Wilbert B. Smith

Wilbert Brockhouse Smith was a Canadian radio engineer and public servant whose UFO importance rests on a narrow but unusually well-documented role: he wrote the 1950 Department of Transport "Geo-Magnetics" memorandum, obtained approval for Project Magnet, and left a Canadian government paper trail around early official UFO reporting.¹²³⁴

  Radio Engineering Career

Smith was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, on 17 February 1910, earned electrical-engineering degrees at the University of British Columbia, and completed a 1934 master's thesis on radio interference in high-tension magneto ignition systems.¹² Before his UFO work, he served as chief engineer at Vancouver radio station CJOR, joined the Department of Transport in 1939, worked on wartime monitoring and ionospheric measurement, and later became Superintendent of Radio Regulations Engineering.¹⁵

His career matters because Project Magnet did not begin as a civilian saucer club or a military intelligence office. It began inside the Department of Transport's radio and telecommunications environment, where Smith was already working on propagation, aurora, cosmic radiation, atmospheric radioactivity, and geomagnetism.³⁵

  Geo-Magnetics Memo

On 21 November 1950, Smith sent a memorandum to the Controller of Telecommunications arguing that his section had extracted roughly fifty milliwatts from Earth's magnetic field in a crude laboratory experiment and might be near a self-sustaining geomagnetic energy unit.³ He connected that speculation to contemporary flying-saucer claims after reading books by Frank Scully and Donald Keyhoe, then wrote that informal inquiries through Canadian Embassy staff in Washington had produced four striking claims: the subject was highly classified in the United States, flying saucers existed, their operating method was unknown, and a small group associated with Vannevar Bush was working on the matter.³

The memo is best read as Smith reporting what he believed he had been told, not as an independent Canadian verification of those American claims.³⁵ Its lasting importance is bureaucratic: Smith recommended a part-time project inside his own section, with early costs carried by the Radio Standards Laboratory, and said Defence Research Board chairman Omond Solandt had offered cooperation while Smith preferred to keep the work within Transport for the time being.³

  Project Magnet

The Project Magnet report states that Commander C. P. Edwards, then Deputy Minister of Transport for Air Services, authorized the work in December 1950 so the saucer phenomenon could be studied within existing establishments.⁴ The assignment went to the Broadcast and Measurements Section of the Telecommunications Division, with outside help to be obtained informally from the Defence Research Board and the National Research Council.⁴

Smith's 1952 report treated UFO evidence as an engineering problem hampered by weak inputs: no specimens, uneven witness reports, and a need for interviews, questionnaires, weighting factors, and deductive analysis.⁴⁶ Its most controversial conclusion was that reported vehicles were "probably extra-terrestrial," but that conclusion came from Smith's small sighting analysis and does not establish that the Canadian government proved extraterrestrial craft.⁴⁷⁵

The Shirley's Bay station near Ottawa was the project's attempt to move from witness testimony to instrumentation, using a magnetometer, gamma-ray counter, radio set, gravimeter, and recording equipment.⁴ Later official review says Smith's detection efforts were unsuccessful, that media attention made the project unwelcome inside the department, and that he continued privately after Transport terminated Project Magnet in 1954.⁷

  Project Second Storey

Project Second Storey grew from a 22 April 1952 Defence Research Board meeting chaired by Omond Solandt, where officials discussed more organized collection and analysis of flying-saucer reports.⁸ Smith outlined an extraterrestrial theory at that meeting, while the committee moved toward standardized observation, interrogation, and reporting procedures rather than endorsement of his conclusions.⁸

The Project Magnet report says Second Storey produced the questionnaire and interviewer guide used to collect, catalogue, and correlate sighting data, and a surviving form shows the practical focus on observer identity, experience, location, date, time, and description.⁴⁶ Sky Canada's 2025 review says Second Storey held six meetings from 1952 to 1954, did not investigate sightings directly, and concluded that UFOs posed neither a security threat nor scientific interest.⁷

  Archive Trail

Smith's role survives because Canadian records were preserved across several streams. Library and Archives Canada describes a federal UFO collection drawn from the Department of National Defence, Department of Transport, National Research Council, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police, covering records accumulated from 1947 into the early 1980s.⁹

A second trail runs through the University of Ottawa's Arthur Bray fonds, where the "Research on Wilbert B. Smith" hierarchy includes Project Magnet files, biographical material, correspondence, writings, technical drawings, photographs, and related UFO research records.¹⁰ This matters because some Smith material survives as later photocopies or family-transmitted papers rather than only as original federal files, so provenance is part of the evidence, not an afterthought.¹⁰⁵

  Assessment

Smith did not prove the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, and his strongest claims outran the evidence available in the official files.⁴⁷⁵ His significance is that a technically trained Canadian official converted Cold War saucer reports into an authorized government study, tied them to geomagnetic speculation, helped shape standardized reporting, and left records that still anchor Canadian UFO history.³⁴⁸⁹

  Selected Records

• 1934 - A study of the high-tension magneto ignition system with special reference to the source and elimination of radio interference²
• 21 November 1950 - "Geo-Magnetics" memorandum to the Controller of Telecommunications³
• 1952 - Project Magnet report on Shirley's Bay and Department of Transport sighting analysis⁴
• 22 April 1952 - Defence Research Board meeting minutes on flying-saucer sightings⁸
• 1950s - Project Second Storey sighting report questionnaire⁶

  References

  References

1. Wilbert B. Smith, The New Science, biographical foreword ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. open.library.ubc.ca ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. sunrisepage.com ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. bac-lac.gc.ca ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

5. Matthew Hayes, A History of Canada's UFO Investigation, 1950-1995 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. bac-lac.gc.ca ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. science.gc.ca ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

8. bac-lac.gc.ca ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

9. canada.ca ↩ ↩²

10. arcs-atom.uottawa.ca ↩ ↩²