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Situation Red, The UFO Siege!

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"Situation Red" was the late Leonard Stringfield's (he died in 1994) definitive literary work, and the one book which anyone even slightly acquainted with his productive and interesting life knows about.

Stringfield's interest in the UFO/ET phenomenon was triggered by a daylight sighting in August 1945 when he was an Army Air Force Intelligence Officer. With 12 other USAAF personnel on board a C-46 aircraft on the way to Tokyo, he sighted three large glowing balls of light pacing their aircraft on the starboard side. The electronics on the plane were affected, one of the two engines stopped working and the pilot prepared to ditch in the Pacific. When the three balls of light departed in formation, everything returned to normal and the aircraft was able to successfully land at Iwo Jima. This encounter made a big impression on Stringfield, as well it might. When thousands of sightings of "flying saucers" and balls of light under obvious intelligent control and exhibiting "impossible" flight characteristics started to be reported all over the world in 1946-47, Stringfield immediately saw that these were almost certainly related to the phenomenon he and other allied servicemen had witnessed during WW2, often referred to in the European theatre as "Kraut Fireballs" and in the Pacific as "Foo Fighters".

This book, published in 1977, chronicles Stringfield's work with his organization Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO) from the 1950s through 1977 with a major focus on the years 1973-77. CRIFO became for a time the largest US-based civilian UFO-interest organization with more than 2,500 active members. He was always close to many senior USAF personnel and even asked to pass on details of encounters from any phone, anywhere, at the expense of the USAF.

The book chronicles a large number of encounters - some in great detail - which may be new to even serious students of this phenomenon. Encounters causing physical harm to witnesses (burns, blindness etc.), leaving physical traces and those with significant missing time elements feature prominently. Stringfield, like Jacques Vallee and other researchers from the period, became convinced that humans were sometimes abducted by the entities behind this phenomenon and that these were probably more common than reported. He was particularly interested in reported humanoid/occupant encounters.

From his contacts in the USAF and from other evidence, Stringfield became convinced at an early stage that ET technology had occasionally crashed and been recovered, and that this was the greatest government/military secret. Ten years prior to the publication of Timothy Good's seminal book of the same title, chapter nine of "Situation Red" is titled "Above Top Secret" and explores the evidence for crash/recoveries. He was certainly the first researcher to get his teeth into this issue, again several years prior to the 1947 Roswell crash being investigated by Stan Friedman and others.

At just over 200 pages, "Situation Red" is a classic of this genre and does contain a lot of interesting and original material. Though his style is not as easy-read and racy as that of Donald Keyhoe, and lacks the intelligent, engaging humor of a writer like Budd Hopkins, Stringfield was a good literate writer and a true original. In his later, bearded years, he was sometimes confused in appearance with the great J. Allen Hynek, who he survived by six years.

Due to the publishing success of "Situation Red" with long print runs in both hardcover and paperback, good copies are reasonably easy to find.