Ringwald told him the lights were back again. Schlueter followed the line indicated by Ringwald and saw them a long way off. Impossibly far, in fact, but still within radar range. He called out to Meiers, but the radar operator was now having technical problems with his AI set.
Schlueter again prepared to engage the enemy, but the lights had already begun to glide away to the northeast, eventually retreating deep into the German lines and disappearing altogether.
Nobody said anything until shortly before the Black Widow landed. Although Schlueter and Meiers were agreed that the Germans must have been experimenting with some new kind of secret weapon, neither wanted to hazard a guess as to what this weapon might have been. There was nothing they knew of in their own inventory that approached the weird, darting performance characteristics of the aircraft they'd just seen.
Fearful they would become the target of unwelcome squadron humor — along predictable lines they were "losing it" — they decided not to report the incident. And Ringwald, the spook, went along with it.
Reports of this incident exist in a number of UFO books — books I'd not encountered before because to someone steeped in the dry reportage of nuts-and-bolts technical journalism, they'd never entered my orbit.
The incident showed that almost three years before Twining wrote his memo to General Schulgen unconventional aerial objects had appeared in German skies prior to their manifestation across the U.S.A. in 1947.
On odd days off work and at weekends, I'd begun trawling public archives for corroborating evidence of this sighting. What I found were details on the 415th Night Fighter Squadron and the aircraft Schlueter had flown at the time of the encounter; details that allowed me to fill in the gaps of the published account and to visualize the sense of bewilderment and fear that Schlueter and his crew would have experienced that night. But along the way, I discovered that Schlueter's sighting was far from unique. All that winter of 1944-45, Allied aircrew reported small, ball-shaped aircraft glowing orange, red and white over the territory of the Third Reich. While some attributed the lights to natural phenomena such as ball lightning or St. Elmo's fire, others could not dismiss the sightings so easily. The devices appeared to be able to home in on Allied aircraft as if guided to them remotely or by some built-in control system. Bit by bit, the reports entered the realm of officialdom. In archives and on the Internet, I found dozens of them. "At 0600, at 10,000 feet, two very bright lights climbed toward us from the ground," another pilot from the 415th told intelligence officers after an encounter on December 22, near Haguenau, close to where Schlueter, Meiers and Ringwald had been. "They leveled off and stayed on the tail of our plane. They were huge bright orange lights. They stayed there for two minutes. On my tail all the time. They were under perfect control. Then they turned away from us, and the fire seemed to go out."
Although their appearance was sporadic, aircrews increasingly re ported the devices via the appropriate channels. They nicknamed them "foo-fighters," a bastardization of the French word "feu" for "fire" that had worked its way into a cartoon strip called Smokey Stover, the Foolish Foo Fighter which had first appeared in a Chicago newspaper several years earlier. Meiers, who was a resident of Chicago, appears to have been the first person to have coined the term.
The consensus was that foo-fighters were Nazi secret weapons of some kind, but mighty strange ones, since they did not open fire on Allied aircraft, nor did they explode on proximity to them. They simply appeared, tagged along for a while and then vanished.
Seemingly, the spooks couldn't provide any plausible explanation for what they were either, as the following account, by Major William Leet, a B-17 pilot attached to the U.S. 15th Air Force, indicated after a nighttime encounter with a foo-fighter—"a small amber disc" — that followed his bomber all the way from Klagenfurt, Austria, to the Adriatic Sea in December 1944. "The intelligence officer that debriefed us stated it was a new German fighter but could not explain why it did not fire at us or, if it was reporting our heading, altitude and airspeed, why we did not receive antiaircraft fire," he reported. Most encounters were at night, but there were daylight sightings, too. A B-17 pilot, Charles Odom, flying on a daylight raid into Germany, described them as being "clear, about the size of basketballs." They would approach to within 300 feet, "then would seem to become magnetized to our formation and fly alongside. After a while, they would peel off like a plane and leave."
A P-47 fighter pilot also reported seeing a "gold-colored ball with a metallic finish" west of Neustadt in broad daylight, while another saw a "three to five feet diameter phosphorescent golden sphere" in the same area.
In 1992, researchers digging into the foo-fighter mystery uncovered a wealth of buried reports within the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Maryland. What was intriguing was that almost all of them had been filed by pilots and crewmembers of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. Unlike the incident involving lieutenants Schlueter, Meiers and Ringwald (whose experience was relayed after the war by a former war correspondent), the 15 "mission reports" of mysterious intercepts, many of which occurred in a triangular sector of the Rhineland bordered by an imaginary line linking Frankfurt-am-Main to the north, Metz to the west and Strasbourg to the south, could be examined in their original format; logged in the dispassionate shorthand of the intelligence officers who originally noted them down.
"December 22–23, 1944—Mission 1, 1705–1850. Put on bogie by Blunder at 1750 hours, had AI contact 4 miles range at 0^7372. Overshot and could not pick up contact again. AI went out and weather started closing in so returned to base. Observed two lights, one of which seemed to be going on and off at 0^2422." And another: "February 13–14, 1945—Mission 2,1800–2000. About 1910, between Rastatt and Bishwilier, encountered lights at 3,000 feet, two sets of them, turned into them, one set went out and the other went straight up 2–3,000 feet, then went out. Turned back to base and looked back and saw lights in their original position again."
The reports made it clear that the sightings covered a period between September 1944 and April 1945.
September. Two, maybe three months before Schlueter's and Meiers' own encounter. Maybe, I thought, that tied up one little loose end. When the spook, Ringwald, had been riding with them that night he must have been looking for something he already knew to be there. So what did we have here? Ostensibly, these objects — they could hardly be described as "aircraft" — exhibited characteristics similar to T.T. Brown's flying discs. Their historical interest lay in the fact that their "existence," if you could call it that, had been logged by observers with impeccable credentials more than three years before the first rash of flying saucer sightings in the United States. True, it was wartime and things got misidentified. But with the foo-fighters there was none of the hysteria that accompanied the U.S.-based sightings of 1947, which tended to make the testimony, if anything, more objective and believable. These people, many of them hardened by years of combat experience, felt they were encountering something new and dangerous in German skies. And the year 1944 seemed to be key.
Their experiences echoed what USAAF General Twining had told General Schulgen in his secret memo of September 1947. That "aircraft" making no apparent sound, with metallic or light-reflecting surfaces, exhibiting extreme rates of climb and maneuverability, "were within the present U.S. knowledge." What did that mean exactly? I didn't know, but somehow I felt the wording was key.