Smokey Stover who it is agreed by most 415th members gave the "foo fighters" their name. The phrase foo fighter, also taken from Holman's strip, was used by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II to describe various unidentified flying objects or mysterious aerial phenomena seen in the skies over both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operations. Though foo fighter initially described a type of UFO reported and named by the 415th Squadron, the term was also commonly used to mean any UFO sighting from that period. Foo Fighters is also the name of a rock band, first heard in 1995.
Unidentified flying object probably had an extraterrestrial explanation. A top secret Swedish military opinion given to the USAF in 1948 stated that some of their analysts believed that the 1946 ghost rockets and later flying saucers had extraterrestrial origins. (For document, see Ghost rockets.) In 1954 German rocket scientist Hermann Oberth revealed that an internal West German government investigation, which he headed, had arrived at an extraterrestrial conclusion, but this study was never made public. Project Sign was dismantled and became Project Grudge at the end of 1948. Angered by the low quality of investigations by Grudge, the Air Force Director of Intelligence