Project Magnet (1950–1954)

Project Magnet began with a memo written by Wilbert Brockhouse Smith, a senior radio engineer in Canada's Department of Transport (DOT), dated 21 November 1950. The memo asked for approval to investigate whether Earth's geomagnetic field could detect flying saucers and help prove or disprove their existence. The request was approved as a secret study; Transport Canada formally authorised the project on 2 December 1950, with Smith as its director. Wikipedia summary of the program describes it as a government-run UFO study that used DOT facilities, with some help from the Defence Research Board and the National Research Council.

Background

Smith was a career broadcast engineer. He joined the DOT in 1939 to help build Canada's wartime signal monitoring system, set up an ionospheric monitoring network in the far north in 1947, and served as Canada's delegate to North American broadcasting agreements in 1949 and 1950. The biography of Smith records that his 1950 memo relayed a secondhand account from the 1950 NARBA conference, in which US scientist Robert Sarbacher reportedly said that research led by Vannevar Bush was more highly classified than the hydrogen bomb. Those claims were never verified, and a Metabunk discussion questions how Smith described Sarbacher's remarks.

Activities

In June 1952 Smith issued a preliminary report concluding that UFOs were probably of extraterrestrial origin and almost certainly manipulated magnetism for flight. A 1953 report repeated those conclusions. The same year the government created a parallel body, Project Second Storey, chaired by the astronomer Peter Millman, whose members were sceptical of UFO reports. Smith set up a monitoring station at Shirleys Bay on the Ottawa River in October 1952, equipped with radio receivers, Geiger counters and cameras. The Shirleys Bay article reports that the station allegedly recorded a suspicious signal on 8 August 1954, and that fog prevented photographs. The project was formally wound down in mid-1954.

Legacy and status

Smith kept the Shirleys Bay work going with his own money until his death in Ottawa in December 1962. His posthumously published writings extended his views to telepathic contact with extraterrestrials, which is not supported by any evidence in the official record. The memo was classified Top Secret until it was downgraded to Confidential in 1969.

Project Magnet matters to ufology as one of the few UFO studies run by a national government that assumed extraterrestrial origin, yet it also shows how a single enthusiastic official could steer a state programme. Historians generally read it as a personal crusade that ended without evidence. Its scientific claims rest largely on Smith's own reports, and the alleged debris and signal accounts remain unverified.