Ongoing phenomenonFoo Fighters

Pilot reports of small luminous globes, typically orange or red, pacing or maneuvering near military aircraft. Documented across multiple theaters: Royal Air Force night fighters over the English Channel (1942 onward), U.S. Army Air Forces over Europe (1943–45), USAAF over the Pacific (Marianas campaign, 1944–45), and Luftwaffe pilots (designation “feuerball,” though the German reports may be partly retrospective). The 415th Night Fighter Squadron, flying P-61 Black Widows from Dijon-Longvic and Ochey, France, beginning November 1944, has the densest set of contemporaneous pilot debrief reports. The squadron’s intelligence officer Lt. Fred Ringwald and squadron commander Lt. Col. Oris Hill filed reports up to Twelfth Air Force. The phrase “foo fighter” came from squadron member Donald Meiers, a fan of the Smokey Stover comic strip whose firefighter character used the nonsense phrase “where there’s foo there’s fire.” Time magazine published an article using the term on 15 January 1945. The phenomenon then became a U.S. Eighth Air Force intelligence category. Project Sign, the first formal USAAF UFO investigation in 1947, retroactively classified the foo fighters as the earliest cases on its books. The 1949 Robertson Panel report cited them. The mainstream postwar explanation has been St. Elmo’s fire, ball lightning, or instrument-illusion; the residual problem is that pilots reported objects that took up apparent station-keeping positions relative to the aircraft for periods of minutes, which neither St. Elmo’s fire nor ball lightning does. The 415th NFS reports are in the NARA RG 18 files at College Park, Maryland.