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.