The 1945 Seattle Foo Fighter Reports

Record summary

The term “foo fighter” was used during World War II for unexplained luminous phenomena reported by military aircrews, especially in Europe and the Pacific. Seattle and the Pacific Northwest provide a possible North American civilian-reception context through newspapers and returning-aircrew accounts, but individual civilian cases before 1946 must be verified carefully. The lead matters for tracing how a military wartime label entered postwar UFO vocabulary. Conventional possibilities included aircraft, flares, reflections, and atmospheric effects; the category itself did not identify a novel craft.