Project Magnet

Project Magnet was the first official Canadian investigation of flying saucers, a study run from December 1950 to 1954 inside the Canadian Department of Transport by the senior radio engineer Wilbert Smith. Smith held that the Earth's magnetic field might be the key to the propulsion of the craft, built a purpose-made observatory at Shirley's Bay outside Ottawa, and in 1952 reported that the objects were probably extraterrestrial and manipulated magnetism to fly; the Department ended the project in 1954 after adverse publicity and a judgement that Smith's investigations had drifted outside its mandate. The Defence Research Board's advisory committee, Project Second Storey, ran alongside it from 1952 to 1954. Smith's November 1950 memorandum, which reported that the subject was classified in the United States above the hydrogen bomb, figures in the UAP disclosure literature, and Steven Greer reads it as describing American reverse-engineering projects on retrieved craft. Smith continued privately funded research on anti-gravity devices until his death in 1962.

Founding

Smith met the American scientist Robert Sarbacher at the Canadian embassy in Washington on 15 September 1950 and afterwards wrote to the Department of Transport's Controller of Telecommunications, in a memorandum of 21 November 1950, that flying saucers exist, that the matter was classified higher than the hydrogen bomb in the United States, that their method of operation was unknown, and that Vannevar Bush headed the American inquiry. The Department formally approved Project Magnet on 2 December 1950, with the support of the deputy minister for air services, Commander Edwards; it set out to explore geomagnetic phenomena and their possible role in the propulsion of the craft, and it drew on the Defence Research Board and the National Research Council.

Shirley's Bay observatory

In 1952 Smith set up the project's observatory at Shirley's Bay, on a restricted military site west of Ottawa, equipped with a gravimeter, a magnetometer, a radio-noise receiver and a gamma-ray counter to detect the magnetic, radio and gravitational disturbances that he expected a craft to cause; the press called it the "Canadian Flying Saucer Observatory," and it was finished in October 1952. The 1952 Project Magnet Report analysed 25 sightings and concluded that the craft were probably extraterrestrial; in 1953 the American author Donald Keyhoe featured the project in a book. Press coverage of the observatory brought public interest and a flood of inquiries to the Department. According to Andrew King, at 3:01 pm on 8 August 1954 the observatory's instruments registered an unusual disturbance — Smith said the gravimeter "went wild" — although the observers found only overcast sky and the chart-recorder trace was the only evidence.

Closure

Mounting scepticism among Smith's colleagues, the publicity and his growing emphasis on the extraterrestrial hypothesis led the Department to end the project, which it did in mid-1954 on the ground that his work had left its mandate. The accounts disagree on the timing: one dates the termination to June 1954, and another to two days after the disturbance of 8 August. The Defence Research Board had meanwhile sponsored a parallel body, the interdepartmental Project Second Storey, created in 1952 and chaired by the astronomer Peter Millman of the Dominion Observatory; it collected and correlated sighting reports and worked to standardise a sighting form, investigated no sightings itself, and was wound up in 1954.

Open questions

References

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