Aerial view of the old San Clemente NAAS, circa 1941-44. The original airstrip on the island was a hard packed gravel-dirt strip located in the center of the island. The date of its construction is not known. The above photo shows the reconstructed airstrip. Work started in 1938 and paved over that original strip. Completed in 1941. The San Clemente airstrip is the suspected touch down spot of the large airborne object of unknown origin typically associated with the UFO Over L. A., The Battle of Los Angeles on February 25, 1942. (National Archives photo) Below is how it looks today.
San Clemente Island is the southernmost of the eight California Channel Islands. It lies 63 miles south of Long Beach and 78 miles almost due west of San Diego. Surface area is approximately 56 square miles. Thought to be volcanic in origin, the island stretches northwest to southeast for about 23 miles, and is around 7 miles wide at the widest point. From a geologists point of view, the island of San Clemente makes for a fascinating study. The east side faces the ocean with vertical cliffs, some 1,000 feet above the sea, while the west side rises in steps, which show how the island was successively raised over time. On top of some of these huge rock steps lie old sea beaches that once met the sea. On the northwest side of the island there are mysterious sand dunes, some 40 to 50 feet high, without a trace of their origin or a source for the sand there. On the southeast side of the island are huge bubble-like caves, formed by volcanic activity like the rest of the island, these caves are both above water and underwater, some as big as 150 feet across. About a quarter of a mile off of the northwest end of the island, lies what some believe to be the volcanic source for the island of San Clemente, Castle Rock, which is a vertical crater 40 feet deep.
AND NOW THIS:
It should be noted for the reader that since the article this page is referenced to was put online several years ago, many people have taken my original idea of the L.A. object landing on San Clemente Island and ran with it --- and done so nearly always without citing sources or giving credit. However, the possibility for the potential landing at San Clemente was extrapolated directly from MY uncle through personal conversations with famed and meteorite hunter and astronomer Dr. Lincoln La Paz.
Now while it is true La Paz never paid much attention to me personally, basically because I would guess, I was "just" a kid when we met, he did become fascinated with my story of the L.A. object because I said it was "thick." The following is from the original source:
According to my uncle, after La Paz had his own experience near Fort Sumner he became fascinated with my account of the Los Angeles object because, not unlike the one he saw, it was huge --- most such phenomenon reported falling into the somewhat smaller disc-like or saucer-shaped object category. La Paz especially liked the fact I had said the rear or stern was rectangle in shape, rounded on the corners, flat on the bottom and top and fairly thick. He liked the thick part, because he determined the object he saw to be a 100 feet thick --- an unusual statistic at the time.
Any of you who have read my online material have more than likely come across the fact that at onetime I owned an immaculately restored 1940s wooden Ford station wagon (see). One day I parked the woodie outside a small restaurant when a man came running in yelling at the top of his voice asking if anybody in the restaurant owned the wooden station wagon out front. Instantly seeing in my mind's eye tiny little bits and pieces of wood flying into the air and scattered all over the parking lot thinking he or somebody else had smashed into it breaking it to smithereens, I jumped from my seat, brushing the man aside, and ran out the door.
The woodie was not touched. Matter of fact it was just as I left it.
The man doing all the yelling was a skipper of a privately owned marlin boat and he just wanted to know who owned the wagon out front and who the person was that was responsible for maintaining the wood on it. Showing a huge sigh of relief that the car was not demolished beyond repair in some fashion I told him the person responsible for keeping the wood in such great shape was me. The skipper asked if I would be interested in doing, as he called it, the brightwork, on his boat --- meaning, basically, sand, scrape, and spar varnish all the natural-color wood on the boat over and over for the rest of my life. My answer was no, but it did lead me, out of curiosity, to go to where the boat was moored and look it over.
It just so happened the day I was there a young woman was walking along the dock with several small children in tow when one of them, a very little girl who I guess could not swim, missed her footing somehow and slipped off the edge of the dock into the water. For all practical purposes she was drowning. The mother started yelling like crazy and since I was probably the only person really within earshot close enough to respond, I leaped off the boat onto the dock and into the water. While still in the water I handed the little girl up to the skipper, who had been running all the way along the dock only a few steps behind me. In the process, due to all the commotion, a small crowd gathered.
Amongst the crowd was a woman that recognized me, a former Rose Marie Reid swim suit model that I knew as Sullivan, but since married to the son of a renowned ocean explorer.(see) They had a boat in the harbor and since we had not seen each other for ten years or so, after everybody was sure the girl was OK, she asked me to join her for drinks on her yacht, get into some dry clothes and get caught up. As I was leaving later in afternoon Sullivan asked if I would be willing to go to a party she was throwing in a couple of weeks. As I slowly strolled away down the dock I halfheartedly turned back and nodded in agreement that I would attend.
I duly showed up at the designated time and duly circulated and engaged in small talk. Unexpectedly, during the chit-chat sessions two things related to the L.A. UFO came up --- both from the same person, a diver by the name of "Jack" --- who would one day become a highly respected, albeit non-academically affiliated, marine archaeologist. At the point in time we are talking about here however, he was a low level player in the field working his way up the ladder and on his degree. Even so, he was still well known up and down the California coast for his diving expertise and underwater archaeology skills.
We got to talking and one thing led to the next, eventually the conversation turning to the L.A. object. He told me although he was too young to have participated in any original dive related to the object --- actually he had not even been born yet --- he had met a couple of old timers, hard hat guys, who had. They told him they participated in a retrieval effort of a highly secret nature off San Clemente Island a few months after the start of the war --- not between the coast and the island proper, but on the deep, open ocean side. They told Jack, to their knowledge nothing ever came of it and nothing of any size was found or located, although over the years they heard rumors to the contrary. For one thing, apparently whatever they were looking for sonar was not able to detect it. So too, they had been diving during the day which was fairly typical. However, the regular daytime teams were pulled out and sent back while a so-called specially trained night diving crew was brought in. What they found, if anything, was not known.
Secondly, Jack told me even though San Clemente Island was run and controlled by the Navy and off limits HE could, if I was so interested, get me on the island. Which needless to say, I took him up on. So, even though some may talk about San Clemente using my ideas, unlike most, I have actualy been there and looked the place over to see if any of it was remotely possible. To this day I cannot say for sure, only that I saw the object that night as a young boy, it was huge, as big as a Zeppelin, and that La Paz told my uncle it went down off the coast.
THE GALVESTON DAILY NEWS, FEB. 26, 1942
UFO OVER L.A., The Battle of Los Angeles
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