The Foo Fighters

Aircrews flying combat missions in the Second World War reported small luminous objects that appeared beside them in the air. The accounts in this file describe glowing silver balls and discs that danced off wingtips, paced formations, circled aircraft at close range and kept up with them. German, American and English pilots reported them. So did Japanese crews, and one account has a dark object photographed pursuing Sally bombers over China. Each side assumed the objects belonged to the other. By these accounts, intelligence never explained them.

What is on the record

Four government records were for a time attached to this file: a CIA Scientific Advisory Panel report and three CIA FOIA items. A 2026 full-text audit found none of them actually discusses the foo fighters — they are general papers on the wider subject, swept in by loose matching — and they have been removed. What remains is the strength of this case anyway: thirteen resolved claimants across fifteen videos on four independent channels, which is among the broadest sourcing in the archive.

The claimant list is worth setting out plainly. Most of it is categories rather than people: Allied aircrews, Allied and Axis bombing crews, military pilots of all combatants. Only a handful of individuals are attached, among them Leonard Stringfield, Robert May, Ted Stevens and a Lieutenant Myers of Chicago. One telling puts the figure at more than two hundred Allied pilots and says Eisenhower was aware of the reports. That is a source's claim, not the archive's count.

Ordinary explanations sit in the record rather than outside it. Crews were dismissed at the time as suffering hypoxia, though whole crews reported the same thing. Ball lightning is raised in two tellings, and in one of them the sceptic making the case concedes that some descriptions do not fit it. The dating is loose. The archive's period runs across the war years and the sightings span more than one theatre, so this entry describes a phenomenon reported over years rather than a single night.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 on the breadth of its independent tellings. What the file establishes is that airmen on all sides reported the same class of object. What the objects were is not resolved here.