What happened
In the last winter of the Second World War, American night-fighter crews flying over the Rhine began reporting glowing balls of light that joined them in the dark. On 27 November 1944, pilot Ed Schlueter and radar operator Donald Meiers of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron said a red ball of fire had chased them through a series of high-speed manoeuvres. Meiers, a fan of the Smokey Stover comic strip, called it a 'foo fighter', and the name stuck. Crews described red, orange or white lights, singly or in groups, that paced their aircraft, turned when they turned, matched their speed and then shot away or blinked out. They never attacked, could not be shaken off and never registered as hits. Similar lights had been reported by RAF bomber crews since 1942 and appeared over the Pacific too. SHAEF told the press in December 1944 they might be a new German weapon, and Time ran a story in January 1945. Postwar searches of German facilities found nothing that matched.
The official explanation
Allied intelligence first suspected German secret weapons such as jet or rocket interceptors, but the Germans did not fly those types at night where foo fighters were seen, and postwar interviews with German scientists and Luftwaffe officers turned up no such programme. Proposed natural explanations include St. Elmo's fire, ball lightning, reflections from ice crystals, and the visual illusions and vertigo that the US Navy began studying in night aviators in 1945. The 1953 Robertson Panel suggested electrostatic or electromagnetic effects, and noted that had 'flying saucers' been a popular term in 1943-45 these objects would have been so labelled.
The anomalous case
Foo fighters were reported by trained military aircrews, repeatedly, in official debriefings, across three theatres of war and by both sides; German and Japanese pilots reported similar lights. The 415th's intelligence officer, Captain Fritz Ringwald, forwarded a list of fourteen separate incidents in December 1944 and early January 1945 up the chain to SHAEF. The objects showed apparently controlled behaviour, holding formation with aircraft, matching evasive manoeuvres and outpacing P-61 night fighters, which electrostatic glow and ball lightning do not do. The British Air Ministry admitted in March 1945 that no satisfactory explanation could yet be given. Historian Graeme Rendall, author of a study of European foo fighters, has compared these encounters with the US Navy UAP reports of 2004 and 2015 and argues the phenomenon was never explained, only filed away.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Foo fighter Wikipedia
- The Foo Fighters: Today's Pilot Encounters With UAP Are Nothing New (Graeme Rendall) The Debrief
Witness reports elsewhere
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