Pas trop le temps de creuser mais l'incident aurait-il un lien avec ceci ?
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Fire:balloon.htm
The balloon campaign was not the first time the Japanese attacked the American mainland. It was, in fact, the fourth attack. In
February 1942, even before the Doolittle raid, Japanese submarine I-17 shelled an oil field up the beach from Santa Barbara (CA) and damaged a pump house.
et ceci :
" `The Battle of
Los Angeles was a myth; the Japaneses did not send planes over that city the night of Feb 2-25, 1942, a Japanese navy spokesman told the Associated Press today.
The question was put because the Fourth Air Force at San Francisco on October 28th said that planes, possibly Japanese, were overhead that night. Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, former commander of the Western Defense Command at San Francisco, was quoted, "
It is my belief that those planes were launched from submarines somewhere close to the shore under our detectors."
Capt. Omae of the Japanese navy said, however, that a plane was launched from a submarine and sent over the Southern Oregon coast on Feb. 9, 1942, "to attack military installations, but the lone pilot was unable to discover any. Another purpose was to keep Americans worried over coastal attacks and force them to keep many planes at home. This would cut down the air strength America could send overseas." Omae said the reason the Oregon coast was selected was not indicated in navy files.
The submarine, which shelled Ft. Stevens, Oregon, near the mouth of the Columbia River, approached its objective by remaining submerged during the day and surfacing late at night. Omae said the submarine commander had a full set of plans of Ft. Stevens and his objective was to destroy the military installations.
The submarine which shelled the Goleta oil filed near Santa Barbara, CA., early in 1942, also sought military installations, and to nail down American forces in the United States. That attack was made so the Japanese people could be told that one of their submarines easily reached the United States coast. "When the submarine commander failed to find military installations he shelled oil property," Omae said.`
If Omae was recounting their successes, I don't see why he wouldn't mention fire balloons. That is unless of course he wasn't familiar with their launch. If that's your argument I'd then counter that it still couldn't be the case because the first launch was two years later in '44. Also the LA Times picture strongly suggests the "balloon" was elliptical along the horizontal. Whereas we can assume a partially deflated balloon would be elliptical along the vertical axis. The general shapes don't match up. That aside, also take in to account that the balloon was reported to be incandescent according to a number of people, including, Halbert P. Gillette of San Marino who wrote a Letters to The Times, L.A.T (pp. 81, Sword, Terrenz (2002). Battle of
Los Angeles 1942: The Mystery Air Raid, 60th Anniversary Edition. New Bruncswick, NJ: Global Communications. ISBN N/A.)
"Wednesday morning a friend told me that he had witnessed the first "dog-fight" between airplanes over America. Later it turned out that what he had seen was a "dog-less dog-fight," for no enemy airplanes had been seen or even heard, and that what
looked like a balloon had been spotted by searchlights and fired upon.
The photograph in Thursday's ''Times'' shows the alleged balloon clearly, illuminated by nine converging searchlight beams, and with half a dozen blobs of light from bursting anti-aircraft shells near it. This "balloon" has a nearly hemispherical top and possibly a similar base. That it was not a balloon seems probable because the escape of a no balloon has been reported, as well as because it failed to collapse under intense and apparently accurate shellfire. What was it then?
The answer is that it was probably an approximately globular cloud of exceptional character. There is a well-known, though rare, meteorological phenomenon known as a fireball. Occasionally such a luminous ball drops out of a thundercloud and drifts away looking like an incandescent balloon. The astonishing features about a fireball are two, first its almost perfect sphericity, and second its incandescent."
http://rrrgroup.blogspot.com/2008/10/1942-ufo-battle-for-
los-
angeles.html
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Avis perso
Allez chercher des ovnis dans les projo antiaériens/DCAalors que l'on sait qu'il y a eu une attaque ennemie (japonaise?) dans ce secteur précis est un gag... Ce peut être un simple spot d'explosion et/ou son nuage éclairé par les projos. Un sous marin aurait pu larguer des leurres (ballons?) pour détourner l'attention et pouvoir tranquillement accomplir sa mission en Californie.
Bref. Rien de potentiellement exotique là-dedans.