Foo Fighter

"Foo fighters" were the glowing balls of light — red, orange, or white, sometimes in formation — that paced Allied bomber crews over Europe and the Pacific through 1944-45, the first systematically documented UFO cohort collected by any military. Pilots initially suspected a new German weapon and filed intelligence reports accordingly, but no wreckage, radar signature consistent with a solid craft, or postwar German program was ever found to explain them. The name itself is aircrew slang lifted from the American comic strip "Smokey Stover," whose firefighter hero repeatedly declared "where there's foo, there's fire" — nonsense wordplay that 415th Night Fighter Squadron crews adopted as a private joke for their glowing pursuers. Because the reports came from trained military observers, under combat conditions, filed through official intelligence channels rather than to newspapers, foo fighters occupy a special place in ufology's evidentiary hierarchy: proponents cite the officer-witness credibility, while skeptics favor prosaic explanations like St. Elmo's fire, ice-crystal reflections off exhaust, or German flare/searchlight tests. The episode predates "flying saucer" by three years and is often cited as proof that the phenomenon — whatever it is — did not begin with Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting.