UFOs and World War II: Gremlins, Balloon Bombs, and the World in the Balance
The story of flight during the Second World War (1939–45) is, of course, a mammoth one. Accounting for all belligerents, the United States included, air forces fielded 640 discrete models of fighters (with numerous subcategories related to wings, engines, weight, and roles), bombers (with numerous subcategories), flying boats and float planes, observation and recon, photo recon, communications, light transport, cargo, passenger planes, and gliders.
In addition, air forces of the world ran 144 trainer models (with subcategories); about ten rotorcraft; four lighter-than-air craft; and eight missiles, rockets, and drones. Prototype aircraft that did not see combat nevertheless flew, and accounted for fifty-seven winged models; twenty-one glider models; nine rotor prototype models; nine missile prototypes; and thirty models of miscellaneous prototypes.
Additionally, twenty-three models of purely experimental prototypes saw development and, in some cases, limited flight.
The most-produced combat plane of World War II, the Soviet Ilyushin IL-2 Sturmovik ground-attack plane, saw more than 36,000 units. The second-and third-most-prolific, the Soviet Yakolev Yak-1, -3, and -7 fighter; and Germany’s Messerschmitt Bf-109 fighter, saw 31,000 and 30,500 examples, respectively.
The United States alone manufactured more than 275,000 aircraft of all types. During 1939–1945, then, skies around the world bristled with aircraft. Any attempt to detail them all is beyond the intention and scope of this book.
However, salient points that relate to the later UFO phenomenon should be noted.
- Effective airpower enjoys support not just from the military but also government, scientists, engineers, logistics experts, manufacturers, workers, and civilians.
- Ample supplies of state-of-the-art aircraft, fuel, ordnance, and trained, motivated fliers can create a virtually unbeatable flying force.
- Significant losses in one or more of the areas mentioned above quickly degrade an air force’s ability to survive and win.
- Lack of aerial preparedness (as with the Americans at Pearl Harbor) can be damaging or fatal.
- When evenly matched air forces face off, a spirited defense (as during the Battle of Britain) can turn back a determined attacker.
- Technological advances (such as drop tanks, incendiary bombs, aircraft carriers, radar, jet engines, rockets, and the atomic bomb) must be dramatic and continual.
- Tactical innovation (such as great naval battles conducted mainly by aircraft, and fighter support of bombers) is vital.
- Ceaseless, round-the-clock aerial attacks will wear down the enemy.
- Civilian areas should be freely bombed.
Allied adherence to the two final directives weakened Germany so that it could not resist Allied ground troops, and staggered Japan and set it up for the A- bomb. The directives also loom large in the minds of UFOlogists who wonder if our “first contact” will be with extraterrestrials that exhibit a “total war” mindset. This is a well-worn trope of science fiction. Still, we must prepare to accept that extraterrestrial visitors are or may become hostile.
Fairies, Gremlins, and Foo Fighters
As the world’s air forces tangled during World War II, trained, alert pilots and air crews, functioning with a little luck, could complete their missions and survive to fight another day. But one in-flight obstacle encountered by fliers from many nations had a creepily perplexing aspect: the bothersome airborne objects called foo fighters.
The foo fighter notion is rooted in Pict lore dating from about 250 AD to 950 AD, specifically, magical creatures called fairies (sometimes spelled “faeries”). Some are handsome creatures resembling men and women; others are troll-like.
Some are angelic while others look like demons. The fairies’ otherworldy aspect encourages presumed links to gremlins, mischievous imps that figure prominently in Scottish and larger UK folklore. They came to the fore in UK popular culture during the world wars, when they displayed a keen—and often destructive—interest in aircraft. Biplanes’ control wires were supposedly snipped by gremlins during 1914–18, and the creatures shouldered the blame for aviation mishaps during the Battle of Britain (1940) and other British air campaigns of World War II.
By mid-war, the gremlin figure had established itself in the United States, and American aircrews complained of the creatures’ destructive mischief. Bugs Bunny met a clutch of mischievous gremlins in a memorable 1943 Warner Bros. animated cartoon, Falling Hare, and the Disney studio worked to develop British writer Roald Dahl’s 1942 book The Gremlins as an animated feature or, alternatively, a short, during 1942–43. The studio abandoned the project, but a revised edition of Dahl’s book became an international success when reissued, with Disney-studio illustrations, in 1943. (A replica reissue of the 1943 edition appeared in 2006.) Foo fighters were even more mysterious than gremlins, and more closely related to the physical world. Initially unnamed, these illuminated aerial intruders bothered bomber and fighter pilots in all theaters of World War II.
Many were spherical; others were disc-shaped, or configured like wedges. They usually moved parallel with combat planes, hanging behind in some instances, but sometimes keeping pace or zooming ahead. They were not aggressive, but they distracted and annoyed pilots, who were busy avoiding ground fire and scanning the skies for enemy aircraft.
Foo fighters appeared first to British aviators, in the late summer of 1941. In time, German and Japanese flyers encountered them, too. American flyers began to complain of the peculiar lights late in 1944, and coined the “foo fighter” name to suggest the things’ inexplicable nature. (The word “foo” came from Bill Holman’s Smokey Stover comic strip, in which slapstick firefighter Smokey frequently proclaimed, “Where there’s foo, there’s fire!”) Although most wartime pilots accepted that the foos were not aggressive, some nevertheless fired bursts at them, mainly out of curiosity. On March 25, 1942, an RAF tail gunner over Holland spotted an illuminated flying object. The gunner fired from 150 yards, to no effect. That outcome may have been a common one, as there are no records of foo fighters displaying hits, damage, or destruction by gunfire.
Pilots snapped numerous photographs of foo fighters, but image quality is almost invariably poor. Skeptics explain foo fighters as many things, such as reflected light on canopies, visible “bounce” from the Moon or bodies of water, cloud formations, and defective or dirty cameras. Alternatively, pilots captured foo fighters in photographs snapped in clear airspace around the globe. Further, discrete pilot reports bear striking similarities.
A particularly aggressive foo revealed itself in December 1944, chasing an American fighter twenty miles down the Rhine River. By this time, the phenomenon was prominent on the metaphoric radar of U.S. military intelligence, where a consensus developed: the “phoo bombs” (as internal intelligence documents called them) had been developed by Germany; some in Allied intelligence suspected that Germany manufactured the foos in Austria.
That conclusion isn’t entirely unreasonable except that foo fighters continued to bedevil military and civilian aircraft after war’s end in 1945. Although no convincing postwar document mentioning “phoo bombs” has yet surfaced, the things continued to preoccupy a segment of the U.S. military post-1945.
Military historians and UFOlogists with military orientations insist that the foo fighters originated in Germany. Some other UFOlogists opt for an extraterrestrial explanation. Whatever the truth, the fact is that secret investigation of unidentified flying objects took on robust life during World War II, and continued afterward—coinciding neatly with the epic UFO events of 1947: the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico. In other words, the military and military intelligence had UFO investigative apparatus in place long before 1947.
