The Foo Fighters of World War II

December 22, 1944: The pilot of the Allied plane was nervous. He was at 10,000 feet, over enemy territory. Somewhere hidden in the black sky there was sure to be German fighter aircraft. He scanned the darkness looking for trouble. Suddenly he saw two large, orange glowing balls approaching him. His radio operator saw them too. They didn't look like enemy fighters, but neither did they look like anything he'd ever seen.

The balls suddenly leveled off and started following the plane. The pilot decided to try and lose them with evasive maneuvers. He put his plane into a steep dive. The objects immediately followed. Next he tried a sharply banked turn. The objects stayed with him. For several more minutes the pilot used his best tricks to lose his pursuers and failed. When he was about to give up suddenly the objects were gone, disappearing suddenly into the night. During he whole incident not a shot was fired.

The above is a typical example of an encounter with a "foo fighter." Toward the end of World War II pilots began reporting seeing strange glowing balls flying around their aircraft at night. The objects seemed to maneuver with great speed and the Allies began to worry that the German's had developed a new weapon with startling capabilities.

The objects were dubbed "foo fighters." because of a popular comic strip at the time, Smoky Stover. Smoky was fond of saying "Where there's foo there's fire" and the objects seem to be fiery, rounded shapes.

Another encounter was described by Major William D. Leet:

"My B-17 crew and I were kept company by a 'foo-fighter,' a small disc, all the way from Klagenfurt Austria, to the Adriatic Sea. This occurred on a 'lone wolf' mission at night, as I recall, in December 1944..." Major Leet goes on to note that the intelligence officer that debriefed him and his crew "stated that it was a new German fighter, but could not explain why it did not fire at us, or if it was reporting our heading, altitude and airspeed, why we did not receive anti-aircraft fire."

More encounters with the foo fighters were reported, but none of the objects ever seemed to take any aggressive action, so the idea that they were an advanced enemy weapon was dropped. After the war was over it was learned that German pilots had been seeing the same things and German military authorities had feared an Allied secret weapon.

So what were the foo fighters? The military decided they might be an unusual electrical or optical effect (maybe related to ball lightning). They also considered the possibility that the whole thing was in the imaginations of the plane crews who were justifiably nervous under the pressure of flying dangerous war time missions. No conclusive explanation has ever been found.

Copyright Lee Krystek 1996. All Rights Reserved.