by Mack Maloney
So, while the actual number may never be known, there’s no doubt whatever was happening in the skies a half a world away in Europe was also happening above Asia and the Pacific.
The Tromp Incident
February 1942, just two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the entire South Pacific was engulfed in war.
William Methorst was a crewmember of the Dutch cruiser RNN Tromp. The ship was sailing in the Timor Sea, close to New Guinea. Methorst was on watch.
As Methorst later told UFO writer Peter Norris in an interview, he was on the lookout for Japanese aircraft when he saw a huge saucer-shaped object about a mile high approaching his ship. It was moving at tremendous speed. As Methorst watched the object through binoculars, it abruptly slowed down and then began to circle the cruiser.
Methorst immediately informed the ship’s bridge, but no one could identify the object, other than to say it was not any known aircraft.
Incredibly, the object circled the RNN Tromp for almost four hours, keeping pace with it and always maintaining the same altitude.
Then, unexpectedly, the object broke its orbit, accelerated to almost Mach 5 and was gone.
The Tasmania Sighting
A few months later, in the summer of 1942, a pilot for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) was flying over Tasmania when he had an encounter with a mysterious object.
The RAAF pilot reported that the object was shaped like a large airfoil, about 150 feet long and 50 feet wide. The airfoil tapered to a fin at its rear, and the RAAF pilot could see sporadic green blue flashes emanating from this area.
The object was a bronze color, and on top there was a dome that seemed to be reflecting flashes of sunlight. The pilot theorized something might have been inside this dome wearing a helmet and that this was causing the reflections.
The object kept pace with the Australian plane for a few minutes before suddenly turning away. From this angle, the RAAF pilot could see four fins on the object’s underside.
At this point, the object suddenly accelerated to tremendous speed and, according to the RAAF pilot, dove straight into the ocean. Buffeted by the Pacific waves, it created a massive whirlpool as it quickly disappeared below.
The Formation over Tulagi
On August 12, 1942, Sergeant Stephen Brickner of the U.S. Marines was sitting in a foxhole on the island of Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
Located close to Guadalcanal, Tulagi had been firmly in Japanese hands until just a few days before. But a Marine landing on August 7 had lit off a battle for control of the island, a clash the Marines would eventually win. Later on, a U.S. Navy PT boat base would be built there, and among the PT boats assigned to it would be the famous PT 109, commanded by John F. Kennedy, who went on to be the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
But on this day, the fighting for control of the island was still going on. It was midmorning, and the Marines were cleaning their equipment in anticipation of more combat. Suddenly their unit’s air raid siren began blaring.
Brickner slid deeper into his foxhole, ready for what the Marines were sure would be a Japanese air raid. Looking straight up into the bright tropical sky, Brickner recalled hearing the aerial formation before he could see it.
The sound was like a mighty roar echoing in the heavens, Brickner would say later. But this didn’t seem right, because he’d heard Japanese planes before and this was definitely not the distinctive droning sound they usually made.
Then Brickner saw the formation — and was astonished.
Instead of the typical V shape that Japanese planes always flew in, what Brickner saw were waves of bright silvery objects flying very high overhead. Each wave was made up of at least a dozen objects, and there were lots of them — maybe 150 in all.
Brickner could detect no wings or tails on these objects, and they were going faster than any Japanese airplanes he’d ever seen. Though new to combat, and weary from battling the Japanese for the past five days, the scene still gave Brickner pause.
As quoted in Keith Chester’s Strange Company, Brickner said: “All in all, it was the most awe-inspiring and yet frightening spectacle I’ve seen in my life.”
What Flew Over Tarawa?
One of the bloodiest battles fought in America’s war against Japan was for a tiny stretch of rock and sand called the Tarawa atoll.
Located in the central Pacific, Tarawa is part of the Gilbert chain, a string of islands strategically crucial to anyone wanting to control the thousands of square miles of ocean in that part of the war zone. Actually a couple dozen smaller islands grouped together, the Japanese had bombed Tarawa the day after Pearl Harbor and then occupied it a few months later.
Needing to secure bases to continue its island-hopping campaign toward Japan, the U.S. Marines carried out an amphibious landing on Tarawa on November 20, 1943. Eight brutal days later, 1,000 Americans and 5,000 Japanese lay dead, but the island was in U.S. hands.
By early 1944, a series of U.S. Navy radar stations had been built on Tarawa, allowing American forces to watch for any Japanese aircraft in the area.
In an incident related to UFO investigator Major Donald Keyhoe, one day in April of that year, a Navy radar man detected an unknown aircraft on his radar screen. The bogey was moving north to south at 700 miles per hour, a tremendous speed for 1944, and twice as fast as most of the U.S. fighter aircraft.
The news quickly brought a number of senior navy officers to the radar station. The first things they checked were the radar sets themselves, making sure they were working properly and that this wasn’t some aberration. But the station’s radar operators assured the brass everything was running correctly.
Then, almost as if to confirm this, a second bogey popped onto the screen. Moving just like the first, north to south, it was flying at the same incredible speed of 700 miles per hour.
At this point, there were only two possible explanations. Either the Japanese had suddenly invented a plane that had broken the sound barrier — highly unlikely — or it was “something else.”
The two blips eventually left the radar screens, and their origin continued to be a mystery.
But the ending for this particular foo fighter episode was still about a year and a half away.
Mystery at Palmyra
One night in late June 1944, a Coast Guard vessel sailing about 800 miles southeast of Hawaii received an urgent radio message. A U.S. Navy patrol plane had crashed into the sea close to its location. The Coast Guard ship was asked to search for survivors.
Immediately changing course, the Coast Guard vessel rushed to the suspected crash area and used its searchlights to look for any wreckage or survivors. But they found nothing.
A day later, the ship was anchored at the nearby island of Palmyra. The ship’s executive officer was on the bridge, standing watch, when he spotted a bright light over the island around midnight.
The light began to grow, even as he was watching it, coming closer with every second. For a moment, the XO thought this might be the lost patrol plane, inexplicably returning home. But on looking at the light through binoculars, the XO realized it was no typical aircraft, lost or otherwise.
It was a sphere, perfectly round, and very bright. It went into a hover above the Coast Guard ship, moving so slow that at times it appeared to be stopped in midair.
This went on for more than thirty minutes until the sphere finally picked up speed and moved off to the north, in the same direction as where the patrol plane had been lost.
The XO later had a conversation with a navy lieutenant concerning the missing plane and the otherworldly sphere.
The fact that the patrol plane had vanished was a huge mystery for everyone involved. Its crew was well trained and experienced. When flying over large areas of water, long-range pilots relied on their direction finder to be in working condition. But even if the lost plane’s gear had malfunctioned, the pilots would have known which direction they were heading simply by noting the position of t
he setting sun.
As for the sphere, the navy officer told the XO that no U.S. planes had been up the night before and there wasn’t a Japanese plane within 1,000 miles of the island. So whatever the XO saw, it didn’t belong to either side.
As recounted later by UFO writers Jerome Clark and Lucius Farish, the XO admitted he believed the two incidents — the lost plane and the unearthly sphere — were related. The navy lieutenant had seconded that theory.
The missing plane was never found.
The Palembang Object
On August 10, 1944, a B-29 bomber based at Kharagpur, India, was on a mission over Palembang, Sumatra, bombing Japanese gas facilities in that part of enemy-occupied Indonesia.
The bomber was one of fifty flying the mission. This particular plane had dropped its bombs, and then, by releasing photo flash bombs, its crew began filming the destruction they’d wrought on the Japanese below.
Once their mission was complete, they turned back for their home base, flying at 14,000 feet. About a half hour into this return trip, though, two of the B-29’s crewmembers spotted an oval-shaped object 1,500 feet off their right wing.
About six feet in diameter, the object’s surface was very bright and pulsating vigorously. Its color was changing from intense red to orange, and it was spewing a blue green exhaust plume.
Thinking this was some kind of enemy device, the B-29 pilot put his plane through a series of extreme evasive maneuvers, all while flying at more than 200 miles per hour. Climbing, diving, turning, banking, the object stayed with the big plane through all of it, keeping pace and never missing a beat.
At the end of ten minutes of wild flying, the object finally broke off contact. Climbing straight up, it accelerated to tremendous speed and disappeared overhead.
7
Back to Europe
Tales of the 415th
Of all the American air units that served in the European theater of World War II, one in particular will be forever linked to the foo fighters phenomenon.
And while there is no way to tell for sure, quite possibly this unit ran into more foo fighters on a regular basis than any other during the war — which is very strange because the men of this unit were also the ones who gave the foo fighters their name.
The unit was the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. One of America’s first ever night-fighting units, the 415th had been trained in Orlando, Florida, before being deployed overseas in 1943. They first went to North Africa, then to Italy, and finally, in 1944, they were stationed in France.
The squadron flew the Bristol Beaufighter, a British-built, two-engine, multiseat heavy fighter whose top speed was more than 300 miles per hour. And, because the plane was large enough to put a sizable radar set in its nose, as well as carry respectable loads of ammunition and fuel, the Beaufighter was a formidable night warrior.
The pilots who flew these night fighters were all above average in skill, daring… and eyesight. Theirs was a dangerous and almost foolish mission: prowling the night skies over Germany, like birds of prey looking for anything moving on the ground or in the air, at the same time they offered themselves up as tempting targets for German antiaircraft fire or their night-fighting counterparts in the Luftwaffe.
It took a very special pilot to fly for the 415th.
* * *
The strangeness started for the squadron on the night of November 26, 1944.
A lone 415th Beaufighter took off from the unit’s home field near Dijon, France, and headed into Germany, hunting for enemy locomotives. After destroying a number of targets, the plane’s pilot spotted a strange red light flying nearby. It came within a half mile of his aircraft before disappearing. As this didn’t seem all that unusual at the time, the pilot reported the light during his debriefing and thought that was the end of it.
Until a few days later. The same pilot was airborne again, along with his radar operator and, this time, as an extra passenger, the 415th’s intelligence officer, Captain Fred Ringwald. Because other pilots in the unit had reported seeing odd lights, too, Ringwald thought that if he was able to get a look at one, he might be able to tell if it was a new German weapon or not.
At some point during the patrol, the three men onboard the Beaufighter spotted a line of lights a distance away. Ringwald thought they were lights on a hill, but they soon realized there were no hills in the area. Plus, the unit’s ground radar people were telling them there were no other aircraft — friendly or not — in the area, either.
The three airmen counted eight lights, all in a line, burning bright orange. They could also tell that the lights were moving extremely fast.
The pilot steered toward them, but the lights abruptly blinked out. But then, just as suddenly, they reappeared, this time even farther off in the distance. The lights remained blazing for a few more minutes before diving very steeply and disappearing for good.
The Beaufighter eventually returned to base, but the pilot and radar man chose not to say anything about spotting the mysterious illuminations, fearing they’d be grounded with battle fatigue.
As for Captain Ringwald, who’d gone along on the ride specifically looking for mysterious objects, he didn’t mention the lights to anyone, either. As Keith Chester says in his book Strange Company, the incident was just “too weird” for the intelligence officer to report.
But the real weirdness was yet to come.
* * *
A few weeks after this encounter, on December 16, more than a half million German soldiers smashed through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, starting the largest engagement of the war. It would become known as the Battle of the Bulge.
Soon after the battle commenced, the 415th was back in the night skies over Germany, this time looking for truck convoys and forward enemy airfields — targets that, if destroyed, would slow down the Nazi onslaught.
One of the squadron’s Beaufighters found itself over Bre-isach, Germany. Flying very low, its pilot spotted a half dozen red and green blinking lights aligned in the shape of a T. The pilot assumed they were enemy flak and kept on going. But ten minutes later, he saw the odd alignment again. This time it was closer to him and toward his rear.
The pilot turned left — the lights followed. He turned right, and the lights stayed with him again. No matter what he did, the mysterious lights followed him perfectly.
This went on for almost five minutes — until the lights suddenly blinked out.
* * *
A few days later: another mission, another sighting. One of the 415th planes was flying in the vicinity of Strasbourg, France, when its crew was suddenly aware of two large orange lights approaching them. They came right up to the Beaufighter, leveled off and then took up position on the night fighter’s tail. They remained for about two minutes before suddenly turning away and then blinking out.
The next night: two more sightings. One 415th pilot on patrol reported seeing reddish flames in the air, at 10,000 feet; another saw a glowing red object shoot up toward his aircraft, turn over, then go into a dive before disappearing.
Two nights later: four more sightings. One Beaufighter crew saw two yellow streaks of flame flying even with them at about 3,000 feet. The same crew also saw several red balls of fire that flew level with them for at least ten seconds before disappearing. A second crew reported seeing four bright white lights, in vertical formation and staggered evenly, hovering motionless two miles above the ground. A third crew had a bright white light follow them for more than five minutes, despite taking evasive action.
* * *
By this time, it had become obvious that something very strange was going on. Almost all of the 415th’s pilots had encountered the mysterious lights, and they continued to see them just about every time they went up.
It got to the point where the pilots felt they should give the mysterious lights a name. A pilot named Charlie Horne suggested “foo fighters”—from a then-popular comic strip called Smokey Stover. Stover was a zany firefighter whose fire truck was called the
“Foo Mobile.” (Perhaps connected to all this, the French word “feu” means “fire.”)
In any case, from Horne’s utterance, these strange lights, as well as all the weird aerial objects Allied aircrews had been encountering throughout the war, now had a name that continues to be used to this day.
* * *
Meanwhile, December dragged on and the Battle of the Bulge still raged. The 415th continued going up over Germany every night, looking as always for targets of opportunity. And the newly christened “foo fighters” were still continuing to dog them.
On December 27, there were two more sightings. One Beaufighter crew encountered strange lights throughout most of its patrol, describing them as bright orange balls hanging in the air, moving slowly and then suddenly disappearing in ones and twos. Another crew saw three sets of red and white lights, trailing them on both sides of their aircraft. Two nights later, on New Year’s Eve, a Beaufighter crew saw a group of mysterious lights fly past them at 10,000 feet. The following night, more strange lights were seen over the enemy city of Strasbourg.
On and on it went. At the end of January 1945, with the Battle of the Bulge finally over and won by the Allies, the 415th’s intelligence officer, Captain Ringwald, was asked to provide information on the strange lights his unit had been seeing. He prepared a report, noted in detail in Keith Chester’s book Strange Company, that cited no less than fourteen separate incidents of 415th pilots seeing foo fighters while flying combat operations in barely five weeks’ time.
And it didn’t stop there. The 415th crews reported three more foo fighter sightings in just the first nine days of February.
* * *
Maybe it was no surprise then that shortly afterward, a group of mysterious men arrived at the 415th’s base in France, intent on looking into the squadron’s flood of foo fighter reports.