago that Lazar came forward, claimed he worked on technology out in the Nevada desert, and suddenly the Area 51 base became known all over the world.

The I-Team has done occasional updates with Lazar over the decades but it is never easy to get him to open up. The premiere of the new film has fired up many of the same arguments about his credibility, but the first audience to see the movie didn’t need much convincing.

The line of eager fans stretched around a city block in downtown Los Angeles. A sellout crowd of 1,600 people filed into the historic United Artists theater to see a film narrated by movie star Mickey Rourke and to hobnob with like-minded enthusiasts, some brought their Area 51 saucer model kits. At least one wore an ET mask.

A few famous faces were in the audience when director Jeremy Corbell took the stage and explained why he was inspired to tackle this particular slice of UFO history.

“The reason I made this film is because I wanted to know the truth,” said Jeremy Corbell, documentary filmmaker. “People that are haters, debunkers talk smack. Some of you are in this audience. You don’t know the story. You didn’t get it right.”
As the lights dimmed and the projector fired up, the subject of the movie Bob Lazar took a seat alongside other interested parties.

“There are nine flying saucers, flying discs out there…”

That 1989 interview on KLAS TV changed things forever for Bob Lazar, whose identity was made public months later. His story about alleged alien technology being stored and analyzed at S-4, a camouflaged facility built into a mountain south of Groom Lake, the heart of the now infamous Area 51 military base, set off a stampede.

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