How about something entirely different and a challenge to your conventional cryptozoological thinking?

Maybe people have been going about investigating the historical accounts noted here in all the wrong ways?

Could “foo fighters” be unknown animals of the atmosphere, actually cryptids, instead of “flying saucers”?

Time Magazine wrote about them in 1945.

Though “foo fighter” initially described a type of UFO reported and named by the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron, the term became commonly used to mean any UFO sighting from that period.

The term “foo fighter” was used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe various UFOs or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific Theater of Operations.

Formally reported from November 1944 onwards, witnesses often assumed that the foo fighters were secret weapons employed by the enemy, but they remained unidentified post-war and were reported by both Allied and Axis forces.

Of course, today, most people associate the word with music, not phenomena. In 1995, when singer Dave Grohl’s previous band Nirvana disbanded, he named his next group Foo Fighters.

Sure, those before us have mentioned UFOs, optical illusions, balls of plasma, ball lightning, and electrical discharges.

But what if we think aerial zoology or astrobiology for a moment, a la’ Ivan Sanderson?

What if foo fighters are unknown animals that should be studied by cryptozoologists, not ufologists?

And, no, this is not an opening to talk about “rods” that seem clearly to be tiny light flares, lens artifacts, and insects that have been made into “monsters.”

If you are intrigued by this topic, there’s one book you will want to read on the subject of foo fighters – Strange Company: Military Encounters with UFOs in World War II by Keith Chester, with an introduction by Jerome Clark (NY: Anomalist Books, 2007).

Take the book, read the accounts with a fresh point of view, and don’t get bogged down in the extraterrestrial and flying saucer hypotheses. Perhaps looking at the raw data, from a new angle, might be quite interesting and revealing.

Just a Monday morning thought.