The Boys from Topside

About the Author

This site's own Wilbert B. Smith key-figures entry, its Project Magnet case file, and its existing essential-reading articles on Project Magnet: The Lights In The Sky Are Not Stars and The UFO Files: The Canadian Connection Exposed already document Smith's credentialed 1950-1954 government career in depth; this article does not repeat that ground.

This book's own front matter connects Smith directly to the wider 1950s-60s contactee movement: its introduction was written by George Hunt Williamson, a key figure in the Adamski-era contactee circle and co-author of The Saucers Speak (1954). This article's own research also found documented correspondence between Smith and Frances Swan, a Maine contactee who claimed automatic-writing contact with entities she called "Affa" and "Ponnar," introduced to Smith in 1954 by retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Herbert B. Knowles -- a concrete link, independent of this book itself, placing Smith inside the same informal network as other contactee-era figures rather than as an isolated case.

The publisher itself carries a directly relevant reputation this site's own research treats as material context: Gray Barker's Saucerian Books/Press, already documented on this site as carrying "a separately, extensively documented reputation -- by his own later admissions and by the independent testimony of friends and collaborators -- for fabricating and embellishing UFO stories for commercial gain throughout his career." That reputation does not itself prove anything false in this specific book, but it is a relevant fact about the imprint that published it, and this article discloses it rather than omitting it.

Historical Context & Origins

This article's own research was not able to confirm who specifically initiated this posthumous 1969 compilation beyond editor Timothy Green Beckley -- whether Smith's family, his estate, or Beckley and Barker acting independently -- and flags that detail as unconfirmed rather than asserting a specific account.

The book collects eleven essays Smith originally wrote for Topside, the newsletter of the Ottawa New Sciences Club, an organization this article's own research confirms Smith founded during his post-Project Magnet years -- not, as sometimes assumed from the 1996 reprint's retrospective subtitle (...Life of New Age Futurist Wilbert Smith), an organization contemporaneously named for the "New Age" movement, a later label applied only when Beckley's own Inner Light/Global Communications imprint reissued the book in 1996 under a new ISBN (189206216X) with different cover art.

This article's own research could not verify a specific medical detail sometimes attached to Smith's later years -- that he suffered a brain tumor. Multiple independent sources confirm only that Smith died of cancer on December 27, 1962, without specifying the type or site, and this article found no biographer or researcher directly connecting his declining health to the content of his later claims. Readers should treat any more specific medical claim as unconfirmed.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The book's organizing theme, drawn from its Topside-newsletter essays, is Smith's own cosmology of contact: a claimed telepathic relationship with beings he and his circle called "the boys topside," bound up with his separate "New Science" ideas about unified-field and antigravity concepts he said the contacts had shown him. This article's own research found no evidence for the term "Council of Etheria" or similar terminology in connection with this book or Smith's writings generally, despite that phrase sometimes circulating in secondary UFO-lore discussion, and does not use it here.

Beyond Smith's own essays, the collection includes appendix material from other contributors on a claimed anomalous "chunk of hardware" found near Ottawa, alleged Venusian landing claims, additional humanoid-encounter reports, a "Canadian saucer album," and UFO photographs attributed to the Childerhose and Homer Schaeffer cases -- none of which this article's own research was able to independently verify, and all of which should be read as period contactee-movement material rather than corroborated evidence.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This site's own Project Magnet case file (Case File #277) documents Smith's actual, credentialed government research program in full -- the 1950 Geo-Magnetics memorandum, the Shirleys Bay instrumented observatory, the ambiguous August 1954 gravimeter reading, and the program's formal closure -- and is where this book's citation on this site originates. That case file explicitly separates Smith's legitimate government work from the esoteric material this book collects, a distinction this article maintains throughout.

This site's own Project Magnet: The Lights In The Sky Are Not Stars article covers a separate, later (2017) compilation of Smith's own Project Magnet-era primary writings, assembled with additional research context by Grant Cameron and John Musgrave -- a companion volume readers wanting Smith's credentialed-era material, rather than this book's post-1954 esoteric turn, should consult directly.

Critical Reception & Controversies

As of this article's research (August 2026), the book holds a thin 2.5-out-of-5 average on Goodreads from only 2 ratings and no written reviews -- too small a sample to draw any real conclusion from, but consistent with a scarce, little-discussed small-press item rather than a text with any meaningful readership engagement.

This article's own research found Matthew Hayes -- the academic historian already cited on this site's Project Magnet case file for his 2018 Journal of Canadian Studies article and his chapter in Search for the Unknown: Canada's UFO Files and the Rise of Conspiracy Theory (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022) -- treats Smith's broader body of writing and notes as a case study in how one figure's material gets amplified into wider UFO conspiracy theory. This article was not able to confirm that Hayes's published work specifically discusses this book by title, however, and presents that connection as general scholarly context on Smith rather than a direct review of this specific volume.

No other academic or mainstream press engagement with this specific book was located during this research -- an expected pattern for a scarce, out-of-print 1969 small-press collection rather than evidence of any deliberate obscurity.

Influence & Legacy

This book's legacy is documentary rather than evidentiary: it is the primary printed record of Smith's post-Project Magnet esoteric period, connecting a genuinely credentialed government engineer's later private beliefs to the wider 1950s-60s contactee movement through its George Hunt Williamson introduction and Smith's own documented correspondence with fellow contactee Frances Swan.

Set alongside this site's own Project Magnet case file, this book's chief value is in illustrating a documented pattern within UFO history -- a credentialed researcher's serious, government-backed instrumented program giving way, after that program's inconclusive close, to private and increasingly esoteric personal belief -- rather than in any specific claim the book itself makes.

The Book

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