The Real Foo Fighters, an article from Skeptic magazine

Here's my article, The Real Foo Fighters so if there any questions about my research I'd love to hear them. Thanks...

The first Foo fighter reports were from September 1941, with a several month lull in 1943 and distant lights don't actually follow and fly round aircraft as seen by several crews during WW2 . These objects were seen, close up, by both sides during the war manoeuvring in tandem as if shadowing the aircraft they were "attracted" to.

reply to post by Rotwang17
Thanks for posting your research on the Foo Fighters. Reading through it, I find it hard to argue against the probability that many sightings could have been created by vestibular illusions of one stimulus or other. Let's add pilot fatigue? Surely a factor and moreso when combined with unusual visual effects created by cloud, smoke and lights. Often we imagine these incidents occurring in clear skies when in reality there could be low cloud ceilings, fog banks concealing the ground and patches of smoke from artillery.

I'll have to really read your article in more detail and revisit some of the aviation safety papers I have. They include commercial and military pilot perception studies that relate to flight safety and the broad range of misperceptions that even experienced crews can encounter.

For now, my initial thoughts don't entirely agree with your conclusions because they suggest a case-closed scenario that isn't fully consistent with the reports I've read. No doubt, given an opportunity to assess the encounters with the knowledge we have nowadays, many would fit your explanations. However, many Beaufighters and P-61 Black Widows had two/three-men crews and some reports referred to 'we' as in multiple witness - they both saw the same phenomena. In at least one case, they reported a visual sighting that coincided with a brief response on the Airborne Intercept early radar.

Furthermore, one would expect the conditions and available stimuli to be broadly similar to pre-1944 and possibly equivalent to the latter stages of the Great War. Maybe I'm pushing it with that? Still, I do wonder why increases in vestibular/autokinetic illusions would be regionally and temporally specific before spreading out from the German skies and across Eastern Europe towards Japanese airspace. One would expect similar experiences to be reported across the geographical range of aviation.

By the way, 'a post-cognac manifestation ' is a cheerful phrase that I'll have to try and remember. Really made me smile

Factually inaccurate from the first sentence, wasted the first half a dozen paragraphs talking about wholly irrelevant "Jet and Rocket planes" .

Here's first person testimony from the guy's own flight log. it's easy, to sit there and talk about it like it was a game. it wasn't, these people had the highest death rate outside of the Submarine service, their very lives depended on their reactions being full on song and whilst, not everyone was fully fit and many did suffer from battle fatigue, they tended to end up dead.

Granted...Hitler's fighter jet's and buzzbomb's did create a light signature, that probably startled some Allied pilot's on the newfangled Axis invention of the jet engine. Maybe a few Allied pilot's were fooled into thinking that some of these jet propelled aircraft, might be an actual version of such reported instances of actual Foofighter's, over the European skies during WW2.

But your conclusion...that Foofighter's are all Axis jets, pilot eye strain, etc,etc --- is a hasty generalization --- which does not prove that your supposition about Foofighter's is correct. The overwhelming evidence, supersedes your conclusion, that is, some of these Foofighter reports are based on sighting's of actual air/space craft of intelligent design and in all likelyhood.. not from this earth.

May I suggest that you read Captain Edward J. Ruppelt's book, titled: The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects

I've also had a Foofighter sighting myself...back on the night of November, 1976, approx. 40 miles west of Washington D.C. --- and I can assure you --- that in all likelyhood, that it was of intelligent design; and not from this earth.



Foofighter's,


Erno86

Jets?

Rocket planes?

Eye strain?

My bet is that you can do much better than that.

To be fair all the people in the those planes during WW2 were taking large amounts of air force prescribed amphetamines to keep them alert during the long bombing runs. Then after the war when pilots stopped taking amphets when they went out in planes the foo fighters were never seen again.

Sounds like a thinly veiled attempt at flirting with Druscilla, throw in a bigfoot and you should be good as gold...

Me thinks you're after her stars and flags...

Originally posted by Rotwang17

so if there any questions about my research I'd love to hear them. Thanks...

Hi Rotwang, did you ever come across any cases involving EM effects or radar confirmation when you were conducting your research?

Originally posted by PhoenixOD

Then after the war when pilots stopped taking amphets when they went out in planes the foo fighters were never seen again.

Couldn't this case be considered a foo fighter (seemingly intelligently controlled, self luminous object anyway)?

reply to post by karl 12


Maybe but i think foo fighter were more defined as balls of light that seemed to follow the planes staying close to the cockpit and matching the aircraft's maneuvers.

reply to post by karl 12


In the winter of 1945 my friend's father was working as a conductor for a Coventry based bus operator. His regular run involved dropping the early shift off and picking up the night shift from a factory on the outskirts of Coventry almost next to the airport there Baginton. There was a 20-30 minute turnaround between the two journeys and he and his driver use to park up alongside the airport fence, turn the lights off and sit having a cup of char and ciggie in the back of the bus. One night that winter as they were doing exactly that, they saw a bright light heading for the airfield that seemed to come closer and closer.

The next thing they knew, the light shot past them just inside the fence about 4-5 fee from the ground. he described it as only 3-4 feet in diameter and as it shot past them it turned upwards and just streaked up into the sky and was gone. What really made them both wonder was that, they both saw, in the light of the object and clearly heard, the bow wave the object caused, making the chain link fence bulge and rattle as it flew past.


The chief reason Foo fighters dropped off the radar (sic) was cos, we simply renamed them UFOs.

Furthermore, the Germans had no operational Jet Fighter squadron between late August 1944 and January 1945 after they were withdrawn to undergo training in new tactics. The Me 163 was deployed almost exclusively to try and protect the Ruhr industrial area and only had a a very short duration flight wise. they were actually "fired" straight up, had 5 mins fuel for combat and then glided back to earth powerless. They were about 10 times more successful at killing their own pilots, usually on take-off, than they were at shooting bombers down , I believe they are credited with 5 kills in total.

Plus neither airframes were really ever used at night, only one actual working night-fighter version of the 262 was ever built, they already had the Heinkel "Owl" and the later variants of the "JU88" which were proven and successful against bomber formations and had been adapted to carry radar in their noses. Ergo until February 1945 apart from 4 months between April 19th 1944 and late August,44, there were very few jets in the air full stop.and those that were were nearly always used in daylight.

Sorry if this seems slightly off-topic! It's intended to illustrate how some pilots interpreted the experience of encountering a *who knows what?*

I'd like to add this recollection of an encounter with a 'fireball' by a pilot. Although it isn't a 'typical' Foo incident (being over the States), it describes similar characteristics as some of those over Europe. It's illustrative that Hanchett provides a clear description and 'thinking-out-loud' about what it was. He runs through a number of ideas to explain it to his own satisfaction and ends up with 'I don't know what it was.'



If anyone's read the Nash/Menzel letters (in brief here) available in full over here, we see a similarly rational dissection of what was observed. The pilot and co-pilot run through a series of likely explanations and are forced to rule them out until left with 'I don't know.'

reply to post by Kandinsky

That was a very compelling account of a pilot that sounded very scincere as he recalled his encounter. I have no doubt that he saw something ,what I don't know and could have a normal explanation . However I can't imagine what that could be.

RE: karl 12

So far as EM effects and RADAR contact with Foo fighters, I found absolutely on evidence of any. According to the 23 members of the 415th and 416th NFSs that I interviewed, which were the only squadrons that had the name foo fighter in their unit records, none reported any RADAR contact. This is what was so puzzling to them, they could never get close enough to them. The SCR-720 RADAR had an effective range of about 5 miles. One of the 415ths engineers that I interviewed recieved his training at MIT's top secret Radiation Lab. He had never heard of these things being reported on RADAR.

Given the fact that these were visual sightings, we certainly can not dismiss the fact that pilots flying at night are in an ideal situation for producing illusions. Even if they had sighted an alien space craft, we still are going to be plagued with the problems of human perception.

Just in case anyone would like to get a glimpse of the complexities involved in Nocturnal Combat Aviation, here's a link to a recent publication by Col. Tomas J. Tretdici, Armstrong Labs, Brooks AFB, Tx... Night Vision Manual for the Flight Surgeon

Dr Tretdici also houses a collection of USAF School of Medicine archived research projects, which is where the entire 57 reports of Project X-148, totaling over 400 pages of research documents are located. Copies of which, were also provided to me, free of cost. Many thanks to the Armstrong Labs!

reply to post by Rotwang17


Perhaps... the foofighter's don't give off any radar signature at all. The plasma currents of the foofighter, probably have to be encased in some sort of magnetic shield; with an inner magnetic field to protect the starship from the plasma.

Here's some 5 by 5 for ya....

"On July 16, 1945 at 5:29: 45 am mountain wartime, at the Trinity Site, White Sands New Mexico, somewhat west of the city of Roswell and long before it became famous for the Roswell UFO, the first nuclear explosive device on Earth was set off. Shortly after that test and especially so after the war the general New Mexico area was inundated by "Green Fireballs". Theoreticans in the Air Force believed the fireballs were propelled objects and not natural phenomena, being a very close similarity to foofighters."

sped2work.tripod.com/foo_fighters.html

"From early April until late May of 1945, hundreds of sightings of these mysterious "balls of light" were made by bomber crews of the 20th Air Force over the night skys of Japan."

Erno86,

Well, that sounds very fascinating, however its also highly speculative. Based on interviews with over 120 airmen who sighted "balls of fire" that seemed to pace their aircraft during the war I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that none of these airmen knew what they were seeing. For two reasons I feel that these things are very natural in origin; first off these stories I collected are variants of an age old ghost story, the Jack-'o-lantern legend cycle and second, these experiences are identical to other pilots experiences with "visual" vertigo in night flying. I collected a tale from a Col. Gordon Timmons, who was the first commander of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron where he was chasing a "ball of light" over Mexico in 1940. He suddenly realized that he was about to crash into the ground and pulled up, only to realize that he was chasing a ground light. The reason he gave for pursuing the light was that he said he saw it making maneuvers, like a fighter. He stated that this was his first encounter with vertigo and when I filled him in on the Foo fighter sightings made by the 415th after Capt. Harold Augspurger took over the squadron, he assured me that these sightings were also vertigo.

As much as I would like to say that the case is closed on the Foo fighters, I would like to emphasize that there is still a lot to be learned about how these experiences unfold and how they can involve a multitude of variation. During the war the US Navy experienced an above normal amount of aircraft accidents in training for night flying with nearly 16% of these accidents involving pilots chasing ground lights and stars. What happened in many of these cases is that the pilot lost orientation with the horizon, which was very easy in those days because the trainer aircraft were not equipped with a malcolm horizon, which wasn't developed until the 1970s. Once they lost their orientation to the earth the autokinetic illusion as well as somato-gravic and somato-gyral illusions could easily make a ground light appear as if it were a moving aircraft light. Thus the trainee would make a pursuit and smash dead into the ocean. These types of incidents led the US Navy to investigate the impact of illusions and disorientation upon nocturnal aviators and was proved to be a very important aspect of the onset of disorientation-vertigo syndromes.

reply to post by Rotwang17


Based on my own eyewitness account....a fully charged red-orange plasma Foofighter, can approach diameters of approx. 700 - 1,000 feet in diameter. It appeared [approx. 1 mile away, less than 3,000 feet in altitude] to me as some kind of complex flying war-machine; that could possibly wreck fiery havoc all over the continental United States.

I'm sure that the U.S. Federal government wants to treat such subject matter as Above Top Secret, yet I am still fascinated about seeing such a beautiful, yet complex flying machine --- which happened to be in just one of it's color power phases during the time I observed it --- the other... being one minute earlier, as it flew in [east to west, bluish-white light, approx. 5,000 feet in altitude, approx. 15,000 mph]; coming from the direction of Washington D.C.

Good luck.. in seeing one too.

Cheers,

Erno86

reply to post by PhoenixOD


Hallucinations can't be photographed.