Rhine front · Europe (415th NFS).Foo Fighters

Toward the end of the Second World War, the mission reports of Allied crews flying at night began to include a strange element. Alongside the details of the dogfights over the Rhine Valley, in occupied Europe, pilots reported inexplicable lights following their aircraft. According to the press story and later accounts, the first sighting came in November 1944: the crew of a Bristol Beaufighter night fighter of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron (pilot Edward Schlueter, radar operator Donald Meiers and intelligence officer Fred Ringwald) saw eight to ten bright orange lights at high speed off the left wing, with neither the airborne radar nor ground control registering anything. Meiers named them, borrowing a nonsense word from the "Smokey Stover" firefighter comic strip: "foo fighters".

The pattern recurred over dozens of missions. The 415th's report for December 1944 summed it up: 'We have encountered a phenomenon which we cannot explain; crews have been followed by lights that blink on and off changing colors etc. The lights come very close and fly formation with our planes.' The sortie-report extracts the squadron forwarded on 30 January 1945 describe a large red light, five or six red and green lights in a T shape that the pilot at first 'thought were flak', two lights that came up from the ground, levelled off and stayed on his tail for two minutes 'under perfect control at all times', yellow streaks of flame, a light that followed for five minutes despite evasive action, and another that went out when the aircraft turned into it. And it adds: 'In every case where pilot called GCI Control and asked if there was a Bogey A/C in the area he received a negative answer.' They never attacked. The airmen's immediate hypothesis, in the middle of the war, was the most prosaic possible within the context: a German secret weapon (perhaps a psychological or tracking device) designed to disorient the crews. The phenomenon was not limited to Europe: crews in the Pacific theatre reported similar observations against Japan.

The case reached the public at once, which is part of its documentary value. On New Year's Eve 1944, Associated Press war correspondent Robert C. Wilson spent the turn of the year with the 415th; the next day his story on the foo fighters appeared on the front page of newspapers across the United States. Thus, unlike so many later cases reconstructed years afterward, the foo fighters were recorded almost in real time (in military reports and contemporary press) by trained witnesses (pilots and radar operators) whose professional credibility was not in doubt. The chain of command had no answer: on 5 February 1945 the First Tactical Air Force wrote that it had 'no further information or explanation' and that 'it is believed that further investigation is warranted', and on 11 February SHAEF referred the matter to the Air Ministry. Later accounts hold that no German or Japanese weapon matching the descriptions turned up after the war.

The strongest reading is one of atmospheric and electrical physical phenomena poorly understood at the time, rather than structured objects. St. Elmo's fire (plasma discharges at the edges of aircraft), reflections from ice crystals, electromagnetic effects and possible illusions of motion from night flying explain much of the casuistry; the 1953 Robertson Panel, two of whose members had taken part in investigating them, wrote that they 'were believed to be' electrostatic or electromagnetic phenomena or reflections from ice crystals, but that 'their exact cause or nature was never defined', and Robertson and Alvarez called them 'to date unexplained but not dangerous', though they felt these phenomena 'are not beyond the domain of present knowledge of physical sciences'. But "natural" is not the same as "explained": some observations (objects that seemed to accelerate, manoeuvre in a coordinated way and keep pace with high-speed fighters) do not fit cleanly into plasma or ice, and remain without a closed explanation. That is why the foo fighters are still, eight decades on, less a mystery about craft than a control case on what the atmospheric physics of the time could not yet name.

Among the primary documents PURSUE declassified is a British Air Ministry (D.D.I.2) memorandum to SHAEF, dated 13 March 1945 and titled 'Balls of Fire — Red', embedded in this case's viewer. In it, Group Captain E. D. M. Hopkins acknowledges that Bomber Command crews had for some time been reporting 'similar phenomena' and proposes as the most likely explanation that a few of the alleged aircraft may have been Me.262 fighters and, for the rest, 'flak rockets'; but he concludes that 'the whole affair is still something of a mystery' and that 'the evidence is very sketchy and varied so that no definite and satisfactory explanation can yet be given'. The document fixes, in real time and at the top level of Allied air intelligence, both the dominant prosaic hypothesis and an awareness of its limits.

A second declassified file connects the phenomenon to wartime Germany from another angle: an FBI report of November 1957 (embedded in the viewer) records the interview of Wladyslaw Krasuski, who recounted seeing in 1944, near a German military compound, a large circular vehicle that rose vertically. It is a retrospective, secondhand account without corroboration, but it illustrates how the postwar period entangled the Allied 'foo-fighters' with rumors of German circular weapons, an association worth treating with caution: Krasuski's account does not prove a Nazi technological origin, it only documents the persistence of that narrative.

The foo fighters matter for two things that almost never coincide: they are chronologically the first modern military UAP phenomenon, predating Kenneth Arnold (1947) and Roswell, and they are documented almost in real time, in military reports and contemporary press, by trained witnesses. That shields them from the usual critique of late reconstruction. Their value is also methodological: they are the control case for the "natural but unexplained" category. The explanation the Robertson Panel proposed, electrostatic phenomena such as St. Elmo's fire, or reflections from ice, is mundane, and British air intelligence in 1945 preferred another equally prosaic one: a few may have been Me 262 fighters and the rest flak rockets; but being mundane does not mean being settled, and a fraction of the observations resists that reading. They thus embody the distinction the site keeps marking between the evidence axis and the explanation axis: strong professional testimony, with no instrumentation to pin it down, about a phenomenon that is probably physical and still without a closed name.