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Smith, who in 1955 became one of City View’s three inaugural trustees, was himself an ardent believer in aliens. In a speech delivered to the Vancouver Area UFO Club in 1961, a year before his death, he claimed to have communicated with extraterrestrials, whom he at least occasionally referred to as “the boys topside.” An engineer, he was particularly interested in such technical matters as how their spacecraft was built and how they were propelled. He claims they explained to him how the speed of light is not constant, and that time was not the measured chronological ticking we imagine, but a “field function” that changed throughout the universe, and which could be altered. Their ships, he was told, were supported on the Earth’s gravitational field. The fields surrounding their ships, he added, created areas that reduced areas that weakened the strength of objects that came into contact with them, accounting for the destruction of earthly military craft that flew too close to them. This explained, among other phenomenon, the May 1956 crash of a military jet into the Villa St. Louis convent in Orleans — the jet, Smith said, flew into a “very strong vortex of reduced binding,” causing it to break apart.

“I wrote a very stiff memorandum to the appropriate people in my own department pointing out some of these facts,” he wrote. But his letter, he maintained, “wound up on the crank file.”

Similar unstable vortices, he added, were created when nuclear explosions occurred. An unnamed friend of his who had also been in contact with “these people from outside” claimed to have spoken with one, Tyla, a garbage collector whose job it was to clean up the radioactive messes created by such man-made explosions. Tyla, Smith said, gathered the material, took it aboard his ship where it was rendered inert, and then dumped it in some secluded spot on Earth. In 1948, Tyla reportedly told his friend that he would dump his next load near Ottawa, and that he would pick an opportune time so many people could witness it. According to Smith, it took place on Remembrance Day that year: “We looked up to the north-west of Ottawa and there was Tyla’s little craft, an egg-shaped affair in the sky, and coming out of the tail-end of it was what looked like an almost dissipated portion of a jet trail that was dropping down.”