Wilbert B. Smith

Wilbert Brockhouse Smith (1910 – 27 December 1962) was a Canadian radio engineer and federal government scientist who is remembered in ufology as the man behind Project Magnet, a small Department of Transport study of whether geomagnetism could be used to detect, and perhaps explain, flying saucers. He was a credentialed, mid-ranking civil servant, not a fringe outsider, and that is the source of his enduring interest. The documentary record supports a real, modest Canadian program. The more dramatic claims attached to his name rest almost entirely on his own testimony and on secondhand retellings.

Early life and background

Smith was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1910. He studied electrical engineering at the University of British Columbia and took an MSc in 1934. From 1934 to 1939 he was chief engineer of the Vancouver radio station CJOR, a job that placed him at the practical end of the young broadcasting industry, where antenna design, power and interference were daily concerns.

Sources are not fully consistent about him. Wikipedia's biography gives his death as Ottawa, Ontario, while other accounts place it in Hull, Quebec, across the river. Its lead also calls him "William" while the title and body say "Wilbert". "Wilbert" is used by most sources and here. Wikipedia itself flags the article as needing more citations, so its ufological details should be read alongside the other sources below.

Career at the Department of Transport

In 1939 Smith joined the federal Department of Transport (DOT) to help build Canada's wartime signal-monitoring system. His portfolio grew to cover radio-wave propagation, frequency and power standards, ship communications, antenna design, and the problem of reducing interference with American broadcasters. He also pursued side interests in auroras, cosmic radiation and geomagnetism, and he came to believe that the Earth's magnetic field might be tapped as an energy source. In 1947 he established Canada's far-north ionospheric monitoring system.

He rose to be Canada's chief delegate at the 1949 and 1950 conferences of the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement (NARBA), which set AM and FM standards across several countries, and in 1952 he helped implement the Canada–US Television Allocation Agreement. In 1957 he became DOT's Superintendent of Radio Regulations Engineering in the Telecommunications Division. In 1963, after his death, he was awarded the Keith S. Rogers Memorial Engineering Award for advancing technical standards in Canadian broadcasting. That ordinary record matters: his ufology grew out of a competent engineering career, not in place of one.

Project Magnet

The Sarbacher conversation

By Smith's own account, the turning point came at the 1950 NARBA conference in Washington. There the American scientist Robert Sarbacher told him that the United States regarded flying saucers as real, with investigations (reportedly led by Vannevar Bush) classified at a level above hydrogen-bomb information. This is Smith's report of a private conversation, and no independent record of it from the American side is cited in the sources used here.

The memo and the approval

Smith's memorandum of 21 November 1950 asked approval to investigate geomagnetics as a means of detecting flying saucers. It was marked Top Secret and downgraded to Confidential in 1969. Kevin Randle quotes the passage in which Smith says "we are on the track of a means whereby the potential energy of the earth's magnetic field may be abstracted and used." The project was approved on 2 December 1950, according to Wikipedia's Project Magnet article, as a small, part-time operation using DOT facilities with some help from the Defence Research Board and the National Research Council. Named collaborators included James Watt of the Defence Research Board, John Thompson of DOT, Prof. J. T. Wilson of the University of Toronto and Dr. G. D. Garland of the Dominion Observatory.

Second Storey and Shirley's Bay

In April 1952 the government created Project Second Storey, a parallel committee of scientists and military officers that met periodically to discuss "the UFO problem" and recommend government action. Smith sat on it and reported some Project Magnet findings to it. In June 1952 he issued a preliminary report arguing that UFOs most likely had an intelligent extraterrestrial origin and almost certainly manipulated magnetism for flight, and a 1953 report repeated those conclusions.

In October 1952 Smith set up an observatory at Shirley's Bay, a restricted site west of Ottawa, to measure the physical effects he expected UFOs to produce. The front page of the Ottawa Journal for 11 November 1953 described a UFO sighting station there equipped with a magnetometer, gamma-ray detector, radio receiver, gravity meter and recording equipment, though the article does not explicitly name Smith. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the experiments there as inconclusive. Dates for the station vary between sources (October 1952, November 1953), so they should be checked against primary files.

Wind-down

The funded project ended in 1954, with formal activity stopping around mid-1954; sources differ on the month, and the Wikipedia article gives no cause. Smith was allowed to keep using the Shirley's Bay facilities at his own expense until his death in 1962. One secondary site, Mysteries of Canada, claims that he told a Commons committee in 1955 that nothing had been detected at the site and suggests he was under pressure; that account is less rigorously sourced and is treated here as unverified.

Later claims and beliefs

After the government program wound down, Smith's public statements went well beyond his memos. He came to link UFOs to psychic phenomena and believed he was in telepathic contact with extraterrestrial "Space Brothers". He founded the Ottawa New Sciences Club and wrote for its publication, Topside; the articles were collected posthumously in 1969 as The Boys from Topside.

In a 1961 interview by Fitch and Popovitch, transcribed in NICAP material and in Frank Edwards' popular book Flying Saucers: Serious Business, Smith reportedly said that about 3,000 pounds of unusual metal had been recovered around July 1960, and that a fragment from a saucer shot down near Washington in July 1952 had been "loaned" by the US Air Force to a classified group. He also claimed that his research showed gravity could be created and controlled, and that he had worked on an anti-gravity device before dying of cancer, then dismantled it, telling his wife the world "was not ready for it." His wife published his unfinished book, The New Science.

Reception and criticism

Randle, who is generally open to Roswell-era claims, calls the 1950 memo "a document composed of rumor without foundation": one man's account of conversations, uncorroborated, which does not by itself prove crashes or a cover-up. He also notes that Smith cites only two books.

A Metabunk discussion goes further. It says the alleged 1952 Washington shootdown has no credible corroboration, that Timothy Good's Above Top Secret, a key source for the story, was criticized in The Skeptic in 1989, and that the 1961 transcript comes from popular, uncorroborated UFO paperbacks. It disputes the H-bomb wording in the 1950 memo and notes that one PDF is named "smithmemo-21nov51", at odds with the 1950 date. It also argues that a classified program would be unlikely to share recovered material with a civil servant, and it calls The New Science "word salad" and pseudoscientific.

Legacy

Smith is historically significant for two reasons. First, Project Magnet is among the earliest official, if tiny, government-sponsored UFO inquiries, and it is listed alongside Second Storey in surveys of government investigations. Second, the Sarbacher conversation and the memo became staples of later "cover-up" literature as a supposed inside confirmation from a credentialed engineer.

His papers outside the family were acquired by Arthur Bray, a retired Canadian military pilot, and donated to the University of Ottawa as the Arthur Bray fonds (1994, with later additions). Library and Archives Canada also hosts digitized federal UFO files, though the Project Magnet material has not been fully verified against them here.

Current status

The program existed and its broad outline is well documented. Smith's pioneering role is not in doubt, but his conclusions, the recovered-metal claims, the Washington shootdown and the Space Brothers lack independent support. Open questions remain on the exact end date of Project Magnet, the authenticity and dating of some memo copies, and his place of death. Credibility is best treated as contested: real government work, unsupported extraordinary claims.