FOO FIGHTERS pt.1

FOO FIGHTERS pt.2

FOO FIGHTERS pt.3

FOO FIGHTERS pt.4

THE MYSTERIOUS "FOO FIGHTERS" OF WWII

During WWII, when a series of incomprehensible events suddenly erupted over battle zones from North Africa to Guadalcanal to the Rhineland, hundreds of fliers and infantrymen on both sides of the conflict had occasion to look into the skies at a mystery that has never been explained.  Whatever the cause, these weird aerial apparitions, which came to be known as "foo fighters", were enough to make witnesses forget momentarily the life and death concerns of men in combat.

June 24, 1947--the date Kenneth Arnold's Mt. Ranier sighting would firmly plant the phrase Unidentified Flying Objects in the public consciousness-- was more than five years away when the first known sighting of a "foo" took place.  The witnesses were tow sailors of the deck of the S.S. Pulaski, an old Polish vessel which had been converted into a British troopship for use in ferrying soldiers between Durban, South Africa, and Suez, Egypt.  While the ship was cruising thorugh the Indian Ocean during the early morning hours of a clear, starry night in September 1941, seaman Mar Doroba happened to look up and saw, as he recalled some years later, "some strange globe glowing with greenish light, about half the size of the full moon, as it appears to us."

He called out to one of the English gunners and the two of them watched the strange light, which they estimated to be at an altitude of 4,000 to 5,000 feet, as it followed them for the next hour.  Finally the thing "just disappeared."

If there were foo sightings in 1943, as surely there must have been, we have no record of them.  One possible explanation for the scarcity of reports  from that year is that, since at that time UFOs were usually assumed to be secret military weapons, military security kepts reports out of the press and discouraged observers from speaking to outsiders about their experiences. It is also likely, though, that there were comparatively few sightings that year, because even after the war, when soldiers were free to talk, few if  any recalled seeing UFOs in 1943. However, 1944, was another story altogether.  From April of that year through August 1945, there would be no shortage of bizarre phenomena in the sky. Among the first to witness the "things" were the radar plotters of the Argus 16 Combat Intelligence Center at Tarawa, where in April 1944 a "bogey," the blip of an unknown object, was traced moving at the then incredible speed of 700 miles per hour.  When the radar operators had determined there was nothing wrong with their sets, they had no choice but to conclude that it was a supersonic Japanese plane.  Of course, it wasn't, since after the war American intelligence experts found that the Japanese had no such fighter.