Wilbert Brockhouse Smith (1910–1962) was a Canadian radio engineer who spent most of his career in the federal Department of Transport and, from 1950, led Project Magnet, a small official study of whether flying saucers might draw power from the Earth's magnetic field. His memorandum of November 21, 1950, reporting what Canadian Embassy contacts in Washington told him about American secrecy on the subject, is one of the most quoted government papers in UFO history.

Born in Lethbridge, Alberta, Smith studied electrical engineering at the University of British Columbia, finishing a master's degree in 1934, and was chief engineer of the Vancouver radio station CJOR before joining the Department of Transport in 1939 to help build Canada's wartime signal-monitoring system. He worked on radio propagation, frequency standards and ionospheric monitoring in the far north, was Canada's chief delegate to the North American broadcasting conferences of 1949 and 1950, and in 1957 became superintendent of radio regulations engineering. He was honored after his passing for his work on broadcasting standards.

In the 1950 memo to the Controller of Telecommunications, written after a trip to Washington for the broadcasting talks, Smith said discreet enquiries through embassy staff had produced four points: the subject was the most highly classified in the U.S. government, "rating higher even than the H-bomb"; flying saucers exist; a small group "headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush" was studying them; and American authorities considered the matter tremendously significant. Notes in his papers dated September 15, 1950 record a related conversation with the American physicist Robert Sarbacher, who is quoted as saying the saucers exist and that "we didn't make them." Both papers report what Smith was told, and no U.S. record has confirmed the group they describe or Vannevar Bush's place in it.

Project Magnet was approved on December 2, 1950 and run part time on Department of Transport resources, with help from the Defence Research Board. Smith's 1952 report concluded that the objects were probably extraterrestrial craft that manipulated magnetism, and he later set up an instrumented station at Shirley's Bay outside Ottawa. The department ended the work as official research in June 1954; that August the station recorded a deflection large enough to set off its alarm, under an overcast sky, and no cause was ever identified. When his final report was released in 1968, the astronomer Peter Millman, who had chaired the parallel Project Second Storey committee, added a note that its conclusions were Smith's alone. Smith carried on privately, turning to theories of gravity and to contact accounts, until he passed away in Ottawa in 1962.

His papers drew new attention in 2026. A less-redacted copy of a December 1953 CIA memo, released in June in the Department of War's third PURSUE tranche, showed American intelligence following Canada's saucer research while Project Magnet was running. Researcher Grant Cameron cited the 1950 memo on American Alchemy in September, and the Sarbacher notes circulated widely on X, including in a post reposted by the journalist George Knapp. Some posts said the memo confirms that physical debris was recovered, though its text does not mention debris. Smith's memo and notes remain the documents most often cited for the claim that Washington classified flying saucers above the hydrogen bomb.