Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm a military aviation historian, been at it for about fifteen years now. I've spent the last decade researching something that most people have never heard of, even though it happened to hundreds of Allied pilots during World War II. They called them foo fighters. And before you ask, yeah, that's where the band got their name. But the thing is, this wasn't some joke to the men who saw them. These were trained military pilots. Night fighter crews. Bombardiers. Radar operators. Professional airmen with excellent service records. And what they reported seeing over the skies of Germany and the Pacific, it shook them to their core. One pilot from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron described how he felt when he saw them. His exact words were, scared shitless. That's not something you say lightly when you're already flying combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe.
The story really starts in late November 1944. The 415th was stationed near Dijon, France, flying Bristol Beaufighters over the Rhine Valley. One night, a crew was patrolling just north of Strasbourg, right on the French-German border. Partly cloudy, quarter moon. The pilot was Lieutenant Edgar Schell. His radar operator was Lieutenant Dan Meyers. And riding along as observer was their intelligence officer, Lieutenant Fritz Ringwell. Ringwell was the first to see them. He pointed to the hills and said, I wonder what those lights are over there. There were eight to ten of them in a row, glowing fiery orange. Then Schell spotted them off his right wing. They checked with ground radar. Nothing. Their own onboard equipment registered nothing. Whatever these things were, they weren't showing up on any screen. Schell figured they might be some kind of German weapon, so he turned the plane to engage. The moment he did, the lights just vanished.
At first, the crew didn't say anything. They were afraid of being laughed at, or worse, grounded for psychological evaluation. But then other crews started reporting the same thing. And that's when Meyers gave them a name. He was from Chicago, big fan of a comic strip called Smokey Stover about a firefighter. The character had this catchphrase, where there's foo, there's fire. So after one mission, Meyers stormed into the debriefing room, slammed a copy of the comic on Ringwell's desk and said, it was another one of those foo fighters. The name stuck. fighters and ww2, I have heard about this - Naomi' Though I should mention, the original version had a different word in front of foo. The records cleaned that up later. The reports kept coming in through December. December 17th, a pilot near Breisach saw five or six flashing red and green lights in a T-shape. They followed him, closing to within a thousand feet before disappearing. December 22nd, two more crews had sightings. One reported two lights in a large orange glow rising from the earth to ten thousand feet. They tailed the fighter for about two minutes, then peeled off and flew level for a while before going out. The pilot noted they appeared to be under perfect control at all times.
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