"In this eye-opening, thoroughly researched book, bristling with surprising revelations," writes UFO historian Jerome Clark in the foreword to the book, "Keith Chester challenges decades of conventional wisdom about the UFO phenomenon."

It's time to drop the pretense that UFOs were a rare sight before 1947, when pilot Kenneth Arnold witnessed nine "flying saucers" over Washington State. While Arnold's sighting is regarded by many as the beginning of the UFO phenomenon, Strange Company illustrates just how pervasive the phenomenon was years earlier--before, during, and after World War II. "What this work suggests," says author Keith Chester, "is that while an immense twentieth century war was raging on Earth, someone, or something, from somewhere else, was watching us."

Keith Chester is an artist and filmmaker living in Bel Air, Maryland. After witnessing a daytime UFO in the mid-1960s, he became fascinated with the phenomenon. By the late 1980s, he was devoting considerable time to research on UFOs.

After the famous Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting of 1947, the U.S. Air Force established the first-ever government office for investigating UFOs. However, it was not the first time that a U.S. government body had encountered reports of airborne anomalies. Throughout the Second World War, both Allied and German air crews saw strange, moving lights in the sky that they called “foo fighters.” The many extant reports of these things suggest that military brass was anything but unfamiliar with UFOs by the summer of 1947, and may have already had a plan in place to manage public perception of the UFO phenomenon.

It’s not possible to establish when exactly the first sighting of a “foo fighter” occurred, but a report from the British Royal Air Force, or RAF, from August 1940 indicated that Intelligence officers were already struggling to understand a number of “peculiar incidents” reported by crewmen, and wondered if the Germans were experimenting with new technologies.(1) In September of 1942, the Operational Research Section of the British Air Ministry produced a report on some recent “Pyrotechnic Activity” over Germany, and mentioned four distinct phenomena. One involved balls of fire that seemed to “drip” multicolored fragments for 30 seconds or so before burning out in the air. Another involved colored balls of light that flew 6 or 7 thousand feet into the air. The writers concluded that the Germans had been firing objects into the air with mortars, or on rockets, but noted that none of the launches had ever harmed a plane, or coincided with an enemy attack.(2)

On November 28th, 1942, an RAF bomber crew saw what seemed to be a solid object with four evenly-spaced pairs of red lights attached. The crew estimated it to be 2-300 feet long, and travelling up to 500 mph.(3) Another report from May of 1943 noted that one crew saw what they described as a reddish-orange “meteor” outside of Duisburg in Western Germany that flew from North to South, falling as it went. Three times during the observation, the object emitted a “burst” that produced a green “star.”(4)

In 1943, the Germans unveiled the V-2 Rocket, the world’s first long-range guided missile, and Allied aircrews and ground forces began seeing them immediately. Among the first reports on the new technology are a few reports of so-called “rockets” with some strange behaviours. An RAF ‘Raid Report’ from January 1st, 1944, noted that a British Mosquito pilot had seen two rockets between Halberstadt and Hanover that changed course and overtook his plane before disappearing in the sky. As one passed within 200 yards, the pilot saw a “fiery head” and a “blazing stern.”(5) Reports from January 28th and 29th, as well as February 3rd, described an elusive red light, the latter two of which left a trail of flames and black smoke.(6) 

Some of the best-documented reports that we have of UFOs in the Second World War come from the U.S. Army Air Forces, the antecedent to the U.S. Air Force. In August 1943, the U.S. Eighth Air Force in England produced a report on stories of multi-colored explosions in the sky that they called “Pink Flak.” The author of the report makes it clear that the explosions were a “well-understood phenomenon” at the time, and laments the fact that many crews had likely kept silent on their experiences for fear of ridicule.(7)

The crew of a raid over Frankfurt on February 4th, 1944, said they saw a stationary, silver ball about 10 miles away that just hovered in the air.(8) On the night of February 19th, two different crews saw a “silver, cigar-shaped object like an airship.” The second crew noted that there seemed to be a line of windows along the bottom of the object. A few nights later, another crew saw three silver zeppelin-like objects moving in unison.(9)

There were many more sightings of unidentified balls and lights over the spring, summer, and fall. In November 1944, a newspaper in Minnesota quoted Lt. Col. Oris B. Johnson describing some “new gadgets” being thrown at Allied planes. These included what he described as a phosphorous bomb that dripped fire as it exploded, as well as burning pieces of dummy airplanes that appeared in front of bombers, but did no damage when struck.(10) Between the 1st and 5th of December, 1944, British bomber crews had encounters with fast-moving balls of light that seemed to explode when fired at, and that even exploded on their own. None of these lights were seen to follow planes, however.(11) Years after the war, Goerge Todt, an American columnist for the Los Angeles Herald, stated that he and another infantryman in France once saw a cherry-red light in the sky in August, 1944. It flew out from behind their lines, then stopped in the air for more than 12 minutes over the frontline, contracting and expanding again every few seconds, in a steady, rhythmic way. Todt also said that he’d seen another UFO over Paris in February.(12) 

The first to refer to these lights as “foo fighters” was a radar operator named Donald J. Meiers of the American 415th Night Fighter Squadron. In American English in the 1930s and '40s, “foo” was a well-known nonsense word, made popular by a comic strip called Smokey Stover, which centered on a firefighter who referred to fire as “foo,” and to himself as a “foo fighter.” On a flight in November, 1944, Meiers and his pilot, Ed Schleuter, saw what they described as eight or ten orange or red balls of fire that hovered on the horizon, then disappeared when the plane turned towards them. The objects reappeared in the distance, moved horizontally for a while, then vanished. An intelligence officer who attended the debriefing said that Meiers was extremely rattled by the experience. He brought a copy of the comic strip to the meeting and slammed it down on the officer’s desk, shouting, “it was another one of those fuckin’ foo fighters!” before storming out of the room. A few nights later, another crew saw a huge red light flying over their plane at 200 mph.(13) “Fuckin’ foo fighters” became the term of choice for these lights in the 415th until the aircrews shared their stories with the press, and the expletive was removed.(14)

A string of entries in the squadron’s official War Diary show that there were more sightings in December and January. These and more were confirmed by an intelligence officer’s report to Tactical Air Command.(15) In December 1944, a crew saw a “brilliant red light” travelling at an estimated 200 mph. Though technical failure prevented the crew from tracking the object on radar, they watched it fly away until it just “went out.” A diary entry from two nights later notes that a crew saw five or six red and green lights arranged in a “T” shape that followed their plane through several miles of turns and closed to 1000 feet. The same entry was the first of many to use the term, “foo-fighter.” On December 24th, a crew saw a “glowing red object” shooting up into the air before doing a “wingover,” or a sort of U-turn in the air before diving out of sight. There were more sightings in late December, one of which involved a yellow streak of flame that seemed to fly alongside the plane.(16) None of the sightings were ever corroborated on radar.

Surprisingly, censors allowed reports of these foo-fighters to make it to the press, albeit with some redactions. On December 13th, 1944, the Eugene Register Guard reported that the Nazis had deployed “floating silver balls” in the air.(17) A concurrent report in the Twin Falls Telegram referred to a new German “air defense weapon” that looked like Christmas ball ornaments.(18) On December 31st, Robert Wilson, a young war correspondent with the Associated Press, spent the night with the airmen of the 415th, intending to write a New Year's story. After they told him of the sightings they’d been having, Wilson published a story on the “Eerie German ‘Foo-Fighter’” in the Texas Morning Avalanche.(19) Wilson quoted Meiers who identified three types of lights, and formations of lights, including a group of “about 15” which always appear in the distance, and flicker on and off. The article also shares quotes from other pilots who saw the things, and some versions of the story even listed names. 

Despite the sensational nature of the story, Wilson’s piece received little notice in the papers, which by then were all focused on the battle against the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes forest. Aside from a few attempted armchair debunkings, and a summary of Wilson’s story in Time Magazine, there was no other public mention of the foo fighters for the remainder of the war.(20) But sightings continued.(21) In one of the last appearances to the 415th, the pilot turned into a group of foo fighters as soon as he saw them, and they disappeared immediately, only to reappear behind his plane. The pilot flew into a large cloud, and immediately dove two thousand feet while turning left. As he emerged from the bottom of the cloud, the foo fighters emerged with him, at the same relative position.(22)

As sightings of foo fighters over Germany were dwindling in February, 1945, they picked up with the American night fighters in Italy. An Operations Report from the 414th Night Fighter Squadron in Pontedera, Italy, made note of an encounter with two “very bright” lights on the night of February 16th. The night after that, a crew saw four bright lights around the Mantova area that burned out after two minutes, and a squadron in Pisa, Italy, noted recent sightings of “orange-red lights” near La Spezia and further inland.(23) On February 21st, another pilot saw two large red balls of fire, and the following night, a pilot watched a strong white light East of Parma for about four minutes.(24) On the 27th, there was another sighting of “balls of fire” around Bologna.(25)

In March, there were a few sightings in Belgium, and several more in Italy and Germany. On March 13th, the crew of a P-61 fighter saw “100 balls of orange fire,” and a second flight saw two. The last recorded sighting of a foo fighter over Italy was on the 18th: a Mosquito crew with the 416th chased a light for half an hour over Northwest Italy, only to see it suddenly disappear. The next night, the 415th had their last recorded sighting in Germany, and the last sighting in Europe.(26) As Jo Chamberlain claimed in his report on the Foo Fighters in American Legion Magazine, their appearances over Germany ceased when the Allied ground forces moved East of the Rhine in March of 1945.(27)

But just before the sightings started dropping off in Europe, they increased in the South Pacific. On January 10th, 1945, an American crew off the coast of Iwo Jima saw an amber light overtake them on their right, and disappear into the clouds ahead. In March, a crew saw a few lights that seemed to be anchored to an object follow them through a few turns before pulling away, and they even picked them up on radar.(28) On June 18th, a crew was tailed for about 42 minutes by a light that alternated between a bright red and a dim orange.(29) These are just a few of the many foo fighters seen in the South Pacific, however, and they weren’t the first. A report from August, 1944 noted several sightings over Sumatra, including a crew that saw reddish-orange balls of light and groups of light appear “out of nowhere” on their starboard side and explode into 4 or 5 fragments each. The crews guessed that they saw 250 or 300 separate explosions, and noted that firing at them had no effect.(30) 

A Bomber Command Mission Report for the night of May 2nd, 1945 described three separate incidents: one involved eight intense flames of a light green color, one of which exploded in the air. Another involved several trails of red fire arranged in pairs that were each up to 5000 feet long.(31) A Report for May 14th, notes that a B-29 crew was followed by a red or flame-colored “ball of fire” that appeared immediately after bombs away.(32) Sightings in the South Pacific dwindled over the summer of 1945, and by the time of Japan’s surrender in August, they had all but ceased. 

There was no resolution to the foo fighter mystery, but when people began talking about “flying saucers” after Kenneth Arnold’s UFO encounter in the summer of 1947, American air veterans immediately recalled their wartime experiences. Just two weeks after Arnold’s sighting, at least three different papers in the U.S. published quotes from American air veterans who believed that the foo fighters were secret German or Japanese weapons, and that the unidentified saucers were probably the same technology, deployed by another country.(33) In 2008, the British Ministry of Defense released a large batch of files on UFOs that included a “background briefing” on historical cases. This briefing confirmed that British pilots were also seeing “balls of fire” and “mysterious moving lights” that often tailed their planes, and that the Royal Air Force began formally collecting these reports in 1942. Though both British and American authorities assumed the foo fighters to be secret Axis weapons, they found no evidence of any such projects after the war. What’s more, Allied intelligence had learned that German pilots were seeing the same mysterious lights!(34)

So what were the foo fighters? After Bob Wilson’s story was published, some scientists in New York wrote to the paper to suggest that the crews were seeing instances of St. Elmo’s fire, an electrical phenomenon that can result in balls of fiery light that move in erratic ways.(35) But St. Elmo’s fire is a very rare, and often short-lived phenomenon, and could explain only a small fraction of sightings, at best. It’s possible that the observed phenomena were actually due to testing on secret weapons of war. But if this were the case, we would have to assume that both the Axis and the Allies independently deployed the same experimental technologies in perfect secrecy, and both successfully destroyed all records of their existence after abandoning them. One would also have to explain why none of the technologies ever managed to harm an enemy plane, or achieve any clear strategic advantage for the operator. 

Though many UFO witnesses reported round, disc-shaped objects after the summer of 1947, many sightings of the late '40s and early '50s involved balls of light or fire very similar to the most common foo fighters. For example, in the case of the so-called “Flatwoods Monster” of 1952, a group of children saw a glowing red, pear-shaped object with a fiery tail. When some of the children saw it on the ground later that night, it was pulsating between a cherry red, and a pale orange.(36) And zeppelin or cigar-shaped objects have long been common, and are still seen today. There seems to have been a high degree of continuity between the UFO sightings of the Second World War and the more publicized sightings of the post-war period, especially in the evasive, almost playful behaviour of the objects. Some sightings could have been stress or fatigue-induced hallucinations, of course, but the vast number of reports, and the high degree of consistency between them suggest that some witnesses, at least, were seeing something that was actually there.

Given the sheer volume of UFO reports available to U.S. intelligence services by the end of the war, it’s likely that someone in the government had already devised a protocol for dealing with UFO reports by the time of Arnold’s sighting. Though the term “UFO” was not coined until 1952, and there was no neutral term with which to categorize truly unidentified aerial phenomena, there are many reasons to believe that U.S. intelligence would have taken an active interest in reports of foo fighters. America’s delicate alliance with the Soviet Union made both parties uneasy, and when it became clear that the foo fighters were not the work of the Germans or the Japanese, it would not have been a great leap in logic to assume that they were soviet spycraft. 

It’s now known that there were many UFO sightings around the world between the war and Arnold’s sighting, including the so-called “ghost rockets” seen in Sweden in 1946.(37) While we don’t know if U.S. intelligence were tracking these kinds of sightings at the time, it’s clear that Arnold’s was far from the first tip-off to the UFO presence. Several ufologists, including Kenn Thomas and Richard Dolan, have suggested that some of the first UFO cases to make the news after Arnold’s sighting were staged, spun, or manipulated as part of a disinformation campaign to discredit UFO witnesses, and stigmatize UFO research. For example, Thomas has shown that U.S. intelligence services were involved in the Maury Island incident in several different ways, and that one of the two principal witnesses did work with the CIA. It’s possible that the then-burgeoning U.S. intelligence community, still searching for an explanation for the unresolved foo fighter sightings of the early 1940s, had already devised a plan to manage the public narrative on UFOs, and put it into action when Arnold’s sighting brought the subject to national attention.

Aircrews from England, Germany, and the U.S. were all witness to a wide variety of aerial phenomena that intensified in the closing years of the Second World War. The lights, spheres, fireballs, and cigar-shaped objects that they saw were reminiscent of the kinds of UFOs seen before and after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in the summer of 1947, as well as those seen today. Whatever they were, it’s hard to imagine that U.S. intelligence was not taking note of further sightings by the time that Arnold’s story hit the papers. Exactly what any government knew about these aerial anomalies, however, is still unknown.

Source: https://www.thinkanomalous.com/Foo-Fighters.html

Schweinfurt, a Mystery Solved ?

by Andy Roberts

In 1990 I wrote an article entitled W.W.II Document Research - In Search of Foo-Fighters, which primarily dealt with the 'UFOs' allegedly seen in the 14th October 1943 Schweinfurt raid. [1] This has since been posted on the Project 1947 website [2] and now forms the background to the present article.

The tone of my 1990 piece was very sceptical of the case because, despite having gone to great lengths, I had been unable to track the source of the case down. The source was an alleged UK government document quoted in author Martin Caidin's Black Thursday, a book which dealt with the events of the bombing raid of Thursday 14th October 1943.[3]

Having done quite a bit of research into foo-fighters, and having a general interest in W.W.II, I have been quite obsessed by the story over the years. All avenues of enquiry seemed to lead nowhere, and in 1999 I went to the Public Records Office (PRO) at Kew and searched many files connected to the Schweinfurt raid. At that time I found nothing at all relating to Caidin's claims and this only strengthened my feelings it was a fabrication. However...

In July 2000 I spent another few of days at the PRO and this time hit pay-dirt. Besides finding several hitherto unseen references to what would later be termed 'foo-fighters', much new material on ghost rockets and 1950s UK government UFO research, I again went through all the available Schweinfurt related files and came across something of great relevance. But first here is how Martin Caidin reported the incident in Black Thursday.

"As the bombers of the 384th Group swung into the final bomb run after passing the Initial Point, the fighter attacks fell off. This point is vital, and pilots were queried extensively, as were other crew members, as to the position at that time of the German fighter planes. Every man interrogated was firm in his statement that "at the time there were no enemy aircraft above." At this moment the pilots and top turret gunners, as well as several crewmen in the Plexiglas noses of the bombers, reported a cluster of discs in the path of the 384th's formation and closing with the bombers. The startled exclamations focused attention on the phenomenon, and the crews talked back and forth, discussing and confirming the astonishing sight before them.

The discs in the cluster were agreed upon as being silver colored, about one inch thick and three inches in diameter. They were easily seen by the B-7 crewmen, gliding down slowly in a very uniform cluster.

And then the "impossible" happened. B-17 Number 026 closed rapidly with a cluster of discs; the pilot attempted to evade an imminent collision with the objects, but was unsuccessful in this manoeuvre. He reported at the intelligence debriefing that his "right wing went directly through a cluster with absolutely no effect on engines or plane surface."

The intelligence officers pressed their questioning, and the pilot stated further that one of the discs was heard to strike the tail assembly of his B-17, but that neither he nor any member of the crew heard or witnessed an explosion.

He further explained that about twenty feet from the discs the pilots sighted a mass of black debris of varying sizes in clusters of three by four feet.

The SECRET report added: "Also observed two other A/C flying through silver discs with no apparent damage. Observed discs and debris two other times but could not determine where it came from."

No further information on this baffling incident has been uncovered, with the exception that such discs were observed by pilots and crew members prior to, and after, Mission 115 of October 14, 1943.

Memorandum of October 24 1943, from Major E.R.T. Holmes, F.L.O., 1St Bombardment Division, Reference FLO/1BW/REP/126, to M.I. 15, War Office, Bombardment Division, London, S.W. (copy to Colonel E.W. Thompson, A-2, Pinetree)" [4]

 Caidin's account of this event via the alleged UK document has existed in UFO legend for forty years without proof. Now I can reveal that the document exists and is almost as Caidin records it.

 The document, which Caidin obviously based his account on, reads as follows. All spelling and punctuation is in the original. The file in which the document can be found is: AIR 40/464

 At the top right of the document is a rubber stamp giving details of circulation to:

1. Col Kingman Douglas

2. A.I.3. ? (W/Cdr Smith)

3. A.I.2. ? (W/Cdr Heath)

(Author note: the ? refers to a squiggle or letter I cannot decipher, although it could well be 'to'. Also the background of the stamp on which the above was written says:

Received 17 Oct 1943

Copies sent to A.I.8 (USA)

The rest of the document is as follows:

Analysis

• Presumably Caidin must have seen a copy of this document from one of the American recipients. The following points seem relevant:

• I have tried to check the reference Caidin gives three times now at the PRO, once by using a professional researcher. It does not exist. However the AIR files were all re-numbered at some point prior to them being located at the PRO and it is possible the reference refers to the files' original designation.

• It is also possible the reference pertains to the accompanying letter when it was sent to the USA. This is unlikely however, as the memo is stated to have been sent from one UK source to another and then on to the USA. The Rubber stamp clearly states it was received on 17 October, pre-dating Caidin's reference by seven days. But the sheer number of channels through which documents went could be the reason for this confusion, and now the original document has been located I don't think we need get hung up on the original reference any more.

• I have found no record of most of the personnel listed. However a Squadron Leader Heath was involved in the UK's investigations of the Scandinavian 'ghost rockets' in 1946.

• Besides the above, other than some possibly excusable authorial hype, Caidin has recorded the incident more or less as the document states.

Conclusion

At least we now know Caidin's reference exists! Besides that there is little to say really. The objects reported are intriguing but not completely mystifying. There were many types of flak being used by the Germans in W.W.II and several files in the PRO refer to coloured flak, flak which threw off unusual fragments, and so on. This explanation is made more likely by the fact that the 'F.L.O.' in Caidin's reference stands for 'Flak Liaison Officer', at least suggesting that the Air Ministry were treating it within a flak context.

The objects could also have been some kind of 'window' dropped by the Germans in an attempt to disrupt radar or radio communication among air crew. The explanation as to what the small objects were is now more of a task for the air historian than it is for the ufologist. What is clear from the original account is that the discs, whilst unusual, were clearly not any type of 'craft', under intelligent or purposeful control or dangerous to the air craft or crew.

In my opinion these objects do not belong in the category of sightings referred to as 'foo-fighters', both by their physical description and by their behaviour and characteristics. Although often lumped in with foo-fighter reports they are clearly different. This story has been a staple of UFO writers for the past three-four decades. Now we have further clarification and I believe that this particular mystery is more or less laid to rest. - © 2000 Andy Roberts

References

1. UFO Brigantia July 1990  

2. http://www.project1947.com/arwwr.htm 

3. Caidin, Martin. Black Thursday, Dell 1960 

4. ibid  

These weird balls were of fantastic and variable speeds, glowed from orange to red and white and back to orange, and appear to have been sighted first at 10 p.m. on November 23, 1944, by a U.S. pilot in the area north of Strasbourg in Alsace Lorraine.  Three nights later they were again seen by a U.S. pilot flying in the same area. They were seen for a third time on the night of December 22-23, 1944, by a U.S. pilot flying a mission over the same area.

Just before the Allies overran and captured the secret German experimental stations east of the Rhine these balls vanished.  But in no such station was the slightest clue discovered even hinting that the Nazi technicians had invented and flown these mysterious blazing balls.

Over Japan, Nipponese air pilots met the blazing balls and took them to be secret and mystifying aerial devices of the Americans or the Russians.  On the other hand, equally mystified U.S. pilots supposed that the balls were a curious device thought up by Japan as a last-ditch expedient to stave off mass-bombing raids.

One pilot chatting in the mess with others who had met the balls on night flights — and had been “ribbed” by intelligence officers who heard their reports — had a brain wave.  “Let's call the so and so’s foo fighters,” he said. The name stuck.  It seems to have been suggested by a comic strip in which one “Smokey Stover” said: “Yeah, if there’s foo, there’s fire.”  Probably the slang word foo is a corruption of the French word feu, or fire.

I myself have seen what may have been a foo fighter. I quote from my diary of November 2, 1950:

“At 6:20 p.m. I went into the garden of this house at Bexleyheath, Kent, which stands on a low hill and has a commanding view of a region of Kent just 12 miles from Charing Cross in central London. I merely sought a breath of fresh air and was looking for nothing. Glancing up casually into the starry sky, I suddenly saw a yellow luminous ball appear in the southern quadrant of the sky.  It flew silently, with no gas or spark-emission, on a level trajectory and at no great velocity.  It vanished into a belt of cumulus cloud near the zenith. It did not reappear. Was no sort of balloon, weather or cosmic.  Was no meteor, and no sort of pyrotechnic.  Its altitude was about 2,500 feet up and it shone with lunar brilliancy.”

Next morning I read in the “London Daily Telegraph” a report that on the same night but one hour 40 minutes later than the time of my own observation, people on the Herts-Bucks border, some 25 miles west, were mystified by a strange orange light flashing across the sky and visible for some seconds. Some 30 miles west of the Herts-Bucks border is the British Ministry of Supply’s atomic station of Harwell, Berks.

What I saw was, I believe, a foo fighter of the same type as that encountered six years before by U.S. pilots. Exactly three weeks earlier — October 12, 1950 — a woman cycling from Gloucester City, England, reached the Barnwood suburb of the town when, as she told the local newspaper:

I was startled at 11:15 p.m. that night to see four lights, like huge stars, stationary over Barnwood. After a few moments their lights began to wink in and out . . . Two friends tell me they saw these lights that same night and that two of them moved over a hill about two miles away. I refuse to believe they were airplanes. Can any reader tell me what they were?”

I told this woman that what she and her friends saw were probably foo fighters but it must be understood that probably not one English person in a million knows what is meant by foo fighters or has ever heard of them.  My request to the Public Relations Branch of the British Air Ministry in Whitehall, London, inquiring what reports were made to intelligence officers by British pilots who are said to have met these weird balls on war missions remains without answer after four weeks.

It was at 10 p.m. on November 23, 1944, when Lieut. Edward Schlüter, U.S. pilot of the 415th Night Fighter squadron, stationed at Dijon, in south central France, took off from Dijon, on a routine patrol to intercept German planes west of the Rhine between Strasbourg and Mannheim.  As the crow flies he had to fly 150 miles on a patrol that would take him east over the Vosges mountains, a very lonely, grim and isolated range buttressing the westward approaches to the Rhine.

Schlüter is a finely built man, the last word in aeronautical efficiency, and a very experienced night fighter of the second World War. He is a native of Oshkosh, Wis.  With him, in the darkened cockpit of the plane, were the radar observer, Lieut. Donald J. Meiers, and an intelligence officer, Lieut. F. Ringwald.  Nothing happened till their plane had crossed the Vosges and they had sighted the shining waters of the Rhine, rolling rapidly towards Mainz.

The sky that night was clear, with light clouds.  Visibility was good and the moon was in the first quarter. U.S. radar stations, covering all U.S. pilots in that area, had not notified the crew of any other plane in the sky.  Some way to the east, Schlüter could see the white steam jetted from the smokestack of a German freight locomotive, running in black-out conditions, with fire-box door clamped up and blinded.

At this time, in 1944, Germany stood at bay and the Allies were closing in on her.  Some 20 miles north of Strasbourg, Lieutenant Ringwald, the U.S. intelligence officer, glanced to the west and noticed eight or ten balls of red fire moving at an amazing velocity.  They seemed to be in formation and could be seen clearly from the darkened cockpit of the U.S. night fighter.

“Say,” said Ringwald to Schlüter, "look over there at the bright lights on those hills yonder.  What are they?”

Schlüter: “Hell, buddy, there are no hills over there! I should say they were stars. You don’t need me to tell you that it is not easy to guess at the nature of lights you see on night flights. . . . Not when they are distant, as these are.”

Ringwald: “Stars, d’ye say?  I don't reckon they are stars.  Why, their speed is terrific!”

Schlüter: “Maybe they are just reflections from our own 'plane.  We are going pretty fast.”

Ringwald: “I am certain, absolutely sure, that those lights are not reflected from us.”

Schlüter now gazed hard at the lights.  They were now off his port wing.  He got into radio telephone contact with one of the ground radar stations.

“There are about ten Heinie night fighters round here in the sky.  Looks as if they are chasing us and their speed is high.  I'll say it is!”

U.S. radar station: “You guys must be nuts!  Nobody is up there but your own plane.  Ain’t seein’ things, are you?”

Meiers in the plane glanced at the radarscope. No enemy planes showed up on the screen! Schlüter now maneuvered the fighter for action and headed toward the lights.  They were blazing red.  Suddenly they seemed to vanish into thin air! Two minutes later they reappeared but now a long way off.  It looked as if they were aware of being chased. Six minutes later the balls did a glide, levelled out, and vanished.

None of the occupants of the U.S. night fighter could make out what the red balls were. Schlüter guessed they might be some German experimental devices like the red, green, blue, and white and yellow rockets that flashed up amid the flak of antiaircraft batteries when a big enemy night bomber raid was on.  I have myself seen such rockets when on night patrol on the edge of London at the time of the big German bomber raids in 1942 and 1943.  The Germans appear to have had these mystery devices, as had the British, but I have never been able to find out what purpose they served.

But the bewildered night fighter pilots did not let this mystery spoil their mission.  Lieutenant Schlüter that night bombed hell out of eight fast German freight trains on the Rhine railroads.  Back at the base at Dijon, knowing they would not be believed by intelligence higher-ups and might be charged with hallucinations and war neurosis, Schlüter and his two companions said nothing.  They made no report to base at Dijon.

On November 27, 1944, another act in the foo fighter drama was staged. Lieutenant Henry Giblin, native of Santa Rosa, Calif., was flying a U.S. night fighter in the Alsace Lorraine region, south of Mannheim-am-Rhein.  He had with him Lieutenant Walter Cleary of Worcester, Mass., as radar-observer.  As they were approaching the German town of Speyer on the Rhine south of Mannheim, they got a shock.  Some 1,500 feet above their own plane a “hell of a huge fierce, fiery orange light” shot across the night sky at an estimated speed of 250 miles per hour.  Again U.S. ground radar stations reported when called: “No enemy machines in the vicinity.  Only your own plane in the sky over there.”

Giblin and Cleary decided to say nothing to intelligence, fearing ridicule from higher quarters.  It is not wise for a war-time flyer to take such a risk.  Let some one else do the reporting!

No other observations of queer things in the sky came the way of the U.S. 415th Night Fighter squadron until three days before Christmas, 1944.  On December 22, 1944, Lieutenant David McFalls, of Cliff-side, N. C., and Lieutenant Edward Raker, radar observer, of Hemat, Calif., were flying at 10,000 feet just south of Hagenau in the old German Reichsland.  Hagenau is 20 miles north of Strasbourg and 16 miles west of the Rhine.

Here is the report of U.S. pilot Giblin:

“At 0600 (six p.m.), near Hagenau, at 10,000 feet altitude, two very bright lights climbed towards us from the ground.  They levelled off and stayed on the tail of our plane.  They were huge bright orange lights.  They stayed there for two minutes.  On my tail all the time.  They were under perfect control.  Then they turned away from us, and the fire seemed to go out.”

On the night of December 24, 1944, McFalls and Baker had another amazing experience. Here is their report:

“A glowing red ball shot straight up to us.  It suddenly changed into an airplane which did a wing over!  Then it dived and disappeared.”

The reader should note the sudden disappearance of this weird thing in the sky.  “They,” if the reports are to be believed, would appear to hail from some phenomenal world of a different wavelength of visibility from our own.  “They" — whoever these etherian beings are — can operate controlled machines which suddenly appear from nowhere, fly at vertiginous speeds, and as suddenly vanish into thin air.  Yet, in our world of radiological science, in which we have but touched the threshold of the unseen rays in the invisible octaves of the solar spectrum, let the physicist pause before he dismisses these stories of picked men as hallucinations.

It is true that in both London and New York in the late 1920’s, a man on a stage was rendered invisible by warping light rays in a field of rapidly rotating magnetic poles.  But the phenomena of these weird foo fighters are on a scale that transcends anything we have yet produced.

FATE’S readers (see the summer issue, 1948) may recall the strange experience of Kenneth Elders, of the Landing Aids Experimental Station at Arcata, Calif.  He directed a C-47 pilot to fly to a certain location, because of the appearance on his radarscope of what are technically called “discontinuities.”  There appeared to be three signals, denoting that three aircraft were passing over the airfield at Arcata.  Yet, when the pilot reached the spot in the air, he saw nothing nor did his instruments record any electrical reactions.

So far in 1944 the pilots of the 415th squadron had seen these weird balls at night and despite the ridicule of the higher-ups and the medical and psychiatric skepticism, other reports began to be made.  In the Pacific theatre pilots began to be warned before starting out on missions that if they met strange phenomena in the sky they need not conclude that they were suffering from hysteria, war-induced neuroses, or hallucinations.  Pilots talking war “shop" in the messes called the balls krauts, or kraut balls.  Two British night fighter pilots, whose names I have been unable to ascertain, thought the foo fighters were secret German experimental devices, perhaps intended to strike fear in a war of nerves.  Some U.S. intelligence officers supposed they were radio-controlled objects sent up to baffle radar, in the same way of the foil “window” that was dropped by bombers to confuse the radar watchers.

Yet if they had been secret devices, no war department of any country would have risked sending them over hostile territory where they might be shot down or intercepted.

There is the case of a U.S. bomber pilot of the 8th U.S. Air Force.  He reported that he saw 15 foo fighters following his plane at a distance, with their lights winking on and off.  A U.S. P-47 pilot saw 15 foo fighters by day at or near Neustadt in the same Rhenish area, some 40 miles west of the Rhine and 55 miles northwest of Strasbourg.

Here is his report:

“We were flying west of Neustadt when a golden sphere, which shone with a metallic glitter, appeared, slowly moving through the sky. The sun was not far above the sky line, which made it difficult to say whether or no the sun’s rays were reflected from it or whether the glow came from within the ball itself.”

A second P-47 (Thunderbolt) pilot also saw the same or another “golden, or phosphorescent, ball which appeared to be about four or five feet in diameter flying 2,000 feet up.”

By this time the higher-ups in the U.S. Air Force had been forced to take notice of die increasing reports of level-headed pilot-observers.  It was no longer enough to wave these reports away with a smile and half-serious reference to hallucination and combat-neuroses.  Nor were the men satisfied at the explanation that they were flares. Whoever saw a flare that behaved as did the foo fighters? Flares are not maneuverable!

The final attempt at a brush-off came from New York, in January, 1945, when “scientists” insulted the intelligence of the men of 415th.  The New York scientific wallahs said the men of the 415th and the 8th Air Force had been seeing St. Elmo’s lights!  It may be noted that St. Elmo’s lights are seen on sea and land in times of electrical meteorological conditions.  They have been seen at the top of Pike’s Peak, from ships’ mast-heads, and from the tops of towers and spires.  In the days of Julius Caesar there was one occasion when these lights flashed from the tops of the spears of his legionaries.  In our own time the White Star Liner Germanic, in mid-Atlantic, ran into a heavy thunderstorm at 1 a.m.  Electrical flames one-and-a-half-inch long jetted from the foremast truck and small balls, one-half inch to two and one-half inches long, ran up and down the mast but were "tied” to it.

But what possible resemblance could there have been between these weird foo fighters, under intelligent control, and St. Elmo’s lights?

In 1945 the foo fighters made their appearance in the seas of the Far East — the other side of the globe from the German Rhine — over Japan, and over Truk Lagoon.  Crews of U.S. B-29 bombers reported to intelligence that balls of fire of mysterious types came up from below their cockpits over Japan, hovered over the tails of their bombers, winked their lights from red to orange, then back from white to red.  It was the same thing that had happened a few months before on the other side of the globe over the Rhine!  Here too the weird balls were inoffensive — just nosey and exploratory, albeit unnerving.

One night a B-29 pilot rose into a cloud in order to shake off one of these balls of fire.  When his plane emerged from the cloud-bank the ball was still following behind him! He said it looked to be about three and one-half feet wide and glowed with a strange red phosphorescence.  It was spherical, with not one sign of any mechanical appendage such as wings, fins, or fuselage.  It followed his bomber for five or six miles and he lost sight of it as the dawn light rose over Mount Fujiyama, some 60 miles southerly of Tokyo.  Here it seemed to vanish into thin air!

The B-29’s found that even at top speed they could not outdistance these balls of fire.  Some 12,000 feet up over Truk Lagoon in the Caroline archipelago, a pilot of a B-24 Liberator was startled by the sudden appearance of two glowing red lights that shot up from below and for 75 minutes followed on his tail.  One flaming ball turned back while the other still dogged his bomber.  It maneuvered in such a way as to suggest intelligent direction from some remote control.  It came abreast of the Liberator, then it shot ahead, and for 1,500 yards held the lead.  After that it fell behind.  Its speed was immensely variable.

As dawn came, the strange ball climbed some 16,000 feet above him into the sunshine.  In the night hours the pilot noticed changes in the colors of the ball, which were precisely what had been seen over the Rhine, in 1944.  It was just a sphere with no appendages.

The pilot radioed to base and had the reply: “No: no enemy planes are near you.  Your own bomber is the only one up there, as the radarscope shows.”

Now while the foo fighters were making their appearance in the Far Eastern theater, they were, at about the same time in January, 1945, again sighted by pilots of the U.S. 415th Night Fighter squadron.  These pilots reported to U.S. intelligence at the Dijon base, that over Western Germany they had met the blazing balls alone, in pairs, and in formations.  One pilot said that three formations of these lights, red and white in color, followed his plane.  He suddenly reduced speed and apparently took them off guard.  They came on with undiminished speed and then, to avoid any collision, also reduced speed and fell back, though still dogging him.

From ground radar came the usual reply: “Nothing up there but your own plane!”

On another occasion, when the queer formation of foo fighters got on the tail of a U.S. night fighter of 415th squadron, the perplexed and exasperated pilot swung his craft around and headed for them at top speed!  As he came, the lights vanished into thin air.  They simply were no longer there.

Note what this pilot reported:

“As I passed where they had been I’ll swear I felt the propeller backwash of invisible planes!”

Came the reply from a derisive ground radar station:

“Are you fellows all plum loco?  You must be crazy!  You’re up there all alone!”

The puzzled pilot flew on and, glancing back, was now startled to see that the balls had reappeared about half a mile astern of his plane.  He thought to himself: “I’ll show these spook planes a trick!”  The night was starry but, near the zenith, was a bank of cumulus cloud.  He headed his plane at top speed right into the mass of cloud.  Then he throttled back and glided down for about 1,800 feet.  He turned the machine around and headed back from the cloud the way he had entered it, but on a much lower level.  Sure enough, the balls had been caught napping!  They emerged from the cloud ahead but now on a course opposite to his own!

It is true that, when the Allies overran Germany, no more foo fighters were seen.  On the other hand, when secret German experimental stations were seized and their secrets examined by intelligence men, nothing was found blueprinting plans for blazing balls that can be made visible or invisible in the wink of an eyelid!  Such a discovery would have been the most tremendous accomplishment of mid-twentieth-century science!  It could not have been kept secret!

But the foo fighters, like other types of “flying saucers,” have been seen in other days!

Let us draw on the great reservoir of information of the late Charles Fort, so often tapped without acknowledgment.  In his “Book of the Damned,” he cites Robert Mallet’s Catalogue (Rept. British Association, 1852): “Globes of light seen in the air over Swabia (S.W. Bavaria or Bayern, Germany), on May 22, 1732.”

1877: March 23. Dazzling balls of fire appeared from a cloud, and moved slowly over Venice, France.  Visible for more than 1 hour. Similar balls seen in sky over Venice eight or ten years before. October 5.  Mysterious balls like electric lights seen over West Wales coast.  They appeared and vanished suddenly. High velocity.

1848: September 19. Two bright globular lights, blazing like stars, seen over sky of Inverness, Scotland.  Sometimes stationary, sometimes moving with high velocity.

1880: July 30. At night, in a ravine near St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), Russia, a large sphere and two smaller ones, all illuminated, seen for three minutes moving along a ravine.  They vanished noiselessly.

1893: May 23. Captain Charles J. Norcock, of H.M.S. Caroline, saw globular lights for two hours in sky at 10 p.m., between Shanghai and Japan in East China Sea.  These balls of light were also seen the same night for 7½ hours by Captain Castle of H.M.S. Leander.  He changed the ship’s course to chase them but they fled from him.

1896: A U.S. postal clerk saw a round red light rise 100 feet over a train he was in at night, at Trenton, Md.  It rose higher and went north.  At first it outsped the train, then it fell behind.

1950: October 30, from 10:50 to 11 p.m.  Two brilliant blue spherical lights travelled at a terrific speed over Devon, England, from north to south.  They came inland from over the Bristol Channel.  Numerous eyewitnesses included naval men at Devonport.

December 2, in daytime. Noiseless globes of fire vanished in a flash of light over Towyn, Merioneth, Wales.  At Penzance, Cornwall, players in football matches stopped play to watch a long black object, with a flaming tail four miles long, rush across the sky.  At Looe, East Cornwall, a blue light, “like a sausage,” rushed across the sky.

December 7. Balls of light seen by farmers in Cumberland, England.  All descriptions tally.

Authority in England and in the United States is all out to play down the phenomena and explain them away even if the “explanations” ignore or distort the full facts.

One thing it is safe to say: The derided flying saucers and other strange aerial phenomena will continue to be seen in the skies of Britain and in other parts of the world long after the one-sided talk has been forgotten.  No amount of talk or conspiracy of silence can hide the truth.

By Dr. David Clarke & Andy Roberts

The future was uncertain for those who joined the Royal Air Force at the start of World War II. All were volunteers and many looked upon their baptism into the world of flight and combat as an adventure which would bring experiences both good and bad. But none expected the strangest experience they would face would be unidentified flying objects that would play tag with their aircraft during raids on occupied Europe.

In recent years much has been written about UFOs seen during World War Two and although there is as yet no single work which deals comprehensively with the subject, many UFO books and magazines feature stories about the so-called ‘foo-fighters’. Unfortunately the majority of these are sensationalised or un- referenced accounts dealing solely with the American experience and until recently little was known of the experiences of RAF aircrews and the response of the British government to these reports.

In an attempt to redress that balance, since 1987 we have been digging deep into the foo-fighter mystery. There have been two, intertwined, strands to this approach. The first has been interviews with the many combat air crew who witnessed this perplexing aerial phenomena and the second has been research into studies of the phenomena by the Air Ministry.

During WWII the terms ‘UFO’ and ‘flying saucer’ were yet to be invented. But it is human nature to name the unknown in an attempt to make it explicable and thus hopefully to understand it better. The name which stuck to WWII aerial phenomena and which has become widely known was ‘foo-fighters’, a term given to them by an unknown American airman, probably in 1943. No-one is certain where the name came from but it may have originated in a popular 1940s U.S. cartoon strip featuring the character Smokey Stover, whose catch phrase was ‘where there’s foo, there’s fire’. Alternatively ‘foo’ may have derived from the French word for fire - ‘feu’ -, the phenomenon often being described as resembling a fireball.

Whatever its origin, ‘foo-fighter’ was a term specific to the United States Air Force, and appears not to have been used in a British context until March 1945. But our research has revealed that RAF air crew during WWII had their own names for the UFOs they saw. Based on information gleaned from interviews with surviving aircrew and details in log books, it appears that ‘The Light’ or ‘The Thing’ were the two most common terms used in RAF squadrons from 1942 onwards. One early contemporary example comes from December 14 1943, when Squadron Leader P. Wells wrote in his flight log of a, ‘Screaming dog-fight with the “light”’. In a 1987 interview we asked Wells if he was aware the American’s were seeing similar phenomena and if he knew of the term ‘foo-fighter’. He replied, ‘...foo-fighters is a new name to me, we always called them “The Light” in the squadrons in which I served in 1943-44’. Other air crew, baffled by the lights which pursued or paced them, rationalised their sightings as evidence of new jets or ‘rockets’ and referred to them in those terms in flight logs and at debriefings. However, the term ‘The Thing’ stuck in people’s minds and was being used by British witnesses and newspapers in relation to UFOs well into the 1960s when it was applied to the UFOs seen during the famous Warminster flap

No-one knows who the first RAF air crew to see a UFO in WWII was, but one of the earliest recorded RAF encounters comes from B.C. Lumsden who observed two classic foo-fighters while flying a Hurricane fighter over France in December 1942.

Lumsden had left England at seven p.m., for a mission over the French coast. An hour later, while cruising at 7,000 feet over the mouth of the River Somme, he discovered that he had company. Two steadily climbing orange-coloured lights, with one slightly above the other. Lumsden at first thought the lights may be tracer flak, but discarded the idea when he saw how slowly the objects were moving. He did a full turn and saw the lights astern and to port but now they were larger and brighter. At 7,000 feet they stopped climbing and stayed level with his Hurricane. The frightened pilot executed another full turn, only to discover that the objects had stayed with him. Lumsden nose-dived to 4,000 feet with the lights following his every manoeuvre. Finally they descended to about 1,000 feet below him until he leveled out, at which point they climbed again and resumed pursuit. The two lights seemed to maintain an even distance from each other and varied only slightly in relative height from time to time. One always remained a little lower than the other. At last, as Lumsden's speed reached 260 miles per hour, he was gradually able to outdistance the UFOs. ‘I found it hard to make other members of the squadron believe me when I told my story,’ Lumsden said, ‘but the following night one of the squadron flight commanders in the same area had a similar experience with a green light.’

Lumsden’s account was just one of a growing number which reached the Air Ministry during 1942. By early autumn enough sightings had been reported to warrant an official statement and on 25th September a report classified SECRET was issued by the Air Ministry’s Operation Research Section, entitled A Note On Recent Enemy Pyrotechnic Activity Over Germany. Baffled by the flood of reports, the report’s authors discussed the possible causes of the phenomenon. They concluded, not entirely convincingly, that the sightings were new or misperceived types of German anti-aircraft shells and referred to them as ‘Phenomena 1’ and ‘Phenomena 2’, suggesting that more suitable names be given them in a report being prepared by a branch of military intelligence, M.I. 14.»

This report was one of a series produced throughout the war by the Air Ministry. Although aircrew believed that the Intelligence departments were not taking the matter seriously enough, report after report was being carefully collected and thoroughly analysed. Documents recently discovered in the Public Record Office convincingly demonstrate that, rather than causing the Air Ministry to believe they were being visited by a strange and unknown phenomena, the reports were treated soberly and with caution. Just as today’s Ministry of Defence analyses UFO reports for their defence implications, so the besieged Air Ministry was concerned that the WWII sightings may have represented some new Axis weapon and they monitored the situation accordingly.

However, several well known UFO writers have suggested there was a top secret study conducted by the Air Ministry during WWII and which was the genesis of alleged ‘cover up’. We have conducted an in depth study of these claims and found them to be without foundation. Even the great UFO enthusiast and wartime pilot Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard did not believe any such study existed, writing in 1978:

‘This implies Treasury sanction; it suggests that in the middle of the War against Germany when we had our hands full and it was far from certain that we could survive, the Air Ministry was concerned that a UFO menace existed: it most certainly was not….’

Yet the response by Air Intelligence to aircrew who reported UFOs during the wartime years appears baffling. Why did they appear to take so little interest? Why was there no detailed de-briefing of the witnesses? Why did they not send up observers to film or observe the phenomena for themselves? These and other questions frequently came up during our interviews with RAF aircrew who witnessed these phenomena. But the documentary evidence at the Public Record Office shows that the RAF had been taking a great deal of interest in the sightings. Files in the PRO reveal that Air Intelligence had a wealth of information on all kinds of unusual radar trackings, ‘mystery’ aircraft and unusual rockets and flak, gathered from all branches of the RAF. Each sighting was carefully analysed in the context of known weaponry, enemy tactics and the psychological problems of misperception.

The attitude displayed in these documents is best summed up by the late comedian and former Goon show star Michael Bentine:

‘When I was an intelligence officer in Bomber Command in the winter of 1943-44, I debriefed several crews about some lights that had attacked them when they were over the Baltic. They fired at the lights, which didn’t shoot back. These lights didn’t seem to do anything, just pulse and go round. We put it down to fatigue, but later, after I had sent the reports in, an American G2 Intelligence Officer told us that their bombers saw lights in the sky - ‘foo-fighters’ he called them.’

In another interview Bentine described how he debriefed a Polish bomber unit based in England. They claimed that silver-blue balls appeared near their wing on six missions during the autumn of 1943. These tailed the planes as they raided the Nazi V-weapons base at Peenemunde. The crews told Bentine it must be a new weapon. ‘But what did it do to you?’ Bentine inquired. ‘Nothing,’ they replied. "Well it was not a very effective weapon, was it?" he pointed out. Bentine’s last statement accurately sums up the conclusions reached by the Air Ministry during their study of these phenomena – whatever the ‘foo-fighters’ were, they did not constitute a threat to aircraft.

So, it seems that there has never been a ‘cover-up’ by the British Government of information about WWII UFOs, just a collection of baffling reports consigned to the dusty shelves of the Public Record Office. It is interesting however that some of the personnel who were involved with WWII UFO analysis, such as the Sir Henry Tizard and the Air Ministry’s Director of Intelligence, Dr R.V. Jones, were also involved in studies of Ghost Rockets in 1946 and the ‘flying saucer’ sightings from 1947 to the mid 1950s. Using their rigorous techniques of analysis, borne out of wartime necessity they continued to view UFO sightings with interest but ultimately regarded them as a modern myth based on misperception. Researchers who wish to trace the roots of the MOD’s current attitude to UFOs should seek out the files held by the PRO to discover how the conclusions which have endured for over fifty years, were originally formulated.

Witness accounts and documentary evidence indicates that the majority of WWII UFO sightings were of small spherical objects. However, two RAF sightings have come to our attention which indicates huge objects were also being seen by aircrew. Whilst it is possible that other foo-fighter sightings may have been new types of flak such as ‘scarecrow’, designed to mimic an aircraft in flames, flak tracer or jets such as the ME262, none of these prosaic explanations can account for the following sighting, which took place on the night of 28 November 1942.

The sighting was thought to be of such significance that it was sent to the headquarters of Bomber Command Recorded in a document, stamped ‘SECRET’. The covering letter, from the Air Vice Marshal of no. 5 Group. RAF, read, ‘Herewith a copy of a report received from a crew of a Lancaster after a raid on Turin. The crew refuses to be shaken in their story in the face of the usual banter and ridicule.’ »

The document referred to an unusual sighting made by the entire crew of aircraft ‘J’, piloted by Captain Lever of 61 Squadron, based at Syerston in Lincolnshire. If a sighting such as this were made by the whole crew of an aeroplane today it would make headline news in every country in the world. As it was it this fascinating report has remained hidden for over half a century deep in the heart of the Public Records Office. Written by an anonymous intelligence officer the account reads:

‘The object referred to above was seen by the entire crew of the above aircraft. They believe it to have been 200-300 feet in length and its width is estimated at 1/5th or 1/6th of its length. The speed was estimated at 500 m.p.h., and it had four pairs of red lights spaced at equal distances along its body. These lights did not appear in any way like exhaust flames; no trace was seen. The object kept a level course.

The crew saw the object twice during the raid, and brief details are given below:-

‘(i) After bombing, time 2240 hours, a/c height 11,000 feet. The aircraft at this time was some 10/15 miles south-west of Turin travelling in a north-westerly direction. The object was travelling south-east at the same height or slightly below the aircraft.

(ii) After bombing, time 2245 hours, a/c height 14,000 feet. the aircraft was approaching the Alps when the object was seen again travelling west-south-west up a valley in the Alps below the level of the peaks. The lights appeared to go out and the object disappeared from view.’

Had this incident been a one-off sighting it could perhaps have been dismissed, although as what we are not sure. But two distinct sightings of what appears to be the same object traveling in different directions raise more questions than answers. Even more baffling was the final paragraph which soberly stated:

‘The Captain of the aircraft also reports that he has seen a similar object about three months ago north of Amsterdam. In this instance it appeared to be on the ground and later traveling at high speed at a lower level than the heights given above along the coast for about two seconds; the lights then went out for the same period of time and came on again, and the object was still seen to be traveling in the same direction.’

It is difficult to know what to make of this sighting. Bomber Command was impressed by the sincerity of the report, and the fact that the crew was bold enough to repeat their fantastic story to their incredulous colleagues. The object resembles no known aerial craft and can not be easily attributed to misperception of astronomical or meteorological phenomena. The case remains one of the most unusual UFO mysteries of W.W.II on file at the Public Record Office.

We discovered another RAF account of a huge UFO in the files of the British UFO Research Association. Whilst this case is not, as yet, backed up by any documentary evidence the detailed account is worth relating here. Sgt Pilot G.N. Cockcroft of Bradford, West Yorkshire, who flew with a Halifax bomber squadron, recalled:

“On the night of 26/27 May 1943 we were to carry out an attack on the Krupps Armament Works at Essen. As I recall between 400/500 aircraft were involved in the raid. We experienced the usual flak, when crossing the Dutch coast….but fortunately sustained no serious damage. The barrage flak in the Ruhr Valley was extremely heavy, particularly in the last few minutes on the approach to the target. The first wave had already bombed and the general target area was well alight.

“It was in the two or three minutes before our final run-in, when we were at approximately 18,700 feet when we saw in front, but slightly to port and about the same height, a long cylindrical object, silvery gold colour, very sharply defined, hanging in the sky at an angle of approximately 45 degrees. There were, evenly spaced along the length of the object, a number of port holes. The first crew member to sight this object was the Captain, at that time Sgt/Pilot Ray Smith of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Besides Ray and myself other members of the crew to see the object, which was called to their attention by the Captain were the bomb aimer, the flight engineer, the mid-upper gunner and wireless operator.”

In fact, the only members of the crew not to see the object were the navigator and rear gunner who were both otherwise engaged in ensuring the bomber didn’t get lost or shot down. Cockcroft continues:

“I think that the first reaction of most of us was amazement because this object just had no right to be there. After a very short space of time, twenty to thirty seconds, it suddenly began moving and, retaining its attitude, climbed rapidly until it vanished from sight. The speed it attained seemed to us completely incredible. It was certainly into the thousands of mph! As it accelerated, the outline became blurred and the shape foreshortened. The size is more difficult to judge but it was very large, certainly very much bigger than our own aircraft, appearing at least as long as a king-sized cigarette or small cigar at arm’s length. We then completed our bomb run and returned to base.

“The intelligence officer de-briefing us was given a description of this object but we were unable to judge what importance was attached to it by the authorities and, quite frankly, it was just another unusual phenomenon which, since apparently harmless, was of far less importance to us than other wartime hazards.”

In their efforts to explain foo-fighter phenomena sceptics have suggested that some may have been examples of very bright, long lasting meteors known as a bolides. This may indeed be the case. But bolide meteors cannot account for the instances where bombers were ‘chased’ for long periods of time by foo-fighters. Perhaps the most remarkable case of an aircraft pursuit comes from the penultimate year of the war.

On the evening of 26th April 1944 Arthur Horton taxied his Lancaster bomber onto the runway at RAF Mildenhall in preparation for a raid to Essen in Germany. It was, he thought, just another routine, if terrifying, mission. When interviewed by us in 1987 Horton claimed he had not heard about any unusual aerial phenomena during the war and as usual was only concerned with the task in hand - find the target, drop the bombs and return home as quickly and safely as possible. He had no idea of the events which would unfold over the next few hours, and how ‘The Thing’, as he called it, would almost cost him and his crew their lives.

The raid went as exactly as planned despite the potentially fatal distractions of Luftwaffe night-fighters and the flak which sought them in the searchlight beams. Bombs dropped, the Lanc. turned for home and the crew allowed themselves to relax slightly. But shortly after leaving the target Horton’s intercom crackled into life with a panicky warning from his rear-gunner. Unidentified lights had appeared out of the darkness and were following the ‘plane. Horton asked the gunner if he was certain. Yes, he replied, four orange balls of light were tailing them, two on each side of the aircraft, accelerating in short, powerful, spurts. According to the frightened gunner they were about the size of large footballs and had a fiery glow to them. Intercom reports made it clear that other crew members could see them now, and Horton realised they must be real and not hallucinations brought on by combat fatigue. One gunner thought he could see small, stubby wings and possibly an exhaust glow from the rear of the objects. Now Horton was getting worried. He had never experienced anything like this before and whilst the unidentified flying objects were not displaying any signs of aggression he couldn’t take the risk. Forty three years after the event Arthur Horton clearly recalled exactly what he did next:

‘I of course immediately dropped the aircraft out of the sky. My gunners didn’t know what they were. Should they fire? By this time I was standing the aircraft on its tail and beginning a series of corkscrews and turns with the things following everything I did - but making no move to attack us. By this time we had the throttles ‘through the gate’, the gunners still asking what they should do. Apart from flying the thing I had to try and answer them. But were they some form of flying contraption that would explode at some specific distance from us, or on contact? Did they want us to fire at them to cause an explosion? Out of the kaleidoscope of thought the only answer was ‘If they are leaving us alone, leave them alone’....’ »

Horton’s term ‘through the gate’ refers to a technique by which Lancaster pilots could move the throttle sideways and forwards, breaking a wire, ‘the gate’, in the process. This would then give considerable extra power. But the strain on the engines was immense and three minutes was the maximum amount of time recommended. Horton continued evasive action for ten minutes, during which time all the crew except he and the bomb aimer saw the phenomena. Whatever the objects were they stayed close to the Lancaster, duplicating its every move, until they reached the Dutch coast when, in the words of one of the gunners, ‘they seemed to burn themselves out’.

Exhausted, but relieved, Horton flew the Lancaster back to England. His dramatic evasive manoeuvres had caused a serious mechanical fault which resulted in them having to land at a different airfield. Horton and his crew were baffled by their mystery visitors, and could only presume they had been chased by a German secret weapon, perhaps a radio-controlled anti-aircraft rocket or shell. Upon reporting their experience to the Intelligence Officers at de-briefing they were met not with interest but with ridicule and no explanation as to what they had experienced. But Horton stuck to his account and wouldn’t be persuaded that his crew had imagined the glowing orange balls.

We have been unable to locate reference to this sighting in PRO files but evidence it took place does exist. In his log book for the flight Horton recorded they had been ‘Chased by rockets -4’. Bernard Dye, the mid-upper gunner also noted the incident in his log-book as, ‘Rocket attacks lasting ten minutes...’.

Although Horton and his crew had never heard of anything similar before or since, the phenomena they witnessed are entirely consistent with other so-called ‘foo-fighter’ experiences. Perhaps if Horton’s rear-gunner had risked opening fire we may be a lot wiser about the nature of the foo-fighter phenomenon. But then again perhaps not. It was a risk Flt Lt Horton was not prepared to take.

Several other aircrew reported unusual aerial phenomena in terms of ‘rockets’. Yet post war research has demonstrated that the Axis forces did not have the capability to produce rockets which could twist and turn whilst following an airplane and certainly not for the lengths of time reported. Consider the following two accounts. Rockets? Or something more sinister?

Flt Lt Mortimer reported the following to intelligence officers at debriefing after a raid on the night of 2 January 1944:

‘Engaged by two rockets in vicinity of Halberstadt and later near Hanover, 90 degrees alteration of courses made and definitely established that rockets altered course. Overtook us slowly, appearing with a fiery head and blazing stern on a parallel course. Initial velocity seemed to be fairly great. Disappeared without explosion.’

Another, similar, incident took place on the 29 January 1944 when Pilot Officer Simpson submitted the following report to Air Intelligence:

‘At 52 32N 13 03E, 2037 hours, 20,500 ft, heading 082 degrees True. A red ball leaving trail of yellow/red flames and black smoke at about 1,000 yards and at the same time dead astern. It was seen closing in. I dived to starboard and the object followed, appearing to fizzle out and then immediately to reappear. I turned hard to port and it followed us round in a tighter turn than we were in. When within 100 yards or less of the aircraft, it finally fizzled out.’

German rocket? Bolide meteor? Or unexplained aerial phenomena – a UFO? The Air Intelligence officers at de-briefing dutifully logged these and many other sightings, sifting carefully through them in a number of ‘secret’ reports which analysed their characteristics in great detail. The conclusions reached in 1944-45 were no different to the conclusions reached by the MOD in the year 2002 – basically ‘no defence significance’. Once it had been ascertained that these UFOs did not explode, fire or display aggressive characteristics Air Intelligence was content to let the matter drop, maintaining a watching brief. There was a war on they could not afford to waste time and money chasing phantoms of the skies.

As with all other phases of the UFO enigma, argument has raged down the decades among ‘experts’ as to just what has been witnessed by those terrified and puzzled air crew. In that respect the foo-fighter enigma does not differ from sightings of phantom airships during the early twentieth century or observations of flying triangles during the last few years of the millennium. And, of course, it’s very easy for us as vicarious consumers of others’ experiences to pontificate about misperception of natural phenomena such as meteors and misidentification of enemy jet planes, rockets and flak. Speculation does not in any way diminish the effect these sightings had upon the witnesses. We are not, as yet, certain just what were the stimuli behind the ‘foo-fighter’ reports. But, as with all UFO sightings, the perceived experience is always radically different from the reality of the stimuli, and it is within that tension where the answer to the UFO problem lies. The problem is – are we prepared to accept the answers?

For a full list of references see chapter 1 of Out of the Shadows (London: Piatkus 2002)

Copyright David Clarke and Andy Roberts 2003

The RAF Experience

Dr. David Clarke & Andy Roberts - Originally published in UFO Magazine (UK) January 2003

The future was uncertain for those who joined the Royal Air Force at the start of World War II. All were volunteers and many looked upon their baptism into the world of flight and combat as an adventure which would bring experiences both good and bad. But none expected the strangest experience they would face would be unidentified flying objects that would play tag with their aircraft during raids on occupied Europe.

In recent years much has been written about UFOs seen during World War Two and although there is as yet no single work which deals comprehensively with the subject, many UFO books and magazines feature stories about the so-called ‘foo-fighters’. Unfortunately the majority of these are sensationalised or un- referenced accounts dealing solely with the American experience and until recently little was known of the experiences of RAF aircrews and the response of the British government to these reports.

In an attempt to redress that balance, since 1987 we have been digging deep into the foo-fighter mystery. There have been two, intertwined, strands to this approach. The first has been interviews with the many combat air crew who witnessed this perplexing aerial phenomena and the second has been research into studies of the phenomena by the Air Ministry.

During WWII the terms ‘UFO’ and ‘flying saucer’ were yet to be invented. But it is human nature to name the unknown in an attempt to make it explicable and thus hopefully to understand it better. The name which stuck to WWII aerial phenomena and which has become widely known was ‘foo-fighters’, a term given to them by an unknown American airman, probably in 1943. No-one is certain where the name came from but it may have originated in a popular 1940s U.S. cartoon strip featuring the character Smokey Stover, whose catch phrase was ‘where there’s foo, there’s fire’. Alternatively ‘foo’ may have derived from the French word for fire - ‘feu’ -, the phenomenon often being described as resembling a fireball.

Whatever its origin, ‘foo-fighter’ was a term specific to the United States Air Force, and appears not to have been used in a British context until March 1945. But our research has revealed that RAF air crew during WWII had their own names for the UFOs they saw. Based on information gleaned from interviews with surviving aircrew and details in log books, it appears that ‘The Light’ or ‘The Thing’ were the two most common terms used in RAF squadrons from 1942 onwards. One early contemporary example comes from December 14 1943, when Squadron Leader P. Wells wrote in his flight log of a, ‘Screaming dog-fight with the “light”’. In a 1987 interview we asked Wells if he was aware the American’s were seeing similar phenomena and if he knew of the term ‘foo-fighter’. He replied, ‘...foo-fighters is a new name to me, we always called them “The Light” in the squadrons in which I served in 1943-44’. Other air crew, baffled by the lights which pursued or paced them, rationalised their sightings as evidence of new jets or ‘rockets’ and referred to them in those terms in flight logs and at debriefings. However, the term ‘The Thing’ stuck in people’s minds and was being used by British witnesses and newspapers in relation to UFOs well into the 1960s when it was applied to the UFOs seen during the famous Warminster flap

No-one knows who the first RAF air crew to see a UFO in WWII was, but one of the earliest recorded RAF encounters comes from B.C. Lumsden who observed two classic foo-fighters while flying a Hurricane fighter over France in December 1942.

Lumsden had left England at seven p.m., for a mission over the French coast. An hour later, while cruising at 7,000 feet over the mouth of the River Somme, he discovered that he had company. Two steadily climbing orange-coloured lights, with one slightly above the other. Lumsden at first thought the lights may be tracer flak, but discarded the idea when he saw how slowly the objects were moving. He did a full turn and saw the lights astern and to port but now they were larger and brighter. At 7,000 feet they stopped climbing and stayed level with his Hurricane. The frightened pilot executed another full turn, only to discover that the objects had stayed with him. Lumsden nose-dived to 4,000 feet with the lights following his every manoeuvre. Finally they descended to about 1,000 feet below him until he leveled out, at which point they climbed again and resumed pursuit. The two lights seemed to maintain an even distance from each other and varied only slightly in relative height from time to time. One always remained a little lower than the other. At last, as Lumsden's speed reached 260 miles per hour, he was gradually able to outdistance the UFOs. ‘I found it hard to make other members of the squadron believe me when I told my story,’ Lumsden said, ‘but the following night one of the squadron flight commanders in the same area had a similar experience with a green light.’

Lumsden’s account was just one of a growing number which reached the Air Ministry during 1942. By early autumn enough sightings had been reported to warrant an official statement and on 25th September a report classified SECRET was issued by the Air Ministry’s Operation Research Section, entitled A Note On Recent Enemy Pyrotechnic Activity Over Germany. Baffled by the flood of reports, the report’s authors discussed the possible causes of the phenomenon. They concluded, not entirely convincingly, that the sightings were new or misperceived types of German anti-aircraft shells and referred to them as ‘Phenomena 1’ and ‘Phenomena 2’, suggesting that more suitable names be given them in a report being prepared by a branch of military intelligence, M.I. 14.»

This report was one of a series produced throughout the war by the Air Ministry. Although aircrew believed that the Intelligence departments were not taking the matter seriously enough, report after report was being carefully collected and thoroughly analysed. Documents recently discovered in the Public Record Office convincingly demonstrate that, rather than causing the Air Ministry to believe they were being visited by a strange and unknown phenomena, the reports were treated soberly and with caution. Just as today’s Ministry of Defence analyses UFO reports for their defence implications, so the besieged Air Ministry was concerned that the WWII sightings may have represented some new Axis weapon and they monitored the situation accordingly.

However, several well known UFO writers have suggested there was a top secret study conducted by the Air Ministry during WWII and which was the genesis of alleged ‘cover up’. We have conducted an in depth study of these claims and found them to be without foundation. Even the great UFO enthusiast and wartime pilot Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard did not believe any such study existed, writing in 1978:

‘This implies Treasury sanction; it suggests that in the middle of the War against Germany when we had our hands full and it was far from certain that we could survive, the Air Ministry was concerned that a UFO menace existed: it most certainly was not….’

Yet the response by Air Intelligence to aircrew who reported UFOs during the wartime years appears baffling. Why did they appear to take so little interest? Why was there no detailed de-briefing of the witnesses? Why did they not send up observers to film or observe the phenomena for themselves? These and other questions frequently came up during our interviews with RAF aircrew who witnessed these phenomena. But the documentary evidence at the Public Record Office shows that the RAF had been taking a great deal of interest in the sightings. Files in the PRO reveal that Air Intelligence had a wealth of information on all kinds of unusual radar trackings, ‘mystery’ aircraft and unusual rockets and flak, gathered from all branches of the RAF. Each sighting was carefully analysed in the context of known weaponry, enemy tactics and the psychological problems of misperception.

The attitude displayed in these documents is best summed up by the late comedian and former Goon show star Michael Bentine:

‘When I was an intelligence officer in Bomber Command in the winter of 1943-44, I debriefed several crews about some lights that had attacked them when they were over the Baltic. They fired at the lights, which didn’t shoot back. These lights didn’t seem to do anything, just pulse and go round. We put it down to fatigue, but later, after I had sent the reports in, an American G2 Intelligence Officer told us that their bombers saw lights in the sky - ‘foo-fighters’ he called them.’

In another interview Bentine described how he debriefed a Polish bomber unit based in England. They claimed that silver-blue balls appeared near their wing on six missions during the autumn of 1943. These tailed the planes as they raided the Nazi V-weapons base at Peenemunde. The crews told Bentine it must be a new weapon. ‘But what did it do to you?’ Bentine inquired. ‘Nothing,’ they replied. "Well it was not a very effective weapon, was it?" he pointed out. Bentine’s last statement accurately sums up the conclusions reached by the Air Ministry during their study of these phenomena – whatever the ‘foo-fighters’ were, they did not constitute a threat to aircraft.

So, it seems that there has never been a ‘cover-up’ by the British Government of information about WWII UFOs, just a collection of baffling reports consigned to the dusty shelves of the Public Record Office. It is interesting however that some of the personnel who were involved with WWII UFO analysis, such as the Sir Henry Tizard and the Air Ministry’s Director of Intelligence, Dr R.V. Jones, were also involved in studies of Ghost Rockets in 1946 and the ‘flying saucer’ sightings from 1947 to the mid 1950s. Using their rigorous techniques of analysis, borne out of wartime necessity they continued to view UFO sightings with interest but ultimately regarded them as a modern myth based on misperception. Researchers who wish to trace the roots of the MOD’s current attitude to UFOs should seek out the files held by the PRO to discover how the conclusions which have endured for over fifty years, were originally formulated.

Witness accounts and documentary evidence indicates that the majority of WWII UFO sightings were of small spherical objects. However, two RAF sightings have come to our attention which indicates huge objects were also being seen by aircrew. Whilst it is possible that other foo-fighter sightings may have been new types of flak such as ‘scarecrow’, designed to mimic an aircraft in flames, flak tracer or jets such as the ME262, none of these prosaic explanations can account for the following sighting, which took place on the night of 28 November 1942.

The sighting was thought to be of such significance that it was sent to the headquarters of Bomber Command Recorded in a document, stamped ‘SECRET’. The covering letter, from the Air Vice Marshal of no. 5 Group. RAF, read, ‘Herewith a copy of a report received from a crew of a Lancaster after a raid on Turin. The crew refuses to be shaken in their story in the face of the usual banter and ridicule.’ »

The document referred to an unusual sighting made by the entire crew of aircraft ‘J’, piloted by Captain Lever of 61 Squadron, based at Syerston in Lincolnshire. If a sighting such as this were made by the whole crew of an aeroplane today it would make headline news in every country in the world. As it was it this fascinating report has remained hidden for over half a century deep in the heart of the Public Records Office. Written by an anonymous intelligence officer the account reads:

‘The object referred to above was seen by the entire crew of the above aircraft. They believe it to have been 200-300 feet in length and its width is estimated at 1/5th or 1/6th of its length. The speed was estimated at 500 m.p.h., and it had four pairs of red lights spaced at equal distances along its body. These lights did not appear in any way like exhaust flames; no trace was seen. The object kept a level course.

The crew saw the object twice during the raid, and brief details are given below:-

‘(i) After bombing, time 2240 hours, a/c height 11,000 feet. The aircraft at this time was some 10/15 miles south-west of Turin travelling in a north-westerly direction. The object was travelling south-east at the same height or slightly below the aircraft.

(ii) After bombing, time 2245 hours, a/c height 14,000 feet. the aircraft was approaching the Alps when the object was seen again travelling west-south-west up a valley in the Alps below the level of the peaks. The lights appeared to go out and the object disappeared from view.’

Had this incident been a one-off sighting it could perhaps have been dismissed, although as what we are not sure. But two distinct sightings of what appears to be the same object traveling in different directions raise more questions than answers. Even more baffling was the final paragraph which soberly stated:

‘The Captain of the aircraft also reports that he has seen a similar object about three months ago north of Amsterdam. In this instance it appeared to be on the ground and later traveling at high speed at a lower level than the heights given above along the coast for about two seconds; the lights then went out for the same period of time and came on again, and the object was still seen to be traveling in the same direction.’

It is difficult to know what to make of this sighting. Bomber Command was impressed by the sincerity of the report, and the fact that the crew was bold enough to repeat their fantastic story to their incredulous colleagues. The object resembles no known aerial craft and can not be easily attributed to misperception of astronomical or meteorological phenomena. The case remains one of the most unusual UFO mysteries of W.W.II on file at the Public Record Office.

We discovered another RAF account of a huge UFO in the files of the British UFO Research Association. Whilst this case is not, as yet, backed up by any documentary evidence the detailed account is worth relating here. Sgt Pilot G.N. Cockcroft of Bradford, West Yorkshire, who flew with a Halifax bomber squadron, recalled:

“On the night of 26/27 May 1943 we were to carry out an attack on the Krupps Armament Works at Essen. As I recall between 400/500 aircraft were involved in the raid. We experienced the usual flak, when crossing the Dutch coast….but fortunately sustained no serious damage. The barrage flak in the Ruhr Valley was extremely heavy, particularly in the last few minutes on the approach to the target. The first wave had already bombed and the general target area was well alight.

“It was in the two or three minutes before our final run-in, when we were at approximately 18,700 feet when we saw in front, but slightly to port and about the same height, a long cylindrical object, silvery gold colour, very sharply defined, hanging in the sky at an angle of approximately 45 degrees. There were, evenly spaced along the length of the object, a number of port holes. The first crew member to sight this object was the Captain, at that time Sgt/Pilot Ray Smith of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Besides Ray and myself other members of the crew to see the object, which was called to their attention by the Captain were the bomb aimer, the flight engineer, the mid-upper gunner and wireless operator.”

In fact, the only members of the crew not to see the object were the navigator and rear gunner who were both otherwise engaged in ensuring the bomber didn’t get lost or shot down. Cockcroft continues:

“I think that the first reaction of most of us was amazement because this object just had no right to be there. After a very short space of time, twenty to thirty seconds, it suddenly began moving and, retaining its attitude, climbed rapidly until it vanished from sight. The speed it attained seemed to us completely incredible. It was certainly into the thousands of mph! As it accelerated, the outline became blurred and the shape foreshortened. The size is more difficult to judge but it was very large, certainly very much bigger than our own aircraft, appearing at least as long as a king-sized cigarette or small cigar at arm’s length. We then completed our bomb run and returned to base.

“The intelligence officer de-briefing us was given a description of this object but we were unable to judge what importance was attached to it by the authorities and, quite frankly, it was just another unusual phenomenon which, since apparently harmless, was of far less importance to us than other wartime hazards.”

In their efforts to explain foo-fighter phenomena sceptics have suggested that some may have been examples of very bright, long lasting meteors known as a bolides. This may indeed be the case. But bolide meteors cannot account for the instances where bombers were ‘chased’ for long periods of time by foo-fighters. Perhaps the most remarkable case of an aircraft pursuit comes from the penultimate year of the war.

On the evening of 26th April 1944 Arthur Horton taxied his Lancaster bomber onto the runway at RAF Mildenhall in preparation for a raid to Essen in Germany. It was, he thought, just another routine, if terrifying, mission. When interviewed by us in 1987 Horton claimed he had not heard about any unusual aerial phenomena during the war and as usual was only concerned with the task in hand - find the target, drop the bombs and return home as quickly and safely as possible. He had no idea of the events which would unfold over the next few hours, and how ‘The Thing’, as he called it, would almost cost him and his crew their lives.

The raid went as exactly as planned despite the potentially fatal distractions of Luftwaffe night-fighters and the flak which sought them in the searchlight beams. Bombs dropped, the Lanc. turned for home and the crew allowed themselves to relax slightly. But shortly after leaving the target Horton’s intercom crackled into life with a panicky warning from his rear-gunner. Unidentified lights had appeared out of the darkness and were following the ‘plane. Horton asked the gunner if he was certain. Yes, he replied, four orange balls of light were tailing them, two on each side of the aircraft, accelerating in short, powerful, spurts. According to the frightened gunner they were about the size of large footballs and had a fiery glow to them. Intercom reports made it clear that other crew members could see them now, and Horton realised they must be real and not hallucinations brought on by combat fatigue. One gunner thought he could see small, stubby wings and possibly an exhaust glow from the rear of the objects. Now Horton was getting worried. He had never experienced anything like this before and whilst the unidentified flying objects were not displaying any signs of aggression he couldn’t take the risk. Forty three years after the event Arthur Horton clearly recalled exactly what he did next:

‘I of course immediately dropped the aircraft out of the sky. My gunners didn’t know what they were. Should they fire? By this time I was standing the aircraft on its tail and beginning a series of corkscrews and turns with the things following everything I did - but making no move to attack us. By this time we had the throttles ‘through the gate’, the gunners still asking what they should do. Apart from flying the thing I had to try and answer them. But were they some form of flying contraption that would explode at some specific distance from us, or on contact? Did they want us to fire at them to cause an explosion? Out of the kaleidoscope of thought the only answer was ‘If they are leaving us alone, leave them alone’....’ »

Horton’s term ‘through the gate’ refers to a technique by which Lancaster pilots could move the throttle sideways and forwards, breaking a wire, ‘the gate’, in the process. This would then give considerable extra power. But the strain on the engines was immense and three minutes was the maximum amount of time recommended. Horton continued evasive action for ten minutes, during which time all the crew except he and the bomb aimer saw the phenomena. Whatever the objects were they stayed close to the Lancaster, duplicating its every move, until they reached the Dutch coast when, in the words of one of the gunners, ‘they seemed to burn themselves out’.

Exhausted, but relieved, Horton flew the Lancaster back to England. His dramatic evasive manoeuvres had caused a serious mechanical fault which resulted in them having to land at a different airfield. Horton and his crew were baffled by their mystery visitors, and could only presume they had been chased by a German secret weapon, perhaps a radio-controlled anti-aircraft rocket or shell. Upon reporting their experience to the Intelligence Officers at de-briefing they were met not with interest but with ridicule and no explanation as to what they had experienced. But Horton stuck to his account and wouldn’t be persuaded that his crew had imagined the glowing orange balls.

We have been unable to locate reference to this sighting in PRO files but evidence it took place does exist. In his log book for the flight Horton recorded they had been ‘Chased by rockets -4’. Bernard Dye, the mid-upper gunner also noted the incident in his log-book as, ‘Rocket attacks lasting ten minutes...’.

Although Horton and his crew had never heard of anything similar before or since, the phenomena they witnessed are entirely consistent with other so-called ‘foo-fighter’ experiences. Perhaps if Horton’s rear-gunner had risked opening fire we may be a lot wiser about the nature of the foo-fighter phenomenon. But then again perhaps not. It was a risk Flt Lt Horton was not prepared to take.

Several other aircrew reported unusual aerial phenomena in terms of ‘rockets’. Yet post war research has demonstrated that the Axis forces did not have the capability to produce rockets which could twist and turn whilst following an airplane and certainly not for the lengths of time reported. Consider the following two accounts. Rockets? Or something more sinister?

Flt Lt Mortimer reported the following to intelligence officers at debriefing after a raid on the night of 2 January 1944:

‘Engaged by two rockets in vicinity of Halberstadt and later near Hanover, 90 degrees alteration of courses made and definitely established that rockets altered course. Overtook us slowly, appearing with a fiery head and blazing stern on a parallel course. Initial velocity seemed to be fairly great. Disappeared without explosion.’

Another, similar, incident took place on the 29 January 1944 when Pilot Officer Simpson submitted the following report to Air Intelligence:

‘At 52 32N 13 03E, 2037 hours, 20,500 ft, heading 082 degrees True. A red ball leaving trail of yellow/red flames and black smoke at about 1,000 yards and at the same time dead astern. It was seen closing in. I dived to starboard and the object followed, appearing to fizzle out and then immediately to reappear. I turned hard to port and it followed us round in a tighter turn than we were in. When within 100 yards or less of the aircraft, it finally fizzled out.’

German rocket? Bolide meteor? Or unexplained aerial phenomena – a UFO? The Air Intelligence officers at de-briefing dutifully logged these and many other sightings, sifting carefully through them in a number of ‘secret’ reports which analysed their characteristics in great detail. The conclusions reached in 1944-45 were no different to the conclusions reached by the MOD in the year 2002 – basically ‘no defence significance’. Once it had been ascertained that these UFOs did not explode, fire or display aggressive characteristics Air Intelligence was content to let the matter drop, maintaining a watching brief. There was a war on they could not afford to waste time and money chasing phantoms of the skies.

As with all other phases of the UFO enigma, argument has raged down the decades among ‘experts’ as to just what has been witnessed by those terrified and puzzled air crew. In that respect the foo-fighter enigma does not differ from sightings of phantom airships during the early twentieth century or observations of flying triangles during the last few years of the millennium. And, of course, it’s very easy for us as vicarious consumers of others’ experiences to pontificate about misperception of natural phenomena such as meteors and misidentification of enemy jet planes, rockets and flak. Speculation does not in any way diminish the effect these sightings had upon the witnesses. We are not, as yet, certain just what were the stimuli behind the ‘foo-fighter’ reports. But, as with all UFO sightings, the perceived experience is always radically different from the reality of the stimuli, and it is within that tension where the answer to the UFO problem lies. The problem is – are we prepared to accept the answers?

For a full list of references see chapter 1 of Out of the Shadows (London: Piatkus 2002)