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?
