author
Lyle Gifford Boyd
1907–1982
A writer of science fiction and science history, she moved easily between imaginative magazine stories and clear-eyed nonfiction. She is especially remembered for collaborative work with her husband under the name Boyd Ellanby, and for coauthoring a skeptical 1963 study of UFOs.
1 Audiobook
The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age
by Donald H. (Donald Howard) Menzel, Lyle Gifford Boyd
About the author
Lyle Gifford Boyd was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1907. The University of Kansas archives say she grew up in St. Joseph and earned an English degree from the University of Kansas in 1931, the year she married William Clouser Boyd.
With her husband, she wrote science fiction under the joint pseudonym Boyd Ellanby. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits the pair with fourteen stories published in magazines between 1952 and 1958, including Category Phoenix and The Star Lord. Their work gave classic pulp-era ideas a playful, thoughtful twist.
Boyd also wrote nonfiction under her own name. She collaborated with astrophysicist Donald H. Menzel on The World of Flying Saucers (1963), a skeptical look at UFO claims, and she was a coauthor of The Harvard College Observatory: The First Four Directorships, 1839–1919 (1971). She died in Watertown, Massachusetts, on January 1, 1982.