Canada Had a Flying Saucer Research Program

Why does a farmer-focused MP seem to know more than the Minister of Defence?

Here in Canada, we don't have a 'UAP Caucus' trying to get answers about unidentified flying objects. Instead, we have one Member of Parliament, Larry Maguire, who has been pushing for transparency and disclosure. I don’t know much about his politics, or why he is unusually fixated on the UAP issue. But he made a pretty bombastic claim earlier this year that led me down an interesting rabbit hole.

In a letter dated March 22, 2023, to the then-Minister of National Defence, Anita Anand, Maguire said that it had ‘come to his attention’ that certain Senate committees in the US were undertaking hearings with experts on the recovery and exploitation of materials from UAPs; and he expressed a concern that forthcoming revelations would catch Canada flat-footed and damage its reputation.

“As Minister of National Defence, you may not be aware Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) has participated in efforts to analyze UAP, which is probably traceable to circa 1950,” he wrote. “This recovered foreign material is studied through the Five Eyes Foreign Material Program (FMP), which, in Canada, is sponsored by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command aligned with several intelligence sharing arrangements and treaties.”

He went on to advise the Defence Minister to “request a classified briefing” on the program in order to start getting a communications strategy ready.

The timing of this letter is pretty remarkable. It was sent just a couple of months before David Grusch’s first bombshell exposé was published by The Debrief, and probably well after Grusch brought his concerns to the office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which may well have been pursuing further information from experts named by Grusch when Maguire penned it. Maguire’s letter appears to anticipate the claims that would soon be made public about a secretive program to retrieve and reverse-engineer UAP materials—one that stretches back for decades.

Representing a political district in the prairies, Maguire is best known as an advocate for farmers’ rights. He was a farmer himself, and he has no record of military service. How on earth could he have this kind of insider information about the study of UAPs?

One answer is that he doesn’t. Minister Anand responded to his letter, saying that neither Defence Research and Development Canada nor the Canadian Forces Intelligence Committee have any involvement in this kind of thing. Maguire may simply have been guessing about their involvement, and perhaps fishing for answers.

Maguire was right about one thing, though. Canada did have at least one UAP research program initiated in 1950. It was led by Wilbert Smith, a radio engineer for Transport Canada's Broadcast and Measurements Section. At the 1950 North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement conference, Smith learned about American efforts to study UAPs, and subsequently proposed a Canadian project to do the same, dubbed “Project Magnet”.

He detailed all of this in a memo dated November 21, 1950, in which he explained that he made “discreet enquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff in Washington”, and through these came to a few remarkable conclusions, quoted below:

A. The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.

B. Flying saucers exist.

C. Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Dr. Vannevar Bush.

D. The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance.

Smith’s source for this information was Dr. Robert Sarbacher, a well-respected researcher affiliated with high-profile institutions including Harvard and Princeton, where he worked in the Institute for Advanced Studies under the direction of Albert Einstein. Sarbacher served as an institutional representative of the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies, and as a consultant to the U.S. Navy and Department of Defense during the 1940s and ‘50s.

In response to a written inquiry from a researcher in 1983, Sarbacher openly confirmed his correspondence with Wilbert Smith, and shared more of his knowledge of the government’s secret UAP programs. He wrote that he wasn’t personally familiar with “the people involved in the recovery” of flying saucers, but that he was certain that “John von Neuman [sic] was definitely involved” in the program, referring to one of the scientists central to the Manhattan Project.

“Dr. Vannevar Bush was definitely involved, and I think Dr. Robert Oppenheimer also,” he added.

Sarbacher also said that he was “invited to participate in several discussions associated with the reported recoveries,” which he wasn’t able to attend, and that he “did receive some official reports” when he was working at the Pentagon.

Outside of this letter, I’m not aware of any other public statements or whistleblowing efforts on Sarbacher’s part on the topic of UAPs. It wasn’t an important part of his story. At the same time, he told his correspondent, “there is no particular reason I feel I shouldn’t or couldn’t answer any or all of your questions.”

As for Wilbert Smith, he did get permission, in 1950, to go ahead with Project Magnet, which made use of Department of Transportation facilities and some funding from Canada’s Defence Research Board and the National Research Council. Two years later, he issued a preliminary report in which he expressed his belief that UAPs were extraterrestrial in origin and that they use magnetism for flight. That same year, another research program, Project Second Story, was also established to study reports of flying saucers. That second project also received Defence Research Board funding, and involved Smith.

This Defence Research Board was later restructured to become the Defence Research and Development Canada, the agency referenced in MP Larry Maguire’s letter to the Minister of National Defence. Whatever else he got wrong in that letter, Maguire appears to have been correct in advising that the DRDC “has participated in efforts to analyze UAP, which is probably traceable to circa 1950.”