Since the beginning of time, man has been obsessed with solving the mysteries of the universe. Hundreds of sightings and reports of personal abductions by little green men in saucer-shaped flying craft are collected each year by various private and governmental agencies. Cults are known to worship the existence of alien beings. Top secret military programs like Area 51, Project Blue, and Roswell, New Mexico, have become household words.
And then, there's the following incident, one that played out during the morning watch in the early 1970s over the sunny skies of West Los Angeles.
To set the scene, imagine a front-page photo on the Los Angeles Times of two LAPD officers. One officer had taken a picture of his partner pointing into the western sky toward Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. These were accident investigation (AI) officers; a camera was part of the standard investigation equipment stored in the trunk of their vehicle.
Looking closely at the photo, you could see the object of the officer's attention: a fuzzy white, cigar-shaped image. The headlines screamed that these officers were witnesses to a UFO. Of course, police officers are generally considered trained, professional observers, right? So there'd be no better source to validate this unexplained sighting.
This was not some isolated stretch of a lonely road in Kansas, or the desolate, icy expanses of Siberia. This was Los Angeles, and after reading this top news story, the citizens of the City of Angels would spend the next several weeks gazing at the stars…and not just the Hollywood celebrity types either. But the UFO sighting of this night would never be repeated. Why? Because it was all a hoax, one that was inadvertently created by a police helicopter from LAPD's Air Support Division.
Cops are notorious practical jokers, usually playing their ludicrous or grotesque gags on their fellow officers rather than the general public. But on this night, what started out as an experiment, an exercise in curiosity, backfired wildly and turned into a citywide prank.
So, I have to tell you that the names of the two air crewmembers–who both have long since retired–will remain forever a secret, just in case the statute of limitations for practical jokes is still in effect.
Before getting into how all this took place, I would like to quote Dragnet's Jack Webb. "Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent." (Or in this case, the guilty. Any resemblance is unintentional and purely coincidental.)
Police pilot Rob Cochran that day was flying a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter with Observer Lance Clarion. Assigned to "Air-80," their primary area of patrol took them from downtown LA to Harbor Division, and from the eastern boundary of Watts to Venice Division and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Since the city was basically asleep and all the bars had closed at 2:00 a.m., the police radio was quiet and void of major calls for police service.
It was about 3:00 a.m., and in an effort to keep their minds occupied, Air-80 was slowly "boring holes in the sky" over Wilshire Division. One of seventeen patrol divisions for LAPD, this area was geographically situated north of the I-10 Freeway and west of downtown.
During this quiet time, a discussion arose between Cochran and Clarion as to the limits of the Nightsun. This is the powerful, 30 million candlepower searchlight used on the helicopter for lighting up the ground. Along with the whop-whop noise of the rotor blades, it's the annoying device that flashes through your bedroom window at night while you're sleeping. Both officers wanted to satisfy their curiosity as to the range of rotation that the Nightsun would travel on its mounting brackets.
To answer this burning question, Cochran, for some unknown reason, turned off the navigation lights (the red and green lights) and strobe beacon. Clarion then turned on the Nightsun light and rotated it forward and upward. The beam of light just barely hit the tip of the rotor blades as they traveled around the path in front of the helicopter. This provided an oval-shaped projection of silvery-colored light, intensely bright, and one that flickered as each blade passed through the beam.
Are you starting to solve the cause of the UFO sighting yet?
These few seconds of a flickering, oval beam of bright light, seemingly just hovering or moving very slowly across the black sky, triggered many, many calls to the police communications center as well as to the FAA at Los Angeles International Airport. The police radio crackled alive when the LAPD communication's dispatcher contacted Cochran and reported the citizen calls of a UFO sighting.
Cochran immediately turned all the aircraft lights back on and Claron switched off the Nightsun so they could scan the skies for other traffic flying in their area. Of course, they didn't see anything else.
They didn't realize that they were the cause of the citizens' reports on the ground.
After searching for a few minutes, Cochran even contacted LAX Control (air traffic radar) and inquired if they had anyone else on the scope in the vicinity of the reports. LAX replied with a negative; Air-80 was the only aircraft up in that region at that time of the night. Of course, this made Cochran and Clarion even more concerned: Maybe they weren't flying alone in the "friendly skies."
About a half hour of searching for the reported UFO and seeing nothing, Cochran and Clarion decided to continue their discussion on the Nightsun. By this time, they had traveled several miles over the city to another general location. After again switching lights on and off, they were immediately contacted by the two AI officers mentioned before. These officers stated that they had just taken a picture of the UFO, and asked if Air-80 could see it.
It was about this moment that Cochran and Clarion put two and two together and realized that they were the UFO. Knowing that citizens had made numerous inquiries, even reporting the incident to radio and TV stations, both crew members of Air-80 decided now was the time to disappear. So all the helicopter's identifying lights were turned off and they rapidly flew away from the scene. At the same time they were making their hasty and covert retreat they radioed back to the AI officers saying that they didn't see anything.
By this time, Air-80 was scheduled to return to the heliport in Glendale for refueling. On the flight back, a to-our-deaths pact of secrecy was made between Cochran and Clarion. But sometimes even cops can't keep secrets. There was a lot of "hanger talk," and soon the cat was out of the bag–to other pilots and observers in the unit, not supervisory personnel, of course.
This story was passed along for many years after as new pilots came aboard. Each time it was told, it became like the fisherman's tale of the "one that got away." As far as I know, the truth was never known beyond a few insiders. And now I'll swear that it is just one of those myths and urban legends.
But I wonder: Could a crop circle be made by a police helicopter?