Wilbert Smith

Wilbert Smith was a Canadian radio engineer.¹ In November 1950 he wrote a top-secret memo to the Canada Department of Transport,² a document later found in his official papers in a Canadian university archive.³ Separately, he worked on a top-secret project intercepting communications from the Soviet Union.⁴

In September 1950, while attending a conference in Washington, D.C.,⁵ Smith read the newly published book Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully.⁵ He used contacts at the Canadian Embassy in Washington to arrange an interview with Robert Sarbacher, an American scientist who consulted for the United States Research and Development Board.⁶

In the 1950 Wilbert Smith memo to the Canadian Department of Transport, Smith recorded Sarbacher as saying that flying saucers were the most highly classified subject in the US government, rating higher than the hydrogen bomb.⁷ The memo also recorded Sarbacher saying that flying saucers exist,⁸ that their modus operandi was unknown but that a concentrated effort was being made by a small group headed by Dr Vannevar Bush,⁹ and that the matter was considered by United States authorities to be of tremendous significance.¹⁰ Smith’s handwritten notes of the meeting further recorded Sarbacher confirming that the facts set out in Scully’s book, including recovered aliens and spacecraft, were “substantially correct”.¹¹

Smith’s son, James Smith, said that his father told him he had been shown recovered bodies from a recovered craft that were small and humanoid.¹² Neither the United States nor Canadian governments have ever attempted to rebut Smith’s record of what he learned about the purported US recovered-flying-saucer programme.¹³ According to the Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), Volume I, Canada’s Project Magnet (1950-1954) was run by Department of Transport (Canada) engineer Smith.¹⁴

Smith himself assessed that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin and that they flew by magnetism.¹⁵ He believed he was in personal contact with extraterrestrial beings through telepathy and what he called “tensor beams”.¹⁶ In an interview as early as 1961, he claimed that in 1952 the United States Air Force (USAF) had lent him a piece of a UFO to study,¹⁷ which he said was composed of magnesium orthosilicate.¹⁸ Smith also acknowledged that these beliefs about UFOs were his own, not the official position of the Canadian government.¹⁹

Chris Ramsay has identified Smith, to his recollection, as having been Canada’s Minister of Transport.²⁰ According to Ramsay, the Wilbert Smith 1950 memorandum on flying saucers is a declassified document written by Smith after a trip to the United States, in which he recorded meeting officials who were taking flying saucers very seriously.²¹ The memorandum is an official, uncontested document.²²