It’s the middle of the night and you’re
a pilot flying over Germany during World War
II, when suddenly in front of you are what
appear to be great, big fireballs.
One pilot described them as will-o-the-wisps
while other pilots said they were almost alien-looking.
Anyone who saw them said the same thing though,
that it was extremely hard to get away from
them.
They didn’t attack, just followed and darted
around.
One American pilot said, “I thought it was
some new form of jet propulsion plane after
us.
But we were very close to them and none of
us saw any structure on the fireballs.”
Rumors abounded - did the Germans have a secret
weapon, or were they aliens?
What was going on in the skies and what were
the pilots seeing?
If you check out the top secret messages sent
to and from the Allied Expeditionary Forces
in France that are now available to the public,
there is a lot of talk of strange goings-on
in the skies.
On the 9th of January 1945 a message came
through saying that strange objects were following
American planes.
“Was this a new Japanese aircraft?” the
Allies wondered.
That same year, Time Magazine came out with
an article that questioned what the strange
objects in the sky were that sometimes appeared
like balls of fire.
The British press asked, what were these “foo
fighters” the “yanks” were talking about,
with the word “foo” being British slang
meaning a kind of nonsense word.
Because that’s what the lights seemed to
be, a kind of nonsense that didn’t behave
like anything else on Earth, but they also
struck fear into the hearts of pilots.
More reports from pilots came in about the
mysterious objects that strangely never attacked.
Charles R. Bastien, pilot of the Eighth Air
Force, said that he saw Foo Fighters over
Belgium and the Netherlands.
He described them as, “Two fog lights flying
at high rates of speed that could change direction
rapidly.”
He probably thought he’d lost his mind,
and was likely relieved to be told that two
British RAF pilots had seen the same thing
around the same time.
Sightings also occurred over the South Pacific,
and the pilots knew they weren’t crazy because
the the Foo Fighters were seen by other crew
on board.
Time Magazine further reported that scientists
were sceptical about this being anything extraordinary.
What the pilots were seeing were optical illusions,
they said.
After all, no technology existed which could
control something so ethereal or that looked
like flying fire moving so easily through
the air at such great velocity.
And if the enemy had something up their sleeve,
why did these things never attack?
Were the Foo Fighters technology developed
by the enemy to give pilots a fright?
Or was this not human technology at all?
There were rumors that it may have been possible
for the Axis powers to create some kind of
electrical storm that could disorient pilots
and even interfere with radar, but there’s
no evidence such a weapon ever existed.
Most scientists said that what was most likely
being witnessed was something akin to St.
Elmo's Fire, which is a natural weather phenomenon,
a kind of natural airborne electrical discharge,
and this could certainly appear in the sky
looking bright and luminous.
St. Elmo's Fire is not at all uncommon and
for years sailors in storms described seeing
similar balls of light.
That may fit with the lights pilots saw, but
how does that explain how these balls of fire
managed to follow the planes?
Newsweek described another encounter a U.S.
pilot had with a Foo Fighter in 1945.
“He was braced to meet Nazi planes or anti-aircraft.
Suddenly an eerie light split the darkness
around his plane.
Looking up from his instrument panel, the
horrified lieutenant saw two red balls of
fire cruising alongside his wingtips.”
It wasn’t always the same, though.
In another classified document, it’s written
that a British pilot while flying from England
over to Germany shouted through his intercom,
“They're firing rocket projectiles at us.”
He said they looked like comets, and then
just disappeared.
Other messages also tell us about how these
lights moved at high speed, followed planes,
and were causing pilots to become very concerned.
They were convinced that despite what they
were being told, this was something more than
just a weather phenomenon.
A 1945 edition of Stars and Stripes magazine
pointed out that many of these men seeing
Foo Fighters were veterans, and this kind
of thing had never happened before.
The story goes on to state that the pilots
were growing angry that scientists and top
brass were insisting that they were only seeing
things or that it was just the weather.
Another pilot wrote, “We turned, we rolled,
we dived, we climbed, but the red ball stayed
with us.”
To him, and others, this was not so easily
explained away as a weather effect.
In another top secret document from the time,
Group Captain E.D.M.
Hopkins wrote, “The whole affair is still
something of a mystery and the evidence is
very sketchy and varied so that no definite
and satisfactory explanation can yet be given.”
So, what was really going on?
Many have said that the pilots were not hallucinating,
that it had to be more than some kind of battle
fatigue that made the pilots see things.
There were just too many reports and the pilots
interviewed were veterans who were in good
shape mentally.
It was also said that the Foo Fighters could
not be a creation of the enemy, otherwise
some damage would have been caused and some
evidence of a German or Japanese plan would
have been uncovered in the last seventy years.
The St. Elmo’s Fire theory remained the
best one, but that still left many questions
such as how they were capable of such extreme
maneuverability.
Everyone was stumped.
In the 1950s the CIA was particularly interested
in this mystery.
A special inquiry called the Robertson Panel
that included some of the US’s top scientists
was tasked with looking into the possibility
of UFOs in general, as well as the Foo Fighters
pilots had reported encountering.
The British at the time were also looking
into the same phenomena and both countries
agreed that there were concerns about the
possibility of enemies creating amazing super
weapons, but in the end they also concluded
that those Foo Fighters were not UFOs, or
super weapons, but simply St. Elmo’s Fire.
Other theories have been floated as well,
such as that the pilots were experiencing
autokinesis, an effect which occurs if you
look at something long enough that it appears
to move.
Another possible explanation is that the pilots,
while well trained and experiences, were more
stressed than they realized, and all around
them were bright lights, flak, lights on the
ground, explosions, and this combined with
the psychological pressure made them believe
that a bright light looked like it was moving
around.
It wasn’t an explanation pilots would have
liked to have heard, because that theory meant
they were suffering from temporary psychosis,
but given the stress of the job it might explain
why so many men saw things in the sky.
There is also the possibility of the Foo Fighters
being the notorious German V-2 rocket, which
emitted a glow and a tail of fire as it flew
through the sky.
But one military expert wrote in a book that
the V-2 just didn’t have the kind of maneuverability
described by pilots.
Another theory that has been thrown out is
that the Germans had a ‘wonder weapon’
that fired electrostatic discharges, but there’s
been no proof that any weapon existed like
that at the time, and in fact there’s no
evidence that one exists even today.
So with that, we’re going to call the Foo
Fighters a still unsolved mystery.
Can you solve this mystery?
What do you think the Foo Fighters were?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video
Wartime Paranormal Sightings that Shocked
Soldiers.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.
