Foo fighter
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- This article is about the aerial phenomenon. For the rock band, see Foo Fighters.
The name foo fighter was coined by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II for mysterious aerial phenomena, such as glowing ball lightning seen in the skies over Germany. The phenomenon could very likely be based on the misinterpretation of the Luftwaffe's standard operating procedure of having selected anti-aircraft batteries near German airfields fire coloured flare patterns in regular intervals to aid Luftwaffe night fighters with visual navigation.
Supposedly used as a semi-derogatory reference to Japanese fighter pilots (known for erratic flying and extreme maneuvering), it became a catch phrase for fast moving, erratically flying objects (such as UFOs). It was thought at the time that they might be some Nazi secret weapon.
It has also been suggested that the "foo fighter" was a secret disk-shaped Luftwaffe aircraft nicknamed the "feuerfighter" by the Germans, but as this hypothetical appellation is a nonsensical mix of German and English, this has to be considered an urban legend.
Likewise, the suggestion that some sightings of foo-fighters may have been night-sightings of the German Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet rocket-plane makes no sense as the Me 163 was completely unsuitable for nocturnal operations as it had only a few minutes of fuel, totally insufficient to make contact with an enemy at night, carried no airbourne interception radar, and lacked all night-flying equipment which would have been vital to make its characteristical engine-out glider-style deadstick landing at night.
The term probably originated in the surrealistic comic strip Smokey Stover. Smokey, a firefighter, was fond of saying "Where there's foo there's fire." A Little Big Book titled Smokey Stover the Foo Fighter was published in 1938.
Some have thought that the term refers to Kung fu ("kong foo") fighting, because of its wild, erratic movements of these objects. The term Kung fu was however little known in the English language until the late 1960s when it became popular because of the Hong Kong films and later also the television series: before that it was referred to primarily as "Chinese Boxing".
See also Foo bar.da:Foo fighter (begreb eller ufo) de:Foo-Fighter es:Foo fighter pl:Foo fighter