>(HAUC), which can function as a submersible craft capable of extreme underwater speeds (lack of water-skin friction)
Chinese advancement in frictionless supercavitating submarines are already well known[1]. But claiming that they have the capability to do so with EM propulsion is something new.
What's more bewildering to me is that the patent fiasco surround this. AFAIK state of the art defence tech rarely gets through patent system for obvious reasons, TIL that U.S. Patent system has a way to file secret patents and even that wasn't used in this case.
Not sure whether they filed this patent with PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty), then they would be eligible to submit this patent application for review in other countries as well.
> The concept is fairly simple, although the engineering required to make it a reality is anything but. All matter contains energy on the quantum level. By theoretically creating its own incredibly dense and polarized energy field, the hybrid craft is claimed to be able to create a quantum 'vacuum' around itself which allows it to repel any air or water molecules with which it interacts.
As a PhD in physics, this just sounds like nonsense to me. Energy isn't a field and to polarize it doesn't mean anything.
> Little information can be found about Salvatore Cezar Pais; he has virtually no web presence. What is known is that he received a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1999 and that he currently works as an aerospace engineer for NAWCAD at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland – the Navy’s top aircraft test base. Pais has published several articles and presented papers at American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conferences over the years describing his work in electromagnetic propulsion, revolutionary room temperature superconductors, and topics like his PhD dissertation: "Bubble generation under reduced gravity conditions for both co-flow and cross-flow configurations."
My sample size is small at ~5, but former classmates who joined the military research labs were not the brightest bunch. Of my overall cohort, the smartest ones went into industry, sometimes a different industry than their field of study. The smart but idealistic ones went into academia. And then the ones that truly never shed their sophomoric arrogance, acquired in their formative years and that should have been beaten out of them by the doctoral process, went to the military labs to work on secret stuff.
It may have been true in the past, but military labs don't have the cachet to attract top talent.
With that being said, the most likely reason for this patent filing, as others have noted, is misdirection.
> As a PhD in physics, this just sounds like nonsense to me. Energy isn't a field and to polarize it doesn't mean anything.
That part is just a terrible attempt by the journalist to summarize the theoretical background of the patent's (rather ludicrous) claims in a popular form. The polarization they're talking about is just the vacuum polarization in the standard QED sense. The funny stuff starts when the patent assumes that you can automagically generate fields close to or over the Schwinger limit.
As a fellow physics PhD, I recommend reading the actual patent for comic relief [1]. It has no other use as far as I can tell.
This whole story is complete nonsense. First off, if the US military was in possession of such technology they would NEVER submit a patent for it. Why would they publish the technology to enable others (foreign governments and entities) to easily copy it? The US Government doesn't need to protect themselves from not being able to use the technology if it was real anyways. The federal government of the United States has the "right to use patented inventions without permission"[1].
So yeah, perhaps someone working for the Navy wants to try to patent it so they can make some money from the technology. Well, it is very likely such technology would be top secret classified and any individuals working on it would find themselves in deep trouble for publishing anything, including patents, related to their work.
If this story is true, at least the part about some patent trying to explain the UFO's that have been in the news more of late then it is likely a psyops piece/work and/or is a means to try to quell concerns that there are in fact extraterrestrials visiting earth or things the U.S. government (and others) can't explain.
>As a PhD in physics, this just sounds like nonsense to me. Energy isn't a field and to polarize it doesn't mean anything
Well considering light is energy and you can polarize that.
The inventor is saying you can create gravitational waves through with just EM. Now you need to combine sound and angular momentum. Add a shit load of volts. Like Tesla on crack. And create high frequency standing wave in a resonance chamber. Boom you have the equivalent to a laser. But using all of physics in a perfect storm of power.
I know people who work there, and it seems to have a similar bell curve of talent you see in any corporation (though given what kind of person is attracted to government work, maybe shifted more towards the bottom).
>My sample size is small at ~5, but former classmates who joined the military research labs were not the brightest bunch. Of my overall cohort, the smartest ones went into industry, sometimes a different industry than their field of study. The smart but idealistic ones went into academia.
I hate to point this out but "smartest" doesn't have monopoly over inventions or discoveries.
I've seen two variants of this fly over my house in Colorado a few years ago. Giant triangular craft moving silently at insane speed - clearing the entire night sky in 7 seconds, appeared to be the size of an aircraft carrier. They have 5 very dim white points of light underneath that outline their triangle shape. I wouldn't even believe my own eyes except that my wife shared the experience with me.
Welcome to Colorado. If you camp up in the mountains where there is no light pollution and do some stargazing you'll usually see something classified within a week or two. It was hilarious to me when the B-21 was announced and I could confirm I wasn't regularly hallucinating the profile of an F-117 or something.
The stuff they are doing now with drones is even more wild, I can't wait to read about how those actually work in a few years.
In approx 1989 or so, i was doing marching exercises at the truckee california airport for my civil air patrol group...
My command leader was a former SR-71 flight mechanic...
We were marching about, and it was just after dusk, but a full moon.
At the horizon, we saw a craft come up over the mountains at incredible speed - and we watched it as it was flying at a vertical as opposed to an arc which a winged aircraft woulld require...
Within seconds the thing was hovering about 100 feet above us. Silently. A huge triangle with the white lights on corners and one in the middle.
Our commander yelled and said “everyone inside now!” And hustled us back into our hangar office...
—-
About three weeks ago, in santa rosa ca, i saw a sphere glowing in the sky and moving at a rate which was impossible for conventional craft..
And as i watched it, it literally just disappeared.
Why would anyone controlling such an aircraft deliberately take it to a hovering position above 100 feet of people who have never seen it before? Aren't these flight tests supposed to happen away from public's view? It looks as if on one hand, the government wants to keep a tight lid on these things, on the other hand, they want to give it all away so easily (based on stories such as yours), which makes no sense. I will be a skeptic until the day I can get to lick the surface of such a craft.
It seems like tech so incredible as this would make eyewitness testimony quite literally “unbelievable” and “incredible”. If you had tech like that, you could pretty much show yourself to any group of people less than the population of an entire city, and nobody would believe them.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be intentional. Perhaps they had some other business to fly to that airport, and simply don’t care if there are people there or not due to the “unbelievability effect” which they’d be well aware of.
(Obviously I’m just speculating, and I’m not assigning belief either way to any of this; I just enjoy thinking about the possibilities here.)
I'm as skeptical as everyone else to believe your story even though I've seen two of these. Can you describe the color, markings, or material of the craft? With my experience all I could make out were the 5 points of dim light and nothing else.
Not that this matters much but I used to do a ton of photoshop work down to the pixel and would manually refocus my eyes to clear them. I felt like Wally doing this 3 or 4 times trying to gauge the altitude. It was definitely above the cloud level. I put it around normal cruising altitude of a commercial jet but at that altitude it had to be the size of an aircraft carrier because of spacing of the lights. After talking to several people about this others suggested it was much lower than I described because of the flight characteristics, but I guarantee we didn't get buzzed by this thing; it was miles away.
The events only lasted a few seconds and even as I was pointing at it and shouting to my wife - it took her a moment to realize what was happening and she nearly missed it. I can't take a convincing photo of the moon. This would have been impossible.
Triangular UFOs are interesting. When i was at work one day, (we work on top of a large hill that overlooks land to the horizon) I see a triangular UFO light up and fly slowly towards us. I tell my colleagues, but they are surprisingly not interested. I watched it for a while, my heart in my mouth, sweating. It turned out to be helicopters flying in formation through a very light mist.
If you cannot take a convincing photo of the moon, you should stop talking about UFOs and instead focus on learning to take a convincing photo of the moon. I hope you get the point. This is not an attempt to ridicule you, just pointing out the amount of ridiculousness in your post.
Ok, so I've taken one crisp clear photo of the moon through a friends telescope they let me borrow and I did it with my iPhone. It took 30 minutes to set up and calibrate, I had to position it on the moon, and keep adjusting the tracking. I'm sure 99% of the population has never done this. When I say I can't take a convincing photo of the moon I mean that if I had to capture an event that only lasted 7 seconds and it was the size of the moon; the photo would be a white dot on a black background. You sound like you need to diagnosed if you think I'm not allowed to talk about an experience because I didn't take a picture for you.
Examples and procedures to take a convincing photo of the moon - you need google and some money for the equipment.
Examples and procedures to take a convincing photo of an erratically moving UFO - I don't claim I have the know-how. All I know is the evidence has to be high quality and irrefutable to make such a claim.
My point is, people should not be talking about phenomena they don't understand as if they are true, if they have no skills to gather required evidence.
> the evidence has to be high quality and irrefutable
Please provide an annotated list of irrefutable evidence that others have created so I can see what you are talking about...
Edit: actually if I were to meet you in real life you could just ask my wife about the incident. She hates the fact that she saw it too: I used to talk about this stuff but backed off in recent years. Because she was there it validated the fact that there is some type of conspiracy in the world. We don't know the exact details of the conspiracy but something is definitely not as it seems when a silent triangle rips across the night sky.
Edit2: a simple google search and the second video appears to be what I saw. It's going much slower but the light pattern and altitude are what I remember. Watch the whole video - the first lights are just a plane https://youtu.be/RoR0izkByAI
Again: For it to be conspiracy, there must be violation of law. A "conspiracy theory" needs a law violated, at least in theory. Keeping or sharing secrets does not violate law -- unless the secrets are about violations of law.
Is this really difficult? Nixon had a conspiracy both to violate laws, and to cover up violating laws, making at least three violations. Trump's people probably conspired to violate laws against foreign influence on elections. Clinton didn't conspire to perjure, because it was just him.
“High Frequency Gravitational Wave Generator"? Isn't this the technology reported to be seen by the infamous Bob Lazar in the late 80s? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar
Tinfoil attention seeker or big claims/flimsy evidence pleader. There's also a lot of lonely, sad people who say the FBI's watching them and have a file on them... delusions of grandeur.
I used to have a similar stance, especially given the outlandish nature of his claims, but a lot of things he said that were initially used against him after the Knapp interview turned out to be accurate over time. His supposed prediction of the discovery of Moscovium ("Element 115") still puzzles me.
Not that that's proving anything but it gives me a harder time to entirely dismiss it.
The Joe Rogan interview linked in sibling comment is an interesting follow up to the initial interviews with George Knapp from the late 80s.
Well one could say that it would be a matter of time before someone discovered the Element 115 - what's curious is that he seems pretty confident when he says that, when we will have a stable version of the element (if ever), it will have the same properties he claims it has.
keep in mind though, that it's no longer delusions of grandeur to suspect a 3 letter agency watching you. Just matter of fact.
Just make an international phone call with a non-citizen, for the most obvious example. Slightly less obvious is just walking around outside if you are within 20 miles of a big city or an international border.
To me, that I still look at these guys claims of spooks watching them with incredulity is a bit disturbing. They were obviously nuts, but now it's a fact of life? Totally bizarre.
Not only that. The related drawings include what appears to be some sort of "tac tac" craft.
Which, at this point means we either have some kind of stupid psychological operation on our hands, or (hopefully) some rational facts that shed light on the bullshit artistry of paranormal crackpots, and dispel idiotic space alien malarky once and for all.
I swear, if I hear any further bullshit about "greys" from "Zeta Reticuli 1 & 2" and watch people eat a can of X-files garbage like it's a Dean Kamen TED Talk, I'm going to off myself by eating rat poison, because this world is fucking stupid.
I find this scary. Because: Say this technology isn't that hard, say that we are actually technologically capable of making this a reality? Of making a craft that can basically separate itself off from the rest of the universe and flit off to wherever it wants with impunity? That means that there are very likely many many other alien species out there who have similar capability. And those species don't actually have to be that smart or advanced, they could be just as violent and messed up as we are. And they could be zipping in and out of our atmosphere all the time.
I guess this is the first time I've considered that this whole UFO/alien thing might be real.
God, this might be why they all look the same - the underlying technology requires the same basic external shape... but the craft could be from different civilisations.
They seem to be confusing friction due to interaction with air and water with inertial mass. This is crackpottery at the highest level. It's a bunch of technobabble.
How does writing a patent for a device that obviously can't work as described achieve anything. They can't come along years later and say, oh we invented that, if something similar emerges, as it will be abundantly clear from the nonsense description that they did not invent it.
There seem to be two plausible reasons for getting such a patent — the navy genuinely thinks this is just around the corner and doesn’t want to pay extortionate license fees to an American company to use it or they want China to think we are pursuing such a technology and want them to waste resources pursuing it themselves.
The first doesn't seem plausible for the reason I gave. The second occurred to me. But how stupid do they think the Chinese are? If the top Chinese military researchers really have such a poor grasp of physics, then their research efforts present no difficulties for the security of the US.
The only serious explanation I can come up with is that buried in this application is some element of the design which is feasible and which they do want to protect. But even that seems unlikely, given that they could have just made it secret.
Another less likely explanation is that someone in the navy is playing a prank on the public and the patent office. If the person who submitted the application doesn't actually exist, the navy might have trouble tracking down the perpetrator of the hoax.
One final possibility is that it is a recruiting tool. Perhaps by making this public they get a bunch of correspondence from talented individuals who capably point out that is nonsense, or that are capable of doing experiments that demonstrate parts of the patent to be nonfeasible.
Possibly also they do have some real advanced program that actually is working and they want a smokescreen up to explain it. Maybe some new stealth craft or propulsion or guidance system that is a normal leap forward. Maybe a drone with especially advanced ai guidance systems that allows for more maneuverability. Something the Chinese could copy if they knew how it worked. Or the reverse — that we have discovered some system the Chinese created and are trying to copy it and want them to think we have gotten it wrong.
The first seems quite reasonable. The very public smokescreen would be to control the narrative. Every time someone reported seeing such a thing, the public could be told it is probably just the US working on UFO technology. Certainly I believe the average person without a science degree will not see just how impossible this patent is.
What's really odd is the reply of the patent examiner. It's almost like they are asking, "so just to make sure I understand you, this is quite impossible, right?". The military replied, "yeah of course it is, it would require more energy than could be produced by all the power stations on earth, even if the physics were sound. If it makes you feel better, we could add that we are doing this on battery power".
The general public doesn't seem concerned enough to need a smokescreen, and I wouldn't necessarily consider this "very public." Most people either already believe it's nonsense, or probably secret classified terrestrial craft, or aliens regardless of the official position. The military could probably get away with simply ignoring any rumors and sightings and letting them disappear into the noise of pop culture.
Does anyone recall the missing hard drives from LLL or los alamos, which were grabbed by the chinese spy?
Or the theft of an AWAX by the chinese?
They are not stupid.
When i was at lockheed the chinese were phishing lockheed staff who had attended defense conferences. They managed to get a worm in lockheed that trickle fed them stolen data.
When it was discovered they opened the flood gates and tried to dump mass data out of the lockheed network - which, at the time, only had three egress points to the internet such that lockheed had to shit them down.
Then, lockheed tried to keep an air-gap between vendors they were using... but the chinese hacked the vendors such that they coulld compromise the usb drives being used as the sneakerbet between lockheed and the vendors....
Stupidity is not always evenly distributed. Both the Russians and Americans threw away money on paranormal research, for example, largely because they thought the other side was doing it.
You could argue that there are more stupid Chinese than stupid Americans, but only on the basis that there are way more Chinese than Americans.
The real question is whether they have stupid people making important decisions for them. Or, more stupid than the US has. At least we can be sure that they don't elect them to do it.
I don’t think the first one is true because the US government doesn’t have to pay a license to use US patents. It can even allow a private company to use another company’s patents for work being done on behalf of the US government.
> How does writing a patent for a device that obviously can't work as described achieve anything.
If I did this where I work, I'd get a small cash bonus for the application, and a larger, but still small cash bonus if it issued and a commemerative trinket. Plus, I'd have something nice to write about myself in performance reviews. Sounds like an acheivement to me.
I just had a look at the last jre podcast with some ufo guy that supposedly worked at some secret facility, and i think the coïncidence between what the guy described (some weird propulsion mechanism from fallen UFOs) and the patent linked in the article troubling. There’s definitely some very weird stories gaining popularity at the moment.
I don't think there's a connection. The interviewee, Bob Lazar, is pretty well known in UFO enthusiast circles and has been telling the same story for decades now.
If these are all public patents, why haven't a couple dozen university labs taken a stab at building them or at least verifying the principles? This is something where I would expect even negative results to be newsworthy.
Anyway, it seems to me that the options have narrowed to human tech or psyops. Invoking aliens just doesn't help with any of the observations.
Because they're obvious nonsense. It would be a complete waste of time. Also pretty embarrassing if anyone found out you were trying to replicate this crack pottery.
Well since foo fighters [1] were spotted during the Second World War and I doubt the US patented designs for the F117 stealth bomber several decades before it was revealed, I'd put this in the class of psyops. If they don't know what's flying those things or what they are, better to blame the Chinese instead of little green/grey men and get people all concerned.
Is it "blame Chinese and (not aliens) and get people concerned (to be aware/do something" or "blame Chinese and (not alien and not get people concerned)"?
I mean just make everyone think it's the Chinese so they won't worry about it. "Oh it's just the Chinese and we're developing our own version" is much less scary than "It's something that acts with total impunity in our airspace and we haven't got a clue what it is, how it works or where it's from".
It must have been pretty obvious to the Navy this story would have been picked up by the media and widely circulated.
All this stuff was on those alternative science and energy sites (below) I looked at ages ago. The ones with lifters, ZPE, gravitational wave weapons, and so on. One I thought was interesting was Townsend Brown with the claim he and others did antigravity research with practical applications. The B2 was most likely source of funding at one point given (a) it was enormously expensive and (b) some of its traits matched the ones in Brown's antigravity designs.
Most of the stuff on those sites looked like BS, though. I don't know about Brown and this recent guy, though. This could also be disinformation to get Chinese to waste time on it. It has plus side that they can patent sue them if they do find anything.
EDIT: This was one of the sites. Just came back to me.
TLDR: The claims and descriptions in these Navy patents exactly match the “leaked technical descriptions” from many conspiracy theories over the past 30-40 years claiming that the US government has secret craft capable of defying the current known limits of aerodynamics and propulsion.
Antigravity conspiracy theories has been a favorite source of fascination/amusement for me for a long time (see my username), and I cannot describe how eerie and weird it feels to read official Navy patents and claims by ex-head of Lockheed Martin skunkworks literally corroborating some of conspiracy theories I’ve heard going around for decades. (Yet the skeptic in my brain still won’t allow me to fully believe it until I see a working prototype.)
The whole story here is just so utterly bizarre; the deeper you dig, the weirder it gets. These TheDrive articles seem to do a great job of investigating and reporting on the facts without too much speculation, and I highly recommend diving down the rabbit hole of linked articles (especially on this connected “To The Stars Academy” organization making similar claims of incredible technology by a panel of founders with astoundingly impressive and official credentials).
To add to the strangeness of the Navy patents: the actual patent contents reads almost like gibberish, or the kind of pseudoscientific technobabble you’d write to add scientific explanations of space ships to a sci-fi novel. If the technical descriptions and phenomena are real, then these patents really are describing or hinting at new physics, but in a way that misuses existing terms and reexplains obvious basics of physics with what seems like amateurish imprecision (like referring to cross products as “multiplication”) — which just doesn’t make sense at all given the credentials of those vouching for the patents.
Yet, the descriptions match almost exactly the rumors and conspiracy theories of how electrogravitic propulsion systems of secret military craft worked. And, they describe something that should be testable even without a room temperature superconductor (one could take a charged super capacitor and spin it and/or vibrate it at extreme frequencies and see if this has any measurable effect on its inertial or gravitational mass), which intrigues me.
Look into the “TR-3B” or “Aurora project” conspiracy theory and you’ll find tales and descriptions of the crafts antigravity drive that is absolutely identical to what is described in these patents: a superconducting medium carrying an extremely high charge density, that is rotated and vibrated are incredibly high frequencies — and this is claimed to somehow reduce the inertial mass of the surrounding area.
This TR-3B conspiracy theory is decades old, at least, and it matches these official government patents exactly.
It’s almost as if someone took some of the most intriguing rumors or conspiracy theories of secret government craft from decades ago, and started filing patents from extremely official government sources on exactly the kind of tech that was rumored to exist; yet in a way that sounds much like pseudoscience to anyone educated in modern physics.
This is the kind of thing which, based on the content itself, you’d immediately dismiss as a crackpot conspiracy theory technobabble. But the highly official credentials of the source of these patents, and of the people claiming or hinting that the tech is real (the ex-head of Lockheed Martin skunkworks — it doesn’t get much more credible than that) makes it impossible to ignore in that way.
So I honestly don’t know what to make of any of this. It would be interesting to try experimenting with some of the testable claims that these patents describe.
This has also been a hobby of mine. Regardless of anything about aliens or technology, this area says something very interesting about the way our society processes information, about how scientists and organizations deal with non-reproducible information, for example.
From watching social media over the past few years, especially the various foreign authoritarian governments, we can see an easy pattern: some bit of truth comes out, then the organization trying to suppress conversation floods the conversation with tons of half-truths, lies, conspiracy theories, and so forth. In the firehose of bullshit, the only thing the average observer can do is throw up their hands and give up.
Based on this general pattern of information and disinformation, I'm quite confident that the western mostly-free (?) countries are trying to have an honest conversation with themselves. About what, I have no idea. What I find particularly interesting are the professional, multi-sourced observations of various things happening that seem to just get eaten up by the system itself. Whether incompetence, secrecy, crackpots, or whatnot, it says something really fascinating about how groups of people deal with things they don't want to deal with.
Yes, there are crackpots and liars in the world. Yes, there are people who are honestly mistaken. There are also people who avoid controversy and just throw out the "crackpot" label instead of thinking through things. These are all easy responses. Even putting all the options together, something very interesting is going on that we're not dealing with so well.
I think the need for most people to assign the label “crackpot” vs “credible” almost immediately to any claim (especially to the more far-out claims) is an aspect of human nature: a desire to break down and simplify our view of the world into discrete categories as early as possible.
I think we do this not because this is the most accurate way to think, but because our minds are finite, and we need some simplifying approximation (e.g. quantization of a continuum into categories, or binary decisions) in order to make thinking about the immensely complicated world even possible.
For example, we tend to seek conclusions like “we have decided that A is good, B is bad, C is bunk, and D is science — case closed!” When in reality, our understanding of truth is far more a continuous and constantly evolving thing, as new information and ideas flow through.
Put simply, I think most people are just uncomfortable answering important questions with “I don’t know”, and avoid that answer at all costs, even when it is the correct answer.
A long, long time ago, some generation looked up into the sky and saw a somewhat nearby supernova. Visible during the day! Incredible spectacle!
Within a short amount of time of those folks dying off, however, it all became BS. It was the sky god. It was an optical illusion. It was a bunch of liars. It was stupid people. It was people making stuff up.
These knee-jerk, easy answers come because in most cases they're true. But even more true is the fact that there are a ton of people who just have to know. Whether it's aliens or swamp gas, they have to know one way or the other. Just looking up in the sky and saying "Did you see that? Beats me what it is" isn't good enough.
Non-reproducible phenomenon is still phenomenon. The point the former Assistant SecDef was making in his recent opinion piece is extremely valid. If we can't control our skies that's a DoD/Security matter, even if the data is coming to us in such a way as to be very difficult for us to process. Easy answers aren't going to cut it.
>It’s almost as if someone took some of the most intriguing rumors or conspiracy theories of secret government craft from decades ago, and started filing patents from extremely official government sources on exactly the kind of tech that was rumored to exist; yet in a strangely non-credible sounding way to anyone educated in modern physics.
So it's written and presented in a way that only the gullible, naive and crackpots will accept.
Maybe that's the answer then - it's schmuck bait. Someone in the US Navy wanted to troll the UFO nuts, the patent office, or both.
If they wanted to mislead rivals into thinking we have technology we don’t (so as to waste their resources trying to develop tech down a dead-end), why not write it in a more credible way?
If they just wanted to publish “schmuck bait” as you say, I suppose I just don’t see the point of that. It could be explained as an inside joke / trolling I suppose, but for example, look at the credentials of the people here:
This is a really interesting article, thanks for sharing it. Whether the tic-tacs are Chinese, American, or alien, this just seems to add the the evidence that they are real, and the public nature of the patent application seems to fit within the narrative of a managed disclosure.
>> ...the public nature of the patent application seems to fit within the narrative of a managed disclosure.
No. The patent application fits with the narrative that the US patent process is a total joke. This is an attempt to patent science fiction. This patent will be used for everything but the production of a working technology. It will be used by someone to aggrandize themselves and potentially milk "investors". They will wave this "patent" in front of some naive old people, probably in florida, to get them to sign over their life savings.
If anyone on this planet has practical warp drive technology, friction-free motion through air/water, or gravity manipulation tech ... such things are akin to the discovery of fire. In the real world, whether the inventor has a patent or not is absolutely meaningless in the face of what such technology would mean to mankind.
i don't think the US navy typically solicits donations from retirees. it seems to me more likely to be misdirection for rival militaries as others have suggested.
No, but crackpot inventors do. The charlatan tells people that he has invented a magic airplane technology. He the points to the US navy patent as 'proof' that such tech is possible. If his name is on the patent, all the better.
The US navy is a very large organization. I doubt this is a core program. This is some crazy think-tank operating way way outside oversight. Or it is an elaborate joke. Or an attempt to pad a resume before retirement. Or a "patent something or you're out" box ticking.
It does no such thing. It only means someone wants someone else to think they are real. Intelligence is complicated. See all the alien stuff around Roswell that was spun up to cover for the fact we were listening for nuclear weapons tests.
Rush to provisionally-patent what may or may not exist. Monetize the little green Martians' tech even before meeting them. Good thinking. Even if it doesn't exist, it's still better to gamble on the off chance it does.
That might be ok for some patents that require simple examples, but for complex patents that a working model would cost millions... Good luck getting an investor without a patent.
The only thing scary about this is that apparently this "U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise", whatever it is, is a den of crackpots. As a European physicist I'm not familiar enough with how research is managed in the U.S. military, so the fact that this kind of pseudo-science is tolerated is mind boggling to me. Anyone have any insight on what institutional factors might have led to this?
My guess is that if we were actually pursuing such a program, we would first hear about it when those craft devastated an opponent in a war, or was accidentally shot down.
This is most likely pure indirection, IMO. They want the Chinese or Russia to think we are doing this for some reason. Maybe they want them to go down their own wild goose chase or they want them to think something of ours that they have seen recently is a result of this and not some more easily duplicable technology.
I tend to agree, but if the sightings are real and the activity is increasing. The US might want to inform the opponent that we know who is violating our airspace, we know it isn't alien technology, and we know how they are doing it.
If your "opponents" are a threat you wouldn't reveal any information other than what you want them to know. If they are a non-threat, it might be like warning a child about crossing a road.
> "U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise", whatever it is, is a den of crackpots
Isn't that a bit condescending way to address such organization?
Of all the possible justifications, you point to the weakest one imo: that it is ran by ignorant people who are detached from reality when it comes to these matters, to the point of coming out to publicly state they did/are/aim/want to work on something. It's like the eat anything crazy it's thrown at them.
I mean, you could say: "It's just propaganda - they either want to diverge attention so we don't focus on something else (like decrease the warmongering status), or get attention to try to get something (like support/resources)." - Which is believe is the most likely one.
It's a odd behavior, but I doubt it's a byproduct of ignorance and belief in pseudo-science.
> Isn't that a bit condescending way to address such organization?
It would be if their CTO hadn't personally endorsed the "scientific" content of this patent in his letter to the patent office. In light of that, it's hard for me to see a different explanation than either "incompetent scientists" or "incompetent propagandists" (because the patent is a blatant joke to anyone with a science education), hence my reaction. I'm open to a different explanation, hence my question to those better versed in the mysteries of the U.S. military-industrial-scientific complex.
- the approval/publishing of the patent based on such content;
- the news reporting of such content without further research, just for the sake of being a patent and not questioning it's validity in the light of our current scientific knowledge;
- The propagation of such information;
If it's deliberate or fruit of a lot of layers of ignorance, we can't know for sure but there's a high probability of both.
I've heard so many programmers tell me categorically that x way of doing things is the right and true way. I've always been skeptical of these viewpoints because they so often are wrong/baseless. It's human nature to put walls around what we know and do not know based not upon what is actually known or possible but upon how it makes us feel. Many people are naturally inclined to dismiss ideas because it makes them feel good, others to accept them and almost everyone is susceptible to group think. Negative knee jerk reactions are so frequently driven by psychology, by them vs us, that I find it very difficult to see any truth, or take anyone's opinion at face value. The older I get and the more I know about my specialities the more I see that so many people who profess expertise are merely wearing a mask and using it to score social points without any real commitment to truth and so often they are just... wrong.
But on the other hand I have been involved with some utterly clueless organisations - where the group think is so profoundly wrong and backward that it's a wonder they can get anything done...
So I would ask, can you point out a couple of things that I can fact check which are wrong with the patent? I'm no physicist, but have an msc in maths
That said, you’ll always be able to find a way to explain away the weirdness if you speculate: Maybe they wanted the patent, but wanted to dissuade other people from reproducing the tech. One effective of doing this could be to actually patent a design that itself works, but is accompanied by a theoretical description that comes across as a joke / gibberish to any educated scientist. That would (and does, as you can see here) shut down most educated scientists interest in the topic immediately.
I’m not saying I believe that’s the case, just that we can always find a way to believe what we want to believe; belief is very dangerous in that way. (Generally, it’s best to just absorb evidence and withhold any “belief” until you absolutely have to make a binary decision.)
Therefore, I think speculation is pointless: Instead, we should just try to build what is described here, and see if it works or not.
A physics degree is helpful if you want to analyze the theoretical claims made in the patent (which range from trivial, through ludicrous all the way to "not even wrong"), but you don't need to do any of that to understand just how far from reality (or even "hard" sci-fi) this patent is. Instead, just read the patent, accept the contents at face value and consider the numbers the patent itself claims. Quoting the article:
> The application was initially rejected by Patent Examiner Philip Bonzell on the grounds that "there is no such thing as a 'repulsive EM energy field,'" and that "when referring to the specifications as to ascertain about the microwave emitters needed in this system it is seen that for a high energy electromagnetic field to polarize a quantum vacuum as claimed it would take 10^9 [T]eslas and 10^18 V/m." That's roughly the equivalent to the magnetic strength generated by most magnetars and more electricity than what is produced by nuclear reactors.
The field values come straight from the patent itself, you can check that. So, apart from all the silly theory, the patent simply assumes, as a matter of fact, that you can easily obtain magnetic fields that are only found in the most extreme conditions in the universe (and are many orders of magnitude away from anything we can conceivably create), use utterly ludicrous amounts of energy and achieve all of this in a portable craft of some sort. How much fact checking and experience do you really need to see that this is not merely beyond our engineering capabilities, but rather beyond even the bounds of sane science fiction?
The Navy CTO explains in his follow-up letter [0] that the initial findings on generating these high intensity fields have been positive. Are you asserting that's an impossibility?
Of course. The "initial findings" on what's eventually expected to become a huge multi-billion device capable of breaking field intensity records for a picosecond or two are completely irrelevant to the idea of a relatively compact mobile craft that requires even more intense fields for basic operation. That's barely a step away from saying "these values are perfectly fine - magnetars exist, don't they?".
If the criterion for patentability is describing a "future state of the possible" where "possible" just means "might, under a highly generous interpretation, not directly contradict the basic laws of physics... maybe", is there a patent for a Dyson sphere yet?
The CTO says they are trying things, not that they are achieving things. It's trivial to have positive preliminary results for an impossible task, by ignoring the crucial impossibility and playing with the side angles.
He also adds that he wants the patent so that if someone else invents it first the DoD won't have to pay for it, clearly admitting it doesn't exist.
Which by the way is nonsense because the government can take any license it wants for free by eminent domain.
I think it's possible crackpots have found a way to waste government money. The government (CIA and army) have previously worked on a psychic program, for example.
You appear to be operating under the assumption that reports about this do not constitute a PSYOPS operation against the American public.
Just because it is written down does not mean it happened. Just because public money was spent on such a line item does not mean that is where it went.
One theory that seems plausible to me is that there's deliberate confusion and misinformation created to combat or discredit leaks. Imagine that there's an adversary who has access to "open source" accounts that make it to popular or tabloid press, but you want to prevent them from making reliable inferences from that information.
One strategy would be to pollute that channel with misinformation, so that the adversary needs to go down a lot of different rabbit holes to have a chance of finding something real. Bonus: these could be really useful counter intel traps. You'd need just the right mix of plausible and outlandish, because you'll need to fool an adversary who (you should assume) can see through the strategy in general.
But it's just speculation.
And for all of us on the outside, it can be kind of a fun scifi thought experiment.
Which explains a mechanism that seems plausible by me. Described here by someone who appears to be a credible scientist. I even believe i have read a writeup of the theory in New Scientist.
Skip to about 12 mins in, to see speculations about a propulsion system based on the ideas.
You can't defend against what you don't know about. The US invests time and money into a wide range of research topics simply to know what is possible. Military research is a bubbling cauldron of activity.
Well something like this is so clearly bullshit (I have studied quantum field theory and string theory to a degree that I am fairly confident of this assessment) that you have to worry about the sanity of the whole organisation involved. Or in other words before such a publication by someone almost certainly not qualified in QFT, I would expect to see a series of papers published which outline in detail the mechanisms by which this is supposed to work. Even QFT in curved spacetime (without perturbations or gravitational waves) is an extremely hard and well developed subject and I happen to have interacted with some of the worlds expert on it.
Well, I'm not saying it isn't totally BS; but I understand the motivation to overturn every stone when talking about defense. It isn't like the US didn't surprise a country with new physics during WWII.
It wasn't exactly 'new' physics, it was an application of a theory built on established physics. The surprise wasn't that it was possible, but that it was technically and economically feasible.
Japan apparently had their own atomic bomb project[0], but the military didn't consider it a priority so funding was scarce, and it was difficult to secure enough uranium.
The Germans also worked on an atomic bomb during the war. Heisenberg was in charge of the Science. They had an institute in Heidelberg dedicated to it and several other sites. The calculation for the order of magnitude of required fissible material was off by 1, which might or might not have been a deliberate error. Furthermore there was no good source of uranium as far as I know discovered in Germany at the time as far as I know.
I wish you had left your other comment up. You had specific fundamental equations and good details about why the patent must be nonsense. Anyway, thank you for your other comments as well. Something is so odd with all of this and having qualified experts weight in is extremely valuable to those who are with good faith trying to uncover wtf is going on. Consider contacting the original author of the article series, I’m convinced he is determined to try and expose/solve what is behind all this recent attention to UFO/UAP/etc.
Not to mention any serious info op attempts would have accounts created on every relevant forum and thus wouldn't require creating very-obviously new accounts to further their agenda.
Since this patent is not "secret" even tho there are ways to keep it secret and heck you don't even need to patent it if you've such technology.
What does a patent say? Basically that you can create and use it today which would be alarming for most around the world.
What if it's a bait for other intelligence agencies/spies working for foreign governments in US defense area.
And if someone tried to gather info about this tech within US defense ecosystem, they'll be caught without US government risking anything.
It does look like a bait to me, publicise that you poses a technology which makes all your enemies obsolete then wait and watch who is coming or helping them steal it from you.
Clearly misdirection. The question is, what are they hiding? The Navy decided to admit these craft exist then misdirects about how they work.
My guess, they're nuclear powered aircraft of some kind. Maybe conventional besides that, maybe not. You can get such obscene power density with nuclear that the ideal craft may just be an engine with a cowling around it. Efficiency is not a concern so nuclear aircraft are going to look a lot different.
It's the only reason I can think of that Navy would be trying to cover up how they work. The idea of nuclear reactors zipping around in the air is terrifying.
Chinese advancement in frictionless supercavitating submarines are already well known[1]. But claiming that they have the capability to do so with EM propulsion is something new.
What's more bewildering to me is that the patent fiasco surround this. AFAIK state of the art defence tech rarely gets through patent system for obvious reasons, TIL that U.S. Patent system has a way to file secret patents and even that wasn't used in this case.
Not sure whether they filed this patent with PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty), then they would be eligible to submit this patent application for review in other countries as well.
[1]: https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/chinas-future-subm...