# The Foo Fighters of the Rhine [View on uap.fun]() CASE FILE 051 · 1944 Published: September 30, 2026 In the last winter of the war, American night-fighter crews hunting over the Rhine came home with a story nobody wanted to hear: balls of red, orange and green fire that fell in beside their wingtips while ground radar swore the sky was empty. They named the lights after a gag in a comic strip. The reports climbed all the way to Eisenhower’s scientists, and the war ended without an answer. ![Black-and-white photograph taken looking up from an aircraft, whose tall tail fin rises at the bottom of the frame, at three twin-boom night fighters with white-and-black invasion stripes on their wings flying in formation against a cloudy sky.]() Not the 415th: Northrop P-61A Black Widows of the 425th Night Fighter Squadron in formation over France in 1944, photographed from another aircraft. The 415th flew British-built Beaufighters through the winter of the foo fighters and had P-61s only in the last weeks of the war. U.S. Army Air Forces photo 342-FH-3A16294, National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped. ## AT A GLANCE - **DATE:** November 26–27, 1944, through the spring of 1945, with most reports between mid-December and the end of January - **LOCATION:** The night sky over the Rhine valley between Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Mannheim and Worms, patrolled by the 415th Night Fighter Squadron from Dijon and, from December 6, Ochey near Nancy - **REPORT TYPE:** Military encounter - **RESOLUTION:** [Unexplained]() - **RECORD STATUS:** Investigated by four headquarters; never explained ## The story ### A red light off the starboard wing The 415th Night Fighter Squadron hunted in the dark. Its crews, a pilot and a radar observer to each twin-engined Bristol Beaufighter, had fought across North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and in the autumn of 1944 they were flying from Dijon in eastern France on intruder missions: low, lonely sweeps across the Rhine into Germany, hunting for trains, truck convoys and enemy night fighters. On the night of November 26–27 the pilot was Lieutenant Edward Schlueter, a tall young man from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with his radar observer, Lieutenant Donald J. Meiers of Chicago. The squadron’s War Diary for November 27 copied what Schlueter put in his report and called it “the following weird excerpt”: “Upon returning to base saw a red light flying through area about 35 miles ENE of Pt. A. Came in to about 2000 feet off starboard and then it disappeared in a long red streak.” The researcher Keith Chester, working from the mission records, places the flight between Karlsruhe and Mannheim. The unit’s own history, written later, remembered the night as the beginning of something: “At first these two officers were taunted by their buddies and began to wonder if they had developed combat fatigue.” Sources: [First Official Foo-Fighter Records Discovered]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() ![Black-and-white photograph of a dark camouflaged twin-engined Bristol Beaufighter with a U.S. star on its fuselage and the name Fluff painted on its nose, parked on a dusty airfield under a cloudy sky, with another aircraft behind it on the left.]() A U.S. Army Air Forces Beaufighter night fighter, the type the 415th flew over the Rhine. The photograph’s squadron is disputed: Commons files it under the 414th, and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force places it with the 416th at Grottaglie, Italy, in November 1943. U.S. Army Air Forces photo, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. [Image source]() [Public domain · U.S. Air Force]() ### That hill is considerably closer Within days, by Keith Chester’s reading of the records (Chamberlin puts him aboard on the very first night), the squadron’s intelligence officer, Captain Fred “Fritz” Ringwald, a private pilot who had run a service station in East St. Louis before the war, went along on a mission to see for himself. In the version he gave the Associated Press in January, he saw lights off to the right and told the pilot, who said they were “lights on a hill.” A few minutes later he looked again: “Well, that hill is considerably closer to us now.” In the longer telling of Jo Chamberlin, an aide to the air forces chief General Hap Arnold who interviewed the crews in the spring of 1945, the night was reasonably clear, with a quarter moon, and the Beaufighter was working both sides of the Rhine north of Strasbourg. Ringwald wondered aloud what the lights in the hills were; Schlueter said they were probably stars. Then Ringwald remembered that there were no hills there. The lights were “eight or ten of them in a row – orange balls of fire moving through the air at a terrific speed.” Schlueter called ground radar, which told him there was nobody up there but himself. “Are you crazy?” He turned into the lights, which went out, came back far off and, five minutes later, slid away in a flat glide. The crew went on to shoot up seven freight trains, landed at Dijon and agreed to say nothing: Schlueter and Meiers were near the end of their tours and had no wish to be grounded for combat fatigue. Sources: [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() · [Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II]() · [The Foo Fighters of World War II, Part One]() ### Where there’s foo, there’s fire The lights needed a name, and the crews took one from the funny papers. Bill Holman’s comic strip Smokey Stover followed a fireman who drove a two-wheeled fire engine and littered every panel with the nonsense word foo; the running gag was “Where there’s foo, there’s fire.” In Chamberlin’s account a pilot at chow suggested naming the lights, and “a reader of the comic strip” proposed foo-fighters. The unit history is more specific: the first lights were “referred to as such by Lt. Myers” — its spelling of Meiers — “for the lack of a better name and because of the eerie feeling it gave the crew.” When Jeffery Lindell interviewed the surviving officers in 1991, Ringwald recalled that Meiers had a copy of the strip tucked in his back pocket, slammed it down on Ringwald’s desk and swore that it had been another of those foo fighters, with a stronger word in front; the commander, Major Harold Augspurger, is said to have cleaned the name up for the reports. The first written use that survives is in the War Diary for December 18, 1944, where one word has faded past reading on the microfilm: “Our pilots have named these mysterious … which they encounter over Germany at night ‘Foo-Fighters.’” Sources: [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() · [First Official Foo-Fighter Records Discovered]() · [Foo-Fighter Documents]() · [Etymology of “Foo” (RFC 3092)]() · [The real Foo fighters]() ### Under perfect control On December 6 the squadron moved to Ochey, near Nancy, and through the rest of December the lights came almost nightly. On December 14–15, near Erstein, a crew flying at 1,000 feet saw a large red light at 2,000 feet heading east at about 200 miles an hour; their radar had failed, so they followed it by eye until it went out. On December 16–17, twenty miles north of Breisach, another crew saw “5 or 6 flashing red and green lights in ‘T’ shape” and took them for flak, until ten minutes later the same lights were behind them: “We turned port and Starboard and the lights followed.” They closed to about 1,000 feet, off the left rear, and held there for several minutes before disappearing. The same night a crew over Lichtenau fired at lights, with no result observed. At six in the morning of December 23, patrolling at 10,000 feet between Sarrebourg and Strasbourg, a pilot watched two lights climb toward him from the ground near Hagenau, level off at his altitude and sit on his tail for two minutes before peeling away. “They appeared to be under perfect control at all times.” On the night of December 23–24 Lieutenant David McFalls and his radar observer, Lieutenant Ned Baker, saw a glowing red object shoot straight up and then turn into what looked like an aircraft seen from above, rolling over and diving out of sight: a “plane view of A/C doing a wing over and going into a dive and disappearing.” Chamberlin called it “the first and only suggestion of a controlled flying device.” On December 26–27 a crew called the ground controllers, call sign Blunder, to ask whether any enemy aircraft were about, was told no, and then felt the jolt of another plane’s propeller wake — “what was thought to be prop wash; very distinct” — where no aircraft was, and saw lights that “made distinct lines somewhat like arrows”; another watched a light near Worms come “within 100” (the report gives no unit) and follow it through five minutes of evasive action before pulling up out of sight. Sources: [2nd Wrapper Indorsement: extracts from sortie reports]() · [Foo-Fighter Documents]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() ### Christmas Eve over Karlsruhe One of the men who saw the lights was a reporter. Sergeant Ed Clark of Stars and Stripes flew with the squadron on Christmas Eve, and the story he filed about the mission said nothing of foo fighters, probably because the censors would not pass it. In 1950, with the flying saucers in the headlines, he told it for United Press. “I had my first experience with them Christmas Eve, 1944, in the vicinity of Karlsruhe,” he wrote. A red ball rose from the ground, climbed with tremendous speed and drew level off the left wing. “We turned, we rolled, we dived, we climbed, but the red ball stayed with us.” Chamberlin’s notes, which survive with Project 1947, record the rivalry drily: “On Christmas Eve, Sergeant Ed Clark scooped Associated Press reporter Bob Wilson.” Sources: [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighters of World War II, Part One]() ### Until four in the morning Bob Wilson of the Associated Press reached the squadron on the last day of 1944 hoping to be over Germany with a crew at the stroke of midnight. The weather grounded the flight, so he spent New Year’s Eve sharing cognac with the fliers and, by Chamberlin’s account, questioning them until four in the morning. His story cleared the censors and ran across America on January 1 and 2, 1945. “There are three kinds of these lights we call ‘foo-fighters,’” Meiers told him: red balls of fire that flew along off the wingtips, a vertical row of three balls that flew in front, and a group of about fifteen lights far off that looked “like a Christmas tree up in the air” and flickered on and off. “A ‘foo-fighter’ picked me up recently at 700 feet and chased me 20 miles down the Rhine Valley,” he said. “I turned to starboard and two balls of fire turned with me. I turned to the port side and they turned with me. We were going 260 miles an hour and the balls were keeping right up with us.” Another time, he said, they dived at 360 miles an hour; the lights kept to his wingtips and then zoomed away. “When I first saw the things off my wing tips I had the horrible thought that a German on the ground was ready to press a button and explode them. But they don’t explode or attack us. They just seem to follow us like will-o’-the-wisps.” Lieutenant Wallace Gould of Silver Creek, New York, said the lights shadowed his wingtips and then “zoomed 20,000 feet into the air and out of sight”; none of his crew saw any structure on them. The long version of the wire story listed some twenty more fliers of the squadron who had seen them. Sources: [Nazis’ Newest Trick, ‘Fire Balls,’ Follow Or Precede Planes]() · [Eerie Nazi ‘Foo-Fighters’ Mystify Yank Night Fliers]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighters of World War II, Part One]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() ![Tall narrow clipping of a 1945 newspaper column with the bold headline Nazis’ Newest Trick, ‘Fire Balls,’ Follow Or Precede Planes, followed by an Associated Press story quoting Lt. Donald Meiers of Chicago.]() The Associated Press story as the Washington Evening Star printed it on January 2, 1945, datelined “A United States Night Fighter Base, France.” Evening Star, p. A-3, via the Library of Congress, Chronicling America. [Image source]() [No known copyright restrictions · Library of Congress]() ### Spots before the eyes The press was primed. In mid-December Supreme Headquarters had disclosed that American airmen were meeting silver spheres over Germany, which the New York Times likened to the huge glass balls on Christmas trees; the 415th pointed out to Chamberlin that the spheres floated and never followed a plane. So the newspapers called the lights the Nazis’ newest secret weapon; the experts at home called them something else. On January 15 Time wrote that “if it was not a hoax or an optical illusion, it was certainly the most puzzling secret weapon that Allied fighters have yet encountered,” and reported that skeptical scientists thought the fireballs might be an afterimage left in the pilots’ eyes after they had been dazzled by flak bursts, while “front-line correspondents and armchair experts had a Buck Rogers field day.” The correspondents, Time said, guessed that the fireballs were meant to dazzle pilots, mark targets for the flak gunners, jam radar or cut a plane’s ignition in midair. Some scientists in New York, Chamberlin wrote, decided “apparently by remote control” that it was St. Elmo’s fire, the glow of atmospheric electricity on masts and wingtips; a transport pilot back from the Himalayan “Hump” told the AP the foo fighters were only static. Newsweek wondered about the exhaust of a small radio-controlled Messerschmitt rocket plane. At Ochey the crews were furious. When the Time piece reached them in February, Stars and Stripes found them “incensed to learn that the phenomenon had been lightly passed off as a case of spots before their eyes.” Lieutenant Owen Davis and his navigator, Lieutenant Warren Rodick, put it plainly: “If we’re starting to see things now, we’d better quit and go home.” Chamberlin heard the same anger about St. Elmo’s fire, which every night flier knew well: “Just let the sons come over and fly a mission with us. We’ll show ’em.” Sources: [UFO Reports, 1944]() · [Science: Foo-Fighter]() · [Foo Fighters Only Static, Transport Pilot Believes]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() ### They keep the crews on edge Behind the headlines the reports were climbing the chain of command. On January 2, the day the AP story ran, the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division cabled Eisenhower’s headquarters: “Press reports red balls of fire accompanying planes in flight termed ‘Foo Fighters’ by air personnel. Desire explanation if available.” No reply has been found. On January 16 the XII Tactical Air Command sent up the squadron’s own words: “We have encountered a phenomenon which we cannot explain; crews have been followed by lights that blink on and off changing colors etc. The lights come very close and fly formation with our planes. They are agitating and keep the crews on edge when they encounter them, mainly because they cannot explain them.” The First Tactical Air Force answered that no one else had reported anything like it and asked for colors, sizes and altitudes. Meanwhile, on January 19, a top secret evaluation of German capabilities for 1945 by the intelligence staff of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces listed, among untried enemy weapons, the “‘Phoo’ Bomb, Magnetic Waves and gases applicable to aircraft,” and judged that none offered a new threat “of really serious proportions.” On January 30 Ringwald sent back fifteen extracts from the pilots’ sortie reports, stamped secret, with a footnote explaining the word — “Foofighters is the name given these phenomenon by combat crews of this Squadron” — and a last line that hung over the whole file. GCI was the ground-controlled interception radar that steered the night fighters, a bogey an unidentified aircraft: “In every case where pilot called GCI Control and asked if there was a Bogey A/C in the area he received a negative answer.” Sources: [War Department message CM-OUT-86184: Foo Fighters]() · [Night Phenomenon]() · [2nd Wrapper Indorsement: extracts from sortie reports]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() ![Typed wartime military document stamped SECRET at top and bottom, with a signed forwarding endorsement from XII Tactical Air Command and below it the 415th Night Fighter Squadron’s list of sortie report extracts for December 1944.]() The first page of the 415th’s secret reply of January 30, 1945, forwarding extracts from the sortie reports of pilots “who have encountered the Night Phenomenon,” including the red-and-green “T” north of Breisach and the two lights near Hagenau. U.S. Army Air Forces document, public domain, scan via the Internet Archive. [Image source]() [Public domain · U.S. government work]() ### Something more than mere imagination The file went on to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Eisenhower’s command, known as SHAEF. On February 11, 1945, the British Air Commodore C. M. Grierson of SHAEF’s Air Staff wrote to the chief technical intelligence officer of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces that, from the number of reports in the 415th’s list, “it would seem that there must be something more than mere imagination behind the matter,” and that since “pilots and crews are becoming slightly worried by them,” everything possible should be done to get to the root of it. He added that the headquarters’ Scientific Investigation Division, “Mr. Robertson,” had been asked to consider the problem. That was very probably the Caltech physicist Howard P. Robertson, then SHAEF’s scientific intelligence adviser. On March 13 the Air Ministry in London replied that Bomber Command crews had been reporting similar things for some time, that a few might have been Me 262 jets and the rest flak rockets, and that “the whole affair is still something of a mystery.” Sources: [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [Report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (the Durant report)]() ### The cloud and the prop wash The lights did not stop for the paperwork. On the night of January 29–30, halfway between Wissembourg and Landau, a crew saw amber lights at 2,000 feet, one twenty to fifty feet above the other, about a foot across and a thousand feet away, following the Beaufighter. They went out when it turned into them. In another of Chamberlin’s January stories, three sets of red and white lights trailed a plane; when the pilot pulled up sharply they carried straight on, “as though caught napping, and then sheepishly pulled up to follow.” Chamberlin built his climax from nights like these: a pilot turns into the lights, which vanish, and feels the prop wash of an aircraft that ground radar says is not there; later, with lights behind him again, he dives into a cloud, drops two thousand feet and swings thirty degrees left, and when he comes out the light emerges from the cloud “in the same relative position,” as though to thumb its nose at him. On February 13–14 a crew turned into two sets of lights; one set blinked out, the other shot straight up two or three thousand feet and vanished, and when the crew looked back the lights were sitting in their original position. On March 19–20, at Speyer on the Rhine, a crew logged “2 ‘Foo’ Fighters – 1 orange ball and 1 green one.” On April 23–24, by then in a P-61 Black Widow, a crew saw four lights arranged in a square, which went out as the plane approached. “The foo-fighters simply disappeared when Allied ground forces captured the area East of the Rhine,” Chamberlin wrote, a region “known to be the location of many German experimental stations.” The crews had a verdict ready either way: if it turned out the Germans had nothing airborne there, “We’ll be all set for Section Eight psychiatric discharges.” Sources: [Foo-Fighter Documents]() · [2nd Wrapper Indorsement: extracts from sortie reports]() · [First Official Foo-Fighter Records Discovered]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() ![Aerial black-and-white photograph of a wide river with a wrecked steel truss bridge sagging into the water, a long pontoon bridge crossing beside it, and flat farmland, factories and an airfield stretching to a hazy horizon.]() The Rhine at Speyer in May 1945, with the blown road bridge, a pontoon bridge and the Speyer airfield beyond. On the night of March 19–20, 1945, a 415th crew reported “2 ‘Foo’ Fighters” here. U.S. Army Air Forces photo 342-FH-3A22503, National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. [Image source]() [Public domain · U.S. Air Force]() ### Even the teetotalers The 415th was not alone for long. The 416th Night Fighter Squadron in Italy noted in February 1945 that “the hypothesis that the foo-fighters are a post-cognac manifestation has been disproved. Even the teetotalers have observed the strange and mysterious foofighters.” In the Pacific that spring, B-29 crews over Japan reported what an intelligence summary called “red balls of fire,” about the size of a basketball with a phosphorescent glow, which followed the bombers and could not be shaken off: “No amount of evasion of the most violent nature succeeded in shaking the balls,” and one B-29 escaped a ball only by pushing its speed to 295 miles an hour. Another crew flew into cloud twice and came out with the light still on its tail. On May 3, 1945, a B-24 of the 11th Bomb Group over Truk lagoon was joined by two red lights that rose from below; one turned back after an hour, and the other stayed with the bomber until dawn, changing from red to orange to white, and then “climbed to 15,000 ft and stayed in the sun.” Some recollections reach back further still. Years later a B-29 captain, Alvah Reida, remembered a throbbing red-orange globe with a halo pacing his wing on a raid on Palembang, in Sumatra, in August 1944, three months before Schlueter’s red light, before it made an abrupt ninety-degree turn and was gone. Sources: [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() · [The Mysterious Foo Fighters of WW II]() · [Foo-Fighter Documents]() ### Dear Pete When the war in Europe ended, the Americans went looking for the weapon. On October 9, 1945, the intelligence staff of U.S. Air Forces in Europe wrote to General Elwood “Pete” Quesada in Washington: “Exhaustive investigation of German technical personnel and American technical sources in European Theater of operations reveals no confirmatory evidence of German use of so called ‘Balls of Fire.’” Eleven Allied agencies had been consulted and thirteen German generals and scientists questioned, among them the flak commander General Walther von Axthelm and the designer of the Natter rocket interceptor, Hans Zacher, who said his machine “could not possibly be the Ball of Fire.” Several of the scientists suggested static electricity or some weather effect. The letter recommended “that the active search for the ‘Ball of Fire’ be dropped,” while guessing that the reports might add up to scattered German guided-missile tests. General Hap Arnold had also sent his scientific adviser, the geophysicist David Griggs, to look into the lights in Europe and the Pacific. Griggs’s report has never been found. Sources: [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [Report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (the Durant report)]() ### If the term had been popular Two years later the world had a new word. When Kenneth Arnold saw nine objects over Mount Rainier in June 1947 and the flying saucer was born, veterans of the night skies noticed the family resemblance; Ed Clark wrote in 1950 that some saucer reports described reddish-orange lights “similar in appearance to the unexplained sights seen by American airmen.” In January 1953 the CIA convened a panel of scientists to decide what to make of the saucers. Its chairman was Howard P. Robertson. The panel’s minutes note that foo fighters were cited as a precedent — balls of light that flew with aircraft and maneuvered rapidly, thought to be electrostatic, electromagnetic or reflections from ice crystals, “but their exact cause or nature was never defined.” Robertson and Luis Alvarez “had been concerned in the investigation of these phenomena,” the minutes say, and Griggs was believed to know the most about them. Then comes the line that ties the eras together: “If the term ‘flying saucers’ had been popular in 1943-1945, these objects would have been so labeled.” The panel filed two recent sightings as probably foo fighters, “to date unexplained but not dangerous.” Sources: [Report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (the Durant report)]() · [Appendix U: Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() ### The Feuerball If the Germans had not built the foo fighters, the legend-makers would build them. In 1968 the Italian aviation writer Renato Vesco published Intercettateli senza sparare, translated in 1971 as Intercept — But Don’t Shoot, which described a German Feuerball: a round, armored, radio-controlled machine “resembling the shell of a tortoise,” built at Wiener Neustadt, that followed enemy aircraft, interfered with their radio and radar and, if hit, fled at maximum acceleration. Vesco also named a Kugelblitz, “ball lightning.” No wartime document supports either, and the 1945 interrogations had found nothing of the kind, but the Feuerball became a foundation stone of the Nazi flying saucer myth. The British researcher Kevin McClure concluded that both could be dismissed “as objects that never had any physical reality.” Other inventions followed: Andy Roberts showed that a German foo fighter study called Sonderbüro 13 was a hoax planted in a 1970 French book to see who would copy it without checking, and several “foo fighter photographs” now circulating online have no known source at all. Sources: [The Nazi UFO Mythos, part two]() · [W.W.II Document Research (In Search of Foo-Fighters)]() · [The Foo Fighters: Today’s Pilots’ Encounters with UAP Are Nothing New]() ### A name that outlived the war The word the 415th borrowed from a comic strip is now better known than the squadron. In 1994 Dave Grohl, recording alone after the end of Nirvana, needed a name that would sound like a band; he was reading a lot of books about UFOs, which he told Clash were “a treasure trove of band names,” and chose Foo Fighters. He has since called it the stupidest band name in the world. The lights also came back into official conversation in the twenty-first century, when Navy pilots began to describe objects that kept pace with their jets. Writing in 2021, the historian Graeme Rendall set the Rhine reports beside the 2004 “Tic Tac” encounter off California and found them not so different. When the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published the first volume of its historical review in March 2024, it traced official interest back to an unnamed program of 1945 but never mentioned the foo fighters. Barry Greenwood, who had published the 415th’s records from Air Force microfilm in 1992, pointed out that the Air Force had acknowledged in 1952 an inquiry into foo fighters after the war, notably by David Griggs. Sources: [Foo Fighters On Their Band Name]() · [The Foo Fighters: Today’s Pilots’ Encounters with UAP Are Nothing New]() · [The 2024 AARO Report]() ## The evidence ### What survives The foo fighters of the Rhine are unusually well documented for a wartime story. The 415th’s unit history and its day-by-day War Diary survive on Air Force microfilm, and their foo fighter entries were found and transcribed by Barry Greenwood of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy in 1992; the squadron’s mission reports at the National Archives add more nights. The correspondence of January to March 1945 — the War Department cable, the XII Tactical Air Command letter, the 415th’s fifteen sortie extracts, the SHAEF letters and the Air Ministry reply — and the USAFE report of October 1945 are transcribed by Project 1947, with page scans. Around them sit the contemporary press, led by Bob Wilson’s Associated Press story and Time’s reply, and Jo Chamberlin’s American Legion Magazine article of December 1945, written by an aide to General Arnold who interviewed the crews in the spring of 1945. Most of the men’s own later recollections come through Jeffery Lindell’s 1991 interviews and Keith Chester’s 2007 book. The Griggs report and any SHAEF answer to the War Department have not been found. Sources: [First Official Foo-Fighter Records Discovered]() · [Foo-Fighter Documents]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() · [Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II]() · [The real Foo fighters]() ### How the story grew The first night changes with every telling. The unit history says late October; the War Diary’s first entry is November 27, and it describes a single red light that ended in a streak; Chamberlin’s article has eight or ten orange balls with Ringwald aboard; and Harold Wilkins, writing for Fate in 1951, fixed it at 10 p.m. on November 23 and turned the lights red, a date no wartime document supports. Wilkins also supplied the radio operator’s jeering lines that later books quote as if they were logged. Chamberlin’s story of the cloud and the prop wash stitches together separate nights, and his cloud maneuver closely resembles the Pacific bomber reports. Meiers’s three kinds of lights became “as many as ten” in every color in Stars and Stripes. The naming scene has three versions, from an anonymous pilot at chow to Meiers with the comic strip in his pocket, the last recalled nearly fifty years later. Even Meiers’s name wanders: Myers in the unit history, Meyers in the War Diary, Meierson in a modern catalog. The claim that German pilots saw foo fighters too has never been traced to any report. Sources: [First Official Foo-Fighter Records Discovered]() · [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() · [The Strange Mystery of the Foo Fighters]() · [The Mysterious Foo Fighters of WW II]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [The Foo Fighters: Today’s Pilots’ Encounters with UAP Are Nothing New]() ### Explanations on offer At the time the crews suspected a German weapon, radio-controlled or psychological; the postwar interrogations found no such device, and the Feuerball story came decades later. The Air Ministry suggested Me 262 jets and flak rockets, and one controller of the 64th Fighter Wing, Albert Rosenthal, recalled in 1952 that the lights sometimes seemed tied to concentrated flak, sometimes were said to explode when chased, and sometimes produced a slight response on the Beaufighters’ radar. He listed the theories of the time as St. Elmo’s fire, barrage balloons, meteors and “gremlins from the Black Forest nearby.” Time’s scientists offered afterimages of flak flashes; the Robertson Panel, electrostatic or electromagnetic effects and ice-crystal reflections. Planets, stars and ground lights seen from a moving cockpit may account for some reports; Lindell, who interviewed the survivors, argued in 2012 for disorientation and visual illusions, noting that Meiers and his own pilot had quite different memories of the same flight. None of these fits every report, and the squadron’s insistence that ground radar found nothing each time left the file open. Sources: [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() · [Science: Foo-Fighter]() · [Report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (the Durant report)]() · [The real Foo fighters]() · [The Nazi UFO Mythos, part two]() ### Classification note This archive files the Rhine foo fighters as a military encounter because the core record is a combat squadron’s own reports, forwarded through military intelligence channels to Supreme Headquarters. It carries no close-encounter code: the lights were seen in flight, usually hundreds or thousands of feet away, and no one described a structured craft at close range, landed traces or occupants. The Pacific and Italian reports are included for context and are not part of the 415th’s record. Sources: [2nd Wrapper Indorsement: extracts from sortie reports]() · [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() ## Timeline - **OCT 1944:** The 415th’s unit history, written later, dates the first foo fighter to “late in October.” - **26–27 NOV 1944:** Lt. Edward Schlueter and Lt. Donald Meiers see a red light close to 2,000 feet off the starboard wing; it vanishes in a long red streak. - **LATE NOV 1944:** Capt. Fred Ringwald flies along and sees a row of eight or ten orange lights; ground radar reports the sky empty. - **6 DEC 1944:** The squadron moves from Dijon to Ochey, near Nancy. - **14 DEC 1944:** The New York Times reports silver spheres like Christmas tree ornaments over Germany. - **16–17 DEC 1944:** Five or six red and green lights in a “T” follow a Beaufighter north of Breisach. - **18 DEC 1944:** The War Diary records the name for the first time: “Our pilots have named these mysterious … ‘Foo-Fighters.’” - **22–23 DEC 1944:** Two orange lights climb from the ground near Hagenau and sit on a Beaufighter’s tail for two minutes. - **23–24 DEC 1944:** Lt. David McFalls and Lt. Ned Baker see a red object turn into the shape of an aircraft. - **24 DEC 1944:** Sgt. Ed Clark of Stars and Stripes, flying with the squadron, is paced by a red ball near Karlsruhe. - **26–27 DEC 1944:** A crew feels prop wash from an empty sky; a light near Worms follows through five minutes of evasive action. - **31 DEC 1944:** AP reporter Bob Wilson interviews the crews until 4 a.m. - **1–2 JAN 1945:** The AP story runs across the United States; the War Department cables SHAEF for an explanation. - **15 JAN 1945:** Time suggests afterimages from flak bursts and St. Elmo’s fire. - **16 JAN 1945:** XII Tactical Air Command forwards the squadron’s plea: the lights “keep the crews on edge.” - **19 JAN 1945:** A top secret USSTAF evaluation lists a “Phoo” Bomb among untried German weapons. - **30 JAN 1945:** Ringwald sends fifteen sortie extracts; every call to ground control had found no aircraft. - **11 FEB 1945:** SHAEF writes that there “must be something more than mere imagination” and asks “Mr. Robertson” to investigate. - **13 MAR 1945:** The Air Ministry suggests Me 262s and flak rockets but calls the affair “still something of a mystery.” - **19–20 MAR 1945:** A crew logs an orange and a green foo fighter at Speyer. - **SPRING 1945:** B-29 crews over Japan report red balls of fire; a B-24 over Truk is followed until dawn on May 3. - **9 OCT 1945:** U.S. Air Forces in Europe reports no evidence of a German “Ball of Fire” and recommends ending the search. - **DEC 1945:** Jo Chamberlin’s “The Foo Fighter Mystery” appears in The American Legion Magazine. - **JAN 1953:** The CIA’s Robertson Panel cites the foo fighters: they would have been called flying saucers. - **1968:** Renato Vesco’s book introduces the German Feuerball. - **JUN 1992:** Barry Greenwood publishes the 415th’s unit history and War Diary entries. - **1995:** Dave Grohl releases the first Foo Fighters album. ## Sources & interviews - [UFO Reports and Official Documents, 1945]() — Project 1947 (Jan Aldrich) · transcriptions of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron’s unit history and sortie extracts, the XII Tactical Air Command, SHAEF and Air Ministry letters, the USAFE report of October 1945, and the AP, Time, Newsweek and Stars and Stripes stories - [UFO Reports, 1944]() — Project 1947 · the New York Times, Stars and Stripes and Newsweek reports of December 1944 on silver spheres over Germany - [Foo-Fighter Documents]() — Barry Greenwood · Computer UFO Network, 1998 · the 415th War Diary for December 1944 and January 1945 and transcribed mission reports · archived copy - [First Official Foo-Fighter Records Discovered]() — Just Cause no. 32 · Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, ed. Barry Greenwood · June 1992 · the 415th unit history from the Air Force historical microfilm · Internet Archive - [The Foo Fighter Mystery]() — Jo Chamberlin · The American Legion Magazine vol. 39 no. 6 · December 1945 · Project 1947 transcription - [The American Legion Magazine, December 1945]() — The American Legion · scan of the issue with Chamberlin’s article and Raymond Creekmore’s sketch · Internet Archive - [Nazis’ Newest Trick, ‘Fire Balls,’ Follow Or Precede Planes]() — Associated Press · Evening Star (Washington), January 2, 1945, p. A-3 · Library of Congress, Chronicling America - [Eerie Nazi ‘Foo-Fighters’ Mystify Yank Night Fliers]() — Associated Press · Springfield Weekly Republican, January 4, 1945, p. 5 · Library of Congress, Chronicling America - [Foo Fighters Only Static, Transport Pilot Believes]() — Associated Press · Evening Star (Washington), January 10, 1945 · Library of Congress, Chronicling America - [Science: Foo-Fighter]() — Time · January 15, 1945 - [The Foo Fighters of World War II, Part One]() — Saturday Night Uforia · with the War Diary, the long AP version from the Chicago Tribune and a profile of the reporter Bob Wilson - [Night Phenomenon]() — Headquarters XII Tactical Air Command · secret letter of January 16, 1945, with the First Tactical Air Force reply · scan · Internet Archive - [2nd Wrapper Indorsement: extracts from sortie reports]() — 415th Night Fighter Squadron, signed Capt. F. B. Ringwald, intelligence officer · January 30, 1945 · scan · Internet Archive - [War Department message CM-OUT-86184: Foo Fighters]() — Military Intelligence Division to SHAEF, Versailles · January 2, 1945 · scan · Internet Archive - [Report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects (the Durant report)]() — F. C. Durant for the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence · meetings of January 14–18, 1953 · transcription with page scans by Patrick Gross - [Appendix U: Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects]() — Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (the Condon Report) · 1969 · NCAS web edition - [The Strange Mystery of the Foo Fighters]() — Harold T. Wilkins · Fate · August–September 1951 · Project 1947 transcription - [The Mysterious Foo Fighters of WW II]() — Jerome Clark and Lucius Farish · SAGA UFO Report · spring 1975 · Project 1947 transcription - [Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II]() — Keith Chester · Anomalist Books · 2007 · Internet Archive record - [The real Foo fighters]() — Jeffery A. Lindell · Skeptic vol. 17 no. 2 · 2012 · Gale - [What Were the Mysterious ‘Foo Fighters’ Sighted by WWII Night Flyers?]() — Zoe Krasney · Air & Space/Smithsonian · August 2016 - [The Foo Fighters: Today’s Pilots’ Encounters with UAP Are Nothing New]() — Graeme Rendall · The Debrief · April 15, 2021 - [W.W.II Document Research (In Search of Foo-Fighters)]() — Andy Roberts · UFO Brigantia · July 1990 · Project 1947 transcription - [The Nazi UFO Mythos, part two]() — Kevin McClure · Magonia · 2015 repost - [The 2024 AARO Report]() — Barry Greenwood · Center for UFO Studies · March 2024 - [Foo Fighters On Their Band Name]() — Clash · November 2010 - [Etymology of “Foo” (RFC 3092)]() — D. Eastlake, C. Manros and E. Raymond · Internet Engineering Task Force · April 1, 2001 · on Bill Holman’s Smokey Stover Spotted an error, or know a better source? Write to hello@uap.fun. ## Connected files - [The Rocket in Lake Kölmjärv]() — The next wave of unexplained lights in European skies, a year later, this time blamed on German rocket technology in Soviet hands. - [Nine Objects over Mount Rainier]() — The sighting that gave the world the flying saucer, and a new name for what the night fliers had seen. - [The Washington Flap]() — The summer of radar returns over the capital that led the CIA to convene the Robertson Panel and look back at the foo fighters. - [The Nimitz Encounter]() — Sixty years on, Navy pilots describing an object that kept pace with their jets, the case modern writers most often set beside the foo fighters. - [Kenneth Arnold]() — The pilot whose 1947 sighting gave the world the flying saucer, the label the Robertson Panel said the foo fighters would have carried. ## A NOTE ON EVIDENCE Unidentified describes a limit of the available information. It doesn’t identify an origin. [NEXT CASE FILE: The Sign of Shambhala]()