Überblick
Project Second Storey was Canada’s first interdepartmental government committee created specifically to decide how the federal state should assess and process reports of unidentified aerial objects. The Defence Research Board convened an initial meeting on 22 April 1952 to determine whether a more serious effort was required. The committee itself met for the first time two days later, on 24 April, and subsequently adopted the name “Project Second Storey” at its 19 May meeting.
The committee brought together scientific and military-intelligence representation. Peter Millman, an astronomer then associated with the Dominion Observatory, chaired the meetings; Wilbert Smith of the Department of Transport participated while continuing his separate Project Magnet work. Other participants represented the Defence Research Board, armed-service intelligence and operational staffs, and the Joint Intelligence Staff. The structure therefore gave Second Storey a broader institutional base than Magnet, although the committee’s mandate was deliberately limited.
Its principal practical product was a standardised sighting-report system. The form sought specific observational details, corroboration, weather and positional information, possible physical or instrumental evidence, and an assessment of witness reliability. The committee also developed guidance on common astronomical, meteorological and aviation-related sources of misidentification. These procedures show a genuine attempt to improve the quality and comparability of incoming reports, but they were never adopted broadly enough to generate the kind of systematic dataset that a large scientific study would have required.
By March 1953, Millman stated that the accumulated evidence did not warrant an “all out” investigation by the Canadian services. A November 1953 summary report emphasised the difficulty of independently checking most observations and the weakness of subjective testimony for scientific analysis. A sixth and final meeting followed on 22 February 1954. The committee then lapsed, while individual departments continued to receive or occasionally investigate reports. Canada’s current Sky Canada historical review summarises Second Storey as a six-meeting committee that concluded the subject did not justify continuing military investigation.
Chronology
1952 The Defence Research Board convened the committee.
1952–53 The group developed a structured report form and reviewed incoming material.
1954 It concluded that a large dedicated investigation was not warranted on the available evidence.
Context and mandate
Why the committee was created
Second Storey emerged from a convergence of three pressures. First, Canadian departments were receiving reports of unusual aerial objects and had no uniform method for dealing with them. Second, U.S. Air Force programmes had already created a precedent for centralised collection and assessment. Third, Project Magnet had placed the issue inside the Canadian government in a more controversial form: Wilbert Smith was arguing that the reported phenomenon might represent an advanced technology worthy of experimental study.
The Defence Research Board’s response was institutionally different from Magnet. It did not set out to test a propulsion theory or operate a dedicated detection station. Its immediate question was administrative and evidential: were the reports sufficiently coherent and important to justify a larger Canadian effort? That distinction explains much of what followed. Second Storey devoted considerable attention to how reports should be recorded and filtered before deciding whether intensive investigation was justified.
The current Government of Canada historical review describes the committee as a DRB body established in 1952 to examine reported “flying saucers” and determine the appropriate federal response.
Formation and membership
A Defence Research Board meeting on 22 April 1952 brought together eleven participants to consider whether a more serious government effort was warranted. Two days later the new committee held its first formal meeting under Millman’s chairmanship. Eight members attended. The surviving records identify representation from the Defence Research Board, Department of Transport, Joint Intelligence Staff, Directorate of Air Intelligence, Directorate of Naval Intelligence, and Directorate of Military Operations and Plans.
The committee initially considered the neutral codename “Project Theta.” That name was abandoned because of security and tripartite naming conventions, and “Project Second Storey” was adopted on 19 May. The naming discussion helps clarify the project’s status: Second Storey functioned as an interdepartmental committee within ordinary defence-science and intelligence procedures.
Security handling was correspondingly limited. The committee considered CONFIDENTIAL adequate for its own material, while members were to hold SECRET clearances so that information from allied sources could be exchanged if necessary. Public and press contact was discouraged. The classification level and press restrictions were consistent with defence administrative practice and the government’s concern about publicity.
The reporting system
The most durable piece of work produced by Second Storey was its reporting architecture. The form collected witness background, location, date and time, duration, number of objects, angular position, movement, changes of direction, shape, colour, apparent size and brightness, sound, trails, cloud conditions, corroborating witnesses, photographs or other contributory evidence, and the interviewing officer’s view of witness reliability.
The accompanying instructions were methodologically more significant than the form itself. Observers were to distinguish what they actually saw or heard from personal interpretation, provide numerical information where possible, and seek independent corroboration. Investigators were also told to note possible photographic, electronic, magnetic or radioactive evidence associated with a report. In modern terms, the committee was trying to turn heterogeneous testimony into comparable observational records.
A surviving version of the guidance begins by emphasising accuracy, precise observation and minimal personal interpretation. A large declassified Canadian file containing the Second Storey material is available through an archival scan mirror.
Wilbert Smith proposed a numerical weighting system intended to score reports for reliability, confirmation and descriptive clarity. The approach attempted to formalise judgements about witness experience, corroboration and internal consistency. It was not a validated statistical model, but it is historically notable as an early attempt to make the quality of UAP reports explicit rather than treating every account as evidentially equivalent.
The committee also supplied descriptions of balloons, aircraft, astronomical objects, clouds, optical effects, meteors, aurorae and other ordinary phenomena that could generate unusual reports. This was useful operationally because a reporting system that did not actively test conventional explanations would have had limited value. At the same time, the committee never accumulated enough standardised observations to demonstrate how well its filtering method performed across a large dataset.
Documentary analysis
The committee’s advisory mandate
A point that is often blurred in later summaries is the committee’s operational role. Second Storey was not designed as a permanent field team that would dispatch investigators to every promising sighting. At the July 1952 meeting, members explicitly distinguished the committee’s advisory role from direct witness interrogation. Individual military or civil agencies could follow up particular reports when personnel and time allowed, but the committee itself did not establish a dedicated national investigative service.
That decision shaped the evidence available to the committee. Second Storey wanted better data before recommending a larger investigation, yet it did not create the field apparatus most likely to obtain such data. The result was a methodological tension: the committee could reasonably judge the reports it possessed as weak while remaining poorly placed to determine what more systematic field investigation might have produced.
Relationship with Project Magnet
Second Storey and Project Magnet overlapped in time but should be treated as a separate event in the historical record. Project Magnet was a Department of Transport research project led by Smith and built around his technical hypotheses. Second Storey was a Defence Research Board committee intended to advise government more broadly on whether reported flying saucers justified a larger official effort.
Smith sat on Second Storey and repeatedly pushed for a more active programme. He proposed following promising newspaper reports, gathering multiple observations of the same event, testing the accuracy of public observation and applying numerical weighting to witness reports. The committee accepted some of his reporting-method ideas but did not adopt his wider interpretation of the phenomenon or his preference for a dedicated scientific investigation.
This contrast is one of the most useful features of the Canadian record. Two legitimate government-linked efforts operated at the same time and reached different judgements about how much could be inferred from the reports. Smith became increasingly confident that the phenomenon represented advanced technology. Second Storey treated the available reports as insufficient to justify a large military-scientific programme. The distinction is essential when describing Canadian government policy: Smith’s conclusions belonged to Project Magnet, while Second Storey represented the broader DRB advisory position.
U.S. influence and Project Blue Book
The committee also looked south for information. Its May 1952 discussions show an interest in the U.S. Air Force’s developing Project Blue Book procedures, and members hoped to bring Blue Book director Captain Edward J. Ruppelt to Ottawa to explain the American programme. The visit does not appear to have occurred.
Second Storey remained a Canadian committee with its own form and administrative procedures, while drawing on the greater U.S. experience, report volume and military apparatus represented by Project Blue Book. The comparison mattered because Second Storey’s central policy question — whether a national investigation was warranted — was being asked while the U.S. Air Force was already trying to answer a similar question on a larger scale.
Outcomes and legacy
Winding down, 1953–1954
By late 1952 and early 1953 the committee’s momentum had visibly weakened. Meetings became less frequent and attendance declined. On 9 March 1953, Millman stated that the evidence available did not warrant an all-out investigation by the Canadian services and that detailed analysis by DND was unnecessary. The committee nevertheless supported retaining a central route for reports so that the government could remain informed.
Millman’s 21 November 1953 summary report captured the committee’s underlying evidential concern: most reports were difficult to check independently and therefore poorly suited to scientific analysis. This was a narrower and more defensible proposition than saying that every reported object had been identified. The committee’s practical conclusion was that the quality of the material did not justify building a larger programme around it.
A sixth meeting was held on 22 February 1954, partly amid renewed publicity surrounding Smith’s work. After that meeting Second Storey became inactive. The federal government did not stop receiving reports; rather, responsibility dispersed among existing agencies and later shifted towards centralised record keeping. Canada’s current official historical review states that the committee recommended ending military investigations, while public reports continued to reach DND, the RCMP, Transport Canada and other bodies.
Declassification and later historical record
Second Storey’s records did not remain permanently classified. In 1968, as responsibility for federal UFO reporting moved to the National Research Council, Millman supported declassification of the dormant committee material. The surviving records are now represented in Library and Archives Canada holdings and in the University of Ottawa’s Arthur Bray fonds, which includes Second Storey meeting minutes, witness-interview instructions, reporting forms and related material.
The University of Ottawa finding aid lists dedicated files for Project Second Storey information and witness-interview instructions, DRB meeting minutes from April 1952 to March 1953, and the Department of Transport weather-balloon experiment.
A useful independent retrospective appears in the Condon Report’s survey of foreign UFO programmes. After interviewing Millman in 1968, the report described Second Storey as a DRB committee formed to decide whether Canada should undertake large-scale investigation, and recorded its conclusion that such an effort was not warranted. That account is broadly consistent with both the surviving meeting record and the present Canadian government summary.
Historical significance
Project Second Storey matters because Canada’s early federal response operated on two different tracks. Alongside Project Magnet, the state created a separate committee with military, intelligence and scientific representation to evaluate the problem at policy level. That committee produced a reporting methodology, tested the case for a larger investigation, and ultimately declined to recommend one.
Its reporting form is also historically important. Many later UAP institutions have faced the same basic problem: reports arrive as inconsistent narratives with uncertain timing, geometry, sensor context and witness reliability. Second Storey tried to standardise those variables in 1952. The project did not solve the problem, but it recognised correctly that evidential quality depends heavily on how information is collected at the start.
The project’s limitations are equally instructive. A committee that largely avoided direct field investigation could evaluate only the records supplied to it. Its scepticism about the available material was reasonable; its ability to determine what a better-resourced investigation might have found was much weaker. This tension — between poor incoming data and reluctance to invest in obtaining better data — recurs throughout later government UAP history.
Evidence assessment
The documentary basis for Project Second Storey is strong. Its establishment, membership, meeting sequence, reporting form, internal discussions and winding down are supported by surviving government records, archival finding aids and later official Canadian reviews. There is little uncertainty about what the committee was or what it spent most of its time doing.
The strongest positive contribution was methodological. Second Storey recognised that unusual-object reports required disciplined collection: exact time and location, geometry, weather, movement, witness experience, corroboration and possible instrumental or physical evidence. Its form was more systematic than ad hoc correspondence and anticipated several principles still relevant to modern UAP reporting. The limitation is practical rather than conceptual: the form saw limited use and did not generate a sufficiently large, consistently investigated dataset for the committee to test its own methodology rigorously.
The committee’s decision against a large investigation is also well documented, but the basis of that decision needs to be stated precisely. Millman and his colleagues were judging the material then available to government, not reporting the result of a national instrumented survey. Their finding that most reports could not be independently checked supports a defensible assessment of evidence quality; it does not amount to a case-by-case identification of every underlying report.
Second Storey’s narrow operational mandate matters to the weight of its conclusion. The committee wanted reliable data yet chose not to become a standing field-investigation body. Individual agencies could follow up selected reports, but there was no national mechanism designed to obtain high-quality measurements from promising events. The project therefore supports a strong historical conclusion about how Canadian officials evaluated the reports they possessed, and a weaker scientific conclusion about the full range of phenomena that might have been observed had better data been collected.
The relationship with Project Magnet further strengthens the historical analysis. Smith’s participation demonstrates that a more extraordinary interpretation was represented inside the committee. His proposals for more active investigation were considered and generally not adopted. This makes it difficult to describe Second Storey simply as ignorance of alternative views. At the same time, several members, particularly Millman, clearly approached the subject with a strong expectation that ordinary phenomena would explain most reports. That expectation influenced the project’s priorities and should be recognised when assessing how open-ended its inquiry really was.
There is insufficient evidence for the stronger claim that Second Storey was a deliberate “whitewash” designed to conceal a known extraordinary phenomenon. The records show scepticism, concern about publicity and a preference for conventional explanations, but they also show real work on reporting standards, allied information exchange and evidential quality. The more supportable criticism is methodological: the committee’s low confidence in existing reports helped justify a limited investigation, while the limited investigation made it less likely that substantially better evidence would be produced.
The available evidence therefore supports treating Project Second Storey as a well-documented and historically significant government programme whose main achievement was procedural rather than explanatory. It established an early Canadian framework for standardised reporting and helped set federal policy away from dedicated investigation. Its conclusion that the available evidence did not justify a large military-scientific effort is strongly supported as an institutional judgement. Its dataset was too limited to resolve the origin of the wider body of reports categorised at the time as flying saucers.
Source library
University of Ottawa Archives — Arthur Bray fonds, Project Second Storey files
Finding aid listing Second Storey witness-interview instructions, Defence Research Board meeting minutes, reporting material and related Project Magnet/Blue Book files. Useful for locating the surviving document corpus.
Open University of Ottawa Archives — Arthur Bray fonds, Project Second Storey files
Declassified Canadian UFO records — Project Second Storey material (scan mirror)
Large scan set containing primary Second Storey instructions and reporting material. Use as a document-access mirror while citing the originating Canadian government records and archival series where identifiable.
Open Declassified Canadian UFO records — Project Second Storey material (scan mirror)
Office of the Chief Science Advisor — Sky Canada historical review
Current Government of Canada account of Project Second Storey: DRB sponsorship, Millman chairmanship, six meetings, standardised form, limited adoption and the committee’s recommendation against continuing military investigation.
Open Office of the Chief Science Advisor — Sky Canada historical review
Report of the Sky Canada Project (official PDF)
Official report reproducing a Second Storey sighting form and placing the project within the longer history of Canadian federal UAP reporting.
Open Report of the Sky Canada Project (official PDF)
Matthew Hayes, A History of Canada’s UFO Investigation, 1950–1995 (Trent University, 2019)
Primary-source-rich reconstruction of the committee’s six meetings, reporting-form development, Smith–Millman differences, March 1953 policy judgement and 1954 winding down. References original LAC and University of Ottawa files throughout.
Open Matthew Hayes, A History of Canada’s UFO Investigation, 1950–1995 (Trent University, 2019)
Matthew Hayes, “Canada, UFOs, and Wishful Thinking” — Active History
Concise historian’s account of the surviving meeting record and the gap between popular portrayals of a secret investigation and the committee’s largely bureaucratic reporting work.
Open Matthew Hayes, “Canada, UFOs, and Wishful Thinking” — Active History
Condon Report — UFO Study Programs in Foreign Countries: Canada
1968 retrospective based on a visit with Peter Millman. Describes Second Storey as a committee assessing whether large-scale investigation was warranted and records the continuation of Canadian report files after the committee became inactive.
Open Condon Report — UFO Study Programs in Foreign Countries: Canada