Foo Fighters of WWII - Repost

I have posted a research paper I have been working on over the last couple of years for publishing. As of yet I don't really know if I want to publish this paper. But since there is very little research that has been done in this area I feel compelled to share it with anyone who may have similar intrests.

The foo fighters have received very little attention from UFO researchers, perhaps it's because of the percieved difficulty in locating official records. That was really the easy part of all of this research, the hard part was in locating and interviewing all of these airmen who had seen these things.

In all, this paper represents about 5 years of intense research and approximately 120 interviews from eye-whitnesses and key figures in the fields of folklore, psychology, areospace medicine and Air Force history. I've also interviewed about 25 Canadians who have flown night missions during the war. As a matter of fact, their unit histories have yet to be mined for their foo-like content. So if anyone lives in Ottawa within walking distance of the National Archives of Canada, let me know and I'll tell you where to start digging.

Please remember, my conclusions are, indeed, my own opinion. I am not a UFOologist, thus I don't feel compelled to conform to theories that are either friendly or hostile to the topical existence of aliens. I am simply an ethnographer, rather, I study humans not aliens.

A Historical and Physiological Perspective of the Foo Fighters of World War Two.

Previous Posting

Here is a letter I wrote to a friend concerning the origins of the "Will-o'-the-Wisp" which I consider the Foo Fighters to be a modern variant of this Legend type.

Indeed, the Will-o-the-wisp lights are fascinating. I have boxes and boxes of photocopied stories from all over Europe, Africa, Asia and the America's, oh ya, and Australia. I don't believe that I have collected any stories from New Zealand but I know the stories were popular there during the colonial period. The Ausies had several names for these "balls of fire," the Min Min lights and Walking campfires are two names that come to mind. Ofcourse, the Jack-o'-lantern and Will-o'-the-wisp are everpresent in all english speaking lands, even India. I've collected versions of this tale that have this ball of fire chasing people on foot, trains, planes, boats, snowmobiles, cars and on horseback. The popular Disney tale of Sleepy Hollow is one such variant of the Jack-o'-lantern tale. In this tale the headless horseman carries a Carved Jack-o'-lantern pumpkin and not an actual lantern. It's an interesting variant of the tale but many of the motifs of the story are still intact.

So far as I have been able to research, Jack and Will are around 400 years old. I've found stories about wandering lights that predate the 17th century but they bare no resemblance to the Jack and Will stories. There are a ton of stories about these two demons which were fully incorporated into traditional beliefs about fairies. Pixies, Cobolds, Tuckabolds, Elves, etc were trickster type sprites whom also carried lanterns and used to chase night travlers. Even the Queen of the Fairy peoples, Queen Mob, was a Jack-o'-lantern. The British Folklorist, Katherine Briggs was one of the world's most knowledgable persons on Fairy beliefs. She has published several books on beliefs if the Fairy Realm.

What I feel is so important is that Jack and Will were Devils, if not Satan himself, in the tales from the early 17th century. But into the 18th and 19th centuries they were fully intigrated into the realm of the Fairies and almost completely lost all of their associations with the devil. During the mid 19th century Jack and Will became ghosts, or undead roaming spirits. This belief in the disembodied spirit roaming at night with a lantern has become what we pretty much understand as a Jack-o'-lantern. This was perhaps the most popular Ghost story of the 19th Century which also represented a shift from fairy beliefs towards spiritualist beliefs. At this time Spiritualism was sweeping through Northern Europe and North America.

Today, Jack and Will are still alive and kicking within UFO legendry. Not all UFO legends are Jack and Will stories obviously, as was true that not all Fairy legends were Pixie or Colbold legends. They are only a small sub-set of a much greater tradition of supernatural beliefs. These legends and others serve as building blocks for the establishment of a mythological order, or as I call it, a supernatural zoology. We have been guifted, as a species, with an incredible ability for abstract and colorful thought. An imagination is a powerful tool for constructing highly complex ideas and theories, without this highly evolved cognative facilty we would still be grooming ourselves with our tongues. We are aside from all other beings known to mankind, very unique, yet somehow alone. This I find to be unsettling, that man is the only being which posesses the ability to imagine. Before our age of science and reason people have expressed this situation of our uniqueness in a multiplicity of beliefs. The Hindu god Indra among many of his totemic features was depicted as the great god of renewal. Indra was believed to float on his back alone in a great sea with a lotus growing from his naval and within that lotas was another great sea where a smaller Indra was floating on his back with a lotus growing from his naval and so on to infinity. This is a profound image of mankind, but what is even more profound is that this belief is well over 2000 years old.

Well, I could write a book on the stuff I have researched in libraries. The folklore library at Indiana University was my second home for about five years. But considering all of the materials I was able to dig up none of it was anywhere as useful as was interviewing people who had seen the stuff I was looking for. Human beings, and not books, are the greatest source of information a folklorist has to draw upon. When I researched the foo fighters I got to be good friends with many WWII veterans and collected many other stories and personal anecdotes from these guys. The fear, or better yet, the terror that these men lived through during this period in their lives had a massive impact upon them for the rest of their lives. One guy was so terrified to fly at night that the operations officer left the flight tower and hopped onto the wing of his aircraft, put a 45 against his head and threatened to blow this guy's brains out if he didn't fly that mission. The guys that were on the great fire raids over Tokyo were mortified when they found out that they had killed over 150,000 civilians. Now, almost all of these guys that I interviewed are dead. These were some great men and their experiences were real, but I guess it is up to everyone of us to decide for themselves what these experiences mean.

What I believe is stated in my research paper, but this is a narrow and appended version of what greater implications I feel that they point to. I left these implications out of the paper because these are my beliefs, but I do feel that the foo fighters, as well as all human folklore is a human creation. That is, that these tales are an attempt to address the absurd realities of life and that because these things do occur points to the obvious flaws in our well meaning, although niave, attempts at pretending that we know what it is all about. I don't care if you pile 100 college degrees on my ass, I'd still be an idiot if I told you that these things didn't happen, yet they do. And unlike Stan Fredman, I do not believe that if you have 100 observers looking at the earth with three of them saying that the earth looks flat and 97 saying that it looks round and that derived from that evidence that it then is a false assumption to assume that the earth is round 100% of the time. Thus, that the world is flat because 3% of the observations did not conform to the theory that the earth is round. This appears to me to be more of a religious argument than that of a scientific method of reasoning.

To quote the immortal mathematician, Rene Descartes, who in the 17th century said that, "There is nothing that is so hidden that we can not discover it."

Great thread to start again. There's a great mystery to be solved.
Why did the "Foo Fighters" only appear during WWII?
UFO's just don't chase planes like they did back then.

I'm no eye witness of that era, but I have a few thoughts as to why it happened. As with all speculation, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Don't take my word for it. Investigate it for yourself.


These are the main factors contributing to the appearance of the Foo Fighters:

1. Hitler
2. Thule
3. The Hindu Swastika
4. Religious cleansing


"This all happened before. It will happen again."
-Six (Battlestar Galactica)

Well, as a matter of fact Foo Fighter sightings didn't end in the Second World War, they spilled over into the Korean War. F-86 and B-29 crews were also sighting Foo Fighters over North Korea. I have eye whitness accounts from a few pilots who flew night missions in both conflicts. There were also American reports of Mig-15 fighters flying night missions at a time when the Russians had not even begun to fly Mig-15s in the Korean Conflict. This pattern of sightings was very simular to the sightings of Me-262s over the Rhine and Po Vallies in WWII -- at a time when it was clearly documented that the Germans were NOT flying night missions with the Me-262.

I have been planning for some time on writing a more indepth research paper on the transition of the Foo Fighter sightings from WWII to the Korean War -- but I don't have the time right now. Gotta get some shuteye.

I'll reply again tomorrow

Rotwang,great work.Its a fascinating subject and although many UFO cynics are of the opinion that 'trained aviation professionals' were just confused and seeing lights on the ground,Im sure they're mistaken and there is much to this phenomenon.
A very comprehensive,thorough,objective piece,well done.
Regards Karl

This paper only represents a small portion of the material I collected. My intent for pursuing such a finite and occluded topic was precisely because it was virgin territory and hadn't been polluted with mass disiminated and mass produced corporate lore. The beliefs associated with the Foo Fighters had not been cookie-cuttered by the Discovery Channel and when I was able to interview the eyewhitnesses their accounts of the events were relatively pristine and devoid of the corporate jingoism of the modern UFO phenomonon. These men spoke in the language of combat aviators about their encounters with this awesome enemy weapon. An overwhelming majority of these men believed, in ernest, that what they had encountered were real German and Japanese weapons which possessed an astonishing ability to maneuver at high speeds. The beliefs that existed at this time completely excluded alien spacecraft, not one airman I had interviewed mentioned this as a possibility until after they had begun to read reports of sightings of alien spacecraft in their local news papers in the early 1950's.

This is the second largest flap in history, the largest being the Phantom Airships in the 1890's. Although, the Foo Fighters are the largest flap in history which has not been pre-filtered, pre-sorted and reassembled to meet the needs of the mass media. Why? During the war the military in the US had a strangle hold on the media and only allowed stories to be published which would enhance the domestic war effort. Once it became clear that the military hadn't a clue of what was going on, the plug was pulled and the US mass media stopped all reportings of these sightings just after the May 23rd-25th incindiary raids on Tokyo. This just so happened to coincide with Kurtis LeMay's order to blackout all of the reporting of these sightings to the 20th Air Force's Bomb Groups. These sightings persisted until the end of the war in August, but the Bomb Group Commanters and Intelligence officers were ordered not to document these reports and to Court-Martial aircrews who reported opening fire on these "Balls of Light."

Thanks to the Nuclear bomb and the end of the war LeMay and PACAF Command had scored a significant victory, not over the Japanese but the US Media. Not only had LeMay quashed this Foo Fighter buissness but he nearly lost control of the 20th Air Force to a Full Blown Mutiny by the Bomb Group commanders because of his use of "Jack-Booted" tactics to end this affair. The final straw for the Bomb Group Commanders came when LeMay ordered that ALL of the defensive armaments be removed from ALL 500 B-29's under his command.

The question is, "Why did LeMay revert to such heavy handed measures against his own men?" The answer didn't come to me until after I was able to review all of the Bomb Groups intelligence and debriefing reports at the National Archives, Record Groug 18. Because on the May 23rd-25th mission alone, the 20th Air Force lost 18 aircraft to friendly fire. Every single Bomb Group (20 total) reported being attacked by dozens of these "Balls of Fire." It was beyond epidemic in proportion, this was hysteria! According to Japanese records, no Japanese aircraft flew in the defense of Tokyo on that night; Enemy resistance was 0.

Hi,

Very interesting article, that will take some time but I will return.

brotherthebig.

Cool, hope you enjot the piece. If you have any questions please post them here. I'll be keeping up with this thread for the next two weeks.

Cool, hope you enjoy the piece. If you have any questions please post them here. I'll be keeping up with this thread for the next two weeks.

Hi Rotwang,

First of all congratulations on your research paper “A Historical and Physiological Perspective of the Foo Fighters of World War Two”, very well done and documented! I will need to do a better reading, but the “belief legends” subject impressed me. I liked also your comments on advanced planes like Me163 and Me262 and the V-1 rockets. In you preceding thread is there lots of good information also.


For now I will just add some more info related to Foo Fighters (maybe this will have some interest to this thread discussion), that I collected when I was searching resources for my thread UFO: Antigravity or Coandă Effect man made saucers or aircrafts?, and that is related to the earliest saucer projects and Germans advanced technology.

Hidden Evidence - Foo Fighters

Foo Fighters and Germans Saucers

Foo Fighter near Concorde (spanish)

I will come back.

brotherthebig.

Thank You very much. I really havn't pursued the Nazi Flying Saucer thing. When I first began investigating the Foo Fighters in 1991, the only material on this end that I could find was the stuff from Renato Vesco. When I first read his descriptions of Kugelblitz, I about fell out of my chair laughing. In the U.S. Air Force I served as an Electronic Warfare Systems Analyst; I graduated from the Hughes Hall School of Electronic Warfare in 1988 with Honors. At that time I had the third highest GPA in that school's history, circa, 1946. I also have interviewed around 20 Radar Operators (RO's) from the 415th, 416th, 417th, 422nd & 425th Night Fighter Squadrons (NFS) who had seen either Foo Fighters or Me-262s on night missions during the war. I also interviewed the Commander of the only US Army Air Corps Night Fighter Training Facility at Orlando Field, Florida, as well as the Commanders of maintanence for the 415th's and 416th's NFS. These men recieved their instruction on Radar maintanence and operations at the MIT's Top Secret Radiation Laboratory. Their conclusions were that the Foo Fighters were purely a visual phenomonon and that their Radars were not being jammed in any way, shape or form.

From all of my interviews with the RO's, no Radar contact was ever made with the Foo Fighters or the Me-163's or the Me-262's. There was absolutely no evidence of any jamming in any form. The Radar systems used by the night fighter forces was the SCR-720 and not the H2S system which Vesco claims this devise had the ability to jam. In other words, Vesco just made this sh*t up, his description of the Kugelblitz is a laudable piece of fiction. Not even modern stealth drones have the ability to do all the things that Vesco claims these Kugelblitzes could do.

Thanks for posting the videos. The Foo Fighter observing the Concord looked authentic. It went too fast to be radio controlled near by.

Rotwang, You may consider trying to locate Wendelle Stevens, UFO Researcher and Ret Airforce Col. Mr Stevens claimed his crews while in Alaska reported foo-fighter interaction while in flight on the average of 1-2 a month while he was stationed there.

I did have his email address but can't locate it. One of his or other articles on him may include and email address.

W Stevens: www.aztecufo.com...

Dallas

Great repost Rotwang.

I read your paper and thought it first rate. While I agree for the most part with your conclusion of mass hysteria, I still have an uneasy feeling that it can't explain all of the sightings.

I had the privilege of flying in a B17 sometime ago out of Boeing Field in Seattle. I was lucky enough to accompany a WWII lieutenant Colonel on the flight. I asked him about the phenomena, and he was really offended by the thought that so many crews could have been mistaken about what they saw.

As he saw it, the guys in the tincans depended upon their judgment of observation to keep them alive. He stressed that they knew the difference between a snap call sighting, and observations that went on for several minutes with verification from one ship to another.

I do not believe they where witnessing Axis tech, but I have to believe that
something else was inplay some of the time. Natural phenomena I think could explain some sightings, and hysteria could account for many, but as I said I'am just not convinced that other forces were not inplay.

Again thanks for the thread and the time you spent putting it together.

Hi,

Hi made an error on the link for the 2nd video, so now is correct.

Foo Fighters and Germans Saucers (correct)

Sorry for the inconvenience.

brotherthebig.

Thank you. I perhaps should not have used the word hysteria. The term overly reeks of psycho-babel. From the outset I never set out to resolve this mystery-- oh no, I'm not chasing that Will-o'-the-wisp! In German the term Irrwisch and in Latin the term Ignis fatuus are defined as both a fool's fire and an illusion. If indeed, illusions are in play in some of these legends, (not all) then their very nature is not objective, rather subjective. How can I convince any other human of the reality of a subjective experience that they have never experienced? The answer is-- only a fool would try.

Again, if I were to try to investigate the object, then I would have simply added X number of sighting of objects to an already overwhelming catalog of unexplained sightings of objects. In other words, I would have simply done what everyone esle is doing, that is - chasing a Will-o'-the-wisp. Since we can establish the fact that visual-perceptual illusions are beyond a shadow of a doubt - subjective experiences, then what would the purpose be in examining the objective reality of a point of light used in a laboratory experiment intended to initiate the autokinetic illusion? Rather, the objective intent in laboratory experiments concerning the autokinetic illusion revolve around manipulating the observers "beliefs" about the fixed point of light in the test chamber.

The autokinetic illusion can be broken down into a vast myrid of unique illusory experiences-- such as: two-dimensional autokinesis (x,y, axis), three-dimensional autokinesis (x,y,z, axis), multi-target two-dimensional autokinesis, multi-target three-dimensional autokinesis, configural multi-target autokinesis and large scale autokinesis -- to mention a few. To further complicate things, the above characteristics of the autokinetic illusion can be offset and differentiated depending upon if the observer is in motion with a fixed frame of reference or without a fixed frame of reference. Now, when in motion whole families of bifercating illusory sensations (syndromes) can be created by combining any of the above sensations with the oculargyral illusion (rotary) , oculargravic illusion (+G), ocularagravic illusion(-G) and the monocular motion paralax (Moving Horizon).

Ok. Now, my point is rather clear here-- how do we know for a fact that when these WWII pilots were seeing these "balls of light" at night that none of these above illusory sensations were not affecting the pilot's perception of the "ball of light's" apparent movement? This is the devil in the details-- these were subjective experiences. We must interview each and every member of the aircrew and compare their subjective experiences. Well, I did just that. The one thing I can attest to for a fact is that after these aircrews had these experiences there was very little, if any, agreement as to just what had happened to them. This is a red flag for a subjective/illusory experience within a group context.

Perhaps the most quoted personage within the Foo Fighter saga was a Radar Operator in the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Donald J. Meiers. (In my research paper, the picture I attached is a picture of Don taken by a friend of his, Robert Tierny.) I tracked down and interviewed the pilot of Don's Beaufighter, Edward Schleuter. Ed was on every single mission that Don sighted these foo fighters on, and they were several, and Ed could not verify one single sighting that Don had. These men were in the same aircraft and on every occasion these men had completely different experiences.

For obvious reasons I do not believe that we can just foo-foo the possibility that many of these sightings were heavily impacted upon by a wide variety of visual-perceptual illusions of movement. Since I've been the only person ever to go out and to interview these airmen, I think that makes me the only person qualified to say so. My own ego aside, I followed a very strict methodology in collecting these legends and I stand firm.

The $64,000 question is NOT if they exist, but what in the hell are they ;-) If we look at us, and look at our world, we are the infants. It is millions of years old, and we are just a few generations. George Carlin had it correct when he said that all these "save the earth" folks had it all wrong. It's not going anywhere, it's US that will be gone ;-)

So, are these things just an outreach from something that has been on our earth far before us? Are they just taking a peek at what man has been up to in his garage? Are they organic life forms that we cannot even begin to comprehend? Men in Black, the movie, had a part in it about Aliens trying to communicate with us, and how we cannot communicate with a Cock Roach, and maybe they are so far advanced, trying to communicate with us would be in the same ballpark.

All I know for certain is there are things out there that cannot be explained, and for whatever reason, they are not landing on the whitehouse lawn to say hello. Then again, with all the guns and missles, maybe it's a good thing that they haven't tried. lol

Great work on your paper. The world needs more people like you.

I'm curious where the name "Foo Fighters" originated. Could Foo be short for Fool?

Good question 10538.

Well, as you may have guessed, the term Foo was borrowed from Bill Holman's comic strip Smokey Stover. So far as I've been able to investigate a Radar Operator in the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Donald J. Meiers gave the Foo Fighters their name. Don was from Chicago and was an avid reader of Bill Holman's strip which was run daily in the Chicago Tribune. Below is a photo of Don taken by another Radar Operator that he trained with at Orlando Field, Bob Tierney. This photo was taken in Scotland in 1943.



In a mission debriefing in November of 1944, Fritz Ringwald, the unit's S-2 Intelligence Officer, told me in an interview that Don & Ed (Schleuter--Pilot) had sighted a red ball of fire that appeared to chase them through a variety of high speed maneauvers. Fritz said that Don was extremely aggitated and had a copy of the comic strip tucked in his back pocket. He pulled it out and slamed it down on Fritz's desk and said, "... it was another one of those f*ckin' foo fighters!" and stormed out of the debriefing room.

According to Fritz Ringwald, that because of the lack of a better name, it stuck. And this was origanially what the guys in the 415th started calling these incidents-- F*ckin' Foo Fighters. Now in December of 1944, a press correspondent from the Associated Press Corps in Paris, Bob Wilson, was sent to the 415th at their base outside of Dijon France to investigate this story. It was at this time that the term was cleaned up to just Foo Fighters. The unit commander, Capt. Harold Augsberger, aslo decided to shorten the term to Foo Fighters in the unit's Historical Data.

Originally posted by 10538
I'm curious where the name "Foo Fighters" originated. Could Foo be short for Fool?

Like Rotwang mentioned just above, Holman.

Also to consider is "foo" sounds like the French "faux" which means "false".

So "false fighters"-