By this time, it had become obvious that something very strange was going on. Almost all of the 415th’s pilots had encountered the mysterious lights, and they continued to see them just about every time they went up.
It got to the point where the pilots felt they should give the mysterious lights a name. A pilot named Charlie Horne suggested “foo fighters”—from a then-popular comic strip called Smokey Stover. Stover was a zany firefighter whose fire truck was called the “Foo Mobile.” (Perhaps connected to all this, the French word “feu” means “fire.”)
In any case, from Horne’s utterance, these strange lights, as well as all the weird aerial objects Allied aircrews had been encountering throughout the war, now had a name that continues to be used to this day.
Meanwhile, December dragged on and the Battle of the Bulge still raged. The 415th continued going up over Germany every night, looking as always for targets of opportunity. And the newly christened “foo fighters” were still continuing to dog them.
On December 27, there were two more sightings. One Beaufighter crew encountered strange lights throughout most of its patrol, describing them as bright orange balls hanging in the air, moving slowly and then suddenly disappearing in ones and twos. Another crew saw three sets of red and white lights, trailing them on both sides of their aircraft. Two nights later, on New Year’s Eve, a Beaufighter crew saw a group of mysterious lights fly past them at 10,000 feet. The following night, more strange lights were seen over the enemy city of Strasbourg.
On and on it went. At the end of January 1945, with the Battle of the Bulge finally over and won by the Allies, the 415th’s intelligence officer, Captain Ringwald, was asked to provide information on the strange lights his unit had been seeing. He prepared a report, noted in detail in Keith Chester’s book Strange Company, that cited no less than fourteen separate incidents of 415th pilots seeing foo fighters while flying combat operations in barely five weeks’ time.
And it didn’t stop there. The 415th crews reported three more foo fighter sightings in just the first nine days of February.
Maybe it was no surprise then that shortly afterward, a group of mysterious men arrived at the 415th’s base in France, intent on looking into the squadron’s flood of foo fighter reports.
According to Chester, these men were not from any deployed location in the European theater — rather, they’d traveled straight to France from Washington DC.
They studiously ignored the 415th’s commander, Major Harold Augspurger, and dealt instead with Captain Ringwald, the squadron’s intelligence officer. These men then accompanied some of the 415th’s crews on real missions, obviously hoping to spot foo fighters. But even Augspurger wasn’t told whether the mysterious flying objects cooperated or not. And if a report was written about the shadowy group’s visit, the 415th’s CO never saw it.
The men left after just twenty-four hours, eventually heading back to Washington. To this day, just who they were, and who they worked for, is still a mystery.
Once Germany lost the Battle of the Bulge, the Nazi war machine was all but doomed.
Tough fighting continued throughout the winter of 1945, but by spring, Allied armies were overrunning Germany and Allied airplanes ruled its skies.
By May, it was over. Hitler was dead, and German soldiers were surrendering in droves.
Once the fighting had ceased, the dismantling of the German military began. This included the search for answers regarding rumored Nazi superweapons, including the foo fighters. Sightings of the strange aerial objects had dropped to zero since the German surrender, indicating to many that the foo fighters were indeed German secret weapons. But the U.S. intelligence investigation into Germany’s arsenal, secret and otherwise, was just beginning and would take a while to complete.
This meant anyone who’d encountered foo fighters over Europe — especially those men of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron — would just have to wait for the official determination as to what they were.
This theme was borne out in American Legion Magazine in late 1945 in an article later researched by Keith Chester.
Written by Jo Chamberlin, the article reiterated that members of the 415th were anxious to see what army intelligence would find.
And if they found nothing? What if the strange flying things the 415th had been seeing weren’t German in origin?
Then, Chamberlin so aptly concludes: “The men of the 415th will be all set for Section 8s — psychiatric discharges.”
8
Back to the Pacific
The battleship USS New York had a storied history.
Its keel was laid down on September 11, 1911—an interesting date, considering what lay ahead for a future ship of the same name.
After doing convoy duty in the North Atlantic at the beginning of World War II, the New York was eventually refitted and sent to the South Pacific just in time to take part in the invasion of Iwo Jima in February 1945.
Once that action was successfully completed, the ship needed some further repair before its next mission, supporting the massive invasion of Okinawa in April 1945.
One day in March, between these actions, the huge ship was sailing near New Guinea, off the Admiralty Islands, when its radar room picked up an unidentified flying object heading its way.
The crew was called to its battle stations. Moments later, the bogey was spotted hovering right above the battleship, about four miles high. It appeared extremely shiny and silver in color. It was making no noise.
It is estimated that at least 2,000 sailors and marines aboard the battleship saw the strange object, including the ship’s commanding officer, Captain K. C. Christian.
Two destroyers were escorting the USS New York at the time, and their crews saw the object as well. Everyone on hand was bewildered. This was not an airplane they were looking at, as it was keeping pace with the three-ship column, meaning it was making barely 12 knots. No plane could fly that slow and stay aloft.
Yet it was not a star, as it was daytime. Nor was it a balloon, because again, it was traveling at the exact same speed as the ship.
The only other explanation was that the object was a secret weapon fielded by the Japanese; that’s why everyone was waiting for some kind of attack. But a half hour went by, and in that time, the object showed no hostile intent.
Still, its presence alone was posing a security risk to the three ships. So Captain Christian finally gave the order for his men to open fire.
Two of the New York’s three-inch antiaircraft guns blazed away at the thing, apparently hitting it. But the strange object appeared completely unaffected by the furious gunfire.
The barrage lasted long enough for Christian to realize his men were just wasting valuable ammunition. The CO finally gave the order to cease-fire.
Just as soon as the guns fell silent, the object accelerated to a tremendous speed and quickly disappeared, astonishing those hundreds watching below.