Goddard is perhaps best known for his interest in paranormal phenomena; he claimed to have witnessed a clairvoyant incident in 1946 on which the feature film The Night My Number Came Up (1955) was later based.

After attending St George's School, Harpenden, he went to the Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth.

He served as a midshipman in the first year of the First World War and in 1915 joined the Royal Naval Air Service.

His duties included patrolling for submarines in dirigibles; he claims that during this period he was responsible for the creation of the term "blimp".

After flying through some rough weather he emerged to see the airfield seemingly fully operational with planes and attending crew.

In the dream an aircraft was carrying Goddard, two other men and a woman, when it experienced difficulties with atmospheric icing, and crashed on a pebbled beach near mountains.

[citation needed] The story was published in The Saturday Evening Post of May 26, 1951,[6] and the 1955 film, The Night My Number Came Up, was based on the incident.

Michael Redgrave played Goddard, who was depicted in the film as becoming excited for a few seconds as the plane made its crash-landing.

He encouraged Sir George Trevelyan to set up the Wrekin Trust, a body promoting "spiritual education" in 1971.

[8] Goddard wrote the foreword to Muriel Dowding's 1980 autobiography and Allan Barham's Strange to Relate (1984).