[intriguing eerie dramatic music]
[cannons blasting]
[airplane whirring]
- [Laurence] Tonight,
a fiery phenomenon terrorizing American airmen
during World War II,
- Eight to 10 balls of fire
come at the Night Fighter Squadron
with serious speed and intent.
- A huge red light
traveling at an estimated 200 miles an hour.
- He aims his plane towards these balls of light
and prepares to engage.
And just like that, the lights all just disappear.
- The men call these fiery orbs Foo Fighters.
They seem to be stalking US pilots.
But what are they?
- These pilots are stressed and fatigued.
You're looking out into the darkness,
your mind is going to play tricks on you.
- The witnesses were adamant, they saw what they saw,
and it defied the laws of physics.
- Now, we explore the top theories
surrounding these strange encounters.
- Maybe it was a secret German weapon
on a collision course with their airplane.
- The idea of unidentified flying objects
was almost entirely in the realm of fiction.
- This is an 80-year-old mystery, and it's still here.
- [Laurence] What's the hidden truth
behind World War II's mysterious Foo Fighters?
[intriguing cinematic dramatic music]
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Laurence] November 26th, 1944,
Longvic Air Base, Dijon, France.
[cannon blasting]
Allied forces are battling their way
toward the German homeland,
when American pilot, Edward Schlueter,
and his radar operator, Donald Meiers,
take off on a search and destroy mission over Germany
for the 415th Night Fighter Squadron.
- The 415th
Night Fighter Squadron is the point of the spear
for a new type of nighttime war fighting
near the end of World War II.
- It's six months after D-Day,
Allied forces are gaining ground,
and Germany is getting desperate.
While the tide of war is shifting
in the favor of the Allies,
there is an effort to bring the war directly to German soil,
and that leads to a growing emphasis on night fighting.
[air whooshing] [airplane whirring]
- The 415th Night Fighter Squadron
are flying these stealth planes, these Bristol Beaufighters.
They're painted black, they are just armed to the teeth;
they have guns, they have cannons, they can drop bombs.
- The tactic of these night fighters
was to go after things like supply trains
and military installations after dark.
[airplane whirring]
- [Laurence] That night, near Mannheim, Germany,
Schlueter and Meiers attack and destroy
a German military train.
- [Lynne] They're headed back to Dijon,
and they see in the sky
something that they can't explain;
it's like a big red glowing light.
- Schlueter reports that there's a strange red light
about 2000 feet off his starboard side.
- [Nick] It's like nothing they've really seen before.
In the battlefield, there are all sorts of lights
and explosions all the time,
but this is something new, something different.
- [Martin] After it follows their aircraft
for a pronounced period of time,
they notice that the ball of light
suddenly disappears in a long red streak.
- [Laurence] Schlueter soon learns he's not alone.
- [Nick] Another aircrew on the same squadron
encounter very similar strange lights.
This has gone from being a one-off incident
to something of a developing phenomenon.
A few nights later,
the intelligence officer, Fred Ringwald,
decides to come along and see for himself.
His thinking is that perhaps
this is some sort of new German secret weapon.
- [Paul] On this mission, Schlueter and his crew
are on what's called a ground sweep;
they're flying very close to the ground,
following the Rhine River,
they're looking for targets of opportunity,
but they're also trying to stay below German defenses.
- [Laurence] Ringwald suddenly spots
a strange cluster of orange lights in the distance
off the left wing of their aircraft.
- [Lynne] This time, instead of one big glowing red light,
they see maybe about eight to 10
reddish, orange glowing objects.
- [Paul] Schlueter thinks they might just be stars twinkling
far, far away.
He recognizes that things can look different at night
and over great distances in the air.
But then they seem to come closer,
and he realizes this is not simple starlight.
It's eight to 10 balls of orange fire
that seem to be coming towards his aircraft
at breakneck speed.
- [Nick] Schlueter is like, "This is something
really bizarre."
So he gets on the radio and he says,
"Have we got any enemy aircraft in the area?"
And they say, "No. What, are you crazy?
You're the only guys up there."
- [Lynne] And yet men in the plane,
they 100% see something coming at them.
And so, Ed Schlueter, the pilot,
he's a trained fighter pilot, he knows what he has to do.
He decides he's gonna intercept whatever this is.
- [Nick] He prepares to engage these strange lights
and prepares for a dogfight.
At the last moment,
these lights just disappeared off at high speed.
- [Hakeem] A few weeks later,
as Lieutenant Harry Giblin and his radar observer
crossed the Rhine into German territory,
they see two huge orange balls above them,
about 1000 feet higher in altitude.
- [Lynne] The balls of light were moving
at an incomprehensible speed.
So whatever these things are,
they are incredibly fast
and they're incredibly maneuverable.
[eerie dramatic whooshing] [airplane rumbling]
- [Nick] A few nights later,
another crew encounter two glowing balls
heading towards their plane;
and then the next night, they see exactly the same thing.
And it seems to be these balls of light
are tracking the plane.
These balls don't attack the planes,
but there's a sense of menace.
The pilots say, "Look,
we don't know what we're dealing with here,
but it's under intelligent control."
- [Hakeem] Back on the base,
the pilots named these balls of fire that they'd seen
Foo Fighters.
- [Paul] It's a play off of a popular comic strip
in which the main character uses the catchphrase
"Where there's Foo, there's fire."
- [Hakeem] It's a silly name,
but these airmen are deadly serious about what they've seen.
They don't think it's a figment of their imagination.
- [Laurence] By the end of 1944,
the 415th has had more than a dozen mysterious encounters
with Foo Fighters,
and a war correspondent picks up the story.
- [Hakeem] On January 2nd, 1945,
the New York Times runs a story
about these Foo Fighter encounters;
that the Germans have thrown this new technology
into the night skies, and no one knows what it is.
- [Lynne] Suddenly, it's not just the night fighters
who wanna know what's going on,
everyone wants to know what's going on.
What if it's the Germans?
What if this is the Axis powers creating a new weapon,
a new aircraft,
something that we don't know about
that's going to start shifting the advantage
that, at this point, the Allied powers have in the war?
[dramatic thud] [tense dramatic music]
A few days after the New York Times article,
the AP Science editor writes another article
that puts out this theory
that maybe what the German army has done
is put an electric charge over all of its occupied territory
that would disrupt anything flying into it.
And there's a suggestion that these balls of light
are basically latex balloons
that might be getting dragged along
in the wake by these fighters
and moving through this electrified airspace.
- [Nick] It kind of sounds a little crazy,
but there was an occasion where another air crew,
shortly before all this Foo Fighter business took off,
actually encountered
what looked like hundreds of small latex balloons
in the skies over occupied Euro.
[airplane whirring]
- [Paul] Thunderbolt pilots report seeing
about a hundred yellow balloons
approximately one-foot in diameter
at an altitude of two to 3,000-feet.
- [Martin] Seeing these yellow latex balloons by day,
and these similarly-sized orange balls of light by night,
makes the theory seem very plausible.
[tense dramatic music]
- [Laurence] While some in the military
suspect the Foo Fighters may merely be latex balloons,
others fear that the pilots are catching glimpses
of something far more powerful and deadly.
- [Paul] Hitler's putting an enormous amount of resources
into wunderwaffen or "wonder weapons."
Essentially, he's hoping that Germans
will make a breakthrough to create a war-winning weapon
that will destroy Allied forces.
[film flickering] [intriguing dramatic music]
- [Laurence] One such super weapon
is the terrifying V-2 rocket.
- [Lynne] The V-2 ballistic missile
was the world's first long-range ballistic missile;
in fact, it goes farther, it launches higher,
it carries a bigger payload than any of the rockets
that anyone has experienced before.
And in Hitler's arsenal,
he calls this one the vergeltungswaffen,
"the vengeance weapon."
- [Reporter] London after a V-2 raid,
the Nazi vengeance weapon,
which in six months killed or maimed 9,000.
- [Kevin] The worst attack by a V-2 occurs when a V-2 rocket
hits a department store in London killing 168 people.
- [Martin] Between September of 1944 and March of 1945,
Nazi Germany launches over 3,000 V-2 rockets.
They're especially effective
against targets in Belgium and France
and in the United Kingdom,
because the weapons move at such high-speed
that Allied forces have absolutely no weapon system
that can stop them.
- [Laurence] The supersonic V-2 rockets
are unlike anything Allied pilots have seen before,
especially as the V-2's streaked through the night sky.
- [Nick] The V-2 are powered by a mixture of alcohol
and liquid oxygen.
And what's interesting about that
in relation to the Foo Fighters
is that, at night, the plume is a sort of yellowish-orange;
so if a pilot saw it perhaps from a long way off,
they would see a sort of yellowy-orange streak of light,
and they might think that this was an object tracking them.
- [Laurence] But the V-2s aren't the only Nazi super weapon
that leaves fire in its wake.
- [Hakeem] The Komet rocket
is one of Hitler's most touted wonder weapons.
Traveling at 600 miles per hour,
these vehicles were the only rocket-powered planes
ever used in battle.
- [Nick] At about the time that these Foo Fighter reports
were coming in,
there were apparently several hundred
of these Komet rocket aircraft in production.
- [Hakeem] These planes are highly maneuverable,
and they can rapidly climb to 30,000 feet,
before descending to intercept enemy airplanes.
[tense dramatic music]
- [Lynne] What was powering this rocket plane
was a mixture of liquid hydrogen peroxide,
methane, and water.
And when it went off,
what it created was this huge amber plume
that would appear behind the jets.
- [Martin] If you're a pilot looking out,
and you're seeing this mixture of rocket fuel burning,
it would look unlike anything you had ever seen before.
- [Nick] This fiery plume coming out of the rear of this thing
could be mistaken for the so-called Foo Fighters.
- Foo Fighter sightings by the 415th Night Fighter Squadron
continue into the spring of 1945,
then vanish just as victory is declared in Europe.
The timing fuels speculation that the Foo Fighters
were a secret Nazi weapon,
but what kind remains a mystery.
- The war ends in Europe in May of 1945,
but it is still ongoing in the Pacific against Japan.
Flight crews in bombers, the B-29s,
which fly at higher altitudes,
longer distances across water,
they're starting to report the same kind of lights,
similar to the Foo Fighters
that the 415th Night Squadron had seen.
- [Kevin] The pilots are reporting
that there are these balls of fire coming up at them
and hanging on their tails as they fly over Japan.
- [Paul] The colors seem to shift from orange to red to
white in kind of a cyclical pattern.
And even though these balls of light or fire
never seem to offer any kind of attack,
they seem dangerous.
- [Nick] There's one occasion where a pilot
is being chased by one of these things,
and he goes into a cloud bank
that would give this thing the slip,
and he comes out of the cloud
and this thing is still right there on his tail.
- [Lynne] The pilot describes this giant orange ball
about three-feet in diameter
that's just sitting about 500 yards off of his wing;
and it keeps up with him
and then vanishes in the dawn light.
- [Kevin] Several B-29 pilots
say that if they use evasive maneuvers,
they can escape these balls of fire,
but if they're flying steadily on course,
which is what you do on a bombing run,
those balls of fire are right behind them,
and they can't lose 'em.
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Laurence] Some argue that these encounters
with Foo Fighters in the Pacific
indicate that the Nazis may have shared
their secret weapon technology with their Japanese allies
as the war drew to a close.
- [Martin] These sightings give credence to the idea
that whatever the objects are,
they might be a part
of the Axis power's last-ditch defensive effort.
[airplane whirring]
- [Laurence] Once the Nazi regime falls,
Allied scientists rushed to uncover evidence
that these advanced secret weapons actually existed.
- [Nick] May, 1945, Allied scientists took possession
of a number of prototype weapons
that the Nazis had been developing
in secret military installations deep in the Black Forest.
- [Katherine] The Associated Press has an article come out
in August 20th, 1945,
and it reports that British and American scientists
have found more of Germany's weapons,
including a giant bazooka that could fire accurately
at a target over 120 miles away.
- [Nick] There was also something called a Spider Bomb,
a sort of air-to-air missile
that could be fired from a long distance away,
perhaps 15 miles, using a wire to guide it.
- [Paul] None of these experimental weapons
ever got past the prototype phase,
but by the time the 415th Squadron
is flying in the skies over Germany,
there's a possibility that the Axis forces
are just throwing everything they've got at the Allies
and just hoping for a miracle.
- [Laurence] One possible miracle weapon Allied pilots may
have seen was allegedly kept a secret for decades.
- [Kevin] In 1968, Renato Vesco,
an Italian aerospace engineer, writer,
comes out and reveals that he has had contacts
with high officials in the German Luftwaffe
and the German army
presenting information about these German wonder weapons
that have been held secret ever since World War II.
- [Paul] Renato Vesco claims that the Germans had produced
what he called the "Feuerball,"
which was a device powered by a jet engine.
[device roaring]
- [Martin] This was essentially a self-propelled fireball
that could be launched into the sky
to either disrupt or destroy Allied aircraft.
[explosion booming]
- [Nick] The plan was that they would get close enough
and emit some sort of electromagnetic pulse
that would wreck the plane's radar system
and might bring it down.
- [Paul] One witness claimed that when fired during the day,
it looked like a shiny disc spinning on its axis,
but if you fired it at night,
it looked like a burning globe.
[device roaring]
- [Laurence] Vesco also claims
that due to advanced engineering,
these devices were invisible to radar.
- [Kevin] What Vesco says is that in addition,
they had the ability when disengaging
to go vertically very rapidly,
which is exactly what the 415th pilots were witnessing.
- [Nick] Vesco claims that this fireball, feuerball, program
was based in the Black Forest,
the area that the 415th Night Fighter Squadron
was patrolling and operating.
[airplane whirring]
- [Paul] However, skeptics point out
that there's actually no hard evidence
that these weapons were in development and production
in the area where the 415th
was reporting Foo Fighter sightings.
But it is interesting to speculate
on the types of weapons that the Germans
might have thrown into the sky at that time.
- [Laurence] More than a hundred Foo Fighter encounters
are reported during World War II.
Many of these accounts describe strange lights
moving in ways unlike any known aircraft or weapon,
leaving some to wonder whether these objects
were actually in the sky at all.
[cannon blasting]
- [Nick] World War II was really the first non-stop war.
It was 24/7, as much fighting at night as at day,
obviously, the night fighters, night bombing raids,
and people were exhausted, physically and mentally.
[siren wailing]
- [Hakeem] There are lots of advantages to fighting at night,
especially in the air,
but this means that the service people
that are fighting overnight
are subject to sleep deprivation,
including members of the 415th.
- [Nick] In an ideal world,
these pilots would have at least one rest day
between missions,
but with manpower shortages being what they were,
a lot of these people were just flying constantly
night after night after night.
- [Laurence] When it comes to the reports by pilots
of Foo Fighter encounters,
could it be that extreme fatigue and combat stress
were playing tricks on the airmen's minds?
- [Hakeem] Experts say that these factors
could mess with perceptions of reality,
but given the very large number of encounters
and the fact that these fighters are trained
to fight at night,
it seems unlikely that all of these sightings
were due to fatigue and stress.
- [Nick] Knowing what we now know,
it's intriguing to speculate
that these Foo Fighter sightings might have been triggered
by something else.
- [Katherine] These pilots that we're talking about
were exhausted quite often, but they had to overcome this.
They couldn't take a nap while they were flying,
they needed to stay awake, they needed to stay alert,
and they needed a tool to get there.
[intriguing dramatic music]
- [Paul] An awful lot of aviation personnel operating at
night were doing so under the influence of drugs.
The Germans were the first to rely
upon the use of amphetamines to basically drive their troops
beyond the normal limits of human endurance.
[explosion booming]
- [Martin] In the early stages of the war,
the Germans experienced great success
with this new tactic that they have developed
that is nicknamed Blitzkrieg, "lightning war."
The idea is to press a breakthrough so fast and so hard
that it leaves the enemy with no recourse
but to beat a hasty retreat.
- [Laurence] In 1939,
as Germany begins a Blitzkrieg onslaught across Europe,
soldiers are given large quantities
of a powerful amphetamine called Pervitin
to fuel their rapid advance.
- [Lynne] Their mental acuity goes up, they're able to stay
awake, and it also boosts confidence, it boosts
aggression, it makes them into better soldiers.
And at one point in the 1940s,
the British discover a downed German plane;
and in it, they find these amphetamines,
and they realize this is what's powering the German forces,
maybe it could be powering the Allied forces as well.
- [Laurence] In response, American pilots
also begin using amphetamines.
- [Martin] You might not hear about this in history class,
but by late 1943,
the US Army Air Force is distributing millions of tabs
of the powerful stimulant Benzedrine sulfate
to personnel who will conduct night flights
in both bombers and fighters to men
who the army needs to stay awake and alert
under conditions of almost total darkness.
- [Nick] By the time the Foo Fighter sighting start in 1944,
the US has handed out over 70 million of these tablets.
- [Katherine] The men called these go-pills
with the idea that it was basically speed,
this is going to keep them hyped up.
We don't have documentation
about if the 415th was actually using these pills,
but overall, the evidence suggests
that about 15% of American fighter pilots
were using these pills.
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Laurence] But there's a downside
to the continuous use of these amphetamines.
- [Katherine] The Nazis soon figured out that this wasn't
good for their soldiers.
It made them too aggressive, it made them too paranoid,
they had too many problems.
So they declared it was a dangerous drug,
and they stopped giving it to their troops.
- [Nick] People get addicted and then start to take too
much of it.
And if you take too much of these particular drugs,
you get symptoms such as delirium, panic attacks,
paranoia, hallucinations,
exactly the sort of thing that might make you mistake
an innocuous light in the sky
for something rather more unusual and extraordinary,
like Foo Fighters. [airplane rumbling]
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Martin] There's a standard set of side effects
associated with the use of Benzedrine sulfate,
and one factor that often gets overlooked in all of this
is that there is an individual variability.
And what that means is that you give the drug to 10 people,
all 10 of them will experience the drug
in completely different ways,
some of them will hallucinate, some of them will not.
And this provides a powerful explanation
for why some people report
seeing these glowing balls of light
and others don't.
- When Foo Fighters gained global attention In 1944,
the term UFOs had not been coined yet
and tales of extraterrestrial encounters
were mere science fiction.
But a few years later, all that changes
when a possible alien spacecraft sighting
becomes national news.
- [Katherine] On June 24th, 1947,
just a couple of years after the war,
there's a private pilot near Mount Rainier
who reports that he has seen a number of flying discs.
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Laurence] Kenneth Arnold's vivid report
instantly becomes a media sensation.
- [Lynne] The press called them flying saucers.
The pilot himself was like,
"Hey, I never said they were flying saucers,"
but we got that term coined for us
in that year of 1947.
[dramatic thud]
- [Paul] Suddenly, people all across America
are claiming to see unexplained objects
flying in the skies overhead.
The frenzy only gets worse later in the year
when the military reports having recovered
some form of unidentified flying object
near Roswell, New Mexico.
- [Nick] Something came down near Roswell Army Airfield,
and the military put out a press release
harking back to Kenneth Arnold sighting
over Washington State,
and said, "We have recovered one of these flying saucers."
[dramatic whooshing]
Within 24 hours, they changed their story and said,
"It had been just a weather balloon,"
but it was too late,
the story had gone all around the world.
And these two incidents,
Kenneth Arnold's flying saucer sighting
and Roswell could be said to be the birth
of the modern UFO phenomenon.
- [Martin] The UFO craze that's kicked off after Roswell
reignites interest in the wartime Foo Fighter sightings,
and it causes some to wonder
if there is an alien presence out there,
and whether or not they might explain
the wartime Foo Fighter phenomenon.
[dramatic thud] [intriguing dramatic music]
- [Laurence] UFO fears are heightened in the summer of 1952
with a mysterious sighting over Washington, DC.
- [Karlene] On Saturday, July 19th, 1952,
air-traffic controllers at Washington National Airport
reported seeing about 10 different unidentified orbs
hovering above the city.
This became an overnight story.
You're talking about these orbs
that are moving at fast pace.
So the fighter jets were sent out,
and they were reporting that these orbs,
they were moving 600 miles per hour.
[airplanes whooshing]
- [Laurence] These UFO sightings by air-traffic controllers
are a national story.
But the next weekend,
another dozen orbs are spotted in the skies
over the DC region, feeding the UFO frenzy.
- People across the country are talking about UFOs,
they're worried about them, they're wondering about them,
and they're reporting them everywhere.
- [Paul] The Air Force convenes a press conference
and announces that there's nothing to fear,
but a lot of people aren't convinced,
they think that the Air Force is covering something up.
- [Martin] We're in the Cold War
and in arms race with the Soviet Union,
and the CIA's job is to determine
whether or not these UFO sightings
are something that we actually need to be concerned about.
So in 1953, the CIA brings together a scientific committee
that it calls the Robertson Panel
to investigate all of these UFO sightings.
- [Lynne] The conclusion they come to,
it's a bit of a letdown.
They basically end up saying
all of these different things
are misidentification of known aerial presences,
known phenomena,
might be a weather situation
that somebody interpreted wrong.
- [Laurence] But there's one series of sightings
the Robertson Panel can't explain.
- The one holdout that even the CIA recognizes
is the Foo Fighters.
They allow that some accounts simply defy explanation,
and, in fact, they even say,
"Had the term flying saucer existed in 1945?"
That is undeniably what the Foo Fighters
would've been called.
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Laurence] The lack of a satisfactory explanation
from the government gives rise to imaginative speculation
about what the World War II Foo Fighters were
and where they came from.
- [Lynne] For the believers, the Foo Fighters
really were just the start
of what has become an ongoing engagement
with unidentified flying objects.
And as recently as 2024,
we have reports from pilots flying in Oregon
of lights incredibly similar
to the way that Foo Fighters are described,
and, in fact, the air-traffic controllers,
when they're called in,
the pilots, of course, are asking,
"What is in the sky with me?",
just as Ed Schlueter was asking
when he was flying his Bristol Beaufighter,
and the reply from the base comes back,
"It's a UFO."
[UFO roaring]
- Nick] Some UFO believers
say that these things must be extraterrestrial,
and that they were probably drawn to Earth
to witness firsthand one of the most cataclysmic
and high-technology wars in human history.
[explosion booming]
- [Laurence] Skeptics have suggested
that the Foo Fighter encounters of World War II
might have been hallucinations,
but the dozens of airmen who reported those sightings
strongly reject that theory.
These are men known for their bravery, their judgment,
and their keen eyesight;
they insist that what they saw was really there.
[airplane whirring]
- Some people who've looked at the Foo Fighter mystery
believe right from the outset
that these strange balls of light
might have a natural explanation.
[thunder rumbling]
- [Martin] Civilian and military pilots are well aware
of this weather phenomenon that's called St. Elmo's fire,
which is an atmospheric weather condition
that's produced by electrically charged ions
that discharge into the air;
and this can sometimes occur
along the wings of an aircraft in flight at night,
it sometimes looks like balls of flame.
- [Laurence] Most experts believe that St. Elmo's fire
is unlikely to explain the Foo Fighter sightings
during the Second World War,
but a related atmospheric phenomenon might.
[thunder rumbling]
- What gives St. Elmo's fire its glow is plasma.
Plasma is described as the fourth state of matter;
so we have solid, liquid, gas, and we have plasma
- [Hakeem] Plasmas are what occur when you add energy to a
gas and that rips electrons off of the atoms,
and now you end up with positively charged ions
and negatively charged electrons.
When lightning strikes, the illumination is due to plasma.
- [Laurence] Plasma is the most abundant form of matter
in the universe.
The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights,
is a naturally occurring display
of plasma physics in action.
- [Lis] It's plasma that produces naturally
amazing sights.
And some believe that plasma
could be a potential explanation for the Foo Fighters.
[intriguing dramatic music]
- [Paul] Even in the 21st century,
we're not certain what plasma balls are, how they form,
or why they behave the way they do.
There are some scientists that claim
that they seem to act almost like living organisms.
- [Karlene] Plasma balls are a clear sphere.
Inside, you have a mixture of noble gases like neon
interacting with high-voltage electrodes.
Once that electric current moves through the gas,
it emits a light,
and that's what you see glowing with plasma balls.
- [Nick] Sometimes they grow in size,
sometimes they split into multiple parts,
they interact with each other,
and they interact with the environment.
- [Hakeem] Plasmas can also take on different shapes
and they can move in different ways,
with some plasma balls moving quickly
and others appearing to just float in space.
[dramatic whooshing] [intriguing dramatic music]
- [Laurence] Most documented plasma ball sightings
have occurred high above the Earth in the thermosphere.
- [Nick] In 1965, two astronauts on the Gemini 4 orbiter
reported a strange metallic object approaching their craft.
Six months later, the famed astronaut, James Lovell,
reports seeing a bogey at 10 o'clock on another mission.
- [Paul] Decades after Lovell's report,
shuttle missions being conducted into low Earth orbit
on 10 separate occasions
captured images of huge plasma blobs.
[intriguing dramatic music]
- [Laurence] Scientists believe these same plasma balls
occasionally descend into the lower atmosphere
shared by aircraft.
And what happens when plasma comes in contact
with flying manmade objects
may explain the Foo Fighter sightings.
- [Lynne] These plasma balls exist almost entirely
in the thermosphere,
but they've been known to be drawn downwards
through some sort of electromagnetic presence.
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Hakeem] Plasmas can also occur around manmade objects
zipping through the sky
and emitting their own electromagnetic energy.
- [Karlene] So you have these planes that are manmade objects
moving through this electric field.
This can help those plasma balls to form.
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Lynne] The Bristol Beaufighters themselves,
moving through the sky,
would've generated their own electrostatic field
to create the conditions under which these plasma balls
might come from the thermosphere into our atmosphere.
And this ties in perfectly with the way the Foo Fighters
are described by the airmen who saw them
as being drawn towards the planes,
almost like they're investigating
or attaching themselves to them.
- [Hakeem] According to the research, when this happens,
these plasma balls have been known to "toy with" military
and civilian aircraft.
[dramatic whooshing]
- [Nick] The Foo Fighters were variously described
as silver, white, or red, but often pulsing and glowing,
and this is a very common feature of plasmas.
- [Martin] The phenomenon is visually astonishing
and attention attracting,
because when it's being played out,
you see visible balls of fire around the aircraft
while it's flying. [orb whooshing]
- [Laurence] In 2020,
a study by scientists at Cornell University
connects advanced technology aboard the night fighter planes
to the appearance of plasma balls.
- [Lynne] The idea is that these planes
that the Night Fighters were flying,
the way that their radar worked
was that it was pulsing,
and it pulsed so that it wouldn't overheat
all of the equipment.
- [Hakeem] The radar signals that were sent out by these
airplanes were very strong signals,
'cause they had to travel miles
and then reflect back to the airplane
for them to get a signal.
Sending that strong radio signal
through the exhaust from the plane, ionizing that gas,
could easily have formed a plasma ball.
And any fireballs that were created
would then stay next to the plane.
And so, as the plane maneuvers,
the fireball would maneuver along with it,
and so, that would match exactly what the pilot saw
when they were observing the Foo Fighters.
[airplane whooshing]
- [Laurence] Since Foo Fighters were first sighted
in November of 1944,
American military personnel and civilians alike
have developed a host of theories
to explain the Foo Fighter mystery.
While some theorists believe the Foo Fighters could be UFOs,
or the result of some obscure meteorological phenomenon,
others propose a more conventional explanation.
- [Hakeem] The common denominator
with all of these Foo Fighter encounters
is that they happen at night,
and that was a new environment for the pilots
of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron.
To keep from being spotted,
the pilots used airplanes that were painted black
and even had darkened instrument panels.
[dramatic thud]
- [Lynne] So these pilots, when they're flying,
yes, they're looking at their instrument panel,
yes, the radar operator's looking at the radar,
but they're also staring out into the darkness
with very few other lights around them
trying to see what they can make sense of,
and this is an incredibly disorienting experience.
- [Kevin] Flying at night with a moonless sky
with very few reference points and clouds coming over them,
maybe the pilot's eyes were just playing tricks on them.
[dramatic thud] [intriguing dramatic music]
- [Hakeem] Back in 1799,
exploring scientist, Alexander Von Humboldt,
was out at night and he reported that he started to see
the stars swing around in the sky.
[dramatic thud]
- [Lynne] He used the term sternschwankung, swinging stars,
to describe these.
And it wasn't until almost a hundred years later
that science was able to show
the stars aren't actually moving.
[dramatic thud]
- [Paul] What's happening in the night sky
is actually a pretty common phenomenon
known as autokinesis.
[dramatic thud] [intriguing dramatic music]
- [Laurence] Autokinesis is a visual illusion
where a stationary light source,
set against a very dark background,
can appear to be moving.
- [Hakeem] This could be a problem for pilots
because it creates the illusion that a stationary light
could be on a collision course with their airplane.
[dramatic whooshing] [intriguing dramatic music]
- [Paul] In February, 1945,
The War Department actually sets up an experiment
to try to determine whether autokinesis
is the source of the Foo Fighter reports.
They put together an experiment within a simulated cockpit
of one of these Bristol Beaufighters.
- They were in this pitch-black room,
and you have this one little light
that's being shined right in their eyes.
- The pilots would stare at that single source of light
with no reference around them.
And with the passage of time,
they would eventually begin to hallucinate
that the light was moving;
it would swing from side to side,
it would approach them, it would retreat away from them,
and all of it was in their head.
[intriguing dramatic music]
- [Karlene] During the experiment that they conducted,
it only took six to 12 seconds for this optical illusion
to take place.
[intriguing dramatic music]
- [Lynne] When a pilot is flying a plane,
that plane is rolling and pitching and yawing
and moving through space,
that movement alone is enough to create a sense
that a stationary light outside of the plane
is actually the thing doing the moving.
- [Kevin] Even the best pilots can get confused
and see things that aren't there,
and that's something that even happens today.
[airplane whooshing] [intriguing dramatic music]
- [Laurence] As recently as 2011,
a pilot flying a commercial plane caused major havoc
when he mistook a planet for an oncoming aircraft.
- [Paul] A 767 was en route from Toronto to Zurich.
The co-pilot had been informed
that there was a cargo aircraft in his vicinity,
and so he should maintain awareness
for the possibility of its presence.
- The co-pilot saw a light that was coming towards him,
and mistakenly identified it as cargo aircraft.
- [Lynne] To avoid hitting that bright light
that the pilot thought was coming at them,
they decided to take a nose dive.
- [Karlene] Thankfully, the captain took over,
and it was not a deadly crash,
but it almost hit the actual cargo plane
that was in the area about a thousand feet below the 767.
- [Paul] Later investigation demonstrated
that what he was seeing was actually the planet Venus
60 million miles away.
[dramatic thud] [airplane whirring]
- [Martin] We have almost limitless amounts of information
about pilots becoming confused in the sky.
Once that disorientation sets in,
it's very difficult for a pilot to overcome it
and regain situational awareness.
[dramatic thud]
- [Kevin] This kind of disorientation
means that pilots that are flying straight
feel like they're turning,
or even worse, they're so disoriented,
they think that they're upside down
when they're actually flying right side up
because of the lights and things that they're seeing.
[dramatic thud]
- [Karlene] So with all this aerial clutter
that they were seeing in World War II,
this could account for the Foo Fighters.
[dramatic thud]
- [Laurence] Is it possible the Foo Fighter witnesses
were misled by stray lights in the sky?
Some say that might be the case.
- [Hakeem] Proponents of this theory
feel that this autokinesis phenomenon
is an incredibly powerful illusion
that these airmen were never trained on.
According to a night fighter commander
who was interviewed after the war,
his men were never trained on misperceptions or illusions
or disorientation that could occur
during night air fighting.
[dramatic thud] [airplane whirring]
- [Kevin] So these pilots racing over Germany at night,
you can see where the power of suggestion
overrides rational thought.
- [Nick] For the men who encountered the Foo Fighters
in those closing years of World War II,
this remained an experience
that was to them profound and unforgettable.
It was something that would be with them
for the rest of their lives.
- [Lynne] Maybe it was a German weapon that's been lost to time,
maybe it is something literally beyond our understanding.
It was certainly the origin of UFO stories;
and to true believers,
that final chapter has yet to be written.
[intriguing dramatic music] [orb roaring]
[static whirring] [tense dramatic music]
- Whether the Foo Fighters
were created by a state of matter, a state of mind,
or something otherworldly,
we may never know the complete truth
about what or who the Foo Fighters really were,
or if they actually existed.
I'm Laurence Fishburne,
thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."
[cinematic dramatic music]