Foo fighter

This article is about the aerial phenomenon. For the rock band, see Foo Fighters.

File:Foo Fighter.png

Photo of an alleged foo fighter

The term foo fighter was used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over Europe and the Pacific theatre. Contemporary witnesses often assumed that the foo fighters were secret weapons employed by the enemy, and it was not until after the war that it was discovered neither side had anything to do with them. Despite these fears, foo fighters (whatever they might have been) were apparently never reported to have harmed or tried to harm anyone. To this day the case remains unexplained.

Though usually thought of as blobs of light or fire, several different types of reported phenomena were classified as "foo fighters".

Etymology

"Foo fighter" was supposedly used initially as a semi-derogatory reference to Japanese fighter pilots (known for erratic flying and extreme maneuvering), but it became a catch-all term for fast moving, erratically flying objects. There were several other terms used to describe these objects, such as "Kraut fireballs", but "foo fighter" seems to have been the most popular.

The term is generally thought to have been borrowed from the often surrealist comic strip Smokey Stover. Smokey, a firefighter, was fond of saying, "Where there's foo there's fire." (This "foo" may have come from feu, the French word for "fire", or Feuer the German word for "fire", or from Smokey's mispronunciation of the word "fuel".) A Big Little Book titled Smokey Stover the Foo Fighter was published in 1938. Foo may alternatively have come from either of the French words "faux" meaning "fake", or "fou" meaning "mad."

Some have thought that the term refers to Kung fu ("kong foo") fighting, because of the reported wild, erratic movements of these aerial objects. The term Kung fu was, however, little known in the English language until the late 1960s when it became popular because of the Hong Kong films and the later Kung Fu TV series; before that it was referred to primarily as "Chinese boxing".

History

Foo fighters were reported on many occasions from around the world; a few examples are noted below.

• A nighttime sighting from September, 1941 in the Indian Ocean was similar to some later Foo Fighter reports. From the deck of the S.S. Pułaski (a Polish merchant vessel transporting British troops), two sailors reported a "strange globe glowing with greenish light, about half the size of the full moon as it appears to us." (Clark, 230) They alerted a British officer, who watched the object's movements with them for over an hour.

• On February 28, 1942, just prior to its participation in the Battle of the Java Sea, the USS Houston reportedly saw a large number of strange, unexplained yellow flares and lights which illuminated the sea for miles around.

• A report was made from the Solomon Islands in 1942 by United States Marine Stephen J. Brickner. Following an air raid alarm, Brickner and others witnessed about 150 objects grouped in lines of 10 or 12 objects each. The objects seemed to "wobble" as they moved; Brickner reported that they resembled polished silver and seemed to move a little faster than common Japanese aircraft. He described the sighting, saying "All in all, it was the most awe-inspiring and yet frightening spectacle I have seen in my life."[1]

• Foo fighter reports were mentioned in the mass media. A 1945 Time story stated "If it was not a hoax or an optical illusion, it was certainly the most puzzling secret weapon that Allied fighters have yet encountered. Last week U.S. night fighter pilots based in France told a strange story of balls of fire which for more than a month have been following their planes at night over Germany. No one seemed to know what, if anything, the fireballs were supposed to accomplish. Pilots, guessing it was a new psychological weapon, named it the 'foo-fighter' ... Their descriptions of the apparition varied, but they agree that the mysterious flares stuck close to their planes and appeared to follow them at high speed for miles. One pilot said that a foo-fighter, appearing as red balls off his wing tips, stuck with him until he dove at 360 miles an hour [580 km/h]; then the balls zoomed up into the sky."[2]

• The Robertson Panel cited foo fighter reports, noting that their behavior did not appear to be threatening. Interestingly, the Robertson Panel's report noted that many Foo Fighters were described as metallic and disc-shaped, and suggested that "If the term "flying saucers" had been popular in 1943-1945, these objects would have been so labeled." [3]

Explanations and theories

• The phenomenon could be based on the misinterpretation of the Luftwaffe's standard operating procedure of having selected anti-aircraft batteries near German airfields fire colored flare patterns at regular intervals to aid their night fighters with visual navigation. However, this would not explain sightings at locations where German forces were not deployed or based, such as the Pacific theatre.

• Some suggest that some sightings of foo fighters may have been night-sightings of the German Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket-plane. However, the Me 163 was completely unsuitable for nocturnal operations since it had only a few minutes of fuel, totally insufficient to make contact with an enemy at night, carried no airborne interception radar, and lacked all night-flying equipment which would have been vital to make its characteristic engine-out glider-style deadstick landing at night.

• Proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (commonly shortened to ETH) have suggested that foo fighters are evidence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth.

• A type of electrical discharge from airplanes' wings (see St. Elmo's Fire) has been suggested as an explanation.

• Another theory suggests that pilots may have seen ball lightning.

• Reports of strange lights in the night are common throughout history, with explanations ranging from elves and Wild Hunt to UFO. It seems to be another example of the common, although still not fully explained, phenomenon.

• Multiple internal reflections of bright ground objects from the curved plastic canopy of an aircraft can be perceived as images above the horizon, a phenomenon that has been identified with some UFO sightings from aircraft.

Foo Fighters in fiction

• The Canadian animated film Heavy Metal (1981) features a green ball known as the Loc-Nar, an artifact over which people are killing each other and is the sum of all evil. The Loc-Nar is similar to ball lightning, and the film also shows how the Loc-Nar follows a B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II.

• The 2002 Mini-series Taken featured numerous balls of light in the first episode as Capt. Russel Keys plays a B-17 Bomber above France during the second world war during a dogfight.

References

• Jerome Clark, The Ufo Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial, Visible Ink, 1998, ISBN 1-57859-029-9

External links

• Foo Fighter Documents
• The Foo Fighter Mystery (pdf, 2004), explaining the phenomenon as the result of setting up an electric field directed radially to or from a central axis; previous physics paper describing the 'thunderball' (foo fighter) electrostatic phenomenon:

• The Thunderball - an Electrostatic Phenomenon' (1983), Inst. Phys. Conf. Ser. No. 66: Session VI, Electrostatics 1983, Oxford, pp. 179-184.