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Foo Fighters

rynner2 said:
Pietro_Mercurios said:
V2s, being rockets, flew, more, or less, straight up....
http://www.v2platform.nl/book/technical.html

[Book 'V2-VERGELTUNG' from The Hague]

The ballistic trajectory of the V2-rocket

The V2 was a ballistic rocket. The rocket ascended vertically over 4 seconds, after which it followed the programmed trajectory. The rocket ascended over a period of 43 seconds at an angle of 47°. After approximately 65 seconds the fuel supply was cut off to stop the rocket motor. The projectile described a parabolic trajectory and reached a maximum altitude of approximately 97 kilometres.
I'm assuming they were seen after launch during the powered, angled, sector of their flight.

Rockets that fly more, or less, straight up have a disconcerting tendency to fall straight back down! ;)
True, but as the quote shows, if the V2s came back in at the wrong angle, they effectively exploded. They seems to have come back down at more, or less, the same angle as the they went up at, i.e. almost straight down.

A maximum altitude of 95km, with an effective range of 260km, I'll leave the math, for the angle of re-entry, up to you.

Once they were under way, there was no defence.

;)
 
I was simply proposing sightings of V2 launchings as a possible explanation for the sightings reported near Essen.

Discussion of V2 descent seems way off thread!
 
Your English is excellent (better than that of some people I could mention! )

Thank you! :D

About the V-2 rocket, I thought maybe this is what that woman saw, because she said she lived in Essen, and I know that a lot of big factories were there. There was heavy bombing because of this, and defending the city was a priority. There was also a lot of propaganda, especially at the end of the war, about new weapons, so maybe she did see a V-2, or just saw something new in the sky, and thought it must be some kind of defense aircraft. It is actually this story which convinces me most that people did see something odd, because they were used to a lot of different kinds of aircraft flying over and learned quickly what was normal. So something new would have been noticed and talked about. Also, at that time and place, I guess to see something in the sky that is not a bomb people would think, "They missed" or "It's one of ours".

I wish I knew if anyone heard a sound from these lights. That might help to identify what they were. Not the V-2 unless you were close to where it was launched, I guess, but maybe the other ones. When I was growing up I heard a lot of people my parent's age and older who said you always knew what was flying overhead by the sound. (I remember talking to a man who said that when he was little, his mother told him the sound of the bombers flying over was made by bees. She said this so he wouldn't be scared, but if someone told me giant bees were flying over, I think I would be even more scared! :shock:)

My grandfather is still alive, and his memory for these things is very good, so when I talk to him next time I can ask him more about it.
 
Fascinating stories! I knew there was something I should have asked my Grandpa about (he was in the RAF during WWII). Too late now...
 
rynner2 said:
I was simply proposing sightings of V2 launchings as a possible explanation for the sightings reported near Essen.

Discussion of V2 descent seems way off thread!
Slightly off topic, I suppose, but since the V2 came down at almost the same angle as it went up at, albeit, much much faster, I was just trying to fill in some historical background. :)

The streaks, could have been left by the experimental German rocket planes, the ME163, for example.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8126559025769044810

Other, possible WWII, German experimental rocketry, here:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/rockets_wwII_germany.html
 
hey folks,

having been a lurker for YEARS i've decided to wade in on this one and suggest a really interesting programme which i guess you guys may have seen but nobody's mentioned yet.

it was called UFO's The Secret Evidence and wasn't the standard roswell/mib affair i'd been expecting but actually a fascinating and very in-depth look at british, german and us military history with regards to advancements and the rise in ufo/foo reportage, all presented by a chap who is (iirc) a defence journalist.

the reason i so enjoyed the programme was that the chap presenting it, in truly fortean style, just really wanted to get to the bottom of everything rather than wanting to believe anything in particular. he seemed very open minded which is refreshing!

if anyone has 4OD it was available to watch on that and i highly recommend it.
 
Hi there birdy, I saw that programme, it was interesting but it was heavily pushing the "UFO phenomenon mostly due to secret military stuff" argument. Of course many UFOs are military toys but it only explains a certain proportion of sightings/experiences.

He did have a very interesting photo of a contrail from space that could have come from the aurora tho. I think I may have seen the Aurora myself during the period after 9/11 when all planes were meant to be grounded. This thing couldnt be seen at all at first only heard passing over, it had no lights that could be seen at first. Then the moonlight caught its contrail, although it wasnt donuts on a ring, you could see the contrail forming, but no plane was visible or afterburners or anything. The sound was like nothing I have ever heard before, it sounded similar to a jet, but much much deeper and louder, you could tell whatever was making the sound was massive. As I tried to follow this invisible jet as it passed over, I started to see some lights on it, there were two small steady white lights, that I assume were underneath it, as I could only see them once it had moved past the zenith. The thing about these two lights was that they revealed (part of?) the length of the object, it appeared to be very very long. If I had to guess I would estimate its length to be the apparent width of a 2p held at arms length. If you consider that a normal plane at cruising altitude will appear to be like the size of lentil, whatever the plane was, it was huge and powerful. I also got the impression it was very high, like almost low satellite orbit.
 
My father, who was a teenager during WWII tells me they sometimes saw strange lights in the sky that they knew couldn't be ordinary planes during the war. They flew erratically and made abrupt 'impossible' turns, and just the fact that they emitted a bright light ruled them out as conventional aircraft in wartime.
This was in Stavanger, Norway, during the german occupation. The germans stationed here must have seen them also.
There were no V-2 weapons anywhere near Stavanger but there were some german jets stationed on the local airbases in the final months of the war (probably hidden away from allied bombing raids against continental airbases).
 
azuredoor said:
Hi there birdy, I saw that programme, it was interesting but it was heavily pushing the "UFO phenomenon mostly due to secret military stuff" argument. Of course many UFOs are military toys but it only explains a certain proportion of sightings/experiences.

hopefully i've quoted correctly (!)
Um yeah i guess as a military-minded kinda guy that was the natural route for him to take, but he seemed to come to those conclusions after speaking to folk with sighting experience beyond their own military knowledge and didn't necessarily conclude that the military were solely responsible for those events. more perhaps that military experiments at the time were conducted with some kind of new knowledge, and hinted at (particularly regarding roswell) this being gained through contact with new (alien?) technology.
if i recall correctly he ended up questioning his own beliefs come the end.
(natch!)

regarding the aurora segment at the show's close, i had to have a cheeky google on the topic being completely ignorant of it beforehand and i thought it was strange although not off-topic to just whack that in there at the end without mentioning it elsewhere in the programme - not that i remember anyway! interesting stuff though.
 
Hi birdy, Yea he did leave it open ended which was good. I wonder how much Nick Pope has told him about the secret military projects and UFO sightings? I'm sure he must have asked him about such things. Nick Pope would have known about the secret air force programs from his time at the MOD, but he doesn't get too excited about secret military projects being a major source of UFOs Or maybe he is just a plant to divert attention away from the military aspect!? :-D
 
I've only ever seen the pics of foo fighters alongside propeller driven WW2 fighters. Knowing bugger all about the subject did these fooii (made up plural ;) ) continue in the age of jets?

The reason for the question is an idea that crossed my mind seeing the effects of large propellers and powerful engines. I've seen footage of a corsair slowly taxiing and leaving a beautiful spiral vortex from the tips of the prop where the tip speed was rending the air.

Could it be some strange effect where the prop/air interaction creates charged particles that get trapped in a vortex in the wing roots / tip or somesuch?

Why don't prop planes generate it any more? civilian planes are low powered and commercial / military are turbines with props (turboprop) which are somewhat different.

Any mileage in it?
 
Any mileage in it?

I often wondered about that too. The Russians still use propeller driven military planes, so maybe they still see them.

Thing is what's the evidence for it being a real phenomena rather than an Angel of Mons type thing. My father was aircrew in WWII, though in the Far East rather than Europe, but he stayed in the RAF for years after the war and met god knows how many Allied and Axis airmen, but the first time he ever heard about them was when I asked him.

There's mention here from someone about talk of 'ghosts and omens' from a German bomber crew member, personally I think this is likely to closer to the mark. On both sides you had kids in planes facing and meeting out death day after day, if there is anything to this story I'd go for a psychological origin.
 
Are y'all reading the articles, listening to the pilots who encounter them?? And you think these are lanterns? Swamp gas? :D

"Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was less laudatory.
“I don’t believe in safety through ignorance,” he said, scolding the intelligence community for a lack of “curiosity and courage” and a “failure to react” to a strong pattern of sightings.
In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

“It’s very mysterious, and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed,” he said, calling it a “truly radical technology.”
According to Mellon, awestruck and baffled pilots, concerned that reporting unidentified flying aircraft would adversely affect their careers, tended not to speak up. And when they did, he said, there was little interest in investigating their claims.
“Imagine you see highly advanced vehicles, they appear on radar systems, they look bizarre, no one knows where they’re from. This happens on a recurring basis, and no one does anything,” said Mellon, who now works for To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. Because agencies do not share this type of information, it is difficult to know the full extent of activity. Still, he estimated that dozens of incidents were witnessed by naval officers in a single year, enough to force the service to address the issue."

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fravor+interview

In World War 2 allied pilots, operating from the UK, called these "foo fighters"
 
In World War 2 allied pilots, operating from the UK, called these "foo fighters"
There are different kinds.
SmallDisc.jpg

WhiteSandsMcLaughlin.jpg

WhiteSands2.jpg


This one is recharfing on a cloud top after leaving tracks of ionized air, 1902:

Capture.PNG


The smaller objects in the Farmington pic:
Farmington-New-Mexico-1950-ftr.jpg

And the smaller objects mentioned in this excellent article by Zigel:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?...RFNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=IkgDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7098,4541412
Notice the "stars" just like the 1902 crown.
 
In World War 2 allied pilots, operating from the UK, called these "foo fighters"
There are different kinds.
View attachment 16725
View attachment 16726
View attachment 16727

This one is recharfing on a cloud top after leaving tracks of ionized air, 1902:

View attachment 16729

The smaller objects in the Farmington pic:
View attachment 16730
And the smaller objects mentioned in this excellent article by Zigel:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?...RFNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=IkgDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7098,4541412
Notice the "stars" just like the 1902 crown.
 

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There are different kinds. ...

Yes, there's a lot of variety in observed UFO's generally.

No, this variety isn't evident in the WW2-era foo fighters reports (of which none of these cited incidents is an example).
 
Yes, there's a lot of variety in observed UFO's generally.

No, this variety isn't evident in the WW2-era foo fighters reports (of which none of these cited incidents is an example).
Right, they were described as silvery balls hanging in the air, alone or in clusters, some were luminous. They were compared to Christmas ornaments and were thought to be a strange Nazi weapon. The smaller objects in the Zigel account, the smaller objects on the Farmington photo, and even some of the very small discs seen traveling up the sides of missiles and approaching jets, I would classify as Foo Fighters.
 
Relating to the Yugoslav dimension, there was a secret base which became the home for rocketry under Tito, after the war. Support was given to NASA, when the NASA programme faltered. Yugoslav scientists were famed for their engineering capabilities.

False plans were given to America (at first) because Tito did not trust them to honour payments.

 
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Foo fighters have always interested me. Not that I have anything to add. The fact that the observations fall in to three distinct types and are really unlike most later reports is an indication to me that people actually saw something. But I am not thinking extra terrestrial. It might even be a purely mental phenomenon given the stress people must have been under.
 
I always thought Foo Fighters were described as balls of light....., anyway one of my best friends and two others saw several large orange/ white balls of light near Martinsville, Indiana around 1973?. They even chased one that landed in a farm field and as they approached it on foot it took off. He said their flight didn't seem random to him (as if they were ball lightning) but he could not see any actual structure to them...just large opaque balls of light.
 
So, Foo Fighters have this vague, and thus useless, definition? I always thought their unique characteristic was that they appeared to be interested in aircraft. If they are just synonymous with UFOs, that's a shame.

We've had this discussion about earth lights, will o'the wisp, ball lightning, etc. on another thread. Defining them as unique things would be useful but well nigh impossible because they are outside the realm of academic publishing where definitions are important and respected.
 
Smaller objects released from UFOs. We need to be thinking about devices and technologies, not one kind of "craft".
 
The Foo Fighter phenomenon is just about the only type of sighting where the 'ball lightning/plasma sphere' explanation seems to be the best one. The planes of World War II and just after were large objects that flew at unusual heights and speeds; this might have caused electrostatic phenomena which rarely occur in modern flight, so isn't seen very often in the present day.
 
The Foo Fighter phenomenon is just about the only type of sighting where the 'ball lightning/plasma sphere' explanation seems to be the best one. The planes of World War II and just after were large objects that flew at unusual heights and speeds; this might have caused electrostatic phenomena which rarely occur in modern flight, so isn't seen very often in the present day.
Wind tunnels and scale models could feasibly test for those effects.
 
Maybe, maybe not. The foo-fighter phenomenon seems to manifest itself some distance from the 'plane; maybe in a standing wave caused by the slipstream. This would be outside the capacity of most wind tunnels to simulate.
 
Maybe, maybe not. The foo-fighter phenomenon seems to manifest itself some distance from the 'plane; maybe in a standing wave caused by the slipstream. This would be outside the capacity of most wind tunnels to simulate.

Another possible factor no wind tunnel could simulate would be meteorological ionization / plasma / optical effects.
 
The Foo Fighter phenomenon is just about the only type of sighting where the 'ball lightning/plasma sphere' explanation seems to be the best one. The planes of World War II and just after were large objects that flew at unusual heights and speeds; this might have caused electrostatic phenomena which rarely occur in modern flight, so isn't seen very often in the present day.
Have there been any reports from pilots flying WW2-era aircraft at airshows and the like?
 
I seem to remember several foo-fighter type reports from the Fifties, when they were still flying WWII planes at operational heights; but nowadays vintage planes tend to fly low, in easy viewing distance of the ground.
 
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