ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

42 The Hunt for Zero Point
Bit by bit, the reports entered the realm of officialdom. In archives and
on the Internet, I found dozens of them.
"At 0600, at 10,000 feet, two very bright lights climbed toward us from
the ground," another pilot from the 415th told intelligence officers after
an encounter on December 22, near Haguenau, close to where Schlueter,
Meiers and Ringwald had been. "They leveled off and stayed on the tail
of our plane. They were huge bright orange lights. They stayed there for
two minutes. On my tail all the time. They were under perfect control.
Then they turned away from us, and the fire seemed to go out."
Although their appearance was sporadic, aircrews increasingly reported
the devices via the appropriate channels. They nicknamed them
"foo-fighters," a bastardization of the French word "feu" for "fire" that
had worked its way into a cartoon strip called Smokey Stover, the Foolish
Foo Fighter which had first appeared in a Chicago newspaper several
years earlier. Meiers, who was a resident of Chicago, appears to have been
the first person to have coined the term.
The consensus was that foo-fighters were Nazi secret weapons of some
kind, but mighty strange ones, since they did not open fire on Allied aircraft,
nor did they explode on proximity to them. They simply appeared,
tagged along for a while and then vanished.
Seemingly, the spooks couldn't provide any plausible explanation for
what they were either, as the following account, by Major William Leet,
a B-17 pilot attached to the U.S. 15th Air Force, indicated after a nighttime
encounter with a foo-fighter—"a small amber disc"—that followed
his bomber all the way from Klagenfurt, Austria, to the Adriatic Sea in
December 1944. "The intelligence officer that debriefed us stated it was
a new German fighter but could not explain why it did not fire at us or, if
it was reporting our heading, altitude and airspeed, why we did not
receive antiaircraft fire," he reported.
Most encounters were at night, but there were daylight sightings, too.
A B-17 pilot, Charles Odom, flying on a daylight raid into Germany,
described them as being "clear, about the size of basketballs." They
would approach to within 300 feet, "then would seem to become
magnetized to our formation and fly alongside. After a while, they would
peel off like a plane and leave."
A P-47 fighter pilot also reported seeing a "gold-colored ball with a
metallic finish" west of Neustadt in broad daylight, while another saw a
"three to five feet diameter phosphorescent golden sphere" in the same
area.
In 1992, researchers digging into the foo-fighter mystery uncovered a
wealth of buried reports within the U.S. National Archives at College