Foo Fighters

"Foo fighters" was the name Allied aircrews gave to unidentified glowing objects, balls of light, and fiery shapes reported flying alongside their aircraft in the later years of World War II, chiefly over the European theater from late 1944. The reports predate the flying saucer era, involve trained military observers on combat missions, and were never explained.

Night fighter crews of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, flying over the Rhine Valley, logged repeated encounters beginning in November 1944: red, orange, or white lights, singly or in groups, that appeared off their wings, paced them through maneuvers, and departed at speed. Crews reported the objects never showed on radar in most cases and never attacked. Similar reports came from the Pacific theater. The name came from a nonsense catchphrase in the Smokey Stover comic strip ("where there's foo, there's fire").

Combat aircrew across multiple squadrons and services. The reports rose to command attention, were covered by the wartime press (Time and the wire services ran stories in January 1945), and were later reviewed in postwar intelligence surveys.

Aircrew testimony and mission logs. No gun camera imagery of substance survived, and radar corroboration was inconsistent, a fact central to later analysis.

Allied intelligence suspected German secret weapons; postwar investigation found no German program matching the reports, and German and Japanese crews, it emerged, had reported the same phenomena and suspected Allied devices. The 1953 CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel touched on foo fighters, with scientists suggesting electrostatic or electromagnetic phenomena, or reflections, without settling it.

Proposed explanations include St. Elmo's fire, ball lightning (itself poorly understood), optical effects of exhaust and canopy reflections, and combat fatigue. Skeptics note that lights that pace aircraft without radar returns behave like optical and electrical phenomena, not machines. Proponents answer that experienced night-combat crews distinguished reflections from objects, and that the phenomenon's symmetry (both sides saw them, neither owned them) removes the secret-weapon explanation while leaving the reports intact. Foo fighters remain the standard argument that the phenomenon, whatever it is, predates 1947.