The article below was published in the daily newspaper The Record, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA, page 14, on January 2, 1945.
|
Balls of Fire Appear Suddenly and Race Along side Planes Over Reich, Fliers Declare
A U.S. Night Fighter Base, France, Jan. 1 (AP) - The Nazis have thrown something new into the night skies over Germany - the weird, mysterious "Foo-Fighter," balls of fire which race along-side the wings of American Beaufighters flying intruder missions over the Reich.
U. S. pilots have been encountering the eerie "Foo-Fighter" for more than a month in their night flights. No one apparently knows exactly what this sky weapon is.
The balls of fire appear suddenly and accompany the planes for miles. They appear to be radio-controlled from the ground and manage to keep up with planes flying 300 miles an hour, official intelligence reports reveal.
"There are three kinds of these lights we call 'foo-fighters,'" said Lt. Donald Meiers, of Chicago, Ill. "One is red balls of fire which appear off our wingtips and fly along with us, the second is a vertical row of three balls of fire which fly in front of us and the third is a group of about 15 lights which appear off in the distance - like a Christmas tree up in the air - and flicker on and off."
The pilots on this night fighter squadron - in operation since September, 1943 - find these fiery balls the weirdest things they have as yet encountered. They are convinced that the "Foo-Fighter" is designed to be a psychological weapon as well as military, although it is not the nature of the fireballs to attack planes.
"A 'foo-fighter' picked me up recently at 700 feet and chases me 20 miles down the Rhine Valley," Meiers said. "I turned to starboard and two balls of fire turned with me. I turned to the port side and they turned with me. We were going 260 miles an hour and the balls were keeping right up with us."
"On another occasion when a 'Foo-Fighter' picked us up, I dove at 360 miles per hour. It kept right off our wing for awhile and then zoomed up into the sky.
"When I first saw the thing off my wing tips I had the horrible thought that a German on the ground was ready to press a button and explode them. But they don't explode or attack us. They just seem to follow us like will-o-the-wisps."
(An Associated Press report from Paris December 13 said that the Germans had thrown silvery balls into the air agains day raiders. Pilot then reported they had seen these objects, both individually and in clusters, during forays over the Reich.)
Lt. Wallace Gould of Silver Creek, N.Y., said the lights followed his wing tips for a while and then, in a few seconds, zoomed 20,000 feet into the air and out of sight.
The squadron commander, Maj. Harold Augspurger of Middletown, Ohio, has seen them as practically every other member of the squadron except Capt. Ralph Angus of San Francisco, Calif., a veteran flier who said, "It just so happens that I haven't run into them - yet."
Other pilots at this base who have encountered "Foo-Fighters" include Lt. Charles Ingraham, Waynesburg, Pa., also Radio Navigator Austin Tetry, York, a.
