78 years ago tonight, the people of earth did battle against alien invaders

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 2:25 a.m. on Feb. 25, 1942, the people of Los Angeles woke up to sirens. Every light in the city was extinguished. Spotlights searched the sky above as bombs exploded overhead, filling the horizon with smoke and scattering debris across the city.
Dressed in their pajamas, Angelenos stood on their porches, squinting upward to see the battle breaking out above them. In the streets, cars and trollies remained frozen where they had been as the alarms sounded, the thunderous roar of more than 1,400 rounds of ammunition exploding against the still night sky.

Finally, the “all clear” was given at 7:21 a.m. In its wake, the air raid left five dead, many injured, and houses damaged by falling shells. What it did not leave, however, was any downed enemy aircraft.
That’s because there hadn’t been enemy aircraft to begin with.
Regardless, the “Battle of Los Angeles,” or “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” as the incident came to be known, left Los Angeles — and the country — shaken.
Despite contradictory explanations for the night’s events – which in turn kicked off more than a half-century of conspiracy theories — the citywide scare demonstrated just how much the world had changed for West Coast Americans after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor just a few months earlier.

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In the end, the biggest piece of evidence the UFO enthusiasts can point to in this case is that, despite reports of soldiers hitting the target or targets dozens if not hundreds of times, the craft were apparently indestructible. Per another widely quoted anonymous “witness,” “It was like the Fourth of July but so much louder. The military was shooting like crazy on it, but they couldn’t deal any damage.”

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