“I have to start by saying how immensely I enjoyed this book,” so begins Micah. A. Hanks’ review in The Gralien Report of Nick Redfern’s Science Fiction Secrets: From Government Files and the Paranormal. Writes Hanks: “From strange FBI tales involving the apparent paranoia of Sci-Fi writers like Phillip K. Dick, to weird parallels he draws between the terrorist attacks of 9-11 and television programs that predicted the disaster before it happened, this book is a mind bender in the first degree…The old adage ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ comes to mind often when reading this gem, and if you ever doubted it, this will be the manuscript that will finally change that perception. Read it, enjoy it, and be prepared to never see the world around you quite the same way you once did.” Sounds like Hanks liked the book, don’t you think? Considerably more reserved about the book, as expected, is Peter Rogerson at Magonia: “It is…a moot point whether any of the bizarre tales one encounters here and elsewhere are deliberately circulated by governments to baffle foreign intelligence services and to protect real secrets and scandals with a bodyguard of cranks, or as black propaganda…There is no doubt that Nick Redfern gives us an exciting read, but it has to be said that if there is a bodyguard of cranks, he doesn’t half help it along… A jolly good read but keep a full salt-cellar handy.” Of course, Rogerson fails to mention that Redfern actually points out that many of the stories do stretch credibility. Redfern, in fact, is not afraid to detail the failures, the flaws, and the character eccentricities in the stories he recounts; in no way does he suggest that all the things in the book are valid. And just what these stories represent is not a moot point.

We have just published the third volume in Nick Redfern’s Secrets Series. The new volume is entitled Science Fiction Secrets: From Government Files and the Paranormal. It follows the two previous volumes in the series, Strange Secrets and Celebrity Secrets, and may be considered a little bit of both. The book deals with themes and topics at the intersection of science fiction, the paranormal, and UFOs that were often the subject of government and intelligence agency documents. It also deals with such people as Carl Sagan and Steven Spielberg, as well as Philip K Dick and other celebrity science fiction authors.

Among the questions Redfern seeks to answer in this book:

— Did the U.S. Government secretly assist Steven Spielberg in the production of his groundbreaking science fiction movies Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial?

— Why were special agents of the FBI so deeply interested in the life, career, and activities of science fiction author Philip K. Dick (of Blade Runner fame)?

— How did The X-Files spin-off series The Lone Gunmen anticipate months in advance the terrible tragedy of 9-11?

— Why was the top brass of the U.S. Air Force so secretly interested in, and concerned by, the UFO-related tales of a relatively anonymous 1950s science fiction movie-maker who died in poverty in the early 1980s?

— Did a nightmarish scenario presented in one of H.G. Wells’ novels prompt Soviet Premier Josef Stalin to clandestinely embark upon a secret and diabolical experiment designed to create a super race of monstrous, half-human half-ape soldiers?

— Has the military managed to successfully perfect human teleportation of the type that was most graphically and famously shown in Star Trek and The Fly?