Project Magnet

Project Magnet was a small Canadian government study of unidentified flying objects, approved in December 1950 and run by Wilbert B. Smith, a senior radio engineer at the Department of Transport, with some help from the Defence Research Board and the National Research Council. Smith hoped UFOs might reveal a way to use the Earth's magnetic field for propulsion. In October 1952 he set up an observatory at Shirley's Bay outside Ottawa; his 1952 and 1953 reports argued that UFOs were probably extraterrestrial craft manipulating magnetism. The project was formally shut down in mid-1954, though Smith carried on privately until his death in 1962. A parallel committee, Project Second Storey, met from 1952 to consider the question.

The Americans followed it. A CIA scientific-intelligence memo of December 1953 on the state of U.S. UFO work notes the press stories about the Canadian "laboratory", and wonders why Smith's investigations, which Donald Keyhoe's book dated to the late 1940s, had only now reached the press.

The Canadian files themselves (Library and Archives Canada) are still to be added; until then the project's details here rest on secondary sources, and Smith's conclusions are his own, not the government's.

Sources: CIA-UAP-007 (PURSUE, local copy) · Wikipedia