On February 24, 1942, the United States Navy reported the detection of luminous objects over Los Angeles. An anti-aircraft alarm was raised and gun positions were manned.
The alarm was taken seriously, given the state of war the US was in, the previous attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, and the theoretical possibility of the Japanese attacking the US mainland coast.
The situation calmed down, but only for some time, around 2:15 a.m. on February 25, objects that could not be identified were detected on radar. 10 minutes later, an alarm was announced, a blackout was applied and artillery began firing at the object/objects.
Over the next 2 hours, until 4.14, approximately 1,400 shots were fired, but nothing could be shot down. The alarm was triggered at 7.21 a.m. on the same day.
According to witness observations, the object(s) came over the coast from Santa Monica, flew north towards Long Beach, and then turned towards the Pacific Ocean.
Three people died from a heart attack, another three from artillery fire.
Initially, it was suggested that it was a Japanese raid, but after the end of the war in 1945, the Japanese government stated that it had not flown any planes over Los Angeles during the war.
In 1983, the United States Office of Air Force History concluded that an analysis of the evidence pointed to weather balloons as the cause of the first alert. This explanation is convenient for the USB government, considering that they may not have actually known what the US military was up against at the time.
According to eyewitness reports, it was a “round object, with a slight hill in the middle” or “a large elliptical shape, bathed in a shiny orange glow.”
Having in mind that observations of unidentified flying objects have accompanied us for centuries, and the Los Angeles 1942 incident cannot be rationally explained to a satisfactory extent, we can safely assume that it was another encounter between people and UFOs.
This is, of course, an individual interpretation of the facts, it is possible that it was something completely different, but we cannot explain it yet.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Los_Angeles