Responsibility for Unidentified Flying Objects

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# Saucer Station Shut At Shirley Bay: 'Nothing Came of It'

The Transport Department's Flying Saucer Sighting Station at Shirley Bay is being shut.

This results from a departmental decision no longer to permit station operator Wilbert B. Smith to work on it in what Transport Deputy J. R. Baldwin termed "Government time"

Mr. Smith would be free to work on the saucer station "on his own time". reported Mr. Baldwin, and have the use of the equipment "if it is available".

The decision removes the Transport Department from the field of Flying Saucer Research, leaving this investigation to the Defence Research Board.

Reason for the decision:

"We decided that nothing so far had come out of the station's operations to merit further expenditures of Government time on it."

Whether Mr. Smith, who is the department's engineer in charge of the Broadcast and Measurement Section of the Telecommunications Division, will rebuild the station, with his own equipment, at his own home and at his own time and expense, could not be determined.

Saucer investigations, reported Mr. Baldwin, had been undertaken initially "several years ago", although it was only last Summer that Mr. Smith, with the blessing of former Transport Minister Chevrler, built the station at Shirley-Bay as a departmental project.

At that time, Mr. Chevrler said the Department considered it "worthwhile, for the small cost (about $16,000) to attempt finding out if there is anything to this Flying Sauce business".