For decades, the official record of what pilots saw in the night skies over Germany during the final year of World War II has sat inside a Department of War file. Now, that file is public.
Released on May 8, 2026, under the PURSUE program, the document carries a dry, bureaucratic title: “331_120752_Numeric_Files_1944–1945_37153_German_Armament_Equipment_Documents.” Inside are SHAEF messages and memorandums. They do not discuss bombs or troop movements. They discuss “night phenomena (foofighters),” flak rockets, unidentified cylindrical objects, and blinking lights.
One date stands out. March 18, 1945. Germany. That is the specific incident date listed.
The unit at the center of the observations is the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. Multiple references to this squadron appear in the record. These were men trained to operate in darkness, to find enemy aircraft by radar and instinct. What they saw, they reported. And those reports went up the chain of command, into SHAEF, and eventually into a file that would be locked away for more than eighty years.
What the document does not contain is an analysis. No conclusions. No explanation. The official summary provides limited detail beyond the types of phenomena and the squadron involved. The government recorded the observations. It did not explain them.
The timing matters. This was not a single sighting by a lone pilot. The document suggests the observations were multiple. The phenomena were not limited to one location. The file contains references to “flak rockets” and “unidentified cylindrical objects” alongside the more famous “foo fighters” — the glowing orbs that chased Allied aircraft across Europe.
Pilots of the 415th were not the only ones seeing things. The document’s very existence confirms that military intelligence at SHAEF considered these reports significant enough to collect, to file, to keep. They did not dismiss them. They did not classify them as weather balloons or misidentified aircraft. They put them in a file and they held onto it.
The context of the release is worth noting. These records come out under PURSUE, a program that systematically declassifies historical documents. The date of release — May 8, 2026 — falls on the 81st anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. That is not a coincidence.
For those who track these things, the document adds weight to a pattern. According to a Wikipedia summary of UFO sightings in the United Kingdom, many alleged sightings have been reported there, with London holding the highest count. But the war records shift the geography east. These sightings happened over Germany, at night, in the last months of the conflict. The pilots were American. The targets were unknown.
The file is 15.2 megabytes. It is a PDF. The viewer does not work in a browser. You have to download it to read it. That is a small technical barrier, but it is a barrier nonetheless. The information is there. You just have to go get it.
What remains unknown is what else sits in similar files. The Department of War document released under PURSUE is one record. It references the 415th Night Fighter Squadron. It references March 18, 1945. It references foofighters and cylindrical objects and blinking lights. But it does not say what they were. It does not say what happened next.
The record is a snapshot. A moment frozen in paper. What it captures is that men in the sky over a burning continent saw things they could not explain, and their superiors thought it worth writing down. That is the story. No analysis. No conclusion. Just the fact of the observation, preserved, then released, then read again by a world that still does not have an answer.
