The Battle Of Los Angeles

Investigator says documentation supports UFO

David Marler, former field investigator, state section director and Illinois state director of MUFON, returns to the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference this weekend.
David Marler, former field investigator, state section director and Illinois state director of MUFON, returns to the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference this weekend.

David Marler doesn't talk about what he believes. He talks about what the evidence supports. And there's a lot of evidence that says a UFO might have hung over the city of Los Angeles on the night of Feb. 25, 1942.

Marler became interested in UFOs when he was a child growing up in St. Louis in 1973. A wave of sightings near Piedmont, Mo. -- including one by the high school basketball team and its coach -- captured the attention of his father, who was raised in that area. Marler remembers his father saying if the coach said he saw it, he saw it. And it wasn't unusual for his family to load up in the car to go to the Piedmont area to hunt for UFOs.

FAQ

Ozark Mountain UFO Conference

WHEN — Today-Sunday; David Marler will speak at 2 p.m. Saturday

WHERE — Inn of the Ozarks in Eureka Springs

COST — $42-$175; live streaming is available for $43

INFO — ozarkufoconference.…

In 1977, Marler's sister -- who "didn't do drugs, didn't drink and was not fantasy prone" -- had a close encounter while driving home with her husband late one night.

And by 1990, Marler was actively involved in investigating.

"Twenty-seven years later, I'm lecturing, I've written a book, and I'm working with the University of New Mexico," where his extensive collection of photos, government documents and first-person accounts will eventually be housed.

This weekend, Marler will speak at the 30th annual Ozark Mountain UFO Conference in Eureka Springs on a topic well known to most people curious about UFOs. "The Battle of Los Angeles" was documented by The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, radio and a number of other California newspapers, and Marler has original photos, original copies of the newspapers and an inch thick file of declassified government documents.

"I like to bring these original elements because it breathes life into the stories," he says from his office in Albuquerque.

As the story goes -- and the photos show -- an aircraft of some kind hovered over Los Angeles that night. It was attacked by the U.S. military -- on alert for Japanese incursion into American airspace -- but it remained in the sky.

"As objective researchers, we have to look at what the object could not have been," Marler says. "We know it wasn't a U.S. military aircraft, because all military planes were grounded. We know it wasn't Japanese, because they said so after the war. Some skeptics will try to say it was a weather balloon or an anti-aircraft barrage balloon, but I cannot resolve myself that any balloon could sustain that much artillery fire around it."

Marler's ace in the hole is radar confirmation, which he says is never discussed.

"And this was five years before the term flying saucer was invented -- five years before Roswell," he says. "No one was thinking flying saucer. We didn't have helicopters in 1942. So it's very hard to summarily dismiss it. Maybe we were dealing with someone else's technology."

-- Becca Martin-Brown

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NAN What's Up on 04/14/2017

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