The term foo fighter was used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific Theater of Operations.
Though "foo fighter" initially described a type of UFO reported and named by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron, the term was also commonly used to mean any UFO sighting from that period.[1]
Formally reported from November 1944 onwards, witnesses often assumed that the foo fighters were secret weapons employed by the enemy, but they remained unidentified post-war and were reported by both Allied and Axis forces. Michael D. Swords[2] writes,
During WWII, the foo fighter experiences of [Allied] pilots were taken very seriously. Accounts of these cases were presented to heavyweight scientists, such as David Griggs, Luis Alvarez and H.P. Robertson. The phenomenon was never explained. Most of the information about the issue has never been released by military intelligence.
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Etymology
The nonsense word "foo" emerged in popular culture during the early 1930s, it was first used by cartoonist Bill Holman who peppered his Smokey Stover[3] fireman cartoon strips with "foo" signs and puns.[4][5] Holman claimed to have found the word on the bottom of a Chinese figurine.[6] It was part of service culture by World War II and is thought to have led to the backronym FUBAR.[6] By 1944, the term "foo fighter" was used by radar operators to describe a spurious or dubious trace.[6]
The term foo was borrowed from Bill Holman's Smokey Stover by a radar operator in the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Donald J. Meiers, who it is agreed by most 415th members gave the Foo Fighters their name. Don was from Chicago and was an avid reader of Bill Holman's strip which was run daily in the Chicago Tribune. In a mission debriefing on the evening November 27, 1944, Fritz Ringwald, the unit's S-2 Intelligence Officer, stated that Don Meiers and Ed Schleuter had sighted a red ball of fire that appeared to chase them through a variety of high-speed maneuvers. Fritz said that Don was extremely agitated and had a copy of the comic strip tucked in his back pocket. He pulled it out and slammed it down on Fritz's desk and said, "... it was another one of those fuckin' foo fighters!" and stormed out of the debriefing room.[7]
According to Fritz Ringwald, because of the lack of a better name, it stuck. And this was originally what the men of the 415th started calling these incidents: "Fuckin' Foo Fighters." In December 1944, a press correspondent from the Associated Press Corps in Paris, Bob Wilson, was sent to the 415th at their base outside of Dijon France to investigate this story.[8] It was at this time that the term was cleaned up to just Foo Fighters. The unit commander, Capt. Harold Augsperger, also decided to shorten the term to Foo Fighters in the unit's Historical Data. [7]
History
The first sightings occurred in November 1944, when pilots flying over Germany by night reported seeing fast-moving round glowing objects following their aircraft. The objects were variously described as fiery, and glowing red, white, or orange. Some pilots described them as resembling Christmas tree lights and reported that they seemed to toy with the aircraft, making wild turns before simply vanishing. Pilots and aircrew reported that the objects flew formation with their aircraft and behaved as if under intelligent control, but never displayed hostile behavior. However, they could not be outmaneuvered or shot down. The phenomenon was so widespread that the lights earned a name - in the European Theater of Operations they were often called "kraut fireballs" but for the most part called "foo-fighters". The military took the sightings seriously, suspecting that the mysterious sightings might be secret German weapons, but further investigation revealed that German and Japanese pilots had reported similar sightings.[9]
In its 15 January 1945 edition Time magazine carried a story entitled "Foo-Fighter", in which it reported that the "balls of fire" had been following USAAF night fighters for over a month, and that the pilots had named it the "foo-fighter". According to Time, descriptions of the phenomena varied, but the pilots agreed that the mysterious lights followed their aircraft closely at high speed. Some scientists at the time rationalized the sightings as an illusion probably caused by afterimages of dazzle caused by flak bursts, while others suggested St. Elmo's Fire as an explanation.[10]
The "balls of fire" phenomenon reported from the Pacific Theater of Operations differed somewhat from the foo fighters reported from Europe; the "ball of fire" resembled a large burning sphere which "just hung in the sky", though it was reported to sometimes follow aircraft. On one occasion, the gunner of a B-29 aircraft managed to hit one with gunfire, causing it to break up into several large pieces which fell on buildings below and set them on fire. As with the European foo fighters, no aircraft was reported as having been attacked by a "ball of fire"[11]
The postwar Robertson Panel cited foo fighter reports, noting that their behavior did not appear to be threatening, and mentioned possible explanations, for instance that they were electrostatic phenomena similar to St. Elmo's fire, electromagnetic phenomena, or simply reflections of light from ice crystals. The Panel's report suggested that "If the term "flying saucers" had been popular in 1943-1945, these objects would have been so labeled."[12]
Sightings
Foo fighters were reported on many occasions from around the world; a few examples are noted below.
- Sighting from September 1941 in the Indian Ocean was similar to some later Foo Fighter reports. From the deck of the S.S. Pułaski (a Polish merchant vessel transporting British troops), two sailors reported a "strange globe glowing with greenish light, about half the size of the full moon as it appears to us." [13] They alerted a British officer, who watched the object's movements with them for over an hour.
- In mid-1942, a Royal Australian Air Force plane patrolling off the Tasman Peninsula was approached by "a singular airfoil of glistening bronze color", about 150 feet in length and 50 feet in diameter, with what seemed like a dome on top. It paced the plane for a few minutes, then turned away "at a hell of a pace", turned again and dived into the ocean.[14]
- Several UK Ministry of Defence documents, declassified in the 1990s, relate sightings of unusual aircraft by RAF crews in 1942. One, dated December 3, 1942, related that the crew refused to be shaken in their story despite ridicule. During a raid on Turin the night of November 28/29, they twice spotted an object an estimated 200–300 feet in length, 1/5 to 1/6 that in diameter, and traveling at an estimated 500 miles an hour. It had four equally spaced red lights along its length. The pilot, Captain Lever, said he saw a similar object about three months before north of Amsterdam.[15]
- On the night of 26/27 May 1943, during a raid on Essen, Germany, the crew of an RAF bomber reported a large cylindrical object similar to the one reported earlier near Turin. There were a number of "portholes" evenly spaced along its length. It was much larger than their aircraft with an "incredible" speed estimated to be in "thousands of mph".[16]
- Charles R. Bastien of the Eighth Air Force reported one of the first encounters with foo fighters over the Belgium/Holland area; he described them as "two fog lights flying at high rates of speed that could change direction rapidly". During debriefing, his intelligence officer told him that two RAF night fighters had reported the same thing, and it was later reported in British newspapers.[17]
- Ufologist Leonard H. Stringfield related a near-fatal encounter he had at the end of the war when he was a USAF intelligence officer. On August 28, 1945, as they approached Iwo Jima in a Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando, they encountered three teardrop-shaped objects, brilliantly white, closing and on a parallel course. Their magnetic navigation-instrument needles went wild and their left engine suddenly failed. Losing altitude, crew and passengers were told to prepare for a ditch. Then the objects departed and the engine restarted.[18]
- Career U.S. Air Force pilot Duane Adams often related that he had witnessed two occurrences of a bright light which paced his aircraft for about half an hour and then rapidly ascended into the sky. Both incidents occurred at night, both over the South Pacific, and both were witnessed by the entire aircraft crew. The first sighting occurred shortly after the end of World War II while Adams piloted a B-25 bomber. The second sighting occurred in the early 1960s when Adams was piloting a KC-135 tanker.
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Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:45:40 GMT+00:00
and The Beatles NME.com Song by The Clash, Foo Fighters and The Beatles are among the list of 40, which the space agency have selected from a batch of previously used tracks. ... Metallica, U2 May Take The Stage In Space RTT News
