Excerpted from Intercept—But Don’t Shoot by Renato Vesco.

Sub­se­quently other fly­ers encoun­tered the mys­te­ri­ous Foo Fight­ers, but hav­ing learned their les­son from the fate of their col­leagues, they never men­tioned them in their flight reports.

Pilots McFalls and Baker were the ones who broke this imposed silence. They too were from the 4i5th Squadron, and their very short but detailed report forced Air Force intelli-gence to con­sider the mat­ter seriously:

“At 0600 [on Decem­ber 22], near Hage­nau, at 10,000 feet alti­tude, two very bright lights climbed toward us from the ground. 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 [by oper­a­tors on the ground]. Then they turned away from us, and the fire seemed to go out.” The rest of the report was cen­sored. Appar­ently it went on to men­tion the plane’s radar and its sud­den malfunctioning.

Two nights later the same pilots were fly­ing over the Rhine when they were “attacked” by a glow­ing red ball that sud­denly “changed into an air­plane which did a wing over! Then it dived and dis­ap­peared.” Addi­tional cen­sored lines.

Knowl­edge of these facts, which were being increas­ingly repeated, finally caught the atten­tion of mil­i­tary pub­li­ca­tions. Dur­ing the last days of Decem­ber 1944, sto­ries were leaked to the Amer­i­can Legion Mag­a­zine, which pub­lished the per­sonal opin­ions of sev­eral U.S. Intel­li­gence offi­cers and sug­gested that the Foo Fight­ers were radio-controlled devices that the Ger­mans sent up to baf­fle the radar of the night raiders. Pick­ing up the story, the news­pa­pers dug up Hitler’s threat­en­ing speeches boast­ing of the immi­nent use of cer­tain secret weapons capa­ble of com­pro­mis­ing or at least delay­ing the Allied victory.

In an effort to dis­si­pate appre­hen­sion, on Jan­u­ary 1, 1945, the sci­ence edi­tor of the Asso­ci­ated Press, Howard W. Blakeslee, gave a radio talk in which he accepted the offi­cial view of Intel­li­gence and assured his vast audi­ence that the balls of light reported by fly­ers over France were sim­ply St. Elmo’s fire—natural and spon­ta­neous lights pro­duced by mutual elec­tro­sta­tic induc­tion by the very craft fly­ing the mis­sions. And since the lights were imma­te­r­ial, radar could not pick them up.