What the Pilots Reported
From late November 1944, crews of the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron, flying Beaufighters and Black Widows over the Rhine valley, began reporting glowing balls of light, red, orange, or white, that appeared off their wingtips at night, paced them for minutes at a time, and then vanished. The lights did not fire, did not show on radar, and could not be shaken off with evasive maneuvers.
Similar reports came from bomber crews over Germany, from the Pacific theater, and from German and Japanese pilots who assumed the lights were Allied secret weapons. A December 1944 Associated Press dispatch put the phenomenon in American newspapers, and the name stuck.
Where the Name Came From
A 415th radar operator, Donald Meiers, is credited with the name, borrowed from the Smokey Stover comic strip, whose fireman hero declared "where there's foo, there's fire." "Foo" was nonsense slang; "foo fighter" was what you called a light that dogfought you without being an aircraft. The band Foo Fighters took the name from the phenomenon in 1994.
The Explanations
Intelligence officers considered German secret weapons first, and none was ever found; postwar interrogations showed the Germans had been equally puzzled. The scientific candidates are St. Elmo's fire, the electrical corona that forms on aircraft in charged air; ball lightning, still poorly understood; reflections of ground fires or searchlights on canopies; and the exhaustion and night-vision effects of long combat missions.
The CIA-convened Robertson Panel discussed foo fighters in 1953 as an example of a wartime phenomenon that had never been resolved, and the term migrated into the postwar UFO vocabulary as a prehistory of the flying saucer.
Why They Matter to UFO History
Foo fighters are the clearest case of trained observers, in numbers, reporting unidentified aerial lights before the idea of a flying saucer existed to shape the description. That is why both sides of the modern debate claim them: as evidence that something genuinely anomalous has been in the sky for a long time, or as evidence that stressed observers under unusual conditions have always seen lights they could not explain.
Frequently asked questions
What were foo fighters?
Unidentified balls of light that Allied and Axis aircrews reported following their aircraft, mostly at night over Europe and the Pacific, from late 1944 to the end of the war. They never attacked and never appeared on radar.
Where did the name "foo fighter" come from?
From the Smokey Stover comic strip's catchphrase "where there's foo, there's fire," applied by a radar operator of the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron in 1944. The band took its name from the phenomenon fifty years later.
Were foo fighters ever explained?
Not definitively. The leading candidates are St. Elmo's fire and ball lightning, with reflections and fatigue explaining some reports. German secret weapons were ruled out after the war.