"When World War Two ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the almost preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported to UFO observers..." - Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, Chief of the US Air Force Project "Bluebook", 1956.

Late in the war, Allied pilots began to see unusual lights and silvery globes flying at their wingtips. They nicknamed those foo fighters and kraut fireballs, thinking they were some new secret weapon of the Nazis. Let it be clear that there is a distinct difference between these "foo fighters" and the actual flying disks developped by Nazi scientists.

The foo fighter or feuerball story is one of several regarding Nazi flying disks and it comes from the writings of Renato Vesco. Vesco's book Intercept UFO was released as a collaboration with David Hatcher Childress and re-titled Man-Made UFOs 1944-1994. Vesco was a member of the Italian Air Force during the war, and became interested in UFOs and German secret weapons after it. He claims to have obtained his information from British war documents. His thesis of the purpose of foo fighters being to jam radar does not pan out. There are no clear reports that radar jamming occurred specifically when foo fighters were in the area.

A foo fighter was a luminous rounded flying object, observed and reported by hundreds of Allied air crew between September 1943 and March 1945 over the Rhine. A lesser number of reports were filled by crews overflying Japanese controlled territory. 302 sightings were made by 140 crews of the US XXI Bomber Command alone - we may take these as a cross-section sample of the whole.¹

The fireballs were mostly described as around "six inches in diameter", "the size of a soccor ball", or "about the size of a basketball". The colour of the illumination was described as very strong white, although reds, yellows and ambers were also mentioned.

Both the United States and the British authourities agreed in their published summaries regarding the phenomenon, that the objects were "invulnerable". No method could be found to shoot one down. If they were aware of that, apparently someone had attempted to do so. Unfortunately, although searching through hundreds of documents with their extensive deletions, we are unable to discover what happened to the aircraft's bullets when firing upon a foo fighter. Did they seem to go straight through it; were they rebounded or deflected by some king of force field?

Fireballs approached Allied aircraft from the ground upwards. Between one and three fireballs would then take station about five metres from a wingtip. They were comfortable at 200 knots, but could be evaded at high speeds They seemed able to make up the lost distance if they had the opportunity after falling behind. Occasionally Allied aircrew reported that the objects fell out of control and were observed to crash and explode on the ground. This would confirm that they were material creations of human technology.

One RAF pilot and navigator, and one US Air Force air gunner, reported that a fireball transformed suddenly into a small aircraft "with a navigation lamp burning on the left wingtip".

These aberrations lead us to suspect that the "foo-fighters" were a German aerial device with a singular propensity.

The highest known priority for any project in the Third Reich was "kriegsentscheidend" - decisive for the war. Only one single project was awarded this category under the protocol of July 21, 1942; the AEG electrical giant´s project "Charite Anlage". Directed by Dr Richard Craemer, it involved the use of tremendous voltages in a Plasma Physics project "which will last until at least the end of the war." It is known that this project involved spinning containers of mercury at fantastic speeds within a ceramic bell-shaped object. Another scientist, Kurt Debus, elaborated the theory known as separation of magnetic fields.²

The foo fighters were creations of German technology, and were remote-controlled from German occupied territory. At some point in its ascent the hydrogen peroxide engine cut out and the ion mercury plasma engine cut in and the craft moved into another magnetic field where, as we have seen, it lost its distinctive aircraft shape and became a fireball to the human eye. In Magnetic Field II it was invulnerable. It then homed calm as you like onto an Allied aircraft but did nothing.

The point was of course, that the craft was invulnerable in Magnetic Field II, but it worked both ways, and Allied aircraft were invulnerable to IT. In all probability, German scientists had not figured out at that stage how to get the foo fighter out of Magnetic Field II into Magnetic Field I at altitude where it could explode alongside the Allied aircraft.

If this could have been achieved, the Reich would have regained air supremacy, for this was an anti-aircraft weapon with at least a 100% success rate - it would have exploded five metres from the aircraft fuselage giving the B-29 or Lancaster no chance or survival whatever.

¹ NARA Intelligence Publications, Air Int. Report Volume 1, No. 8, 26.IV.1945, ² see certificates issued April 22, 1943 and other documents in NARA/RG Foreign Scientist Case Files K Debus, Box 28, US Nat. Archive, College Park. Originally published under "Foo Fighters were German - The Evidence" by Geoffrey Brooks at the Axis History forums.