Page Content (OCR)
Sometimes the "foo's" darted about. Other times they were seen to fly in formation. Several pilots reported seeing the "foo-fighters" during combat. Barracks and locker-room scuttlebutt had classified the "foo-fighters" as another of the Nazis' secret weapons, but not a single one of the glowing craft was ever shot down or captured. And, Allied pilots had to agree, if the Germans had come up with another military invention, it was certainly harmless enough - especially when compared to the "buzz-bomb." Outside of startling the wits out of greenhorn pilots, there is no record of a "foo" ever damaging any aircraft or harming any personnel. The "foo's" were spotted in both the European and Far Eastern theaters, and it came as something of a surprise to thousands of pilots when the Air Force officially decreed that the mysterious lights had never actually existed at ail - or were hallucinations at best. Many Allied pilots, however, had kept quite an account of the "foo's" and had begun to theorize that the things operated under intelligent control. It came as no shock to these pilots when waves of "foo's" were sighted over Sweden in July of 1946. A kind of hysteria gripped the Scandinavian country, however, and the mysterious "invasion" was reported at great length in all the major European newspapers. Some authorities feared that some new kind of German "V" weapon had been discovered and unleashed on the nation that had remained neutral throughout the duration of World War II. Others tried to explain the unidentified flying objects away as meteors - peculiar meteors that disappeared and reappeared and made an infernal roaring, but meteors nonetheless. Too many eyewitness reports were appearing in the newspapers to make either theory tenable. If they had been some new kind of V-2 or "buzz bomb," they surely would have caused great destruction in Sweden. Then, too, who would have been launching the bombs? The Nazi war machine had been destroyed, and the Allies were busy dividing Berlin, conducting atrocity trails, and apprehending German scientists for their respective space programs. As for their being meteors, bolides simply do not maneuver in circles, stop and start, or look like metal cigars. Because of the large-scale interest in the objects which had been generated in Europe, the London Daily Mail sent a reporter, Alexander Clifford, to interview Swedish and Danish military personnel and to conduct an investigation of his own.