PROJECT MAGNET

Opening

In November 1950 a Canadian government radio engineer, Wilbert Smith, wrote a memo to his superiors in the Department of Transport. He said that, after a broadcasting conference in Washington, he had made inquiries at the Canadian embassy and learned that flying saucers were real and that the subject was classified more tightly than the hydrogen bomb. Smith proposed that Canada try to detect them through the Earth's magnetic field. Within weeks the government approved a small project to do it.

It was called Project Magnet. It was a rare example of a government running its own UFO detection effort, and it ended with a conclusion that has divided researchers ever since: its own leader decided the objects were probably extraterrestrial and worked by manipulating magnetism. The official record shows a real project, a real observatory outside Ottawa, and no published measurement of anything.

Timeline

1910Smith is born in Lethbridge, Alberta. He becomes an electrical engineer and a government scientist.

1939He joins the Department of Transport and works on wartime signal monitoring, radio propagation, antennas and the study of auroras and geomagnetism.

15 September 1950According to Smith's memo, he talks with the US physicist Robert Sarbacher, a consultant to the Defense Department's Research and Development Board.

21 November 1950Smith's memo proposes geomagnetic detection of saucers. It is classified Top Secret, and is downgraded to Confidential only in 1969.

2 December 1950The Department of Transport approves Project Magnet.

April 1952The government creates Project Second Storey, a committee of scientists and military officers on the UFO problem. Smith takes part and passes on some Magnet findings.

June 1952Smith issues a preliminary report arguing that the objects probably come from intelligent extraterrestrial sources and probably use magnetism. A 1953 report repeats the conclusion.

October 1952He sets up an observatory at Shirley's Bay, outside Ottawa, to measure whatever physical effects UFOs might produce.

November 1953The Ottawa Journal reports on the UFO station at Shirley's Bay.

8 August 1954The station is said to have recorded an unusual signal. Fog prevented any photograph, and the results were reportedly classified.

Mid 1954Formal activity ends. Smith carries on informally, using his own funds and the Shirley's Bay facilities.

27 December 1962Smith dies of cancer in Ottawa.

Key figures

Wilbert Smith (some sources say William) was a senior radio engineer at the Department of Transport, with a record of real technical work. He was Canada's chief delegate at the 1949 to 1950 broadcasting conferences. He was also a believer: he later said he thought UFOs were linked to psychic phenomena and that he was in telepathic contact with extraterrestrials, whom he called the Space Brothers.

Robert Sarbacher is the US scientist Smith named as his source. He later said he did not remember the conversation well. The quoted remarks come from Smith's account, which makes the whole chain of the project depend on one recollection.

The members of Project Second Storey were scientists and officers from the Defence Research Board and the National Research Council, who helped on a small scale.

Physical and documentary trail

The record: Smith's 1950 memo, which is quoted in most histories of the case and reproduced in part in Timothy Good's 1988 book Above Top Secret; the 1952 and 1953 reports; the Ottawa Journal story; and Smith's posthumous writings. The University of Ottawa holds Project Magnet correspondence from 1950 to 1954, mostly photocopies, and a reprint of the project report. In the memo, as quoted, Smith says he learned at the Canadian embassy that the subject outranked the H-bomb in classification, that flying saucers exist, and that Vannevar Bush headed a small group making a concentrated effort on it.

The Shirley's Bay station is described in later accounts as equipped with a gamma-ray counter, a magnetometer, a radio receiver and a recording gravimeter, among other things. Those accounts rarely cite a primary source. The reported 8 August 1954 signal is the same: I have found no instrument log, no named witness and no published data.

Smith's own claims go further. He is said to have told people in 1952 that he held a piece of a UFO lent by the US government, and he claimed the speed of light is not constant and that craft ran on gravitational forces. These rest on secondary accounts. His anti-gravity claims rest on family accounts: he is said to have taken his device apart and told his wife the world was not ready for it. His unfinished book, The New Science, was published after his death, and his articles for an Ottawa club newsletter came out in 1969 as The Boys from Topside. Some accounts say his files stayed with his wife and emerged in the 1970s.

Things you might not know

• The memo stayed secret for nineteen years. Smith's 1950 note was Top Secret until 1969.
• It started from a conversation. Everything in Project Magnet traces back to Smith's recollection of what a US scientist told him, and Sarbacher later said he did not remember it well.
• He was a serious engineer. Smith set up Canada's far-north ionospheric monitoring system in 1947, and received an engineering award after his death in 1963.
• Fog was blamed. The one reported signal, on 8 August 1954, came with no photograph because of fog.
• The government stayed cautious. Project Second Storey was a parallel committee, and Smith reported to it rather than the other way round.
• He kept going. After the formal project ended, Smith used the Shirley's Bay facilities with his own money until he died.
• He believed in the Space Brothers. His later writing used a Space Brothers philosophy.

Competing explanations

A genuine early attempt at instrumented UFO detection. A government engineer with a good technical record asked for a small budget to test a hypothesis. The project is best seen as an honest attempt that found nothing publishable.

A project built on a belief. Smith's conclusions came early and were stated before the observatory had run for long. His later beliefs in telepathy and the Space Brothers suggest the conclusion drove the work.

A tip from inside the US programme. If Sarbacher's remark was accurate, it would mean senior US scientists believed in 1950 that the subject was classified above the hydrogen bomb. That rests on Smith's memory of one conversation, which Sarbacher himself later could not confirm.

Later life of the case

Smith's memo is quoted in almost every history of official UFO secrecy. Canada's UFO files were later transferred to the national archives, and Smith's papers survive in university collections.

Finding

Project Magnet was a real Canadian government project, led by a respected engineer, and it reached a conclusion the evidence does not support: nothing it published shows the objects were extraterrestrial or magnetic. What it does show is that a government scientist in 1950 believed the secrecy around the subject was real enough to act on.

What still will not resolve: what, if anything, the Shirley's Bay instruments recorded on 8 August 1954, and what Sarbacher actually said at that conversation.