WWII Foo Fighters!

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This article is about the aerial phenomenon. For the rock band, see Foo Fighters. For the homebuilt aircraft, see Stewart Foo Fighter.

The term foo fighters was used by Allied aircraft pilots during World War II to describe various unidentified flying objects or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters of operations.

Though foo fighters initially described a type of UFO reported and named by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron, the term was also commonly used to mean any UFO sighting from that period.[1] Formally reported from November 1944 onwards, foo fighters were presumed by witnesses to be secret weapons employed by the enemy.

The Robertson Panel explored possible explanations, for instance that they were electrostatic phenomena similar to St. Elmo's fire, electromagnetic phenomena, or simply reflections of light from ice crystals.[2]
Etymology

The nonsense word "foo" emerged in popular culture during the early 1930s, first being used by cartoonist Bill Holman, who peppered his Smokey Stover[3] fireman cartoon strips with "foo" signs and puns.[4][5][6]



The term "foo" was borrowed from Smokey Stover by a radar operator in the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Donald J. Meiers, who, according to most 415th members, gave the foo fighters their name. Meiers was from Chicago and was an avid reader of Holman's strip, which was run daily in the Chicago Tribune. Smokey Stover's catch-phrase was "where there's foo, there's fire". In a mission debriefing on the evening of November 27, 1944, Frederic "Fritz" Ringwald, the unit's S-2 Intelligence Officer, stated that Meiers and Pilot Lt. Ed Schleuter had sighted a red ball of fire that appeared to chase them through a variety of high-speed maneuvers. Ringwald said that Meiers was extremely agitated and had a copy of the comic strip tucked in his back pocket. He pulled it out and slammed it down on Ringwald's desk and said, "t was another one of those effin' foo fighters!" and stormed out of the debriefing room.[7][8]

According to Ringwald, because of the lack of a better name, it stuck. And this was originally what the men of the 415th started calling these incidents: "effin' foo fighters". In December 1944, a press correspondent from the Associated Press in Paris, Bob Wilson, was sent to the 415th at their base outside of Dijon, France, to investigate this story.[9] It was at this time that the term was cleaned up to just "foo fighters". The squadron commander, Capt. Harold Augsperger, also decided to sanitize the term to "foo fighters" in the historical data of the squadron.[7]





My Theory - Pressure waves from the plane bounced off the ground and surrounding clouds combined with new waves coming from the plane to form a plasma ball that moved as the plane moved and distance from clouds changed.