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Foo Fighters as ‘the most puzzling secret weapon that Allied fighters have yet encoun- tered’. This article goes on to suggest that Foo Fighters might be designed, ‘1) to dazzle pilots; 2) to serve as aiming points for anti-air- craft gunners; 3) to interfere with a plane’s radar; 4) to cut a plane’s ignition, thus stop- ping its engine in midair’. The same week’s issue of Newsweek had this to say about Foo Fighters: ‘Possibly they are the results of a new anti-radar device which the Germans have developed. On the other hand, they may be the exhaust trails of a smaller model of the radio-controlled Messerschmitt 163, a rocket-propelled flying wing. Day bombers have met the Me 163, which has an explosive charge in the nose and is apparently designed to crash into Allied planes. When one pilot closely inspected foo- fighters tagging him however, he detected nothing but the spheres.’ Germany had already demonstrated its substantial technical lead in aviation and rocket technology, so a small remote-con- trolled craft might have seemed possible, aerial lights are too numerous to dismiss, but in reality the Americans and British authori- ties probably had no real idea what they were dealing with. Today, many diehard UFO investigators continue to insist that Foo Fight- ers were small alien reconnaissance vehicles spying on mankind’s aggressive activities. An alternative theory has been promoted by some conspiracy theorists, who say that Foo Fighters were small, unmanned aerial vehi- cles built in great secrecy by Nazi scientists. This idea has gained a degree of respectabil- ity, despite the fact that no hard evidence exists to support the claim. To explain this, there have been sugges- tions that the technology was captured by the Allies and suppressed because of its impor- tance. Yet, wartime censors were happy to allow media discussion of Foo Fighter inci- dents and one of the earliest reports appeared in The New York Times on 14th December 1944. It talks of floating silver balls seen during daylight hours, which were said to be anew German weapon. The 15th Janu- ary 1945 issue of Time Magazine described Foo Fighter reports prompted US General William J Donovan of the OSS (Office of Strategic Studies — a special ops CIA prede- cessor) to examine the matter with a small team of technical staff. Whether these inves- tigations went much further than the collec- tion and analysis of reports remains unclear, but Donovan is understood to have con- cluded that the phenomenon was unusual, but not new Nazi technology. The RAF set up a similar small secret committee to study Foo Fighters and they were equally concerned that these unidentified lights might be some new and unusual type of secret German weapon. In keeping with their US counter- parts, the RAF finally decided that Foo Fight- ers were harmless and probably caused by some unusual form of electrical phenomena perhaps related to St Elmo’s Fire. The fact that Foo Fighters existed is not in dispute, because the reports of mysterious 47 Simulation of Foo Fighters trailing B-17 bombers across the war-torn skies of Europe. Bill Rose German Wartime Flying Discs