UFO Sightings - Foo Fighters

No...not the Seattle rock band.
Foo Fighters were what World War II Allied aviators called UFOs.
This was a little before Kenneth Arnold and his "saucers".
Actually the first "formal" report was in 1944...and things really picked up speed after that.

The official story was that the highly trained pilots were mistaken.
These weird lights in the sky were light reflecting off ice crystals, St. Elmo's fire, or some other type of electromagnetic weirdness.
One of these lights reflecting off ice crystals chased a fighter plane from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron through a series of complicated aerial maneuvers as the plane tried to lose the "ice crystals" which finally veered off and left.
A member of the Squadron gave the "phenomena" the name "foo fighters" from the Smokey Stover cartoon strip popular at the time.
Actually he added a word before foo fighter...but we don’t use that word in polite company.

This "St. Elmo's fire" was busy.
Round balls of light were chasing planes all over Germany.
And these lights could not be outrun or shot down.
The pilots even started referring to them as "kraut fireballs" because they were convinced they were secret German weapons.
But...it turns out the German and Japanese pilots were running into the same thing, thinking they were ours.
All these experienced fighter pilots confused by a simple phenomena.
Sad isn’t it?

UFO Sightings - Utsuro-bune

Utsuro-bune is interesting because it's generally considered folklore.
But when you look at it, it sounds like a close encounter of the third kind.

In 1803 in the Hitachi province of Japan, several fishermen were out fishing.
They saw a "ship" drifting in the water.
They towed it in and examined it.
The "ship" was a roundish object, ten feet high and seventeen feet long.
It was covered in what looked like rosewood, brass plates and had several glass windows.
Opening it, they found text in an unknown language, food and a passenger.
A small woman, a little over four feet tall with pale skin and red hair.
She wore clothes made of an unknown material and spoke a language no one understood.
She seemed friendly, but she clutched a small box that she would not let anyone take or even look at. 

The elders of the village believed that the woman had done something and had been imprisoned in the "boat" and set out to sea.
After some deliberation, they put her back in the craft and set her back adrift.
It is unknown if the woman objected to this.

Now of course there are many scientific and historical explanations for this event.
But ufologists tend to think the woman was aboard a USO, an unidentified submarine object, possibly disabled, that they brought back to shore.
If you wanna go that route, to me it sounds kind of like an escape pod that might have been ejected from a damaged craft.
Maybe the woman wanted to go back out so she would be picked up by a rescue ship.
You never know right?

Another thing that pique's the curiosity of the UFO crowd is that the recorded symbols that were found in the craft, are VERY similar to symbols that were allegedly found at Roswell and at the Rendlesham Forest Incident.

By the way, in Hokota City which is in Ibaraki Prefecture, they have a park that commemorates the  Utsuro bune incident. 
They even built their own replica of the "ship".