The Foo Fighters: What Wartime Pilots Really Saw

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Late in 1944, over the night skies of the Rhine, radar operators and pilots of the US Army Air Forces began filing reports that made their intelligence officers uneasy. Small balls of orange, red, or white-hot light were shadowing their aircraft in the dark — climbing when they climbed, banking when they banked, sometimes holding a tight formation off a wingtip for minutes at a time before peeling away into the night. The men flying these missions were not green recruits. They were trained night-fighter crews, flying radar-equipped aircraft on some of the most technically demanding sorties of the war, and they were describing something that behaved less like a weapon and more like a companion. They called them foo fighters, and eighty years later the name has outlived nearly everyone who used it first.

Cold War Era Mysteries - vo.rs

The Foo Fighters: What Wartime Pilots Really Saw