Sadly, the subject of post-1947 UFO sightings has become so corrupted by shoddy research, gullible believers, and (most importantly) pop cultural overlay. Thus, pre-1947 sightings are interesting from the standpoint that they are "purer" in terms of anecdotal evidence, even if they are harder to research.
"Foo fighters"--mysterious unexplained aerial phenomena that appeared to or shadowed aircraft in World War II certainly existed. There are too many sighting reports from competent pilots and aircrew to suggest otherwise. But what were they?
Author Keith Chester rightly points out that the subject is almost always a footnote in other UFO books. The subject was ripe for a serious study. So I commend Mr. Chester for his attempt. Sadly, his account falls short on several grounds.
Chester starts out with the accounts of mystery airplanes in Scandinavia in the 1930s as a sort of prologue. Ironically, these sightings are often the footnote to the footnote mentioned above. His discussion of World War Two proper begins with the "Battle of Los Angeles" in February 1942 where unexplained lights or aircraft triggered American anti-aircraft artillery in Southern California. This episode does have a public paper trail--including conflicting explanations from the Army and Navy--in the governmental archives and surely bears serious investigation in its own right. But Chester moves on to the bulk of his account which are mainly US Army Air Forces and Royal Air Force sighting reports.
The accounts of balls of lights or cigar shaped objects one after another certainly make the case that the phenomenon was widespread but I began looking at Chester's footnotes to see where the sightings came from. If the source was a US military document found in Chester's research at the National Archives or a RAF/Ministry of Defence document I tended to give the sighting credence. If the source was from another UFO book such as that of Timothy Good's Above Top Secret, I tended to dismiss it. My reasoning will upset "UFOlogists" but UFO writers far too often are slipshod in their accuracy or research.
Throughout his account, Chester tries to link prominent American civilian scientists like Howard P. Robertson and David Griggs to some sort of far more extensive covert foo fighter investigation. But there is no overt paper trail or definite proof of this. You cannot make an argument over and over again with words like "certainly" and "likely" when it is just as possible that these individuals did not involve themselves with foo fighters.
From the public record, what we do know is that various RAF and USAAF commands and groups made their own investigations of sightings but apart from accounting them to flak or secret Luftwaffe projects, they could come to no definite conclusion. As for the American civilians, only Robertson and Griggs are known to have been officially charged to look into foo fighters and only Griggs has commented publicly on the negative results of his investigation.
From the sighting reports themselves, it is obvious that some number were of enemy flak, enemy aircraft, and misidentified meteorological or astronomical events. Even Chester has to admit this late in his account. Some almost certainly came from war stress and fatigue. In particular, World War Two bombers were not the most comfortable aircraft to fly in. Having flown in a B-24 in the waist gunner position with the open airstream pounding at me, I know how uncomfortable such a long flight in the heart of Nazi Germany must have been. Several hours of that would have totally dulled my senses.
Chester's brief description of "radar ghosts" in the Pacific almost certainly were the result of atmospheric an environmental effects on the primitive radar systems of the time which were not known. I totally dismissed these accounts out of hand.
In addition, when you strip away the interviews and unsourced accounts that Chester got from other UFO books, you are left with just a few major flaps after the Los Angeles incident. These include balls of fire seen by one particular night fighter group in Central Europe and multi-colored circular lights seen by Pacific B-29 crews. This is not to say that foo fighters were not seen worldwide, but they were repeately appeared to multiple witnesses only in a few locations.
The fact that the USAAF night fighter squadrons saw strange objects in an area known to be the site of Nazi secret testing is certainly curious and of course, formed the basis for Nick Cook's Hunt for Zero Point hypothesis of Nazi and later US antigravity testing.
But Chester admits late on in the book that believer in the extraterrestrial hypothesis for the origin of foo fighters. Because UFOs are such a diverse phenomena, I believe it is dangerous to account for all or most sightings to one explanation. As fantastic as Cook's hypothesis is, it no more or less believable that extraterrestrial craft visiting Earth to monitor the war.
To digress for a moment, if extraterrestrials were visiting Earth surely would they not want to conceal their observations? Though their craft apparently had stealth capabilities, those at night that lit up surely revealed their presence. By flying in formation with human aircraft, they surely knew they would be spotted. To what purpose? Why not make contact with humanity at this point?
Many foo fighter sightings that Chester writes about sound much like the still unknown atmospheric plasmas that the British Ministry of Defence recently declared UFOs to be. Of course, explaining one unknown with another is not the most satisfying bit of science.
While I believe Mr. Chester is more honest than most UFO writers, the subject of foo fighters still needs more research to come to a conclusion. I will give Mr. Chester credit in his observation that it is curious that no documents as yet released reveal the results of David Griggs' investigations. But if such records exist, it is yet more proof fo what most already assume: that the US Government has not told the public all that it knows on the subject. But what it "knows" is still debatable. The government might be just as confused as the rest of us.
Thus, Keith Chester starts out much like the S-2 intelligence officers of the day who looked into foo fighters--interested and intrigued but ultimately unable to prove conclusively just what foo fighters were.
C. Husing
former Historian, US Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center
