Project Magnet's Shirley's Bay Detection Station: The Gravimeter Reading of August 8, 1954

Wilbert Brockhouse Smith was a senior radio engineer at Canada's Department of Transport. By 1950 he wanted to know two things. Were flying saucers real? And how might they fly?

On November 21, 1950, he wrote a classified memo. In it, the American scientist Dr. Robert Sarbacher was reported as saying that US flying saucer research was "more highly classified than information about the hydrogen bomb." On December 2, 1950, the department approved Project Magnet. Smith's theory was that the craft used the Earth's magnetic field.

His preliminary report of June 1952 concluded that UFOs were probably extraterrestrial and "likely operated by manipulation of magnetism." At Shirley's Bay, on the Ottawa River west of Ottawa, the project put a 12 × 12 ft hut full of instruments on government land. A gamma-ray counter. A magnetometer. A radio receiver listening for radio noise. Cameras. And a recording gravimeter said to reach within a 50 mile radius. Sources disagree on when it opened. By November 11, 1953, the Ottawa Journal had made public what is often called the world's first UFO detection station.

August 8, 1954. 3:01 p.m. The instruments registered an unusual disturbance. On the graph paper, the gravimeter traced a very large and unexplainable deflection, far greater than conventional interference such as a passing aircraft. In Smith's words, "the gravimeter went wild."

The researchers rushed outside. Above them was a heavily overcast sky with limited visibility. Dense cloud, and nothing else. Whatever lay beyond it stayed hidden. No pictures were made.

Two days later, on August 10, 1954, the Department of Transport admitted to three and a half years of UFO research. "Considerable data" had been collected, it said, but "no definite conclusions had been reached." Project Magnet was ended. Project Second Storey, the committee chaired by astronomer Peter Millman to which Smith reported, was dissolved the same year. Smith kept working at the site with his own money until his death on December 27, 1962.

The timing looks dramatic. The record is more complicated. A June 1954 memo reportedly shows that the decision to close Magnet had already been taken, because public exposure had embarrassed the government. A later claim that the CIA was told of the reading the same day cites no document.

On May 17, 1955, Smith told a House of Commons committee that no UFOs had been detected at Shirley's Bay. Some read that as an honest statement. UFO-oriented writers suggest he spoke under pressure. Smith later described telepathic contact with the "Boys from Topside," and a thread on Metabunk argued that expert descriptions of his claimed UFO debris sound like a meteorite. No specific mundane explanation for the gravimeter trace has been offered.

Building 67, as the hut was later listed, was demolished in 2011. An empty lot remains inside the Defence Research and Development Canada complex off Carling Avenue. Smith's papers went to the University of Ottawa through retired military pilot Arthur Bray. The case lives on in Timothy Good's Above Top Secret, in Matthew Hayes's Search for the Unknown, and in recordings of Smith discussing Project Magnet in his own voice. One afternoon. One overcast sky. One gravimeter that went wild.