The mysterious Foo Fighters
What were the mysterious fireballs that chased fighter planes in World War II?
Foo Fighters is the name of a famous American rock band, led by the former Nirvana singer Dave Grohl; it is also an aeronautical term that became famous in the 1940s but doesn't make much sense in English.
"Foo Fighters," but what does it mean?
Perhaps a corruption of the French "Fou," meaning mad? Maybe a derivation from "Fire," given that a humorous booklet in 1938 coined this neologism? Or does it derive from the nickname given by Americans to Japanese pilots during World War II? The Japanese were called Foo because that was how Kung-Fu (Koong-Foo) was spelled in English. So, the fighters that do kung-fu... Cute, if it weren't for the fact that Japanese pilots were indeed agile and fast in their maneuvers. Whatever the origin of the name, during World War II the term made quite a few aviators' hair stand on end, and more than sixty years later many believe that Foo Fighters were actually UFOs, spotted a few years earlier.
For the first time, it was realized that unknown flying objects were flying in Earth's airspace without any human population demonstrating the technology. Seven decades later, among the general public, there is still debate about the existence of these aircraft (or forms of energy, or who knows) that roam the skies of our planet.
Aliens, natural phenomena? We don't know, and beyond all the revelations, we can only affirm that yes, something exists, and yes, it perhaps shows intelligent behavior, but nothing concrete can be stated. We say that it is very probable and logical that these unidentified flying objects are extraterrestrial spacecraft or from other dimensions, as this explanation is essentially the only possible one.
However, in 1943, when luminous spheres began to be spotted in the war skies of Europe and the Pacific, they were thought to be secret weapons of the enemy. Today, many ufologists blindly associate that phenomenon with UFOs, yet in our view, there are substantial differences.
On Thursday, October 14, 1943, in the skies above Schweinfurt, Germany, crews of American Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses were heading into a slaughter. German fighters, Bf-109 and FW-190, were decimating bombers, while the American fighters approached their target, a ball bearing factory. By the end of the mission, as many as 77 B-17s were destroyed and over five hundred American airmen killed in combat, in what would be remembered as "Black Thursday"... Yet, the pilots who survived the bullets of the swastika-marked fighters witnessed an incredible event. Not far from the target, from above, a cluster of metallic spheres, disks varying in diameter from 3 to 7 cm, plunged into the formation of bombers. The cluster had dozens of spheres flying very tightly together…
The formation found the spheres so close that some pilots could not avoid impact. And here's the surprise: wings, noses, and tails showed no damage from the collision! Only a metallic noise followed, with no explosion... Perhaps the most unsettling thing was that along with the cluster of spheres, the pilots also saw flying debris, floating in the air at the same speed, seeming to follow the spheres... Upon return, the battle narrative was confused with that of this apparition. But in personal diaries, the memory of that sighting remained, as Martin Caidin tells us in his book "The Sky is Hell," published in 1969.
But the Schweinfurth sighting is as clear as it is disconcerting. It was a daytime case of Foo Fighters... Apparently spheres of light varying in diameter from a few centimeters to a meter, of changing color and visible, solitary or in clusters, mostly at night, but seen like at Schweinfurth during the day, in full sunlight: but in these cases, we saw that their consistency was that of opaque metallic spheres. They were spotted throughout the war, hence from 1939 to 1945, but the phenomenon intensified starting from 1944. Main witnesses of the sightings were pilots from all parties involved, both Allies and the Axis: everyone thought they were secret weapons of the counterpart, while after the war it was known that no force in the field possessed similar technologies and devices. The speed was variable, sometimes the same as the airplanes that followed or flanked them, other times superior. Often it matched the relatively low speed of the massive British and American bombing fleets; other times the Foo Fighter showed it could maintain speeds superior, identical to those of the fighter planes. A P-51 pilot claimed to have made a dive at 360 miles per hour and had a red sphere glued to his left wing throughout the descent... At the moment of pulling the plane out of the dive, the sphere separated and went its own way!
Another aspect is that Foo Fighters were indeed spotted by pilots in flight, but also by sailors and soldiers on the ground and at sea. On various occasions, they were seen following trucks and even tanks...
Scientific explanations were not long in coming and are interesting, as much as they did not clarify and do not clarify the mystery to this day.
If today, speaking of UFOs, the scholars who study the phenomenon are not even able to affirm with certainty the corporeality, the case of Foo Fighters is very different. Here we have dozens, hundreds, thousands of testimonies from experienced and trained people who have analyzed with considerable precision every aspect of these flying objects. The fear, often taken for granted, was that the Nazis or the Soviets or the British rather than the Japanese or the usual Yankees had developed technologically innovative weapons capable of disrupting the war. Indeed, the Second World War saw truly astonishing technological progress, entering the war in Poland in 1939 with biplanes and exiting in '45 with rocket planes, jet engines, ballistic missiles, and atomic bombs... Certainly, no one can forget that the first jet aircraft, the Heinkel He-178, flew for the first time in 1938. Or that the nuclear bomb was theorized by famous physicists like Fermi, Oppenheimer, Teller... Yet, the innovative weapons gradually put into service especially by the Germans shocked their enemies more than once.
An example is the Me-163 Komet rocket fighter, a "tailless" of very modern design powered by a highly unstable chemical propellant rocket, dangerous even for the pilots who flew it: well, the performances were fantastic, the Komet reached 1000 km/h and climbed to 10,000 meters in three minutes. Too bad it had only 10 minutes of autonomy and that once the propellant was finished, the plane had to glide like a glider towards the ground, where it would land on a skid (it did not even have landing gear!). When it made its operational debut in 1944, it was a shock for the American pilots and panic soon spread among the bombers. But once the photos were analyzed, once the pilots' testimonies were compared, it was known how to face it and just a few days after the debut the first Komet was shot down by the crossfire of three American fighters.
And here's the point: the Komet was definitely a pure science fiction project for the era that the engineers of Messerschmitt were able to deploy in a war theater. The Foo Fighters, however, remained an impenetrable mystery and this made the pilots shiver... Among the first pseudoscientific hypotheses about the Foo fighters was the theory of an American USAAF colonel, according to whom the mysterious lights were the exhausts of the Komets launched at night, which deceived the American aviators. But today it is perfectly known that the Me-163 was not at all a night fighter: it had no radar and the same instrumentation was sparse, let alone if a Luftwaffe pilot had been able to land in the middle of the night with a glider without landing gear from 10,000 meters high!
These considerations were not heeded during the war, and at least within the ranks of the Allies, any new German weapon, from the Me-262 jet fighters to the V-1 guided missiles and the V-2 ballistic missiles, was designated as a Foo Fighter, along with a myriad of innovative projects that entered service in limited quantities. Perhaps, the only possible credibility of this belief could be found in the matter of the Nazi flying discs, the Haunebu, which became famous on the internet thanks to a series of imaginative reconstructions. Essentially, according to those who believe in this theory, Hitler and his associates would have formed an alliance with Nordic-type aliens, blond and blue-eyed, in the name of a common Aryan origin. The fruit of this alliance was engines operating on "Vril energy" capable of powering disc-shaped aircraft. It's very interesting to read the pseudo-chronicles of Nazi UFOs, also because they are surrounded by many legends, some credible or at least possible (like the Nazi base in Antarctica) and others quite imaginative, though fascinating (like the journey of Nazi astronauts to Mars in search of desperate help in the last months of the war). Some of these rumors are said to have circulated already in the early months of 1945, perhaps born as a backdrop to the pessimistic talks of soldiers; however, the documentation on this is scanty and not wholly reliable, so we reserve the right to show our readers in the future what is true or plausible in all this. What is certain is that the Nazis did not win the war: they lost it, and badly, and if there was alien help, it was miserably insufficient! In reality, German aeronautical projects have elements of absolute genius that revolutionized aviation for decades, but as proof of refutation, they are the work of incredible Teutonic ingenuity… And it could only be so, since the Foo Fighters were also repeatedly spotted by the Germans themselves. In this regard, in 1944 the USAAF established a special commission of inquiry to dispel the many doubts about the phenomenon. The Robertson Commission investigated hundreds of sighting cases, analyzed them in detail, and reached a startling conclusion, namely that the fireballs were not dangerous, did not constitute a threat to aircraft, and their presence was comparable to that of a natural event. All this was scientifically and officially proven and archived in 1949.
So, what were they? At first glance, one might think of ball lightning or plasma spheres known as "St. Elmo's fire." The former is a natural phenomenon, the "obese form" of a regular lightning bolt. They are very rare, very hot, very elusive and although they have been seen near airplanes (in the 1950s, a ball of lightning passed completely through an American flying tanker without exploding the fuel inside), they rarely reach considerable speeds. The Foo Fighters, on the other hand, flew at 500 km/h with ease… It is clear that the possibility that they are electromagnetic discharges, the so-called St. Elmo's fire that appeared on the masts of galleons, is much more tangible. The problem is that these spheres flew among bomber formations as if they were hopping; they followed, darted, spun… Not exactly what a "normal" electromagnetic discharge does. And here come the famous Earth Lights, spheres of light first seen and studied in Hessdalen, Norway, and later sighted and analyzed in other places around the world, including Sassalbo in Italy. These lights are in our opinion quite similar both to the lights that are said to create microwave crop circles, the circles in the grain, as well as the UFOs that are periodically spotted in many magical places.
Earth Lights associated by some with Orbs, which however are invisible to the naked eye and can only be documented through the camera; Earth Lights, on the other hand, are perfectly visible to anyone. In Sassalbo, in the province of Massa-Carrara, in 2001, a cylindrical flying object appeared on the gravel of the local river. The sighting attracted dozens of people who saw this object with their own eyes for many minutes before it suddenly disappeared. Since then, thousands of large or small lights have emerged from the slopes of Monte Alto that towers over the town. Lights colored like those of the Foo Fighters… From here our hypothesis: that they are natural objects, perhaps even existing in other dimensions, that perform a visible activity in the Earth's atmosphere. And who knows if the Foo Fighters did not disappear after the end of World War II but constitute the true form and essence of the "infamous" flying discs...
