Wartime mystery of flying ‘foo fighters’ finally solved

SCIENCE EDITOR

IN THE 1940s, Allied pilots reported being hounded by fast-moving blobs, which they called “foo fighters”.

Shaped like clouds, doughnuts, balls and spheres, and often glowing or translucent, the entities have prompted conspiracy theories that Earth was being visited by advanced civilisations.

Now, a paper suggests the phenomena are in fact plasmas, or ionised gases, that are drawn to the electrical charge of aircraft, spacecraft and satellites.

Experts from the universities of California, Arizona and the Harvard-Smithsonian argue that the strange properties of plasmas make them appear to behave like living organisms, even though they are not alive.

Plasmas can grow in size and replicate, make contact with each and may “feed” off the electromagnetic radiation of satellites and spacecraft, they argue.

“Foo fighters” were first reported by RAF personnel in March 1942, and several US pilots saw glowing lights over Germany throughout the war.

The sightings were largely dismissed as German weapons or flight fatigue, although some speculated at the time they may be a new kind of weather phenomenon. Since the 1960s, huge glowing masses of up to a mile wide, which behave similarly to swarms of living organisms, have been filmed by 10 Nasa space shuttle missions.

The scientists believe that plasmas in the thermosphere – 66 to 372 miles above the Earth – may descend into the lower atmosphere and account for such sightings. Co-author Dr Rudolph Schild, of the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard-Smithsonian: “These plasmas are electromagnetic entities that have a variety of shapes and sizes. They have repeatedly approached spacecraft and the space shuttles and are attracted to electromagnetic activity.

“They have been filmed from space, descending into the lower atmosphere and appear to be attracted to airplanes, fighter jets, nuclear power plants, and ‘hot spots’ of radiation, such as Hiroshima [after the atomic bomb].

“We believe these plasmas account for at least some of the numerous reports of UFOs and Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon over the last several thousand years including the ‘foo fighters’ observed by German, Japanese, and Allied pilots [in the Second World War].”

The research will be published in the