Foo fighters
WWII aircrews on all sides reported glowing orbs pacing their aircraft.
1944 CE · 50.00, 7.00 · status: unexplained
The account
Allied and Axis pilots independently described fast, glowing balls of light that shadowed planes and evaded pursuit. The term came from a comic strip.
The sceptical view
Candidate explanations include St Elmo's fire, ball lightning and misperceived reflections; some cases remain unexplained.
The researched reading
Genuine, widely shared aircrew experiences, most likely a mix of St Elmo’s fire, reflections, other aircraft and night-vision illusions. A residue of well-told cases has never been fully explained.
| Explanation | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Something known, misidentified | 32% | Many "pacing" lights fit reflections on canopies, other aircraft, flares, rocket-assisted night fighters, searchlights and planets that appear to follow a moving plane. |
| Perception, memory or mind | 18% | Night combat flights produce fatigue, hypoxia and the autokinetic effect, in which a fixed light appears to move; expectations spread among units once the name existed. |
| A known natural phenomenon | 15% | St Elmo’s fire forms glowing balls on wingtips and propellers in electrified air, a well-known effect that moves with the aircraft. |
| A poorly understood natural phenomenon | 14% | Ball lightning and other atmospheric plasmas, still poorly understood, have been proposed for persistent free-floating orbs. |
| Genuinely anomalous | 12% | Some reports by experienced crews describe orbs that evaded pursuit and matched manoeuvres; no single explanation covers them all, and they were never systematically recorded. |
| Secret human technology | 8% | Allied crews suspected German weapons, but post-war intelligence found no such device, and Axis crews reported the same lights. |
| A hoax or fabrication | 1% | The reports came through unit intelligence channels; fabrication is unlikely. |
Official position: Wartime intelligence and the 1953 Robertson Panel considered them unexplained but not dangerous, probably electrostatic or electromagnetic phenomena or reflections.
Connections in the atlas
- Palembang foo fighter
- Lemos Ferreira F-84 sighting, Portugal
- Swedish ghost-rocket inquiry
- South African phantom monoplanes
- Scandinavian ghost rockets