Wilbert

Wilbert B. Smith, an electrical engineer with the Canadian Department of Transport, was a key figure in Canada's early UFO investigations in the 1950s. He headed "Project Magnet," an unidentified flying object (UFO) study program established by Transport Canada in December 1950 [1, 6].

Regarding an alleged "alien artifact," Smith's claims primarily centered around the belief that UFOs were indeed extraterrestrial in origin and that material from such craft might exist. Specifically:

• In his 1952 and 1953 reports, Smith concluded that UFOs likely came from intelligent, extraterrestrial sources and almost certainly manipulated magnetism for flight [1].
• More controversially, Smith reportedly claimed to have handled "possible UFO meta-material" and asserted that the Canadians "apparently have 3,000 pounds of alien metal" [7, 9]. He also suggested that the USA had alien craft or pieces of them [8].

While Smith made these significant claims about the existence of alien material and even its quantity in Canada, the provided information does not detail an "extensive deep-search and retrieval" by the Canadian government that definitively confirmed or publicly presented such an alien artifact. Instead, the mentions of the "3,000 pounds of alien metal" are consistently linked to Smith's personal allegations and beliefs, with some sources even questioning the veracity of his assertions [7, 9]. The official government investigation, Project Magnet, was primarily a study program, and while it explored the possibility of alien spacecraft, there is no public record from the provided sources of the recovery or official confirmation of an alien artifact by the Canadian government as a result of an "extensive deep-search and retrieval" operation [4].