UFOs: Fact & Fiction

UFOs: Fact & Fiction

May 19th in Conspiracy & UFO Phenomenon by Nick Redfern

One of the things that has fascinated me for many a year is the way in which military, defense, intelligence, and government personnel have – after their retirement from the Machiavellian world of officialdom – elected to write novels on UFOs that may well be based far more upon secret science-fact, rather than presumed science-fiction. A classic example is the case of a now-deceased man named Ralph Noyes. According to the biographical note on the dust jacket of Ralph Noyes’ 1985 UFO novel, A Secret Property…

“Ralph Noyes was born in the tropics and spent most of his childhood in the West Indies. He served in the RAF from 1940 to 1946 and was commissioned as aircrew, engaging in active service in North Africa and the Far East. He entered the civil service in 1949 and served in the Air Ministry and subsequently the unified Ministry of Defense. In 1977 he retired early from the civil service to take up a writing career, leaving in the grade of under Secretary of State. He has since published several pieces of shorter fiction, most of them on speculative themes.”

The book-jacket continues: “For nearly four years, until late 1972, Ralph Noyes headed a division in the central staffs of the Ministry of Defense which brought him in touch with the UFO problem. Since his retirement he has become increasingly interested in this subject, among others which lie on the fringes of present understanding. He sees speculative fiction as the ideal mode for grappling with these unusual areas of experience. But A Secret Property is not only fiction but also ‘faction’–at least to the extent of drawing on Ralph Noyes’s lengthy background in the Royal Air Force and the Ministry of Defense.”