9. What were the foo fighters?
In November 1944 allied fighter pilots over Europe reported encountering strange lights in the skies. The lights sometimes followed their aircraft, sometimes flew alongside though seemingly at a distance, and darted about in a manner which prevented them from being followed. They were reported in different colors and one allied pilot described them as resembling Christmas tree lights. They could neither be outmaneuvered nor shot down and though they seemed to have flight characteristics which exceeded those of the Allied airplanes they did not attack in any manner. American pilots took to calling the lights “kraut fireballs”, usually with the common expletives of the military man of the time attached. Captured German airmen reported seeing the same phenomena, which seemed to rule them out as a new German weapon, and American airmen in the Pacific reported encountering the lights around the same time.
In December General Eisenhower noted the lights in a press release. The lights were described as “foo fighters”, one of the cleaner names appended to them by pilots (where there is foo there’s fire was a catchphrase popularized by a widely read comic strip). Study of the various reports from around the world led to several theories of what they actually were, which included disorientation on the part of the pilot, St. Elmo’s Fire, and ball lightning. Following the war it was suggested that the lights were in fact a Nazi developed weapon which was intended to shoot down enemy aircraft, which if it was failed spectacularly, and which also doesn’t explain their presence over the Pacific. Some have suggested that the lights were devices derived from another Nazi secret program, the UFO program, which was conducted by the German military and Nazi scientists throughout the war and hidden by the victorious governments of the Allies and the Soviet Union as the Cold War began.