Shades of John Belushi

[QED4]

I finally got around to framing this and though there might be some interest in it. I looks like something from the movie 1941 staring John Belushi but in fact is the front page of the New York Journal American for 9 Dec 1941. The article states that some 30 Japanese planes flew over the Bay Area and then split into two groups and disappeared but not until after most of the west coast was blacked out and Army and Navy planes were sent to look for them. It reads a lot like a report on UFO sightings today.

 

Edit by Mod: Deleted Multiple Posts

[Lee Ragan]

Goldarn! Where's Captain Wild Bill Kelso when you need him?

[Bob Hudson]

I finally got around to framing this and though there might be some interest in it. I looks like something from the movie 1941 staring John Belushi but in fact is the front page of the New York Journal American for 9 Dec 1941. The article states that some 30 Japanese planes flew over the Bay Area and then split into two groups and disappeared but not until after most of the west coast was blacked out and Army and Navy planes were sent to look for them. It reads a lot like a report on UFO sightings today.

 

The movie 1941 was in fact based on The Battle of Los Angeles which is nicely summed up by wikipedia as "the name given by contemporary news agencies to a sighting of one or more unidentified flying objects which took place from late February 24 to early February 25, 1942 in which eyewitness reports of an unknown object or objects over Los Angeles, California, triggered a massive anti-aircraft artillery barrage.

 

Initially the target of the barrage was thought to be an attacking force from Japan, but it was later suggested to be a lost weather balloon, a blimp, a Japanese fire balloon or psychological warfare technique, staged for the benefit of coastal industrial sites, or even an extraterrestrial aircraft. The true nature of the object or objects remains unknown."

 

That New York Journal American headline is more of the same early WWII UFO hysteria and of course had the Japanese been able get their carriers close enough to launch aircraft over West Coast cities they would have attacked.

 

There were a couple of ineffectual Japanese attacks on the West Coast. You can read about the fire balloon attacks at http://www.faqs.org/docs/air/avfusen.html where they also note that:

 

"The Japanese performed a small number of attacks on the American mainland through World War II. In February 1942, Japanese Submarine I-17 shelled an oil field up the beach from Santa Barbara and damaged a pump house. That following June, Submarine I-25 shelled a coastal fort in Oregon, damaging a baseball backstop, and in September, that submarine's crew assembled and launched a small float plane that dropped incendiary bombs, starting a few small forest fires.

 

The fourth and final attack, using balloons carrying incendiary bombs, was the most earnest of them all. "

 

I was working at a radio station in Hollywood when 1941 was released in 1979 and it was wild to watch the movie and then walk out of the Hollywood Blvd. theater and see pretty much the exact same skyline that Belushi's character buzzed in the movie.