Wilbert Smith

Wilbert Brockhouse Smith (1910–1962) was a Canadian radio engineer and senior official of the Canadian Department of Transport who, in the early 1950s, established Project Magnet, Canada's official government UFO research program — effectively the Canadian equivalent of the American Project Blue Book. Smith is most notable for producing a 1950 top-secret memorandum to the Canadian government that, when accidentally declassified in the 1970s, became one of the most frequently cited documentary exhibits in the UAP disclosure community — establishing that flying saucers are real, that their propulsion operates through magnetic manipulation, and that the subject carries higher security classification than the hydrogen bomb.

Career and Background

Smith was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, on February 17, 1910, and earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Department of Transport in 1939 and worked his way up to become Superintendent of Radio Regulations Engineering, overseeing the technical standards for Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications infrastructure.

His interest in UFOs was ignited by public reports of flying saucer sightings in the late 1940s. As a radio and electromagnetic engineer with top-secret clearances and access to American counterparts, Smith was uniquely positioned to make official inquiries into the subject at a level that a civilian researcher could not access.

The 1950 Memorandum

In September 1950, Smith visited Washington, D.C., to attend a broadcasting conference and used the opportunity to make private inquiries among American government contacts about the status of flying saucer research. On returning to Canada, he drafted a classified memorandum dated November 21, 1950, addressed to the Canadian Department of Transport's Controller of Telecommunications, recommending the establishment of a formal government UFO research program.

The memorandum stated five key findings from his American inquiries:

1. Flying saucers exist and are not a hoax or mass delusion.
2. Their modus operandi is unknown but consistent with a high degree of automation.
3. Their propulsion operates through manipulation of magnetism — specifically a controlled interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and an unknown energy source.
4. A small group in the United States was working under very high security to study recovered flying saucer hardware.
5. The subject of flying saucers is classified higher than the hydrogen bomb in the United States.

Steven Greer describes this as "the Wilbert Smith document" — a 1950 top-secret Canadian government memorandum, apparently declassified accidentally in the 1970s, which recorded that "flying saucers are real" and that "a small American group under high security was studying recovered hardware" and "the subject was considered of higher classification than the hydrogen bomb."

Project Magnet

On the basis of his memorandum, Smith received authorization to establish Project Magnet within the Department of Transport in 1950. The project was officially classified as a study of the Earth's magnetic field for the purpose of investigating geomagnetic phenomena, with the actual subject — flying saucers and their propulsion — kept under security classification.

Project Magnet operated from 1950 to 1954 with a small team and a purpose-built detection station at Shirley's Bay, Ontario, equipped with a gamma-ray counter, a magnetometer, and other sensors designed to detect the electromagnetic and gravitational signatures of flying saucers. On August 8, 1954, the Shirley's Bay station recorded an anomalous deflection of its instruments that was briefly interpreted as a possible detection event before cloud cover prevented optical verification. The Canadian government used this ambiguous outcome to quietly wind down the official program, though Smith continued informal research until his death.

Smith and T. Townsend Brown

Smith maintained professional correspondence with T. Townsend Brown, the American physicist known for the Biefeld–Brown effect — the apparent production of thrust from an asymmetric capacitor under high voltage — and for his classified Project Winterhaven proposal to develop disc-shaped aircraft using electrokinetic propulsion. Researcher Jesse Michels, discussing the overlap between Smith's Project Magnet and Brown's electromagnetic propulsion work, notes: "there are letters between him and Wilbert Smith, who set up Project Magnet, which is the Canadian UFO research — their Project Blue Book in the fifties."

The Smith-Brown correspondence is significant because both men were pursuing the same theoretical framework — that flying saucers operated through a controlled interaction with the Earth's electromagnetic and gravitational fields — from their respective government and quasi-government positions. Brown pointed Smith toward Eric Walker, then president of Penn State University, as someone with deeper access to the classified UFO and propulsion programs. Walker, when contacted by researchers, responded in terms that implied substantive knowledge while stopping short of clear confirmation.

Meeting with Philip Corso

Philip Corso, the former U.S. Army colonel who later wrote The Day After Roswell (1997) documenting his alleged role in back-engineering recovered Roswell craft technology, met with Smith in person at the Pentagon. In his interview with Art Bell, Corso recalled: "Wilbert Smith, the great Canadian genius, confirmed it to me in person right in the Pentagon. He came to visit us. I had a good session with him. Then the general came back from his meeting and he told Wilbert Smith: 'you and the colonel have a lot to talk about — I'm going to send him up to your laboratory.'"

Corso was unable to follow up because Smith died in 1962 before the visit could be arranged. Corso described this as "a great loss" and, when told by his general what had happened, received instructions to "sit right down to the table and write down everything that you discussed with Smith because he's gone now."

Theoretical Framework

Smith's electromagnetic propulsion model held that flying saucers extracted energy from and manipulated the Earth's magnetic field through a technology he called "binding force" — a term for what he hypothesized was a fundamental physical force distinct from gravity and electromagnetism as then understood, operating at the interface between energy and matter. He published some of his theoretical work in The New Science (1964, posthumously), in which he laid out a framework for unified field physics incorporating the propulsion principles he believed underlay flying saucer operation.

Smith died on December 27, 1962, in Ottawa. He was 52 years old.

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