Witness to the Battle of LA recounts experience

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” says Stephen Hawking, in the new Discovery Channel series Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.” Hawking is the author of the 1988 best-seller A Brief History of Time.

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he says. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

But trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky,” he says. “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

But maybe Hawking is being a little simple—or hasn’t seen Avatar. Regardless, Lord Martin Rees begs to differ with the world’s most famous theoretical physicist. ...

Rees, president of the Royal Society, which celebrated its 350th anniversary this year, said: “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains. They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.”

So, what’s up with all this talk about aliens? Scott Littleton, an expert on Arthurian legend and professor emeritus of anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, has some answers.

You were eight years old and growing up in Hermosa Beach, when, in the early hours of Feb. 25, 1942, you witnessed what came to be known as the “Battle of Los Angeles.” What happened?

First, remember, this was soon after Pearl Harbor, and two days after the Elwood Oil installation off Santa Barbara had been shelled by a Japanese submarine that had surfaced there. Anyway, I’m sleeping, when suddenly I heard the anti-aircraft guns going. This was about 3:15 a.m. I noticed the sky was very bright, so I look out the window and I see searchlight beams and shells exploding overhead. Something crazy was going on. My father said, “I better see what is going on, this might be the real thing.” So he threw on his air warden gear and went out. My father soon ran back in and says, “Everybody get down in the bomb shelter.” So we all go into the basement, in these old cramped quarters. And my mother was there for about 30 seconds, then she hustles out this little door and I snuck out behind her and we saw practically overhead—and I swear to this day it was hovering—this lozenge-shaped object like an elongated silver bug directly overhead. And outlined by seven or eight searchlight beams. They had it pinpointed. But it was glowing in addition to the searchlight beams. And it was surrounded by exploding shells that were falling on the beach.

How long did you and your mother observe this thing?

We were outside for ten minutes or so. It was hovering directly overhead. Then it began to lose altitude and veered inland over Rodando Beach and we lost sight of it.

If, as some people have suggested, it was a barrage balloon that had drifted, these anti-aircraft shells would have torn it to pieces. My guess is that it was surrounded by a forcefield of some sort that protected it—like something out of Star Wars.

How long did it take you to start thinking of it as a UFO and not just an unexplained phenomenon?

Decades. Not until the late ’70s. Afterwards, Frank Knox, the secretary of the Navy, held a press conference and said it was a “false alarm” due to “war nerves.” To this day that is the official interpretation. [Editors note: A Long Beach Independent editorial put it this way:”There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter.”] ...

via Aliens Like Us -- In These Times.