That spring, Germany was bombing Britain, and Britain was bombing Nazi-occupied Europe. The relentless two-way battle put numerous airplanes in the air, especially at night. Antiaircraft fire, bombs exploding, flaming debris, planes being shot down — it added up to a lot of confusion in the sky.
But among it all, riding on the same airstreams as the Heinkels and Messerschmitts flying west and the Wellingtons and Lancasters flying east, there was something else. Strange airborne things were seen by many: glowing green balls, luminous disks, cigar-shaped objects, weird flying craft — some of gigantic sizes — that displayed incredible speed, impossible maneuverability and for lack of a better explanation, a bizarre curiosity about what was going on in earth’s war-torn skies. “Strange Company” is how UFO author Keith Chester so aptly described them in his outstanding book of the same name.
They would also become known as the “foo fighters.”
The first detailed report of a foo fighter encounter came from Flight Lieutenant Roman Sabinski. A member of the 301 Squadron of a Polish division attached to the Royal Air Force (RAF), on either March 25 or June 25, 1942 (no exact report exists), Sabinski was flying a Wellington bomber over the Zuiderzee, off the coast of Holland. He and his crew were heading west, returning home from a bombing mission over Germany.
The flight had been routine until Sabinski’s rear gunner called him on the plane’s interphone. Some kind of flying object was approaching their plane from behind. Disk shaped and luminous, it seemed to be several miles away. Still, even at that distance it looked larger than the full moon.
Sabinski assumed the object was some type of enemy aircraft, so he directed the rear gunner to open fire as soon as it came in range. When the strange disk got within 200 yards of Sabinski’s aircraft, the gunner did just that. Firing both tracer and standard machine gun rounds, he hit the target, but — in shades of the strange flying object that had appeared over Los Angeles earlier that year — his barrage had no effect. The rounds simply disappeared once they struck the disk.
This went on for about two minutes — the gunner firing but with no results. Then the object zoomed ahead, taking up a position about 200 yards off the Wellington’s left wing. Now both the front and rear machine gunners were firing at it. But again, the object seemed impervious to bullets.
Sabinski began a series of evasive maneuvers, trying to shake whatever this thing was. But the object kept pace with him, always staying in the same position relative to his aircraft. Finally Sabinski gave up trying to elude it. His gunners made one last attempt to destroy their pursuer, but this failed as well.
A few moments later, the object moved to a point in front of the Wellington, remained there briefly, then shot straight up at tremendous speed and disappeared.
Shaken by the strange encounter, Sabinski nevertheless managed to return to base, getting his crew and plane home safely. As was standard procedure, he was immediately debriefed by his unit’s intelligence officer. But when the Polish pilot revealed what he’d seen, the intelligence officer’s only response was to ask Sabinski if he’d been drinking.
Later on, Sabinski talked with other members of his squadron and discovered that the crew of a Wellington traveling behind his plane had seen the strange flying object, too. But, fearing the same kind of ridicule that Sabinski had endured, this crew had not reported it.
Thus began what would become regular sightings by Allied airmen of unexplained aerial objects, flying not just over war-torn Europe but in the Pacific theater as well. They would have many names until christened foo fighters two years later. “Unconventional aircraft.” “Meteors.” “Rockets.” “Suspected secret weapons.”
Whatever the label, though, and no matter how many attempts were made to explain the objects, they became a perplexing mystery, and in some cases, a dangerous distraction to the people who were in charge of winning the war.
There were scattered reports of similarly strange aerial encounters during the rest of 1942. British bomber crews witnessed weird lights over Aachen, Germany, on the night of August 11, then again over Osnabrück on August 17 and over the Somme in occupied France in December.
Then, in January 1943, U.S. bomber crews began reporting unusual aerial phenomena, too. On January 11, a B-17 crew saw something in the sky that one witness described as a smoke ball, and another as a swarm of bees.
Four days later, on January 15, during a U.S. raid over Cherbourg, France, several U.S. aircrews saw large numbers of projectiles — by one description resembling schools of flying fish — coming at them.
The intelligence officers of the bomber units reporting these things were baffled. Of course, the first thought was that the strange aerial objects were new German weapons, being thrown at Allied bomber formations — and indeed, the Germans were always experimenting, at times somewhat desperately, with various kinds of new antiaircraft weapons, such as AA shells packed with loose shrapnel or even small glass globes containing the explosive thermite.
But unusual AA shells could not account for sightings of huge cylindrical disks, large “rockets” that turned on a dime, or gigantic cigar-shaped objects complete with portholes — again, descriptions that would be heard over and over from RAF and U.S. bomber crews as the war ground on.
Plus, of the many fantastic objects being reported by these same crews, none of them had shown any sort of aggression toward Allied airmen. No shots fired, no blowing up of Allied planes in flight, as would have happened if, as some Allied military people insisted, every strange flying thing encountered was a highly advanced Nazi wonder weapon.
So whatever these really strange objects were, they didn’t appear hostile. But that didn’t mean Allied intelligence officers weren’t concerned about them — or how to report them and to whom.
“There was a lot of science fiction around before and during the war,” Strange Company author Keith Chester told us in an interview. “Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers — that kind of stuff. When a crew would report one of these weird encounters, it put their squadron intelligence officers in an uneasy position. These men didn’t want to write something in an intelligence report that would sound like crazy science fiction to someone higher up the command chain. But at the same time they couldn’t ignore the fact that so many aircrews were seeing these things — and eventually, neither could the higher-ups.”
There were hundreds of these encounters reported during the war. And because of the ridicule factor as experienced by Lieutenant Sabinski, and again, the prevalent feeling among some in the Allied command structure that they just had to be some kind of German wizardry, undoubtedly many more incidents went unreported or misreported, being labeled as unusual antiaircraft fire and such.
So while the actual number will probably never be known, to those men who saw them, in both the European and Pacific theaters, foo fighters were real, they were mysterious, and a lot of times, they were frightening.
With special thanks to Keith Chester, Timothy Good, Jerome Clark and Lucius Farish, a list follows of some of the most unusual foo fighter episodes of the war.
On the night of May 27, 1943, an RAF Halifax bomber was heading to Essen, Germany, as part of a massive bombing raid. Ray Smith of the Royal Canadian Air Force was at the controls.
Smith had no trouble finding his target. Essen had already been bombed earlier that evening; indeed, more than five hundred RAF planes would hit the heavily industrialized city this night. The fires created by the preceding wave of bombers had lit up the target area with a bright hellish glow.