FOO FIGHTERS pt.1

FOO FIGHTERS pt.2

FOO FIGHTERS pt.3

FOO FIGHTERS pt.4

Germans were also seeing unconventional arial objects which they, like their Allied counterparts, assumed to be enemy weapons.  A resident of Dresden gave this accounts to the German UFO magazine Weltraumbote in 1958: "It happened here, in March or early April 1945.  I had a clear view of the sky from my position.  My first thought was that it was an airplane.  But I could see plainly that it was round, and had neither propeller nor wings. Also, it was hovering noislessly in the air.  Then it suddenly disappeared, like a broken soap bubble.  I also recall that the unfamiliar object was silvery-colored and flat--not round like a baloon.  I especially remember the sudden disappearance, like something that wanted to avoid my gaze...  The war was till going on at the time, and that evening I spoke to a friend.  'Oh, did you see it, too?' he asked.  No doubt aircraft pilots also observed it."

In April, aerial gunner James V. Byrnes observed a "crystal ball" as it paced his B-24 bomber at a distance of about 30 to 40 feet.  "This object was definitely no hallucination," he told NICAP many years later. A few days before V-E Day in May 1945, a yellowish-white foo, "brighter than any star, or even the planet Venus...  passed completely from horizon to horizon in about two seconds," according to Lynn R. Momo, who was on guard duty at Ohrdorf, a small hamlet on the Elbe about 40 miles west of Berlin. "Its speed was enormous," and it made no sound.  Momo was certain its altitude was no more than 2,000 feet.

As we already have noted, radar sightings of UFOs during WWII were extremely rare, but they were not nonexistant, as Andrew V. Amrose, a radar operator with an antiaircraft battalion, was able to attest.

"I had frequently picked up a target on the radar screen that appeared to be a conventional aircraft," he said.  "But...  upon being tracked [it] would accelerate to a fantastic speed, which made it impossible to set a rate on and even more difficult to identify.  So we referred to them as 'ghosts'... I have always been puzzled by the occurrence of these sightings I have personally made on radar."

William A. Mandel of Los Angeles recalled:

"During the summer of 1945 I was stationed in northern Okinawa.  I was an artillery captain on duty with the military government.  I don't recall the exact date.

"Our bivouac was situated on a bluff facing the East China Sea and overlooking a very narrow stretch of beach.  On a clear moonlight evening I was gazing seaward when I suddenly saw a bright speck of light approaching from the south paralleling the coast.

"The light proved to be coming from the rear of a cigar-shaped object which I could see quite clearly.  It gave out no light except from the tail.  It passed me at a distance of no more than 500 yards and must have been considerably closer.  I judged its speed at from 200 to 300 miles per hour (definitely not jet or rocket speed) at an altitude of not over 400 feet-- probably less since it seemed to pass me at eye level and I stood no more than 200 feet above sea level.

"The object had no wings nor were there any ports or windows visible.  The object moved smoothly and silently at a constant speed along the coast until it disappeared from sight.  I judged the object to be 30 to 40 feet long with a diameter of six to eight feet." Another series of sightings from the Pacific theatre occurred somewhat earlier, on the nights of May 23rd and 25th.  During the bombing raids on Tokyo Americans and Japanese saw objects described as "round, speedy balls of fire" and "flying hotcakes."  The weird lights, about 20 yards in diameter, "were blue--maybe grey...  They were followedseveral times six foot wide and 30 foot long colored air waves," in the words of one witness Tomoyo Okado. Andrew Cimbala of Duquesne, Pa., told this story in 1954:

"In August 1945, while in the Navy, I had the anchor watch at Ulithi in the South Pacific.  Just after sunset, while it was not yet dark enough for the stars to show, I saw a red streak appear in the sky to the east.  It traveled directly over my head, heading west toward Japan.  It was visible for 40 seconds or more from the time it came into view.  It reminded me of a hot bar of steel about a half inch wide and about a foot long.  It was not a flame.  No object of any kind was visible in front of the red streak."

Leonard Stringfield, who would later become a prominent ufologist, was among those aboard a C-46 en route to occupy Atssgi Airdrome, near Tokyo, on August 28th, just prior to the proposed major Allied landing of occupation forces. Suddenly, midway between Ie Shoma and Iwo Jima, the plane's left engine began to fail.

"As the plane dipped, sputtered oil, and lost altitude," he wrote, "I remember looking out through one of the windows and to my surprise, seeing three unidentifiable blobs of brilliant white light, each about the size of a dime held at arm's length."  The lights traveled in a straight line through the clouds, keeping pace and staying parallel with the C-46.  "When my plane pulled up," Stringfield said, "the objects remained below and then disappeared into a could bank."

It was only years later that Stringfield, who my then had become familiar with cases in which UFOs seem to have cause electromagnetic interference with planes and cars, thought to connect the sputtering engine with the enigmatic blobs.  He remembered that it had been the left engine which had malfunctioned, and that the UFOs had been on that side of the aircraft.

That same monthe the crew of the U.S.S. Bradford spotted a "star" streaking across the sky 600 miles east-southeast of Kyushu, Japan.  After turing right, it shot upward at fantastic speed, later estimated to be about 3,000 miles per hour.  Oddly, according to Lt. Dan MacDougald, though "we were equipped with surface search, air search, and fire control radar...  none... could pick up the object."

One curious feature of the WWII sightings is the abscence of landing or occupant reports.  If there were any, to our knowledge no one has come foward with information to this effect.  Of course, we assume for the moment that some kind of intelligence directs the UFOs, we might speculate that the ufonauts considered such activity too dangerous--they might have been mistaken for enemy soldiers and shot at. 

But that, as we say, is just speculation.

Another puzzling aspect of all this, in view of the many post-1947 radar cases, is the foos' way of foiling radar scopes.  Skeptics have always taken delight in this fact, seeing it as proof that the objects were in fact optical illusions ir natural phenomena. Those not content with such simpleminded solutions include researcher John Keel, who believes that the amorphous lights which figure in most WWII accounts, and in many postwar reports as well, are the "real" UFOs.  The so-called craft--the discs, cigar-shapes, and the other objects out of whose appearances flying saucer enthusiasts have fashioned the interplanetary theory of UFO origin--in Keel's opinion are really engineered to mislead us. Whether this is true or not, there is no denying that the foo fighters were something very strange indeed.  Today, years later, we know no more about their origin and purpose than did the author of an article published in the December 1945 American Legion Magazine, and we can only echo his concluding words: