Foo Fighters and Other Thoughts

Unidentified flying objects were in fact nothing new when they first came upon the public consciousness after 1947. Pilots in all theaters of World War II had been seeing them following and keeping pace with their aircraft for some time. Without guidance from their commanders , Allied airmen chose their own name to refer to these objects. They called them foo fighters. They borrowed this name from a popular comic strip of the day called Smokey Stover. http://www.smokey-stover.com/ Smokey was a fireman who drove an impossible vehicle to fight fires called The Foomobile. This vehicle was a small two-man fire engine that had only two wheels on a single axle. In the comic strip of course this worked just fine, while if such a vehicle had been created it would've simply fallen over with the technology of the 1940s. It simply could not work. Since the foo fighters appeared to operate in a manner inexplicable in the 1940s the Allied airmen decided to name them after Smokey Stover's impossible Foomobile.

This wasn't the only time that a comic strip was used to suggest a name for an object used by the military and World War II. The awkwardly named general purpose vehicle became a much loved and ubiquitous tool used by all services. It was initially commonly referred to by its initials GP. This four-wheel-drive vehicle could go anywhere. Shortly before its introduction the popular comic and cartoon character Popeye introduce another comic character called the Jeep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYK66ysrhiY This strange creature resembled a small dog walked upright on two legs and went anywhere. It would walk up walls walk across ceilings with a complete disregard for gravity, and walk over buildings. No obstacle slowed it down. Therefore it comes to no surprise that almost every G.I. in every theater simultaneously came to the conclusion that the general purpose vehicle had to be called the Jeep.

Interestingly with present-day technology the Foomobile is actually quite possible. Its basic design in the comic strip is quite similar to that of the present day Segway. A Foomobile could be constructed today using the computer controlled gyroscopic system of a Segway. This of course could not even be imagined during World War II.

Similarly the flight characteristics and physical behavior of unidentified flying objects have been impossible to understand and completely impossible to explain since their first appearance in antiquity. The fact that the mechanism of their flight behavior cannot be explained in any way by commonly accepted science has been a major argument for skeptics and debunkers. If the flight characteristics of UFOs appear to be impossible then the objects themselves are equally impossible. This however may change dramatically quite soon. Scientists are making new breakthroughs that might explain them. Boaz Almog is a physicist in Israel. He has made a fascinating presentation for the TED talk series. This presentation can be watched in its entirety at the TED website. http://www.ted.com/speakers/boaz_almog In this he describes his research into superconductors and

magnetic fields and an amazing principle that he refers to as quantum locking. In the demonstration viewable on the Ted website he takes extremely thin sapphire discs and super cools them to near absolute zero using liquid nitrogen tuning them into superconductors. He then places the disc over a magnet where it becomes locked within the magnetic field and maintains its position completely defying gravity in relation to the magnet. This is accomplished by quantum locking, a principal described by Almog in detail in the video. The behavior of the super cooled superconducting discs in this video is strikingly similar to the behavior commonly attributed to unidentified flying objects. Boaz Almog may not believe in unidentified flying objects himself, he certainly doesn’t comment on them in the video, but is very possible that he may have explained how they might possibly work within the science that is known today.

Like Smokey Stover's impossible Foomobile modern theoretical science might now have explained how unidentified flying objects just might possibly work and how we might someday be able to build them. No matter how impossible, if it can be imagined today it can be done tomorrow.