The Battle of Los Angeles 

[Credits, References, and More] www.lemmi.no/p/the-battle-of-los-angeles

False alarm, they weren't weird lights. The blackout just allowed LA to see stars for the first time

I do not deserve to watch this for free

Friendly reminder, a UFO means Unidentified Flying Object, not an alien spaceship.

apparently there are 5 deaths. 3 due to panicked car driving, and 2 due to heart attacks.

Whatever happened, someone definitely got fired.

*balloon flies over city* Army: So, you have chosen death.

This is one of these kinds of scenarios where I actually believe it was entirely a mistake on the military’s part. No cover up, just an oopsie. Someone got scared by a balloon or something

AA shells had a fuse to explode at set altitudes. It's perfectly possible the direct hits that guy thought he saw were just explosions happening in the same line of sight, but not on the object.

Just imagine a group of scientist made a time travelling machine and decided to go solve this mystery and went back in time only to realize it was them who made the scenario happen.

Imagine being some dude enjoying a ride in a hot air balloon late at night and suddenly being attacked with AA flak

It may seem like an impossibility for balloons to survive the intense AA fire, however there are 2 things to consider: 1) According to a British research published in 2003, during the Battle of Britain, it took over 20,000 rounds of AA fire to shoot down 1 aircraft. This was because there were only 3 ways to shoot down an aircraft - hitting directly, using a timer fuze to detonate and using a fuze that detonate at a specific altitude. All 3 were very inaccurate (especially at night) such that some claim the actual number of AA rounds to shot down 1 aircraft was more than 100,000 rounds. All this changed when the Allies in 1943 started using... 2) VT fuze (proximity fuse) which was able to detect (using radio waves reflected from target) its proximity to the target and detonate at the closest range. All this before integrated circuits or digital processors were invented. This device was so secret it was not declassified until 1954. An example of how effective the VT fuze is, when the US first tested the VT fuze they had planned for the test to last 2 days where the new fuze were to be used against 3 radio controlled drones. All 3 drones were destroyed on the first day with only 4 shots. During the Battle of Los Angeles, the US had no VT fuze and fired approximately 1,400 AA rounds, so it is well within the realm of possibility for the balloons to escape damage.

Hitting objects with anti-aircraft shells back in the day was extremely hard. Proximity fuses (which would explode on proximity to an object and thus make getting a hit easier) were still in development in this stage and highly classified.

I love that 40’s accent all the people from the recordings have

Soldier: Yo what is that? America: Idk, shoot it and see what happens

I've always thought it was obvious that the photo just shows the confluence of multiple searchlights. You can see that when just two beams cross, the diamond shaped part where they intersect is brighter. Now make six or seven from lights arranged in a circle, and you end up with a single super bright blob with multiple angular edges.

old radar systems seem to think everything is bad except the stuff that is actually bad

Imagine you and a few other guys launch a weather balloon, you're all chillin watching it go up... The all of a sudden the entire city goes dark and the entire coastal AA defense starts lighting up your little weather balloon. lmao

Aliens: *visits earth for the first time during the height of ww2 on accident* “let’s go say hi” Aliens 3 hours later: nope nope nope nope nobody go there

Imagine you making your first Weather Balloon, you're proud. And then a whole city blacks out and Flak guns fired at your Balloon.

General: Hold your fire. Artillery: SOMEONE SAID FIRE!!! *bang boom bang bang pshew takadatakada booom*

Officer-it’s a balloon Army man- did you just say enemy zeppelin? Officer-no it’s a bal- Army man- FIRE!!!

Weather balloon: *exists* US military: “So anyway, I started blasting.”

My grandfather died telling ppl about this night. Everyone just ignored him. So to see RU-vid videos about this 20 years later is mind blowing to me.

My grandmother was 2 years old and living in Los Angeles at the time of the “battle”, and although she doesn’t remember it, my great grandmother was always skeptical of it due to her hearing no planes whatsoever. It would have been so cool to talk to her about it and get a first hand account of what happened that strange night

*Army open fires at a bird thinking it was an enemy airship*

Alien : I COME IN PEACE Goverment : light em up bois

Imagine wondering the empty space for centuries to finally find a planet with life. You're excited, words can't describe your happiness. Then when you land the ground starts flashing white / yellow and things start zipping by your ship

Fantastic video. Love this stuff 🧐

Bruh imagine that one person who just slept through the whole thing and woke up the next day like wtf happened last night?

I love how an amateur channel (Top 10 memes) became a top notch quality channel (Lemmino)

I feel like your music is really great and effective in these vids but not a lot of people mention it. or at least, not as many people as I feel should. it's super great to see not only the writing, research and editing but also music dedicated to the channel. super cool

Secretary of war is the most American occupation i have ever heard

See you again next year

Just remember U.F.O. doesn't mean its an alien spaceship as default.

“Much like much channel name at the time […] was a mistake” Lmao, who remembers Lemmino’s channel being named “Top 10 memes”

Imagine chilling in your blimp then you get shot down by 50 artillery cannons

Top10Memes was the best mistake ever

This is why you eat your carrots, kids

Lemmino Greetings, Its been a couple years since I have watched your video - Battle of L.A. Well, I am still blown away by your fine report, narration, high production values, etc., etc. &etc. I just sent it off to some friends in my email group. Its just too good to keep it secret. :-) Don't stop doing what you do best! Videos.

Your channel is a breath of fresh air in a world with "ancient aliens" in it.

Top 10 memes to these high quality videos. We've come far

The man makes 20 minutes feel like 20 seconds.

The photographs of the event are night photos, which means that they were long exposure pictures. So, the "object" that people see in the spotlights, was just a blob of distorted light from a long film exposure that is needed to capture night photography. This is a fun mystery that I've been interested in for years, but the reality is, that if an object of any kind was truly lit up with those large lights, many more people would have clearly seen it, and there would've been far more certain reports than the vague reports that actually came in. Some saw planes, some balloons, others a blimp, some more saw bag shaped objects, but most saw nothing. This event is lost to time, and the true series of events that created it will never be known, but it was most likely misunderstandings, miscommunications, misidentifying, and fear. And, once the first shells were fired, it exasperated the entire situation.

This is my favorite video ever, I've watched it around 9 times and never get tired of it

7:10 **thousands of people die due to the nuclear attack** Lemmino: **chill beach music**

*he is alive*

It's worth noting - weather balloons will only show on radar if they carry a radar reflector - a device intentionally meant to make them show up on radar. My understanding is that radar reflectors didn't exist in the 40s, so it makes perfect sense that a balloon would show up visually and not on radar but it doesn't explain the earlier radar warnings of something approaching. Until digital screening in the 70s, radar was notorious for false positives, and the radar tracked something from 120 miles away to a "few" miles away in 6 minutes, roughly 70% faster than the fastest plane that existed during the war. To me that strongly argues a false positive radar scare as the initial impetus, followed by shooting anything that even looked like it could be something in the sky.

This would make a great historical fiction novel from the point of some mysterious protagonists doing protagonist things

Quality, not quantity.

Just to be clear, a UFO could be a damn flying pig. Unidentified Flying Object

Dude the music effects you put in your videos just give chills!!!

The aliens decided to talk to us during our largest war in history, and on one of the most protected city’s on the west coast, at night.

The quality of this video is honestly in my opinion better than those documentaries on Televison. This proves that quality > quantity is true.

Weather balloons are often made of synthetic material, and the air inside can wobble along with the wind around it, so it is well possible that this isn't picked up by the radar at all (especially with older, less-precise radar technology). Also, the metal equipment is much more likely to be a bright spot on the radar, but is probably too small to be distinguished from noise, or existing debris of things that are being shot at it. I think whatever the radar reading are, they would be worthless.

Yo we got the sequel going on rn!

this is why the aliens never talk to us.

yup he was abducted by aliens. Thats why he wasnt uploading videos latly, but im happy to see new video of his.

I guess history does repeat itself.

I appreciate your factual format without spin. Keep it that way.

He uploads 3 months after his latest video but it always is worth the wait :)

I can just picture Japan hearing about this shortly after and just being like.. wut?

the alien in the ship just trying to make sure we got our bogos binted: "daaaayum ok, chill bro, im leaving chill"

All these could be avoided if it happened in the morning

>Japanese attack >coast is put on YELLOW alert

The reason why it look like there is a shape in the lights is as he said a lot of smoke or when a lot of powerful lights overlap they can make something that looks like a shape. I've seen it my self

Your videos never cease to amaze me!

I feel like this is a classic case of pure fear, 3am, soldiers are tired and scared of an attack. If you look up on a dark night with no lighting around it's not hard to see things that aren't there

Same time next year then lads?

This, and the intro of the video was one of my favorite of this channel

LEMMiNO deserves more than a youtube channel, he deserves a TV show

Quality >>>>>> Quantity EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. LEMMiNO is my inspiration behind creating infotainment videos as good as I can.

"Nothing was found on ground other than shrapnel" Well, after being fired upon by over 1000 rounds of AA, I would consider myself a shrapnel too lol.

Amazing Video. Love your stuff man, keep it up.

Really good job on this. It seems like there are a bunch of factors (balloons, false radar readings, wartime hysteria) that came together to cause this incident, blaming it on something as tangible and definitive as aliens almost seems like a cop out.

Dad, are you coming back for real this time?

Thank you for the awesome content. See you in a few months.

You should do more space videos! All your videos are great, your voice is super nice and helps me fall asleep when I have insomnia 😊

This is very interesting and something I have heard about, but want to learn more about. The presentation here is very well done. Subscribed.

It is a known fact that all the dislikes on LEMMINOS videos are from bots, no human being can dislike such great content.

To this day birds no longer migrate to the US

"a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire" *claps

In 1944, Japan did release balloons armed with bombs into natural wind currents. A small number successfully made it to the West Coast. The attack killed a group of children in Oregon who were on a church picnic and were curious about the strange object that had landed in woods. Some of these balloons could still be in the backcountry of the West Coast, still able to detonate.

Lemmino uploads video **Disables adblocker**

When i saw my notification say lemmino posted i screamed, YES YES YES!!!!!

While the comments talk great about this beautiful video, can we just talk about how much of a bop that outro tune is? That is an amazing outro beat, its catchy.

I actually did a slideshow presentation on this for my history final. Your video has helped a lot with the research for my project :)

The king is back.

These videos are so incredible, I wish you got more praise than you do - truly a channel "out of this world" ;) - a Dane

Loved it! Could you do a video on the lines of The Great Silence? I'd say that is surely the most crisp, informative video on YT. Would be great if you could do a little more focus on space again.

This is some legit video editing man🤟🏻

Ahhh, finally a reason to live.

Every time Lemmino uploads its like a christmas present

I'm amazed to see video footage and photography of extremely late nighttime from that far back, and it led me down quite the rabbit hole of trying to photos and videos from those times or earlier at night, there in Los Angeles or elsewhere.

alien: ground is clear sir. lets land and help these earthlings. alien afterwards: gets crushed into smithereens.

I missed your voice

Alien: "I come in PEACE" US Army: "PEACE was never an OPTION"

The fact that this kind of content is free is beyond me

Lemino is so real for talking about the best Rage against the Machine album

See you guys in three months