Being around retired Air Force Pilots and Officers and hearing their stories was an amazing experience. Because I was born in the late 1950s and grew up in the 1960s, the topic seemed to come up all the time as a result of massive press coverage in those days. When it did, some of my father's friends and former Air Force associates would discuss their own experiences with Flying Saucers.

It was one thing to hear an untrained observer describe a UFO sighting, but it was another to hear military pilots that had flown the most advanced jets of their day talk about encountering these unknown objects in the sky. I can honestly say that I am certain not one of their stories was fabricated or embellished. If anything, they were probably understated.

Before he switched to the Air Force in 1947, my father was an Army Officer. As a result of having successfully organized a slipshod system of handling and disbursing supplies in various parts of the Pacific, he was asked to join General Douglas MacArthur's Staff in 1943. Years later, my father talked about those days with his friends from that time whenever they stopped by to see him.

Most of their conversations were above my head, but by the time I was nine years old I began to understand some of the things they were talking about. Apart from stories told about UFOs and other things by his pilot friends, many of his World War II buddies talked with him about the time they spent serving in the Pacific and some of those stories fascinated me.

My parents didn't use profanity in our home, but when my father and his friends got together and wanted to swap war stories, the language got a bit rough so they would go out in our backyard and talk around the barbeque which was out of the neighbor's earshot away from the house. Although I wasn't welcome to sit in on those sessions, I sat quietly in our kitchen with the window open and still managed to hear most every word thanks to our backyard acoustics.

Although my father's friends had differing opinions about the Supreme Allied Commander in the South Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur was a name well-respected in our home. As far as his personal experiences go, my father didn't like talking about his wartime exploits with me. It had been painful for him and I knew that he saw a lot of death. However, he was certain that given the limited choices, resources and supplies that the Allied Forces had available to defeat the Imperial Japanese Military, MacArthur had made the right decisions.

When the subject of Foo Fighters came up, I didn't know what they were and it didn't help that my father and his friends often used other terms to describe them. It was only after listening to Long John Nebel and Frank Edwards radio broadcasts and recordings that I understood them to be some sort of UFOs seen by military pilots on both sides during World War II.

During most discussions about the Foo Fighters or related phenomenon, my father would mention something about MacArthur's Report to his buddies. I had no idea what he was talking about and finally decided to speak with him about it. I think I was close to twelve years old at the time and he wasn't thrilled to find out about my eavesdropping.

Although I knew that my father's head was still filled with lots of secrets and things he wouldn't talk about concerning his military service, he did give me a thumbnail sketch about the Foo Fighters and subsequent investigations. He said that by the time he joined MacArthur's Staff in 1943, the General was seriously concerned about reports of strange lights and metallic-looking objects that shadowed or even chased Allied Aircraft.

MacArthur felt these were not Japanese or German Aircraft, reconnaissance devices or secret weapons. He based that opinion on the fact that intelligence reports indicated that Japan Pilots were experiencing the same phenomenon and had no idea what they were. As a result of that information, MacArthur ordered an investigation into the Foo Fighter encounters in the Pacific.

Since Allied Pilots were already routinely debriefed after their missions, it didn't take a great deal of time or effort to ask those that spotted Foo Fighters a few extra questions or have them make drawings of what they saw. That information became the foundation for MacArthur's Report.

After the war ended, captured Japanese war records confirmed that the Foo Fighters had also been seen by Japanese and German Pilots wherever they flew. It certainly wasn't a phenomenon limited to the South Pacific. The Germans even told the Japanese that they could not be American aircraft or observation devices because they had managed to down or capture some.

The Germans believed the technology they found inside these unknown objects was way beyond anything humanly possible at that time. While this might have been more bragging then fact, it does coincide with documents later found in Axis war files by the CIA that indicated the Germans had captured UFOs during the war and were trying to reverse engineer them.

By the time it was finished in the late 1940s, McArthur's Report on the Foo Fighters was over 10,000 pages long. That may not sound like much in terms of government paperwork, but that was merely the information collected. Descriptions and drawings were included without any additional comments. The sightings and encounters hadn't ended, but there was simply no more time or funds for further investigations as far as that particular report was concerned.

My father said that MacArthur was convinced the devices described in the report were of unknown and possibly extraterrestrial origin. Before it was even completed, the report was classified to prevent it from falling into the hands of our allies or enemies. The Joint Chiefs were provided with copies of the report while it was still a work in progress and were said to be greatly concerned about the content. I seriously doubt that it was shared with the CIA or any other intelligence gathering services inside or outside of the U.S. Government.

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