Project Magnet and Project Second Storey

Project Magnet (1950-1954) and Project Second Storey (1952-1954) were Canada's official Cold War-era UFO efforts: the first a small Department of Transport study run by radio engineer Wilbert Smith, the second an interdepartmental committee coordinating sighting analysis for the government.

Smith, a senior broadcast engineer, proposed Magnet in November 1950 to study geomagnetism as a possible propulsion principle, writing in a now-famous classified memo that his Washington inquiries indicated flying saucers were "the most highly classified subject in the United States government, rating higher even than the H-bomb," a secondhand claim (sourced to physicist Robert Sarbacher's remarks) that became a cornerstone of later crash-retrieval lore when declassified.

Magnet analyzed sighting reports and, in 1952-53, operated a small instrumented watch station at Shirleys Bay outside Ottawa with magnetometer, gamma, and radio-noise sensors, history's first government UFO detector. Smith reported one anomalous deflection in August 1954; the government, embarrassed by press attention, ended official support that year, letting Smith continue privately. Second Storey's committee of military and scientific representatives reviewed reports, standardized forms, and concluded the data justified no major program. Smith grew publicly contactee-adjacent before his death in 1962, claiming communications and artifact analysis, which historians treat as his private beliefs escaping the official work.

Smith; Second Storey chair Peter Millman, the astronomer who kept conclusions conservative.

Both long defunct. Canada's later handling ran through the National Research Council's meteor files (which received Falcon Lake and Shag Harbour material) and routine defence channels. The declassified Smith memo remains the era's most quoted Canadian document.

The Sarbacher-Smith thread is the controversy: believers read it as early confirmation of U.S. crash secrecy; skeptics note it is one engineer's note of another man's hearsay, later inflated by the very lore it seeded. Canadian historians also debate how much Magnet was national policy versus one enthusiast with stationery.