Foo Fighters, 1945

The First Word the Military Ever Used for UFOs Was Not “UFO”

On December 14, 1944, pilots of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron were flying combat missions over the Alsace region of France when they encountered something their training had not prepared them for. Red and green lights appeared in the darkness, moving with an intelligence that defied the physics of any known aircraft. The lights closed to within 100 feet of their planes. They matched their turns. They followed them home.

The pilots did not call them UFOs. That term would not be invented for another seven years. They called them foo fighters.

The document that records this is not a secondhand account, a newspaper clipping, or a decades-later recollection. It is War Department memorandum 331-120752, classified SECRET, dated January 16, 1945, from Headquarters XII Tactical Air Command. It is the original. The 415th Night Fighter Squadron’s own sortie reports, forwarded through the chain of command, transcribed verbatim by their intelligence officer, Captain B. R. Ringwald. This document was released in May 2026 as part of the Department of War’s historic declassification of UAP files under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE), and is available for download directly from war.gov/UFO. This is the real thing: the actual classified memo, declassified and published by the United States government.

What They Saw

The reports are precise, the way only combat pilots can be precise about things in the sky:

• December 14-15: “In vicinity of Erstein, flying at 1000 ft, observed large red light at 2000 ft going East at 18:40 hrs. Travelling at approximately 200 MPH.”
• December 16-17: “20 miles North of Breisach at 800 ft, observed 5 or 6 flashing red and green lights in ‘1’ shape. Thought they were flak. About 10 minutes later saw the same lights much closer and behind me. We turned port and starboard and the lights followed. They closed in to about 8 o’clock and 1000 ft and remained in that position for several minutes and then disappeared.”
• December 22-23: “Saw two lights coming towards A/C from the ground. Upon reaching altitude of plane, they leveled off and stayed on my tail for approximately 2 minutes. Lights appeared to be a large orange Glow. After staying with A/C for approximately 2 minutes, they would peel off and turn away, fly along level for a few minutes and then go out. They appeared to be under perfect control at all times.”
• December 26-27: “Observed light at same altitude while in vicinity of Worms. Observer saw light come within 100 ft. Peeled off and took evasive action but light continued to follow for 5 minutes. Light then pulled up rapidly and went out of sight.”

“They appeared to be under perfect control at all times.” This is not the language of confused airmen seeing flak or weather balloons. This is a trained night fighter pilot describing something that matched his aircraft move for move, then departed on its own terms.

The Name

The term “foo fighter” came from the squadron’s own intelligence officer. At the bottom of the 2nd Endorsement, dated January 30, 1945, Captain Ringwald writes:

“Foofighters is the name given these phenomenon by combat crews of this Squadron.”

The word “foo” came from Bill Holman’s popular comic strip “Smokey Stover,” where the fireman protagonist used “foo” as a nonsense exclamation. It had already entered military slang. But the 415th made it permanent. From that moment forward, the term would travel from this classified memo into Air Force intelligence, then into the newspapers, and finally into the dictionary.

What the Brass Did With It

The document does not end with the pilot reports. It traces the military’s response through four levels of command:

XII Tactical Air Command (Lt. Col. Leavitt Corning, Jr., January 16, 1945): Forwarded the reports with a direct request for more information, noting the crews were encountering “a phenomenon which we cannot explain” and that the lights “come very close and fly formation with our planes.” His tone is measured but urgent: “They are agitating and keep the crews on edge.”

First Tactical Air Force (Major Boykin, January 20, 1945): Acknowledged they had no instances of their own. But instead of dismissing it, they asked for specifics: colors, intensity, size, duration, altitude, direction of travel, proximity to the aircraft. This was an intelligence officer doing his job, not a debunker.

SHAEF (Air Commodore Grierson, February 11-12, 1945): This is where it gets interesting. Grierson wrote to USSTAF that “from the number of reports quoted in the 2nd W/Ind from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, it would seem that there must be something more than mere imagination behind the matter.” He didn’t say maybe. He said must be something more. He recommended an Air Technical Intelligence Officer visit the unit in person and obtain reports at first hand. He also sent the material to the Air Ministry and to the Scientific Investigation Division.

The Air Ministry (Group Captain Hopking, March 15, 1945): Responded that Bomber Command crews “have for some time been reporting similar phenomena.” Their best guess: Me 262 jets and flak rockets. But they added a qualifier: “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.”

The British were seeing the same things. Over different targets. From different aircraft. And they couldn’t explain it either.

The Photographs That Weren’t

There is a remarkable thread in this file about photography. On March 4, 1945, the 107th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron attempted to photograph “long cylindrical objects” near the front. The results: unsuccessful. A signal from HQ IX TAC confirms: “PHOTOS OF LONG CYLINDRICAL OBJECTS TAKEN BY 67TH TAC/R PILOTS… WERE UNSUCCESSFUL.”

The objects were real enough to see, real enough to chase, real enough to fly formation with combat aircraft for minutes at a time, but they somehow eluded photography. This pattern, the objects that interact but evade documentation, will repeat for the next eighty years.

Why This Document Matters

This is not a retrospective account filtered through decades of cultural baggage. It is not a book. It is not a documentary. It is the military’s own paperwork, classified SECRET, moving through the chain of command in real time, while the war was still being fought and the witnesses were still flying night missions over Germany.

Several things make it unique:

• It predates everything. Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting over Mount Rainier was June 24, 1947. The Roswell incident was July 1947. The foo fighter reports are two and a half years earlier, from an active combat theater, documented by military intelligence.
• The witnesses were professionals. Night fighter pilots were among the most trained observers in the military. They had to be. Their job was to find and intercept enemy aircraft in complete darkness, using radar and visual identification. If they said something was under intelligent control, flying formation, and then departing on its own, they meant it literally.
• The chain of command took it seriously. Nobody dismissed the reports. Nobody filed them under weather anomalies. From XII TAC to First TAF to SHAEF to the Air Ministry, every echelon treated them as legitimate intelligence requiring investigation.
• The British independently corroborated. Bomber Command crews were reporting the same phenomena over different targets with different aircraft. This was not a single unit’s hallucination.

Aftermath

The investigation went quiet after the war. The 415th’s reports were filed, classified, and buried in the War Department’s numeric files. Project Sign, the Air Force’s first formal UFO investigation, would not be established until 1948. By then, the foo fighters had been gone for three years.

But the term survived. It passed from classified military slang into the public lexicon, where it would eventually give a name to an entire musical genre and become one of the most recognizable words in the English language associated with unidentified aerial phenomena. All from a single footnote in a 17-page classified document, written by a captain in a night fighter squadron, who simply recorded what his pilots told him and gave it a name.

The foo fighters never came back. At least, not under that name. But the lights, the formation flying, the under-perfect-control movements, the approach to within 100 feet, the sudden departure, the evasion of photography, these patterns repeat through every subsequent decade, in every subsequent file. They are all here, in this document, in January 1945, while the world was still at war.

Before Roswell. Before Arnold. Before Blue Book. Before anyone had a framework to explain them away.

Source: War Department, Headquarters XII Tactical Air Command (ADV), memorandum dated January 16, 1945, transmitting reports from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron regarding “Night Phenomenon” observed over the Western Front, December 1944 through January 1945. Declassified and released May 2026 under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). Original document available at war.gov/UFO. Document ID 331-120752.