331 120752 Numeric Files 1944–1945 37153 German Armament Equipment Documents

This is the Allied command’s own paper trail on the “foo fighters,” the lights that Allied night crews over Europe reported in the last winter of the Second World War. It comes from the files of SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, filed among records on German armament equipment.

What the pilots reported

The thread begins in January 1945 with a quotation from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron’s report for December 1944: crews were being followed by lights that blinked on and off, changed color and flew close in formation with their planes, and the unit asked whether other night units had seen the same. Headquarters asked for details, and the squadron replied with extracts from pilots’ sortie reports over eastern France and the Rhine — a red light near Erstein, flashing red and green lights in a “T” shape that seemed to follow an aircraft through turns, orange glows, “Foofighters” north of Strasbourg and, in late January, amber lights between Wissembourg and Landau. The squadron noted that whenever pilots asked ground control whether another aircraft was nearby, the answer was no.

The official explanations

In March 1945 the British Air Ministry replied that Bomber Command crews had been reporting similar things for some time. It suggested a few might be Me 262 jets and that flak rockets were the most likely explanation for the rest, while admitting the affair was “still something of a mystery” and the evidence sketchy. A separate SHAEF note says attempts to get photographs of “long cylindrical objects” claimed by a reconnaissance pilot had failed.