The term foo fighters was used by Allied aircraft pilots during World War II to describe various unidentified flying objects or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific theaters of operations.
In a mission debriefing on the evening of November 27, 1944, Frederic "Fritz" Ringwald, the unit's S-2 Intelligence Officer, stated that Meiers and Pilot Lt. Ed Schleuter had sighted a red ball of fire that appeared to chase them through a variety of high-speed maneuvers.
[10] Royal Air Force personnel had reported seeing lights following their aircraft from as early as March 1942,[11][12] with similar sightings involving RAF bomber crews over the Balkans starting in April 1944.
[14] However, the bulk of the sightings started occurring in the last week of November 1944, when pilots flying over Western Europe by night reported seeing fast-moving round glowing objects following their aircraft.
[15] On 13 December 1944, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in Paris issued a press release, which was printed in The New York Times the next day, officially describing the phenomenon as a "new German weapon".
The Air Ministry's explanation for the Foo Fighter phenomenon was received on 13 March 1945: Bomber Command crews have for some time been reporting similar phenomena.
The whole affair is still something of a mystery and the evidence is very sketchy and varied so that no definite and satisfactory explanation can yet be given.A group of scientists, engineers and former high-ranking Luftwaffe officers were questioned about wartime "Balls of Fire" reports by staff from United States Air Force in Europe's intelligence section in the early autumn of 1945.
Vesco claims that the foo fighters were in fact a form of ground-launched, automatically guided, jet-propelled flak mine called the Feuerball (Fireball).
This device, supposedly operated by special SS units, resembled a tortoise shell in shape, and it flew by means of gas jets that spun like a Catherine wheel around the fuselage.
Miniature klystron tubes inside the device, in combination with the gas jets, created the characteristic glowing spheroid appearance of the foo fighters.
A crude form of collision avoidance radar ensured the craft would not crash into another airborne object, and an onboard sensor mechanism would even instruct the machine to depart swiftly if it was fired upon.
Although there is no hard evidence to support the reality of the Feuerball drone, this theory has been taken up by other aviation/ufology authors, and it has even been cited by some as the most likely explanation for the phenomena in at least one recent TV "documentary" on Nazi secret weapons.
[29][30] However, others cite the single-sourced nature of the claims, the complete lack of evidence supporting them, and the implausible capabilities of the supposed device as marking this explanation as nonsense.