Disturbing History - The Foo Fighters of World War Two

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

The story of the Foo Fighters of World War Two is one of the strangest, best-documented, and least-resolved cases in the history of military aviation. In the late autumn of nineteen forty-four, pilots of the United States Army Air Forces, flying night fighter and bomber missions over Europe, began returning to their bases with reports of glowing objects that paced their aircraft, performed seemingly impossible maneuvers, and then vanished into the dark.The reports were taken seriously by intelligence officers. They were corroborated by multiple witnesses across multiple squadrons. They reached the press in early nineteen forty-five, when Time magazine ran a feature on the phenomenon. And they continued through the end of the war, in both the European and Pacific theaters, with no satisfactory official explanation.This episode follows the story from its earliest documented appearances over the Rhine Valley, with the Four Hundred Fifteenth Night Fighter Squadron and pilots like Lieutenant Edward Schlueter, through the coining of the term foo fighter by radar observer Donald Meiers, who borrowed the word from the cult-favorite Smokey Stover comic strip by Bill Holman.From there, the episode traces the spread of the phenomenon to Pacific theater bomber crews, examines the postwar theories offered to explain it, and follows its tangled relationship to the modern UFO era, including its treatment by Project Blue Book and the Robertson Panel.The candidate explanations are examined honestly and at length. Natural atmospheric phenomena like St. Elmo's fire and ball lightning are considered and weighed against the actual content of the witness reports. Theories about Nazi secret weapons, including Renato Vesco's controversial claims about the Feuerball program, are discussed and contextualized. The psychological strain of combat aviation, including the role of Benzedrine and chronic fatigue, is given serious treatment. And the awkward, persistent residue of unexplained cases is examined for what it tells us about the limits of historical knowledge and the gaps in our collective record.The episode closes by drawing a careful, non-sensational line between the wartime foo fighter cases and the modern Unidentified Aerial Phenomena conversation, noting the similarities in witness language across more than eighty years, and the implications that has for how we treat phenomena that resist neat explanation. The men of the Four Hundred Fifteenth, and the bomber crews of the Pacific, and even the Luftwaffe pilots who reported the same kinds of objects over their own skies, deserve to have their experience taken seriously.This episode is one small contribution to that ongoing effort.For listeners following along with the Disturbing History series on presidential politics, regular programming on that subject will resume in the next episode. Tonight's installment is a deliberate detour into one of the most haunting, well-witnessed, and least-explained chapters of twentieth-century history. Sometimes the disturbing thing isn't a man in a suit making a terrible decision. Sometimes it's a question that history hands us and then walks away from, leaving us to live with the silence.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

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Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian. investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. We're going to step away from the White House for a while. For the last few episodes, we've been knee-deep in the dark history of presidential politics. The deals. The secrets.

The men who walked into that building thinking they could bend the country to their will. And the people who got crushed under the wheels of those decisions. It's been heavy. I know it has. and we'll be back in those marble halls before long, because that series isn't finished, not even close. But tonight, we're doing something different.

Tonight we're going back. Not back into another smoke-filled hotel suite. Not back into another campaign office. We're going up. 20,000 feet up, somewhere over the cold black sky of Western Europe, in the dead of winter, 1944. There's a young American pilot up there,

flying alone in the dark, hunting German night fighters. He's been doing this for months. He's tired. He's cold. He's about as alert as a human being can be, because in his line of work, the moment you stop paying attention is usually the moment you die. And then he glances out the canopy of his airplane,

off to his right, and he sees something he cannot explain. It's a ball of light, glowing, bright. About the size of a basketball, maybe bigger. It's keeping pace with him. holding formation just off his wing. He banks left. It follows.

He climbs. It climbs. He dives. It dives. He throws his airplane into every evasive maneuver he knows, and the thing matches him. Move for move, as if it's playing with him. And then, just like that, it's gone.

He lands back at the airfield, and he tells his crew chief what he saw, and his crew chief just stares at him. because the guy who flew the mission before him said the same thing, and so did the guy before that. And by the time the war is over, hundreds of pilots on both sides will have reported the same kind of encounter.

Glowing balls, metallic spheres, lights that flew in formation, ran circles around fighter aircraft, and then vanished into the dark. The American boys called them foo fighters. The Germans had their own names for them. And to this day, more than 80 years later, nobody can tell you for sure what they were. So why does this story belong here on disturbing history?

Because it's documented, because it isn't a campfire story. The pilots who reported these things weren't drunk teenagers staring at the sky. They were combat aviators, trained observers, men whose lives depended on knowing the difference between a friendly aircraft and enemy aircraft, a star, a planet, a flare, a tracer round, and something genuinely strange. The reports filtered up the chain of command. Intelligence officers took them seriously enough to file them. Time magazine ran a feature on it before the war was even over. And after the war, when the dust settled,

the United States government quietly investigated the phenomenon for years. They never did come up with a clean answer. That's what makes this disturbing. It's not just that something weird happened. It's that something weird happened in front of thousands of witnesses. in the most heavily documented conflict in human history. And the official record still has a shrug where the explanation ought to be. So tonight we're going back to the winter of 44,

to a place where the war never really stopped, even at night, even in the silence between the bombing runs. And we're going to talk about the lights in the sky that the bravest men of that generation could not explain. This is the foo fighters of World War II. To understand what these pilots were seeing, you've got to understand what kind of war they were fighting. Because by the autumn of 1944, the air war over Europe had changed shape.

The big daylight raids were still happening. The 8th Air Force was still flying B-17s and B-24s across the channel in waves, hammering German industry, taking heavy losses. But the night belonged to a different kind of pilot, a different kind of mission, and a different kind of airplane. Night fighters were a specialized breached. Their job wasn't to escort bombers across enemy territory in broad daylight. Their job was to hunt.

They flew alone or in small groups, deep into enemy airspace, often on intruder missions, looking for German night fighters trying to attack the British heavy bombers that came over after dark. They flew low, they flew slow. They used early airborne radar to find their prey. And when they found something, they killed it. And they got out before the German anti-aircraft gunners, or the Luftwaffe could catch up to them.

The American outfit that gave us the term foo fighter was a unit called the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. It's not a name most people know today. There are no big Hollywood movies about it. There's no statue out front of any major museum. But for about 18 months, those men did some of the most dangerous and most overlooked flying of the entire war.

And what they saw out there, on those long, cold missions, became one of the strangest footnotes in the history of human aviation. The 415th was activated in 1943. They trained in Florida, shipped overseas, and ended up flying out of bases in England before being moved to France after the Allied breakout.

They flew the Bristol Bowfighter, a British twin-engine aircraft that looked like something somebody designed in a hurry and never bothered to make pretty. It was a tank with wings, big, loud, heavily armed, slower than a fighter, faster than a bomber, and just the right kind of nasty for the work it was built to do. The bowfighter carried four 20 millimeter cannons in the nose and six machine guns in the wings,

and when it lit up a target at night, the target tended to come apart in a hurry. These men flew with a two-man crew. There was the pilot up front and behind him, in a separate position, was the radar observer. The RO, they called him. The radar in those days was a primitive thing by modern standards. It was basically a small,

screen that showed blips and lines, and the RO had to learn how to read it the way a sailor reads a coast. He'd call out range and bearing to the pilot, and the pilot would try to maneuver the aircraft into position to make a kill. It was tedious, terrifying, eye-straining work, and the men who did it well became almost like one organism with their pilots. You couldn't fake the trust. You couldn't manufacture it. It was earned in the dark, over Germany, in the middle of a war. You should picture what those missions actually felt like, because it matters for what comes next. The bowfighter was loud. The two Hercules engines roared on either side of the fuselage, and the noise inside the cockpit was constant and bone deep. You couldn't talk without the

intercom. You couldn't hear yourself think without throttling back. The cabin heaters were marginal at altitude and the men flew in heavy sheepskin jackets and gloves because the cold at 20,000 feet in a European winter could give you frostbite through wool. The oxygen mass pulled tight against your face. The straps cut into your shoulders. Your hands ached on the controls. Your eyes ached from staring into the dark. A typical mission ran four or five hours, sometimes longer. Take off in the dark, climb to altitude, cross the front line, patrol your assigned sector, drop down to investigate a contact, climb back up, patrol some more. Eventually, if you were lucky, come home in the dark, find your airfield, line up on the approach,

and put the airplane down without crashing it. The men of the 415th did that, night after night, for months on end. They were as professional as combat aviators got. and when men that professional come back saying they saw something inexplicable, you owe them at least the courtesy of taking the report seriously. By the late autumn of 44, the 415th was operating out of an airfield called Oche in northeastern France. They were close enough to the front line that they could be over German territory in a matter of minutes. Their missions ran most of the night.

They'd take off in the dark, climb up to altitude, prowl back and forth along the Rhine Valley. Drop down to chase a contact, climb back up, do it all over again. They were looking for German night fighters, German trains, German troop columns, German anything. And on a clear night, with the moon up and the snow on the ground, they could see the lights of villages way down below them and the dark ribbon of the river winding through it all. That's the picture you need in your head. A two-man crew and a heavy growling airplane. A frozen sky.

A radar screen lit up faintly and green. A pilot peering out into the dark, knowing that anything he sees out there is either trying to kill him or about to be killed by him. And then one night in late November, things got weird. It was November 23rd, 1944. The pilot's name was Edward Schluter. He was a lieutenant, and his airplane that night carried two passengers besides himself.

His RO was a fellow officer, and along for the flight as an observer, was an intelligence officer named Fred Ringwald. Three men in the same aircraft, three sets of eyes, three independent witnesses to what happened next. They were flying somewhere over the Rhine in the area near Strasbourg, when Ringwold, looking out the side of the canopy,

spotted what he thought were stars, bright lights, off the wing, holding station with the aircraft. He pointed them out, and the other two men looked, and they all realized pretty quickly that whatever those things were, they weren't stars.

Stars don't change position relative to a moving airplane. Stars don't pace you. These things were pacing them. Schluter called in to ground control and asked if there were any other aircraft in the area. Ground control said no. He asked again. Ground control checked their radar. Nothing.

According to the people on the ground, Schluter's airplane was alone up there. And yet here were these lights, eight or ten of them, formed up off his wing, red and orange, glowing steady, keeping pace with a heavy twin-engine combat aircraft, moving at well over 200 miles an hour. Schluter, being a fighter pilot, did what fighter pilots do. He turned into them. He pushed the throttles forward and he turned hard toward the lights,

intending to engage. And as soon as he did, the lights peeled off. They didn't run exactly. They didn't accelerate away. They just kind of dissolved into the dark. Gone. Like somebody had thrown a switch. He came home that night and he filed a report. And here's where the story gets interesting.

Because if Schluter had been the only pilot in the 415th seeing this stuff, the report would have gotten filed and forgotten. Combat fatigue. Vivid dream. Some optical phenomenon. Easy to dismiss. But over the next few weeks, more pilots in the same squadron started coming back with similar stories. Different nights. different sectors, different airplanes, same kind of lights.

There was a siding on the night of December 22nd, going into December 23rd. The pilot was a lieutenant named David McFaulz with a radar observer named Edward Baker. They were over Hagenau in northeastern France when they reported two large orange lights climbing toward their airplane. The lights leveled off at the altitude of their bow fighter, hung there for about two minutes, and then dropped away in a smooth curve toward the ground. ground. McFalls and Baker said the things appeared to be under intelligent control. They didn't behave like flares. They didn't behave like aircraft. They moved with a kind of

deliberate purpose that the two men couldn't account for. There was another siding a few nights later, with a different crew over a different sector, and another, and another. By the time Christmas had come and gone, the four hundred fifteenth had logged enough of these reports that the squadrons intelligence officer was actively collecting them. trying to look for patterns. He didn't find any patterns he could use. The objects appeared on clear nights and cloudy nights. They appeared at different altitudes.

They appeared in groups and as singletons. The only consistent thing about them was that they were there. They were behaving in ways that didn't fit any known aircraft, and they were leaving the pilots who saw them shaken in a way that combat itself didn't shake them. There's something about being chased by something you can't identify that gets under a man's skin. in a different way than being chased by an enemy he knows. The pattern was consistent enough that intelligence officers started taking it seriously. Pilots described balls of fire, sometimes orange, sometimes red, sometimes white,

sometimes singly, sometimes in groups. The objects appeared to fly in formation with American aircraft. They paced them. They climbed and dove with them. Some pilots tried to shake them off with hard maneuvering, and the objects matched the maneuvers. Other pilots tried to fire at them and either couldn't get a lock

or watch their tracer rounds appear to pass right through the things without effect. Nobody got shot down by one. Nobody got physically harmed. The objects didn't seem to be hostile exactly. They just showed up. They paced you. They messed with you in a way that felt almost playful.

And then they left. And nobody, on either side of the line, could explain what they were. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college. Help your community build a new playground or help a child make it to that dream competition.

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Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change. Today start your fundraiser in just minutes at GoFundMe.com. That's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com. This is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe. Now, the name. The name is one of those things that's almost too perfect for a story like this. And there's actually a pretty fun explanation for how it came about.

There was a comic strip running in American newspapers all through the 1930s and 40s called Smokey Stover. It was drawn by a man named Bill Holman, and it was about a goofy fireman who drove around in a two-wheel fire truck and got into absurd situations. The strip was kind of like the far side of its day, in the sense that it didn't really follow normal logic. It was full of weird visual gags and made up words and inside jokes. And one of Smokey Stover's recurring catchphrases was, where there's foo, there's fire. Foo.

Just a nonsense word. Holman seemed to have made it up out of thin air, the way cartoonists do. And it stuck. people started using it as slang during the Great Depression and into the war years, the way every generation has its own little throwaway words. One of the radar observers in the 415th was a man named Donald Myers. Don, as his buddies called him, was a Chicago kid, and he was apparently a big fan of Smokey Stover. He'd hung a picture of the cartoon character in his bunk.

He carried the comic strip clippings in his gear. And one night, when his pilot saw one of these glowing, objects out in the dark and asked over the intercom what the hell that thing was, Myers reportedly said. It's a foo fighter, where there's foo, there's fire, and that was that. The name stuck. The other crews in the squadron picked it up. The pilots and the radar operators and the ground crews and the intelligence officers started using it as a kind of code, a shorthand for whatever it was they kept seeing out there. By the time the war was a few months further along, the 415th had its own private vocabulary for the unexplained. They had foo fighters. They had foo lights. They had

foo in the singular and the plural, used as a verb and a noun and an adjective. It would be funny if it weren't so strange. A piece of Chicago kid humor lifted from a goofy newspaper cartoon, becoming the term that thousands of veterans would carry home with them, and that historians would still be debating eight decades later. Words started leaking out beyond the squadron. War correspondence picked up on it. The Associated Press ran a wire story, and in January of 1945, Time magazine ran a piece titled Foo Fighter with a hyphen. The article quoted pilots describing balls of fire that followed their airplanes around the European sky. It was short. It was a little tongue-in-cheek. It didn't go too deep into the implications. But it put the term

in front of the American reading public for the first time, and it confirmed something that the pilots already knew, which was that this stuff wasn't isolated to one squadron, and it wasn't going away. By the time that article ran, the war was clearly in its endgame. The Allies were pushing into Germany. The Soviets were closing in from the east. The Battle of the Bulge had just ground itself out in the Ardennes. And yet, in the middle of all of that, some editor at Time magazine looked at the Wire story and said, you know what? This is interesting enough to put in the magazine. That tells you something. The reports were credible enough and persistent enough and strange enough that even a serious wartime news operation thought the American public deserved

to know about them. The European theater wasn't the only place these things were being seen. Across the world in the Pacific, the B-29 crews bombing Japan were coming back with their own version of the same story. The Pacific Air War was a different animal from the European one. The distances were enormous. The B-29s flew from places like Tinian and Saipan and Guam, climbing to altitudes of 30,000 feet or more, crossing thousands of miles of open ocean to drop bombs on Japanese cities, and then turning around and flying the long haul home.

The crews were exhausted by the time they got back. They were stretched thin. They were flying machines that were enormous for their day, almost as big as a modern airliner. but technologically pretty raw, with engines that overheated and pressurization systems that sometimes failed and a thousand other ways for things to go wrong at altitude. And those crews too started reporting strange lights.

They saw glowing objects flying in formation with their bombers. They saw spheres pacing them at altitude, sometimes hanging off a wingtip for minutes at a time before suddenly accelerating away. They saw them at night mostly, but some daytime reports came in too. The objects didn't open fire. They didn't appear to attack. But they were there, and they were behaving in ways that no known aircraft of the era could behave.

Now you have to remember what was at stake here. The B-29 was the most expensive weapon system in human history up to that point. The B-29 program cost more than the Manhattan Project, more than the bomb itself. The crews flying those airplanes were the spearhead of a multi-billion-dollar strategic bombing, campaign that was trying to end the war in the Pacific. The intelligence officers debriefing those crews didn't have time for tall tales. They were looking for hard information about Japanese air defenses, Japanese radar, Japanese new weapons. And when crew after crew came back saying they were being paced by glowing objects that no radar could pick up, the intelligence officers

had to make a decision about what to do with that information. A lot of those reports got filed and forgotten. Some got passed up the chain. After the war, when researchers started going through old intelligence files, looking for evidence of the foo fighter phenomenon, they found Pacific reports scattered through the records, often using different language than the European pilots used, because the term foo fighter hadn't reached the Pacific the way it had reached Europe. The Pacific crews had their own informal vocabulary. They talked about balls of fire, lights, follow ships, things like that. Different words. Same phenomenon. One incident that did filter into the records came from a B-29 crew operating out of the Marianas, returning from a long mission over the Japanese

home islands. The crew reported a large, brightly glowing object that paced their bomber for several minutes at high altitude. The thing appeared to be metallic. It reflected the light of the moon. The bomber's gunners tracked it through their sights. The pilot took evasive action. The The object held station. And then, when the bomber crossed a particular line of latitude on the long flight home, the object peeled off and accelerated away in a direction the crew could not follow. They tried to report it. They were told to file it and not talk about it.

That kind of instruction wasn't unusual in those days. There was a war on. And intelligence wanted to keep certain kinds of information close. Another Pacific incident involved a different bomber crew over the waters between Owojima and and the home islands. The pilots reported small glowing objects, no bigger than a beach ball, sliding along underneath their wing

for the better part of an hour before vanishing all at once. The radar operators on the bomber couldn't get a return off the things. The gunners couldn't get a bead on them. They just sat there, riding the air alongside an American heavy bomber at altitudes where no enemy aircraft of the era

could have followed, and then they were gone. The crew talked about it among themselves for years afterward. They didn't bring it up to outsiders. There was no point. Nobody would have believed them anyway. There's something almost reassuring about that in a strange way. If it had only been the four hundred fifteen-night fighter squadron, you could chalk it up to mass hysteria in one unit, a kind of shared hallucination born of stress and exhaustion and bad coffee. But it wasn't just one unit. It wasn't even just one theater of war. Pilots in completely different parts of the globe, who'd never met, who couldn't possibly have been comparing

notes, were describing the same kinds of objects doing the same kinds of things, and once you accept that, you've got to start asking yourself what was actually going on up there. So let's talk about the theories, because there are several of them, and none of them are perfectly satisfying, and that's part of why this story stays with you. The first explanation and the one that the official record tends to favor is that the foo fighters were natural phenomena. Atmospheric stuff, weird electrical effects, things that real science can account for, even if they look spooky to a guy in a cockpit at 4 in the morning. There's something called St. Elmo's Fire that gets invoked here a lot.

St. Elmo's Fire is a real thing. It's a kind of electrical discharge that can occur in high-voltage atmospheric conditions, and it can produce glowing balls or streamers of life. around the surfaces of an aircraft, especially around sharp edges like wingtips and propeller blades. Sailors have known about it for centuries. They called it after St. Erasmus, who was the patron saint of sailors. It can be eerie to look at. It can flicker. It can move along surfaces. And it's the kind of thing that an unfamiliar observer could mistake for something more exotic. The problem with that explanation, when you apply it to the Foo Fighter reports, is that St.

St. Elmo's fire doesn't fly off your wing and pace you at a distance. It doesn't form up in groups of eight or ten. It doesn't peel off and accelerate away when you turn into it. It clings to the aircraft. It moves with the aircraft because it's electrically tied to the aircraft. The foo fighters by the pilot's accounts were independent objects, moving on their own, sometimes at considerable distance from the airplanes that observed them. St. Elmo's fire doesn't really fit.

another candidate is ball lightning. That's the rare and poorly understood phenomenon where, during electrical storms, sometimes a glowing sphere of light will form and move around in the air, sometimes lasting for several seconds, sometimes passing through walls, sometimes vanishing with a pop. Ball lightning is real.

We know it's real because too many credible people have seen it for too long. But we still don't have a great scientific model for exactly what it is or how it forms. It's one of those edge phenomena that science kind of acknowledges and then sort of looks away from. Could the foo fighters have been ball lightning? Maybe in some cases. But ball lightning is associated with thunderstorm conditions, and a lot of the foo fighter sightings happened on clear, calm nights,

with no electrical activity in the area. Ball lightning also typically happens in short bursts, lasting seconds rather than the minutes that pilots reported being paced by these objects. and ball lightning doesn't usually fly in formation with other ball lightning. The foo fighters very often did. There's also the possibility of more mundane optical effects. Reflections of stars or planets off ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. Distant lights on the ground being misidentified due to perspective.

Flairs from anti-aircraft fire being misjudged as to distance. All of those things can fool a tired pilot at altitude, and you have to allow that some of the reports, reports probably do come down to misidentification of ordinary things in unusual conditions. But here's the issue. The pilots who reported these things were combat aviators. They knew what stars looked like. They knew what flares looked like. They knew what tracer rounds looked like. They'd seen all of that every night for months. And when veteran pilots, men with hundreds of combat hours, come back saying, that wasn't a star, that wasn't a flare, that wasn't anything I've ever seen before,

You have to give that some weight, not infinite weight. Pilots are human. They can be wrong. But you can't dismiss the whole record by saying they were all confused. Some of them, sure. All of them? That's a much harder sell. So let's leave natural phenomena to one side and talk about the next big theory,

which was, at the time, the leading official suspicion. The foo fighters were Nazi secret weapons. You have to remember the context here. By late 1944, the Germans were on the back foot, but they hadn't lost the technology race, not by a long shot. The Germans were the first to deploy operational jet aircraft, the Messerschmitt 262. They were the first to deploy operational rocket aircraft, the Messerschmitt 163 comet. They were the first to deploy operational ballistic missiles, the V2.

And they had any number of other exotic weapons programs in various stages of, development, air-to-air missiles, guided bombs, things that wouldn't see widespread use until decades after the war ended, but which the Germans were experimenting with in real time. So when Allied pilots started coming back with reports of strange flying objects in German airspace, the immediate intelligence assumption was that these were some kind of new German weapon, maybe a remote-controlled drone, maybe some kind of anti-radar device, maybe a psychological weapon designed to spook allied crews. The intelligence officers debriefing the pilots leaned hard on that interpretation, because it fit the broader pattern of German technical innovation, and because it

gave them a framework they could understand. The trouble was, when the war ended and allied investigators went combing through German records, German factories, German laboratories, and German prisoners, they didn't find anything that matched the foo fighter description. Not really. The German Germans had a lot of weird stuff going on, but they didn't have anything that could fly in formation with an Allied night fighter at 20,000 feet, pace it, dance with it, and then vanish. If the foo fighters were a Nazi weapon, the records of that program have never come to light, and it's been more than 80 years. That hasn't stopped the speculation. In the 1960s and 70s, an Italian aerospace writer named Renato Vesco

published a series of books arguing that the foo fighters were a real, German weapon called the foyer ball, which translates roughly to fireball. According to Vesco, the Germans had developed a remotely controlled flying device designed to interfere with allied radar and disrupt bomber formations. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for college. Help your community build a new playground or help a child make a child, make a to that dream competition. With GoFundMe, it's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 190 million people. Every week, ordinary people meet their goals

and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies, want to raise money for your kids' soccer team, or raise funds for a small business, a creative project or event. GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality. And help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else, raise up to five times more. So think right now. Who could use your help? Change rarely comes from waiting. It comes from someone deciding, today I'll start. Don't wait for someone else to bring change. Today, start your fundraiser in just minutes at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com. This is a commercial message brought to you by Gofundme. He described it as a roughly spherical craft, capable of high speeds and tight maneuvering.

deployed late in the war from secret installations in southern Germany and northern Italy. Now, Vesco's account is interesting. He claimed to have access to Italian and German military documents. He wrote with confidence and detail. He even gave technical specifications. The problem is that nobody else has ever been able to corroborate his sources. Other historians who've gone looking for the documents Vesco described have not been able to find them. The institutions he claimed to have consulted,

have no records of his visits. The foyerball, as a real weapons program, has more or less zero independent documentary support. That doesn't mean Vesco was lying. It might just mean he had access to materials that have since been lost, or that he was working from oral histories that didn't leave paper trails.

But it does mean we can't treat the four ball as a confirmed explanation. It's a story about a story. It's compelling, and it sells books, and it shows up in every documentary about the foo fighters, but it isn't proof, not by a long shot. It's also worth saying that the Germans late in the war were absolutely capable of producing exotic technology that nobody on the allied side knew about until after the surrender.

The Horton brothers built a flying wing prototype that looked from certain angles like a flying saucer. The German rocket program at Pina Munda was years ahead of anything the Allies had. There were experimental aircraft, experimental engines, experimental weapons of all kinds, hidden away in underground factories, and dispersed across the territory of the Reich. When the Americans and the Soviets came in at the end of the war and started picking up German engineers, they recovered enough exotic hardware to keep their own military research programs busy for the next 20 years. So it's not crazy on the face of it, to imagine that the Germans had something we never recovered. but the documentary record matters, and the German archives, as fragmented as they are, have been picked over pretty thoroughly.

If the foyerball had been a real deployed weapon, the kind that flew operationally against Allied bombers, we'd expect to find production records, deployment orders, personnel files, after-action reports, something. Instead, the archives are quiet. Vesco's book exists. The corroboration does not.

There's also a strange wrinkle in the Nazi weapons theory, which is that the Germans were reporting their own foo fighter sightings. Luftwaffe pilots came back from missions describing the same kind of glowing objects that the Allies were reporting. The Germans had their own informal nicknames for them. They called them Crout Balls in some reports, which is a kind of brutal little detail when you think about it, because it means German pilots adopted an allied slur to describe a phenomenon that they themselves were observing. They also called them foyerball, which is the same

word Vesco later used for his alleged secret weapon. And that's where the confusion really starts to bake in. Was the German use of the word fireball describing a weapon they'd built? Or was it just German pilots using the same kind of descriptive language as American and British pilots, calling glowing objects fireballs because that's what they looked like? If the Germans had built the foo fighters, they wouldn't have been mystified, by them. They wouldn't have filed their own intelligence reports about them. Either they were lying to themselves in their own internal documents, which makes no sense, or the foo fighters weren't a German weapon. The simplest reading of the German records is that the Luftwaffe was just as confused

as the Allies. They saw the same things in the same skies, and they didn't know what those things were either. Some researchers have flipped that around and suggested that maybe the foo fighters were an Allied weapon. Maybe the Americans or the British had developed some kind of secret aircraft, and the Allied pilots who were seeing it were just unwitting witnesses to their own side's experimental program. That theory falls apart for basically the same reasons. The Allied records don't show any such program. The pilots who would have been flying these things would have had to be in on the secret. The records would have come out by now, after 80 years of declassification. They haven't, because there wasn't anything to do.

declassify on this front. The Allies were also confused, and they stayed confused. A third theory, and one that gets less attention than it probably deserves, is the psychological explanation. The idea that these men were under extraordinary stress, flying long missions in dangerous conditions, often pumped up on stimulants the Air Force is issued to keep them alert, and that what they were seeing was at least partly a product of their own minds. combat aviators in World War II flew on a daily basis with what we'd now call dangerous levels of fatigue. They were issued benzodrine, which is a form of amphetamine, to stay awake on long missions. They were under constant existential threat.

Many of them had watched friends die. Many of them had close calls themselves. The psychological toll of all that is enormous, and it's well documented in the medical literature of the era and the post-war studies that followed. Hallucinations under those kinds of conditions are not unheard of. Visual misperceptions are not unheard of. A man under chronic stress, on stimulants, peering out of a cockpit in the dark, might well see things that aren't there.

But again, you run into the same problem. If it was just one pilot and one cockpit, sure. But these were group experiences, multiple men in the same aircraft, all watching the same object at the same time, sometimes for several minutes, sometimes confirmed by radar contacts, sometimes corroborated by separate crews, in separate aircraft over the same sector on the same night.

That's not how individual stress-induced hallucinations work. That's not how benzodia works. Whatever the foo fighters were, they were external enough, real enough, present enough, that they affected the perceptions of many different witnesses simultaneously, in ways that are hard to reduce to mass psychology. which leaves us with the explanation that nobody official wanted to put on the books, but that a lot of researchers and a lot of veterans came back to over the years. The foo fighters were unidentified, period, full stop,

not in a sensational way, not in a flying saucers from Mars way. Just in the plain, hard, uncomfortable sense that here was a phenomenon that thousands of trained observers reported, that occurred in a specific window of history, that defied conventional explanation, and that the United States government quietly studied for years without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion. The official post-war response to the foo fighters is one of the more interesting pieces of this whole story. Because what happened, in a way that nobody really planned, is that the foo fighter phenomenon

ended just as the modern UFO era began. The sightings tapered off in the spring and summer of 1945. As the war wound down, as the Allied advance overran the German airfields and pushed into Berlin, as the Pacific Theater came to its final flame in August of 45, the reports got fewer. Whether because the pilots weren't flying combat missions anymore, or because the conditions that produced the sightings were no longer present, or because the phenomenon itself was tied to some specific aspect of wartime conditions that we don't understand, the foo fighters more or less faded out of the active record by the end of the war.

And then, less than two years later, in June of 1947, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private airplane near Mount Rainier in Washington State when he reported seeing nine objects flying in formation at high speed across the sky. He described their motion as being like a saucer skipped across water. A reporter picked up the phrase, ran it in his story, and the term flying saucer was born. Within weeks, sightings of similar objects were being reported all over the United States.

Within months, the federal government had launched an official investigation, which would eventually become Project Sign, then Project Grudge, then Project Blue Book, the program that ran from 1952 to 1969, and which compiled thousands of UFO reports from American skies. And when the people running those investigations went looking for historical context.

They bumped right into the foo fighters. The foo fighter cases were folded into the broader UFO discussion, almost immediately. Some researchers tried to draw a direct line between the wartime sightings and the post-war ones. Others insisted the two phenomena were separate. The Robertson panel, which was a CIA-sponsored review of the UFO question, convened in 1953, looked at the foo fighter reports as part of its overall assessment. The panel didn't reach any firm conclusions about what the foo fighters had been. It mostly recommended that the public be discouraged from taking the broader UFO subject too seriously.

On the grounds that public panic was a bigger national security risk than whatever the objects in the sky might or might not be, which is its own kind of interesting decision when you really sit with it. Let's stay with that for a second, because the Robertson panel matters. The panel was made up of five scientists. physicists mostly. They were brought together at the request of the CIA in early 1953 to review the accumulated UFO reports and recommend a course of action.

They met for four days. They looked at films. They looked at case files. They looked at the historical record, including the wartime foo fighter sightings. And they came out the other end with a set of recommendations that emphasized debunking. Public education programs aimed at reducing UFO interest. and the deliberate cultivation of skepticism in the popular press. What they didn't do is solve the underlying mystery.

They didn't say the foo fighters were Nazi weapons. They didn't say the foo fighters were ball lightning. They didn't say the foo fighters were anything specific. They said, in effect, this whole subject is generating more public anxiety than it's worth, and the government should work to tamp the anxiety down. That's a public policy decision, not a scientific conclusion, and it set the tone for the next several decades of official engagement with the question.

The Air Force was going to be in the business of explaining things away, not in the business of investigating them in good faith. That's a stance that had consequences, and we're still living with some of those consequences today. Project Blue Book ran for 17 years and looked at more than 12,000 UFO reports. It classified most of them as having natural explanations. A few hundred were classified as genuinely, genuinely unexplained. The foo fighters were treated as part of the historical background to the modern era.

They weren't given their own dedicated investigation exactly, but they were referenced. They were on file. They were part of the official memory of the United States Air Force, even if nobody in uniform wanted to make a big deal out of them. There were a few researchers who pushed back against the official posture. Dr. J. Allen Heineck, who was the scientific consultant to Blue Book for most of its run, started out as a skeptic, and gradually, over the course of looking at thousands of cases, became convinced that the program was not doing serious science. He went on, after Blue Book closed, to found his own civilian research organization, the Center for UFO Studies, and he spent the rest of his life arguing that the question

deserved better than what the government had given it. He looked at the foo fighter cases. He took them seriously. He didn't claim to know what they were, but he refused to. to pretend they were nothing, and he kept the question alive in the academic world, even when the official line was that there was nothing to investigate. In the decades that followed, the foo fighters became one of those subjects that lives in the strange middle ground between official history and pop folklore.

Veterans of the 415th gave occasional interviews. Some of them wrote memoirs that mentioned the sightings in passing. A few researchers, both inside and outside the military, kept digging through the records. trying to assemble a clearer picture. But for the most part, the story became a kind of historical curiosity, something you mentioned in a documentary about UFOs, in a paragraph or two, before moving on to the more famous post-war cases. That's a shame, actually, because the wartime cases are in some ways the most important.

They're older. They predate the cultural saturation of flying saucer imagery that came after Kenneth Arnold. They predate the Hollywood movies. They predate the supermarket tabloids. The men reporting these objects in 1944 and 45 had nothing in their cultural toolkit to draw on. No template for what they were seeing. They weren't expecting it. They didn't have a script for it.

They reported what they saw in the language they had available because they didn't know what else to do. That's worth something when you're trying to assess the credibility of historical accounts. The further back you go, before the cultural template exists, the closer you're getting to whatever the underlying phenomenon actually was. The Foo Fighter reports are some of the purest data points we have in that sense. They come from a moment before the modern UFO age, from witnesses who had no incentive to lie, who in fact had every professional reason to keep their mouths shut. And let's talk about that for a second.

The professional risk of reporting something like this for a combat pilot in World War II was real. combat aviators were grounded if they were judged to be cracking up. If you came back to base raving about flying balls of fire, your flight surgeon might pull your wings. You might get sent home or to a hospital, or just quietly reassigned to a desk job. So when these men came back and reported what they saw, they were taking a risk.

They were putting their professional reputations on the line. And they did it anyway, because they'd been trained to report what they observed, and because there were too many other witnesses. to keep quiet. The flight surgeons, to their credit, didn't ground the pilots on mass. They listened to the reports. They wrote them up. They sent them up the chain. The reports were taken seriously enough that intelligence wanted to know more, but not so seriously that operations got disrupted. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

It was handled, you might say, the way the military handles a lot of strange things. With a kind of Grim, practical, let's keep flying attitude. The mission was the mission. Germany was still Germany. The war was still the war. Whatever those lights were, they weren't shooting down American airplanes, and so they got filed under interesting but not currently actionable, and the squadrons kept flying.

After the war, some of the 415th veterans did try to revisit the subject. There were reunions. There were oral history projects. A few of the surviving population. pilots and radar operators sat down with interviewers in the 1960s and 70s and 80s. And what's striking about those interviews, when you go back and read them or watch them, is how matter of fact the veterans are about the whole thing. They don't sound like men trying to spin a yarn.

They don't sound like men who've been polishing a story for decades. They sound like men describing something they saw a long time ago. It didn't make sense at the time, and still doesn't make sense now. They're not trying to convince anybody. They're just saying, yeah, this happened, and we never figured out what it was, and I'd love to know if anybody ever does. That tone, more than anything else, is what makes the foo fighter cases land for me. It's the absence of theatrics.

It's the absence of conspiracy. It's the absence of any attempt to fit the experience into a bigger narrative. These were working pilots reporting working observations, and they did their reporting and went on with their lives, and most of them died of old age before anybody ever came back with a clean answer for what they'd seen. Don Myers himself, the man who gave the phenomenon its name, never made a career out of being a foo fighter witness.

He went home after the war, picked up his life, and lived out his days without becoming any kind of public figure. He'd been a radar observer in a night fighter squadron. He'd seen what he'd seen. He'd come up with a goofy nickname for it, borrowed from a comic strip he liked, and the nickname had stuck, and that was the extent of his contribution to the historical record. He didn't write a book. He didn't go on the lecture circuit. He didn't sit down with researchers

to drag the story out year after year. He just kept his head down and got on with the business of being alive. Shluter, the pilot from the November 23rd siding, was similar. He talked about the incident when he was asked. He didn't make it the centerpiece of his life. He flew. He served. He came home. He had a family. He died eventually, with the memory of those lights in his head, and no answer to take with him. There's something dignified about that. These men weren't looking for attention. They weren't trying to monetize a story.

They reported what they saw, the way they'd been trained to report what they saw, and then they let the chips fall. You compare that with the way the modern UFO subject gets handled, with the influencers and the talking heads and the cable specials, and the social media accounts, and it's a different world. The foo fighter veterans came up in a culture where you did your job, you told the truth as best you could, and you didn't make a fuss. That cultural posture has its limitations. But when it comes to the question of witness credibility, it counts for something. These weren't men with a platform to protect.

They had nothing to gain by lying. They didn't make the story bigger over time. The story, if anything, has gotten quieter as the year, years have passed, because the witnesses have aged out, and there's nobody left to keep telling it. There's a deeper question that hangs over all of this, and it's the question that I think makes the foo fighter story belong on disturbing history, rather than just on some general aviation podcast or some light-hearted UFO show. The question is what it means as a society when something well-documented and inexplicable happens to a large number of credible witnesses, and the

official response is essentially to file it and move on. We like to think of history as a settled record. Things happened. Other people figured out what they meant. The textbooks got written. We learn it in school. But the foo fighters are a case where history just sort of trails off into a question mark. The reports are real. The witnesses are real. The wartime documents are real. The Time magazine article is real. The post-war investigations are real. And the answer is, we don't know. We never did know. We probably never will know. That's an uncomfortable thing to sit with. It implies that there are corners of our collective experience as a species where the lights don't reach, where the official explanations don't quite fit, where the things that happened were real

and the people who saw them were credible, and the institutions of the time looked at it all and shrugged. And that shrug is still sitting there in the historical record, a tiny gap that never got closed. If you start pulling on that thread, you can pull a long way. You can start asking what else, in the historical record, has a shrug-shaped gap in it. You can start asking how much of what we treat as settled fact is actually settled, and how much is just unexamined. You can start asking whether the framework we use to think about what's possible and what's real and what's worth taking seriously is the right framework, or whether it has its own blind spots that filter out evidence we don't know what to do with. I'm not trying to talk you into anything. I'm not selling a

particular theory. I don't know what the foo fighters were. Nobody knows what they were. The men who saw them are mostly gone now, and the ones who are left are in their late 90s and aren't doing many interviews anymore. The story is closing, and in another decade or two, the foo fighters will pass entirely out of living memory and become a fully historical phenomenon, alive only in the archives. That's part of why I wanted to do this episode. Not because I have answers. I don't. But because if we don't keep telling the story, it'll slip through the cracks.

And the men of the 415th night fighter squadron and the bomber group crews in the Pacific and the Luftwaffe pilots who saw the same things over their own homeland deserve to have their experience taken seriously. Even if we never figure out exactly what they witnessed. They were brave men doing dangerous work and they reported what they saw. saw honestly, and the least we can do all these years later, is listen. There's one more piece of the story I want to share with you before we wrap, because it touches on something that I think is genuinely strange. When Project Blue Book closed up shop in 1969, and the Air Force officially got

out of the UFO investigation business, the wartime foo fighter cases didn't get a clean disposition. They were just left there, in the files, with no final verdict. They weren't classified as explained. They weren't classified as unexplained. They were classified as historical, which is bureaucratic code for, we don't have to decide what to do with these, because they happened a long time ago, and they're not our problem anymore. But here's the thing. The phenomenon, whatever it was, didn't stop in 1945. Modern military pilots, flying modern aircraft, with modern sensors, still occasionally come back with reports of objects in their airspace that they can't identify. The terminology has changed. They don't call them foo fighters anymore.

They call them unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, which is the current Pentagon term. There have been congressional hearings on the subject in the last few years. There have been official reports released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. There's been more public acknowledgement from the military in the last five years than there's been in the previous five decades combined, that something is up to the there, and we don't know what it is, and our pilots keep seeing it. I'm not going to wade into the modern UAP debate tonight. That's a whole other rabbit hole, and we'll get into it on a future episode,

because there's a lot to say. But I'll say this. When you look at the modern reports, and you look at the foo fighter reports from 1944 and 45, you find a lot of similar language. Glowing objects, tick-tack shapes, high-speed pacing of military aircraft, sudden disappearance, defiance of known physics. The vocabulary has gotten more technical. The witnesses have access to better instrumentation.

But the basic shape of what they're describing is recognizable across the decades. That's either a coincidence or it's a clue. I don't know which. I don't think anybody knows which. But it's worth noting that the foo fighter cases aren't just a quaint World War II oddity. They might be the first well-documented chapter in a longer story. story that's still being written. And the men of the 415th might have been, without knowing it, the leading edge of an investigation that humanity is still in the middle of conducting. There's a

temptation when you look at all of this, to want to land somewhere clean, to say, here's the answer, to wrap the story up with a bow. I'm not going to do that. I don't think the evidence supports any clean answer at this point. And I'd rather give you the question honestly than give you a tidy lie. What I will say is that the Foo Fighter record, taken as a whole, is one of the most carefully documented bodies of unexplained sightings in modern history. The witnesses were professionals. The conditions were combat. The reports were filed in real time. The phenomenon spanned multiple theaters of war and was observed by men on both sides of the conflict. That's a lot of signal. Whatever you think the underlying cause was, the data is real, and the data deserves

better than to be quietly buried. That's where I'm going to leave it tonight. With the lights in the sky over the Rhine Valley, 80 some years ago, with a young Chicago kid named Don Myers who loved a goofy comic strip and accidentally gave a name to a phenomenon that nobody can explain. With the veterans who saw what they saw, reported it honestly, and went on with their lives. And with a question that's still open, sitting there in the historical record, waiting for somebody to come along and close it. We don't know what the foo fighters were. We don't know if they were natural phenomena that we just haven't fully characterized yet.

We don't know if they were experimental hardware from some program that left no records. We don't know if they were something else entirely, something that doesn't fit any of the categories we currently have available. We don't know. And the not knowing is the part that should bother us. Not because we should be afraid of it, but because it should keep us humble. Because every once in a while, history hands us a piece. piece of evidence that doesn't fit the puzzle we thought we were solving. And the honest thing to do is admit that the puzzle is bigger than we thought. There's an old line attributed to a lot of different

people over the years that says the universe is stranger than we can imagine. I think about that sometimes when I'm reading these old combat reports. Pilots flying tired and cold over enemy territory, looking out into a dark sky and seeing something their training hadn't prepared them for. Reporting it anyway. Trusting that that someone eventually would make sense of it. And then dying, decades later, with the question still hanging in the air, unanswered. Next time, we'll get back to the White House.

We've got more presidential history to dig through. More ugly truths to drag into the light. More of the dark machinery that's run this country for the last 250 years. That story isn't done. But tonight, I wanted you to look up. at the cold winter sky over Europe, 80 years ago, where a young pilot in a noisy twin-engine airplane saw something he couldn't explain

and lived to tell about it and never got an answer in his lifetime. Maybe one day we'll get one. Maybe we won't. Either way, the story belongs in the record, and tonight, it belongs to you. Before you go, I want to ask you for something that genuinely matters to me.

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