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.