FOO FIGHTERS

Opening

From the early years of the Second World War, and above all in the last winter of the European war, Allied aircrews reported lights that paced their aircraft. Balls of fire, white or orange or red, sometimes in pairs, sometimes seeming to sit on a wingtip and then peel off. The American night fighter crews who reported them most often called them foo fighters, a nonsense name that stuck because no official category fitted.

Intelligence sections collected the reports and looked for a German device. They never found one they could show the squadrons, and after the war the Germans' own scientists said they had never built one. Pacific crews filed similar lights. The phenomenon is a wartime record, not a 1947 invention: pilots who already knew flak and night fighters still asked what was flying formation with them.

Timeline

September 1941In the Indian Ocean, two sailors aboard the Polish merchant ship Pułaski report a glowing globe. A British officer aboard watches it for more than an hour.

1942RAF crews begin reporting lights following their aircraft. In December, Pilot Officer Bryan Lumsden, a New Zealander, sees two lights over northern France, a story later published in a New Zealand newspaper.

April 1944RAF bomber crews over the Balkans file similar reports. On 13 October a No. 178 Squadron Liberator crew reports lights over Hungary.

Early October 1944The first American reports come from the 422nd Night Fighter Squadron in Belgium.

27 November 1944Lieutenant Ed Schleuter and his radar operator, Donald Meiers, of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, report a red ball of fire that chased their aircraft through high-speed manoeuvres. Reports thicken across the squadron and its neighbours. Lights appear off the nose or the wing, match the aircraft's speed and never make an attack run. Ground control does not claim them as friendly.

December 1944Associated Press correspondent Bob Wilson is sent to the 415th, at its base near Dijon, and the story reaches the world. On 13 December, Supreme Headquarters in Paris issues a press release calling the lights a new German weapon.

December 1944 to early January 1945The 415th's intelligence officer, Frederic "Fritz" Ringwald, compiles a report of fourteen incidents and sends it to XII Tactical Air Command. Intelligence sends out questionnaires. The theories on the table are St Elmo's fire, flak bursts, a German secret weapon and fatigue.

15 January 1945Time magazine runs a story headed "Foo-Fighter."

13 March 1945The British Air Ministry replies to Supreme Headquarters. It suggests that some sightings were Me 262 jets or flak rockets, but it offers no explanation for the rest.

April 1945The US Navy begins a study of the visual illusions night aviators suffer. Its report, by the psychologist Edgar Vinacke, follows in May 1946.

Spring 1945The Reich collapses, and no device matching the reports is captured.

Autumn 1945US air intelligence in Europe interviews thirteen German scientists, engineers and former Luftwaffe officers. None knows of any German programme that could explain the sightings.

After the surrendersPacific theatre reports, thinner but describing the same lights keeping station, go into the archives with the European ones. They wait for the 1947 saucer wave to give them a new name they did not need.

Key figures

The night-fighter and bomber crews made the reports. They already knew enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft fire, which is what makes their accounts worth weighing. Ed Schleuter and Donald Meiers made the first named report in the 415th.

Fritz Ringwald, the 415th's intelligence officer, turned the crews' stories into a formal report. Squadron intelligence officers wrote the questionnaires that treated the lights as a possible weapon. Allied technical air intelligence searched for a German device and did not find one.

Bob Wilson of the Associated Press made the foo fighters' name public.

German crews, in later and thinly sourced accounts, sometimes described similar lights. That supports the reports but is not a captured document.

Physical and documentary trail

The trail is real and contemporary. It includes squadron reports of lights pacing Allied aircraft at night, Ringwald's fourteen-incident summary, intelligence questionnaires treating the lights as a possible enemy device, the Supreme Headquarters press release, the Air Ministry's reply, the Navy's visual-illusion study, and the post-war interviews with German scientists. There are also parallel reports from the Pacific and from British crews in other theatres, some from years before the name existed.

What is missing is anything that shows what the lights were. There is no gun-camera still that identifies them. There is no wreckage. There is no Peenemünde document that names them as a weapon, and the Germans who would have known said there was none.

If the term "flying saucers" had been popular in 1943–1945, these objects would have been so labeled.

Things you might not know

• The name came from a comic strip. Radar operator Donald Meiers took "foo" from Smokey Stover, whose fireman hero said "where there's foo, there's fire". He read it daily in the Chicago Tribune.
• The first named report was a red ball of fire. On 27 November 1944, Meiers and his pilot, Lieutenant Ed Schleuter, said a red ball chased them through high-speed manoeuvres.
• The original name was ruder. The crews' informal term was cleaned up to "foo fighters" when an Associated Press reporter visited the squadron in December 1944.
• The Allies announced a German weapon. On 13 December 1944, Supreme Headquarters issued a press release calling the lights a new German weapon, and the New York Times ran it the next day.
• In Europe they were "Kraut fireballs". In the Pacific, crews described a burning sphere that "just hung in the sky". Some of the Pacific fireballs may have been Japan's balloon bombs, launched toward America in their thousands.
• The enemy saw them too. German and Japanese pilots reported similar lights following their aircraft.
• A senator saw one. Ted Stevens, later a long-serving senator for Alaska, described a wartime encounter from his time as a pilot.

Competing explanations

An unknown device, German or otherwise. This is what intelligence feared. It has many crews behind it, and no device, and the German scientists questioned after the war knew of none.

St Elmo's fire, ball lightning, flak, reflections or fatigue. These explain many single sightings, and the Navy took the illusions of night flying seriously enough to study them. They struggle with lights that kept formation with an aircraft and then peeled away.

Misidentified aircraft and rockets. The Air Ministry's view for some cases: Me 262 jets and flak rockets were new, fast and unfamiliar in 1944 and 1945. It does not cover the sightings from before those weapons existed.

A secret German weapon lost in the collapse. Possible, but the end of the war produced no such device on any bench.

Later life of the case

After 1947 the foo fighters were read back into history as the first UFOs. The CIA's Robertson Panel cited them in 1953 as lights that had worried the military, had never been explained, and had done no harm. The name itself took on a life of its own: Dave Grohl borrowed it for his band in the 1990s. For the Scandinavian wave that came just after the war, see the ghost rockets.

Finding

Allied crews over Europe, and especially American night fighter crews in 1944 and 1945, reported lights that kept formation with their aircraft and would not answer as friend or flak. These were crews who knew night fighters and anti-aircraft fire, and they could not identify what they saw. The military looked hard for a German weapon and found that none existed. Some sightings were surely jets, rockets, reflections and tired eyes, but no single explanation covers them all.

What still will not resolve: a gun-camera frame that shows what the lights were, or a document from either side that accounts for them.