No Canadian UFO website would be complete without mention of Wilbert Brockhouse Smith. He was a pioneer in Canadian UFO research, particularly during the 1950’s. It was through Mr. Smith that Project Magnet was established. The purpose of which was to “ study how magnetic and gravitational principles might account for the reported flight characteristics of flying saucers.” And it was through Wilbert Smith’s memo dated Nov. 21st 1950 that we know that the United States had classified the flying saucer enigma higher than even that of the H-Bomb.

For further resources and biographical information please see bottom of this page.

The following is an edited version of a speech given by Smith at short notice to the Vancouver Area UFO Club, March 14, 1961. It was entitled "What we are doing in Ottawa."


May I point out that the Project Magnet I was associated with, which received much publicity, was not an official Government project. It was a project that I talked the Deputy Minister into letting me carry out, making use of the extensive field organization of the Department of Transport. No funds were spent on it and we merely had access to the very large field organization and opened a number of files. Unfortunately the gentlemen of the press climbed on this and made a big deal out of it. However we carried the project through officially for about four or five years and then went underground because of press interference.

However we had been following up every lead we could find. Some of the leads led to a dead end. We found a tremendous amount of garbage. We found a number of contacts which we believed to be sincere. Our technique of handling the contacts was to ask a number of rather general-type questions of all the contacts and then we compared the answers. We found that in a majority of cases we got back exactly the same answers from all the contacts. We felt that since this was the case the contacts were probably authentic. In a few instances we got back answers which were completely inconsistent and we discarded these contacts. We just confined our activities from there on to the contacts whose results we had been able to check. In following through our programme of investigation we have always felt that an unconfirmed report of any kind was of interest only. If we could get an additional confirmation we felt that it had something better than a 50 per cent probability of being correct. If we had two independent confirmations we rated it about 75 per cent and so on. So that the material I will be talking about a little later on is the result not of just one bit of information but the majority of it has been the result of three, four, five or sometimes even more independent transmittals of the same information. Now this information includes a great deal of philosophy, a good deal of what you might say, human engineering and a great deal of science. Being of a scientific background myself, my own interest was directed largely towards the scientific end. I wanted to know how these craft were built, what their motive power was, where they got their energy and how come they were able to do such interesting things that our craft were unable to do. Many of the questions that I asked when I had the opportunity to ask them, were along scientific lines. I will admit that I got back a great deal of info, which was completely unintelligible, which sounded like a lot of double-talk. However since we had previously established that the contacts from whom we got this info were probably authentic, we simply took the info down either in writing or on tape and kept it for future reference and eventually we were able to et quite a good deal out of this. There is a great deal that we have that we have not yet been able to decipher. I think the trouble is with us, not with the info. Much of the info, which we obtained from these people, cast some serous doubts on the validity of some of the basic concepts of our science.

For one thing they told us that the velocity of light was not a constant. As a matter of fact they seemed to be rather pointed in their statements that light doesn’t travel, it is. And we told them that from our point of view it appeared to travel with a certain definite velocity of 186,000 miles per second. They said that’s the way it looks to you because you are looking at it from a region having certain conditions, certain influences, but they said if you were to go away from this region you would find that a different set of circumstances prevailed. Another thing they told us cast a great deal of doubt on our ideas of time. They told us that time wasn’t at all what we thought it was, namely what might be marked off with the ticking of a clock, that time was, in fact, a field function, the result of there being a universe. That is, something which was derived from the basic primordial concepts which brought this universe into being, and that it differed as you went from one part of the universe to the other. Also it could be altered, sometimes by natural means, sometimes by intelligently-controlled means in various parts of the universe. So that in any given interval, which incidentally is what our clocks mark off, our intervals, not chunks of time, in these intervals we can have all sorts of lengths of time. In other words if one of you checks your clock with me and finds that they are synchronised and I climb into a flying saucer and take a little trip out well clear of this earth and I watch my clock and, say, come back in three hours time, and we again compare clocks, maybe your clock says I’ve been gone an hour, my clock says I’ve been gone three hours. Both clocks are strictly correct. You’ve experienced an hour in the time that hand went around once; in that same interval I experienced three hours—and they were three real hours, not an illusion. The theory of relativity talks about this dilation. But this leads to a paradox and I think that anyone who is at all mathematically inclined and has taken the trouble to look at the relativistic time paradox is probably disturbed by it. According to the theory of relativity, if I climb into a spacecraft and start out from the earth, here, at a velocity very nearly the velocity of light and I go out to, say, Alpha Proxima, and then I turn around and come back, people on the earth say I’ve been gone something like 10 years. According to my clock I’ve only been gone a year. Now that is a result, apparently, of the time dilation in the theory of relativity in that the spacecraft was moving, relative to the earth at a velocity very nearly equal to the velocity of light. The paradox arises when you consider that relative to the spacecraft, the earth was traveling away at exactly the same velocity, so therefore, to the people on the spacecraft who are relatively stationary, 10 years should have passed and by the time the earth came back to them it should only have been away a year. So you can see right away the very premise on which the theory of relativity is predicated, namely, that if B is relative to A, then A must be relative to B, leads you to an impossible paradox. This paradox is resolved completely if you recognize the variable nature of time. As you move around from one part of the universe to the other, you encounter all sorts of values of time in certain given intervals. Now I find that this idea of the concept of the variable nature of time to be almost incomprehensible to most people because, as they say, a Swede is only a Norwegian with his brains beaten out, I think that that is what has happened to most of us. We were born with more intelligence than we have after we graduate from university because we’ve had it beaten out of us in the process. The very first thing that we learn when we are a very small child is that the feeding must be regulated by the clock. We don’t know about the clock, but regardless of how we feel on the subject we still get the bottle at a certain particular time, and this carries on right through our conscious life. Every time we do something we check with the clock. We become slaves to the clock to the extent that we believe that the intervals cut out by the clock are time itself. So we find it very difficult to readjust. Now I don’t propose to say anything more about this particular aspect, but I would like to say something on the subject of the craft themselves.

We asked them how they were supported and they said they were supported on the earth’s gravitational field. We asked them what the earth’s gravitational field was and they said it was a complicated function which has to do with the influences of the material which made up the planet which was producing the field. Further study on our own with occasional reference to these people form elsewhere and we figured out what was really taking place, to the extent that we were able to go into the laboratory and conduct a series of experiments which proved beyond a doubt that this is true. Our laboratory experiments have allowed us to make about a one per cent change in the weight of objects. We can make them about one per cent heavier and one per cent lighter. Now that is along way from holding a spacecraft up because you have to go over a hundred per cent before you do that. But the fact that we can do it, the fact the principle that the people from outside gave us and guided us to finding out for ourselves are valid, certainly indicates that, first, these people are what they say they are, second, that their technology is what they say it is, that it is superior to ours, that ours is inadequate in many respects. Now I asked for a blackboard here tonight because I want to draw a very small diagram on here, which I think may throw a little light on how these craft are actually held up. Now the diagram is very simple (draws on board). Those lines can be considered as the earth’s gravitational field. This is not a strictly correct representation because a field is a dynamic function, not a static one. Down here someplace is the centre. As you can see this is diverging outward. IF we place any object in here this object is subject to attraction from this virtual centre down here, on this side and this side, but this side is closer than this side, so that we have a net resultant force down this way. However if we bend this field, and we do this to it, this object now finds itself in a field the virtual centre of which is up here somewhere. So that the object, now, thinks this is down and proceeds to fall in that direction. Or if the field is bent until it is exactly parallel there is no resultant force on the object and it remains weightless. It is just that simple, and this is precisely what we have done in the laboratory, but because the fields around the earth are very intense, the fields which we have had available from our modern technology are most inadequate to do more than bend these fields by a very small amount so that we have been able to bend the earth’s field to fool the little weight into thinking that that was down instead of this being down. Now we understand that these craft operate on that principle. Underneath the bells there are three things that people have referred to as landing gear. They’re not landing gear at all, they’re spheres within which a charged sphere is rotating, it is spinning on magnetic bearings. Magnetic bearings are something else which the boys from topside have told us about. It’s a very simple design in section (draws on board). This is the north pole and this is the south, and in it we have a thing which looks like this with a south and this with a north. They’re just simply ferrite bearings permanently magnetized. We built them ourselves and checked them in the lab and they work perfectly. Very simple things. And the spheres carry a charge and they spin on this type of bearing down in side the big ball. And the tilt is just simply produced by rotating the sphere a little bit which bends the field. The process is much more complicated than would appear from what I’m telling you. This is the first step and the end result. Even though there are a lot of others in between.

Now one other thing that I would like to mention, as far as I know our group in Ottawa is the only group that has actually taken the info, from the boys topside and translated it into hardware that works. Much info has been given to us through other channels, but people just talk about it. They don’t do anything about it and I think that’s deplorable. I think when they give info, the least we can do is to show our good faith by trying to convert the info into hardware. We have built two items of hardware on their instructions that I’m rather proud of. One is a coil. It has a ferrite core and a trick winding on it. To look at it, it looks rather like a rather oddly wound inductor. When measured on a radio-frequency bridge it shows some very peculiar properties. There are certain frequencies at which it is impossible to balance the r.f. bridge, and that is a direct contradiction to what any electrical engineer will tell you should happen with a coil of wire wound on a ferrite core. Now if we take this coil and we excite it with radio frequency energy at or near these critical frequencies, we find that energy goes into the coil and nothing comes out. It’s just disappearing. As a matter of fact we had one coil about an inch in diameter and eight inches long and we poured a kilowatt into that coil for two hours from a kilowatt communications-type transmitter. The coil was in a two-inch brass tube with a plate welded on one end and a transmission line fitting on the other. We could find no radiation around the outside of that tube at all. In other words the energy went in; now came out. The info, which we got from the boys topside was that we were making tenser energy, which is a sixth-dimensional radio wave, and is the type of energy they use extensively for radio communications, transmission of power and for pushing and pulling. In fact they use it for just about everything that we could think of. We were not able to control this energy; we could just make it. We are hoping that later on we will be able to learn how to do it, but at the present time we are not just smart enough.

The other item that I’m rather proud of resulted from a series of questions that we asked regarding accidental destruction to our aircraft by flying into the vicinity of a flying saucer. And we were informed that although a few of our aircraft had come to an unfortunate end by what they considered the colossal stupidity of our pilots, they were now taking corrective measures to avoid our aircraft. I asked them what happened, and they said, well, the fields around the saucers in order to hold them up, in order to produce the gravity differential, the time field differentials, which were necessary to operate the ship, these sometimes produced field combinations which reduced the strength of materials to the point where they were no longer strong enough to carry the load that the materials were expected to carry. Now as we know, aircraft, particularly the military type, are built with a rather small factor of safety, and in these regions of reduced binding, the materials are no longer strong enough to carry the load and the craft simply comes apart. Now we asked a series of questions about, or was it possible for our craft to detect these regions so we would not fly into them and they said it certainly was and they would give us the design of an instrument which would do this. They told us also that we, ourselves, were creating regions which were much more dangerous than the regions which they established because we could detect the presence of their craft and give them a wide berth, but we could not detect without instruments the presence of these vortices which we ourselves are producing. Now they gave us the design of the instrument which was fundamentally this: they said to select two materials, one stronger than the other, and they said to arrange so that these two materials pull against each other in such a manner that the weaker material was very near its breaking point and the strong material was a long way from its breaking point. On that basis we devised an instrument and built quite a number of them and sent them around to various people that we knew did quite a bit of traveling and we asked them if they would investigate regions through which aircraft must have passed just prior to breaking up in mid-air. We have unfortunately a large record of our aeroplanes having done just this. One of these crashes occurred at a place called Issoudon which is about 20 miles south-west of Quebec and we investigated the region through which this BOAC aircraft must have passed just prior to the crash. Sure enough, big as life and twice as natural, we found a very large and very strong vortex. Our instruments showed it beyond a doubt. It was about a thousand feet in diameter and roughly circular with a rather sharp line of demarcation at the edge of it. You will recall also that about two years, three years ago, possibly a little longer, a jet aircraft crashed into a nunnery at Orleans, just out from Ottawa. It killed a number of people and did a great deal of damage. The jet engine itself was finally dug out of the subsoil about 30 feet below the foundation. We investigated that one again we found a very strong vortex of reduced binding. We had a number of reports some in from the people in the field who found exactly the same thing. I wrote a very stiff memorandum to the appropriate people in my own department pointing out some of these fact without saying where we got the info. We told them we had instruments which showed the existence of these regions of reduced binding and suggested that something be done about it. The letter wound up on the crank file. I’m afraid that is the fate of most of these things, they wind up on the crank file. However that does not in any way change the fact that these regions of reduced binding exist, people topside told us they existed, we designed instruments which confirmed these facts.

There’s one other little point that I would like to make in connection with these regions of reduced binding. That is, that the people from topside told us that we make them when we set off a nuclear explosion. We make two of them. We make one of them in the vicinity of the nuclear explosion and one on the opposite side of the planet. Any of you who have ever seen pictures or facsimiles of a nuclear explosion have probably noticed that there is a column which is approximately of uniform diameter extending upwards from the region of the explosion and that is capped by a big mushroom-shaped cloud. That shape, that fact itself should have been sufficient warning to us that we were producing a very serious gravitational disturbance. I’ll show you what happens. (Draws on board.) That circle represents the earth. Out from the earth is emanating, for the sake of simplicity, lets call it a gravitational field. We have a nuclear explosion takes place at some point. A nuclear explosion means that there is a sudden change of matter to energy, in other words we have a (static) which is large. Now it is not difficult to tell that if you have such a disturbance occurring in a gravitational field, there will be projected outwards a gravity wave which will be projected in the direction of the gravity field and with the velocity which is inversely proportional to strength of the gravitational field. Therefore if the explosion itself, if the conversion of mass to energy lasts over a period of time which would permit the expanding material to move out a hundred feet this way and a hundred feet this way, we would have a region 200 feet in diameter in which mass was being converted to energy and which would be a virtual sort of a gravity wave that would travel straight up, thereby producing the column that we see supporting the mushroom cloud. What we don’t see is that penetrating downwards through the centre of the planet there is a similar gravity wave which comes to a focal point down here and in this region, from approximately here on down, we have approximately the same mass all the way around so that the gravitational field in here is very low. So the velocity becomes very high and flares out this way, so that it comes out on the far side of the earth as a diverging cone. Now these things don’t go away. We literally punch a hole in the field structure of the earth; a little round cylindrical hole on this side and big conical-shaped hole on the other side. They stay there for a long time. They’re vortices and it takes them quite a while to dissipate. We don’t know how long, but we have gone back to places such as Issoudun three months later and we have found that the vortex has gone. Now maybe it has moved away, we believe that that is what happens because we actually caught one of them moving, or maybe it dissipates, or maybe both. But we did find one out over the North Atlantic that drifted and was picked up first by a friend of mine who is an RCAF pilot who had the instrument with him, they located it on a reconnaissance flight just to the south and west of Iceland. And then again on a flight out about a week later, it was about half way between Iceland and Newfoundland and considerably weaker. At least that is the impression they got from the instrument indication. So that apparently they do move around and I presume they do fade out. We haven’t incidentally located any in the last year or so. I presume it’s because we have not been exploding any bombs lately. Now this is a bit of a review of our activity in Ottawa what we have been doing and why we have been doing it.

Question and Answer Period:

Q:
 Do the vortices affect human life?
 
A:
 That we do not know. We have had no opportunity of placing a guinea pig in the area and keeping them there for any length of time. The vortex at Issoudun extended, when we discovered it, partly over the highway and out into a field. There were no accommodations for anyone even to park, other than on the shoulder of the road, long enough to explore this. We just don’t know.
 
 
Q:
 Why have nuclear tests been stopped?
 
A:
 I can only guess at why they have been curtailed. I saw a picture I know was never released to the public, showing a very large nuclear explosion at Bikini. This picture showed a large fireball which I think must have been well over 100 miles in diameter and projecting out from it were what looked like solar prominences, great tongues of activity. Now these tongues looked to me from the scale of the picture, about 25-50 miles. They were quite comparable in size to the big fireball. Now my guess is that these tongues were in fact chain reactions taking place in the earth’s atmosphere. Now what mechanism was involved I can only guess. I’m not a nuclear physicist, I only know that this picture was considered by those knowledgeable to be very significant and very worrisome. I think another reason, possibly, for the curtailment of the tests has been rising public opinion. It would be highly undesirable to go any further into the business of nuclear weapons than we have gone, possibly we have gone too far already.
 
 
Q:
 (Question was barely audible and referred to the measuring instruments.)
 
A:
 We believe that as long as the elastic limits of the material is not over-stretched the effect is temporary, but if it is overstressed the effect is permanent. Now we found a very peculiar thing. Things in the northern latitudes generally appear to be somewhat stronger than in the southern latitudes. We have one instrument which we took from Toopah(?), Manitoba, through Ottawa, Washington, D.C., and out through Oklahoma City. And while none of our instruments are calibrated in any kind of an absolute unit—simply because we don’t know how to calibrate them in absolute units—they are merely scale indications. The scale goes around to 10. And we set them ordinarily around mid-scale, five or six. At Toopah it went up to about 7 ½--when it got down to Oklahoma City it was down to 2. And when we took it back to Ottawa it came back to the five. We had set it at 5 in Ottawa. Now that meant that there was not a permanent stretch in the nylon fiber, which was the weaker of the two opposing pulls. However every time we take one of these instruments into Toronto we find that it promptly goes from 5 down to 2 and we have actually had several of the nylon fibers break when we take the instruments to Toronto. We came to the conclusion that Toronto was maybe good all right but it wasn’t very strong (laughter). Incidentally they have had an abnormal number of structural steel failures when buildings have been undergoing construction. The steel has given way, bolts have given way. We believe that this is maybe a semi-permanent condition for Toronto because we found that just as we hit the outskirts of the city and as we proceeded through the city and towards Hamilton static it seems to be permanent. It’s been there for four or five years now.
 
 
Q:
 (Barely audible but had to do with the ability of UFOs to materialize and seemingly de-materialize.)
 
A:
 That is a question I find very intriguing. If you consider a point here (indicates on board) about which time is not uniformly distributed. In other words as you come out from here you have less and less time, or looking at it the other way, the tempic field is greater in here than out here. If you have a beam of light passing through this region, since there is more time in here and less time in this part this light doesn’t have to go as far in a given interval as this beam of light does. So this light beam bends so the direction is this direction here, but over here it’s in this direction. So what apparently happens is that the light is bent around this particular point. When you look at a saucer which ash increased the tempic field in the vicinity of the saucer, you find that the light tends to approach the saucer in this fashion, go around it and out the other side. So that what little light comes directly from the saucer occupies such a very, very small portion of your field of vision that you think the saucer, if you see it at all, you think it’s tiny about the size maybe of a dime, when in reality it may be 150 ft in diameter. You are literally looking past the saucer. Now we saw one of the little monitors do exactly that trick. We had very good reason to believe that a certain conversation we were having with a friend of mine was being monitored by one of these fellows, so when we came out of the house we made a definite effort to locate it. We did. It was down in the ditch near the front of the house. As soon as we spotted it, apparently the people controlling it became aware of the fact. We saw what appeared to be just like a heat wave something like a foot in diameter. Popped out of the centre of this appeared to be a little disc abut so big, and it just took off like that into the blue yonder. I think the whole operation occurred in maybe less than two seconds. But we were looking right at it, and there were three of us, and we all saw the same thin. And knowing the trick about the field we figured that that was how it was done. Now there is one way that you can tell that a saucer is parked in a meadow, for example. If there is a background of trees, as you would walk along or drive along in a car looking out across the field, as you pass the vicinity of the saucer since the light has a little bit farther to travel during this, it would appear as though momentarily the background moved backwards. Now I have driven miles and miles past meadows looking for this very thing. I think I know what it ought to look like but I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe since I’m on to this trick they’ll do something else. (laughter)

Our personal thanks to Nick Balaskas for transcribing and providing us with the above.

Further Resources:

Wilbert Smith Biography By Errol Bruce Knapp

Wilbert Smith Archives - Excellent Resource!