By June 1944, though, the Allied lines were well north of Rome, and approximately half of Italy was under their control.
One morning, near the battle lines close to Loreto, Italy, an egg-shaped object suddenly appeared in the sky. It was described as metallic and glistening and reportedly went into a motionless hover over the front.
Allied antiaircraft batteries opened up on it right away, but then something even stranger happened: Nearby German batteries began shooting at it as well,
After a while, the Allied guns stopped firing because their shells were having no effect on the object. But the German gunners continued to pound away at it, even though it was unaffected by their AA fire, too.
Eventually the Germans ceased firing as well. The object stayed hanging in midair for a short while longer, then rocketed off at high speed and was gone.
The B-17 Flying Fortress was probably the most well-known bomber of World War II.
It was aptly named. Able to carry more than 8,000 pounds of bombs, it also boasted up to thirteen .50-caliber machine guns sticking out of both sides of the fuselage and its nose and tail, plus in turrets located on its belly and on top just behind the cockpit.
Enemy fighters would have to think twice about approaching such a heavily armed plane, especially when it was flying in the vast formations the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) were able to send over Germany as the war progressed. When the U.S. military reached the point where it could routinely muster 500 B-17s for a bombing raid, that meant the Luftwaffe fighter pilots would have to contend with more than 6,000 machine guns while trying to shoot those bombers down. For the Americans, there was safety and firepower in numbers.
But some B-17s were called on for another kind of mission. Labeled a harassment raid, the USAAF would send up a single B-17 at night to drop its bombs on some unsuspecting German target; “unsuspecting” because in nearly all cases, B-17s only flew missions during the day.
These “Lone Wolf” raids were intended to keep the Germans off balance. So it was on this particular night in November 1944. Bad weather in the past few weeks had forced the vast armadas of B-17s, and those of its cousin, the B-24 Liberator, from bombing most of Nazi-occupied Europe. But in an effort to keep the pressure on, the USAAF was sending up Lone Wolf planes to bomb selected targets.
One crew, belonging to a B-17 nicknamed “Old Crow,” had been given one of these solitary missions. Flying out of an airfield in Italy, their orders were to bomb a railway yard in Salzburg, Austria. According to the plane’s pilot, Captain Bill Leet, he and his crew were briefed on their target preflight and told of what kind of German defenses they could expect — including AA guns on the ground and possibly some new German jet-powered night fighters in the air.
The “Old Crow” took off but quickly developed an engine problem that would prevent it from reaching its maximum bombing altitude of 30,000 feet. Instead, the plane could only get up to 18,000 feet.
This and other factors caused Leet and his crew to think it best not to bomb their primary target at Salzburg. Instead, they decided to go to their secondary objective, another railroad yard, this one located at Klagenfurt, Austria.
They reached the target area and were prepared for German resistance there, too, but then things got strange. Just as Leet was about to drop his bombs, his plane was suddenly bathed in a very strong light. This light was so intense the entire crew could feel its heat.
Assuming they’d been caught in German searchlights, Leet had no choice but to continue the bombing run. Once the bombs were gone, he hit his throttles, determined to get out of the area as quickly as possible.
What was so surprising was that Leet thought for sure they’d been spotted by the Germans — that’s why they’d been bathed in the especially warm searchlights. But no AA fire was being shot at them. There were no night fighters around, either.
What they’d done had been almost too easy.
In any case, Leet turned the B-17 back toward Italy and headed for home.
But then a huge amber light suddenly appeared off their left wing. No one on the plane saw it coming — one moment, the sky was empty, and the next, it was there.
Leet described the object as being a perfect circle, almost too perfect. And it was luminous, he said, almost too luminous. Judging the size of objects at night is hard, especially at more than three miles high. But Leet guessed the perfectly round circle was about 10 feet in diameter.
Leet’s crew wanted to shoot at it, but he ordered them not to. This thing wasn’t showing any hostility, so he thought it was best that they appear nonhostile as well.
So they flew on, heading for home, their strange company flying right alongside them — for almost the next hour.
As Leet said later, the object’s position never changed; its shape never altered. Its luminescence never lost its intensity.
As a result, Leet was able to study it clearly for a long time. He concluded that he could see no exhaust coming from it. And neither was this thing caused by an illusion or lights or exhaust from another airplane nearby. Leet became convinced the object was real but not man-made.
About fifty minutes after its appearance, the strange perfect circle suddenly blinked out.
Leet described it like someone flipping a switch. Just as before, one moment it was there, and the next it was gone.
The Old Crow finally landed and Leet was debriefed.
As was the case by now, whenever an intelligence officer heard that a crew had seen something strange in the sky, he tried to find an acceptable earthly explanation for it.
So as Leet said, when he first mentioned the luminous perfect circle, his intelligence officer replied it must have been a new secret German fighter.
When Leet disagreed, saying the object never shot at them or showed any hostility, the intelligence officer opined it was probably some kind of secret Nazi instrument that was sending back information on the B-17’s position to German AA forces. But the mission had gone perfectly in that respect, too, Leet told the intelligence officer. There had been no German AA fire.
At that moment, Leet knew the intelligence officer had run out of the typical excuses for foo fighters.
So they were left with no explanation at all.
6
The Other Side of the World
The mystery of the foo fighters was not confined to the conflict in Europe.
During the war years, strange unidentified flying things were seen over the Indian Ocean, over China, up near the Aleutian Islands and most importantly, all across the vast watery battleground of the South Pacific.
And while only a couple dozen unexplained sightings were officially reported during the Pacific war, author Keith Chester thinks the numbers are misleading. “The problem is, because of pressure from the Army Air Force to explain away these things, many sightings were identified by different names and placed under conventional categories,” Chester told us. “Real unknown observations were mixed into categories of things that ‘made sense,’ like seeing a bright star, or a new secret Japanese weapon. Plus, many reports filed by the U.S. Navy have not been located yet.” Chester’s conclusion: “I feel there were probably just as many foo fighter observations reported in the Pacific as in the European theater.”