Foo Fighters

Glowing orbs pacing Allied bombers. Both sides assumed they were the other's.

Allied bomber crews over Europe and the Pacific, 1944-45, logged glowing orbs that paced aircraft through evasive maneuvers — named from a comic strip and reported up the chain, where each side assumed secret enemy technology. Postwar interrogations found German pilots had been seeing them too. The Robertson Panel and later historians filed them under electrical phenomena and combat stress; the reports themselves, written by veteran aircrew, read otherwise. They open the modern era: the phenomenon arrived with mass aviation, or was finally being seen by trained observers with radios.