What happened
Wilbert Brockhouse Smith was a senior radio engineer at Canada's Department of Transport, a specialist in radio propagation and geomagnetism. At a 1950 broadcasting conference in Washington he said he learned from U.S. scientist Robert Sarbacher that flying saucers were real and that American study of them, reportedly overseen by Vannevar Bush, was classified above the hydrogen bomb. On 21 November 1950 Smith wrote a memo, classified Top Secret until 1969, proposing to study the saucers through geomagnetics in hopes of tapping Earth's magnetic field for propulsion. Project Magnet was approved on 2 December 1950, using DOT facilities with help from the Defence Research Board and National Research Council. In 1952 Smith set up an instrumented observing station at Shirleys Bay outside Ottawa, with a magnetometer, gamma-ray detector, radio receiver and gravity meter. His 1952 and 1953 reports concluded UFOs were probably extraterrestrial craft using magnetism. The department ended the project in 1954.
The official explanation
Canada's parallel scientific committee, Project Second Storey, chaired by astronomer Peter Millman, was skeptical and concluded UFOs were not amenable to scientific inquiry. Historian Matthew Hayes, writing in The Canadian Encyclopedia, describes Smith's experiments as inconclusive, and says the department shut the project down after his extraterrestrial views began attracting bad publicity. Smith later claimed telepathic contact with 'Space Brothers', which many regard as undermining his conclusions.
The anomalous case
Project Magnet is notable because a respected government engineer, with official approval, concluded in writing that UFOs were real and probably extraterrestrial. Smith had led Canada's delegations to continental broadcasting conferences and later received a posthumous engineering award, so he was no fringe figure. His memo of 21 November 1950 records his account that U.S. officials regarded the subject as a top-secret matter under study by a group associated with Vannevar Bush, and the memo itself was kept Top Secret in Canada until 1969. Shirleys Bay was a genuine instrument station designed to register physical disturbances from passing objects, an early attempt at UAP sensor science. Smith continued the work with his own funding until his death in 1962 and said he had been building an anti-gravity device. Ufologists regard the memo as an early documentary hint of a classified U.S. program.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- Project Magnet (Canada) Wikipedia
- UFOs in Canada (Matthew Hayes) The Canadian Encyclopedia
- Wilbert Brockhouse Smith Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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