Foo Fighter - Etymology

Etymology

The nonsense word "foo" emerged in popular culture during the early 1930s, first being used by cartoonist Bill Holman who peppered his Smokey Stover fireman cartoon strips with "foo" signs and puns. Holman claimed to have found the word on the bottom of a Chinese figurine. It was part of service culture by World War II and is thought to have led to the backronym FUBAR. By 1944, the term "foo fighter" was used by radar operators to describe a spurious or dubious trace.

The term foo was borrowed from Bill Holman's Smokey Stover by a radar operator in the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Donald J. Meiers, who it is agreed by most 415th members gave the foo fighters their name. Don was from Chicago and was an avid reader of Bill Holman's strip which was run daily in the Chicago Tribune. Smokey Stover's catch phrase was "where there's foo, there's fire" and this was possibly derived from the French word for fire, "le feu". In a mission debriefing on the evening November 27, 1944, Fritz Ringwald, the unit's S-2 Intelligence Officer, stated that Don Meiers and Ed Schleuter had sighted a red ball of fire that appeared to chase them through a variety of high-speed maneuvers. Fritz said that Don was extremely agitated and had a copy of the comic strip tucked in his back pocket. He pulled it out and slammed it down on Fritz's desk and said, "... it was another one of those fuckin' foo fighters!" and stormed out of the debriefing room. However, in a Channel 4 documentary aired 3 June 2011, reporter Nick Cook showed an RAF pilot's report, obtained from RAF archives, reporting a UFO incident with a similar red ball of fire on a bombing mission over Germany, but dated 1942 and taken with fact that the term was already in use by radar operators in 1944, must raise some doubt as to the origin of the term

According to Fritz Ringwald, because of the lack of a better name, it stuck. And this was originally what the men of the 415th started calling these incidents: "Fuckin' Foo Fighters." In December 1944, a press correspondent from the Associated Press in Paris, Bob Wilson, was sent to the 415th at their base outside of Dijon, France to investigate this story. It was at this time that the term was cleaned up to just "foo fighters". The unit commander, Capt. Harold Augsperger, also decided to shorten the term to foo fighters in the unit's historical data.