15 ms·

The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

68 points by peakay 7y ago

Jedd 7y ago
AIUI, viable room temperature superconductors are an existential threat to the coal & gas industries. Worse / better yet, they'd massively disrupt the existing geopolitical power and wealth distribution.
- orionblastar 7y ago
  Wasn't there some airplane crashes that had engineers on the flight that worked for Freescale or some other company in the superconductor market? Funny how those stories just faded away with few questions about how the airliner crashed. I am not trying to make a conspiracy theory, but they should have taken separate flights. edit: Typo and clarification
  - mmcconnell1618 7y ago
    Snopes doesn’t indicate this is likely to be true. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mh370-patent-disappearance/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mh370-patent-disappearance...
    - imglorp 7y ago
      Heh. Also, Freescale does semiconductors. The patent was about wafer yields. Not superconductors :-)
    - aldoushuxley001 7y ago
      ew Snopes, that site's a propaganda rag
    - x__x 7y ago
      Where's the Snopes like site Snoping Snopes?
snowwrestler 7y ago
I continue to believe this is today’s equivalent of “red mercury”: crazy pseudoscience given the imprimatur of the U.S. military to distract and confuse adversaries.
- tgflynn 7y ago
  It seems unlikely any serious adversary would be taken in by this. I think it's more likely a case of gross managerial incompetence where superiors were taken in by a crackpot making claims far outside of his and their ability to evaluate.
- georgeburdell 7y ago
  You give the military too much credit. I have acquaintances in military research and they're more self-sure than they are intelligent. And they love military jargon.
ggm 7y ago
The problem I have in this, is that history is littered with things which without hindsight were crazy-batshit-ideas, and in a world of IPR and patents, definitely do get flagged as wierd. But.. then turn out to be useful. Liquid metal refrigerators using electromagnetics to send the fluid around instead of just pumping ammonia? Thats .. crazy. But also, What Szilard and Einstein patented: safer by far, no moving parts in the working refrigerant fluid. Directed beam weapons: notoriously the 'kill a goat' test for the BRL and Navy tired of loony inventors, but actually the ground work of Radar and like activity according to Robert Buderi (yes, this is a gloss, but there are linkages. The forces people assumed RF beams were weapons, not detection systems) Infra-Red for detection of the enemy. No more stupid than what they had, which is sound, giant sounding dishes to hear bombers. Turns out its harder to do IR than RF, but didn't stop Lord Cherwell obsessing about it, to the detriment of other science initiatives, but NOW IR is a stable of all kinds of things. These UFO patents may contain ideas which make sense in limited fields, or huge fields, or no fields. (obviously, if they are based on perpetual motion flawed physics it tends to no fields)
- willis936 7y ago
  In all of those cases the inventions sounded crazy And no one had really tried it before. A lot of smart people have been working on plasma physics with the goal of controlled fusion for 70 years. HTS research has been ongoing for nearly as long. Suddenly one guy who speaks like a crackpot has discovered things no one else has thought of? Occam’s Razor.
  - ggm 7y ago
    Totally agree with this bit. The alarm bells about these ones are pretty huge.
  - tragomaskhalos 7y ago
    The "quintessence" bit was a bit of a red flag wasn't it
    - Khelavaster 7y ago
Accujack 7y ago
I like the part where he talks about Quintessence as if it's a valid scientific concept... not in terms of a hypothetical form of dark energy, but in the original sense that it's the "quinta essentia" or "fifth element", IE Aether. His emails read like a word salad mix of high energy science and medieval alchemy... very similar to a lot of the "free energy" crackpots on youtube.
smhinsey 7y ago
I would love to be wrong because this tech is very interesting, but I feel like I have developed a pretty good bullshit detector in my time online and quotes such as "VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence)" stick out to me as being discrediting.
- bra4you 7y ago
  Honestly, I have lost track of state of matters. How many are there? 3? s,l,g? Plasma? Bode Einstein Condensate? I vaguely remember at least three more.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    There are over a dozen more exotic states of matter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter
  - Iv 7y ago
    Apparently in physics, there is less talk about states than about phases [1]. There are four fundamental states basically all matter can be in: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, but then you can get philosophical about what constitutes a state. Is a superfluid a liquid? I think there is a stronger case for Bose-Einstein condensate to be a separate state but one could argue otherwise. Crystalline vs amorphous solids could easily be argued as being different states etc... Really, phases are more clearly defined, but more numerous, and change from one material to another. And then you are left with the task of defining colloids, gels, aerosols... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_(matter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_(matter)
cbanek 7y ago
I'd really love some world changing breakthrough technology now. I really would. But I don't really understand this stuff (not that I'm qualified). I guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine, so the fact that it is a patent, doesn't seem to require that it be real. I can't help but think back to the 80's SDI "Star Wars" programs. We said that we could do a lot of things that we couldn't, and that made the Russians crazy. Now I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, but could it be possible this is a misinformation campaign? It's interesting the "new IEEE paper" referenced in the paper only has the one author and no coauthors. I wonder who (if anyone) peer reviewed this paper? Also in the views, interestingly it's only had 40 views (not sure if this is paper views, or not, it says PDF and HTML views). Sadly I don't have access to read it! https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8871349 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8871349
- bra4you 7y ago
  "I guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine" No, you can't because it violates fundamental principles of scientific laws.
  - cbanek 7y ago
    Not only can you, but many people have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents
    - catalogia 7y ago
      From that what that link says, it sounds like you could but now cannot patent perpetual motion devices, since those applications are now rejected in America and UK. Perhaps you can patent them elsewhere though.
      - ganzuul 7y ago
        IIRC they are not rejected but you have to demonstrate the invention with a physical implementation. Of course this proves nothing but it does reduce the amount of paperwork. There is legitimate research going on into reversing the casimir effect but the narrative they present is one of tribology rather than power generation.
mNovak 7y ago
Trying to think if the DoD has any good reasons to encourage conspiracy theorists? Besides the obvious US has mystic weapons angle.
- guerrilla 7y ago
  because some of them are conspiracy theorists? It would seem improbable that Michael Flynn is alone in that. In any case, I think this is most likely due to incompetence. Whether a few of this guy's bosses are conspiracy theorists or not, they obviously aren't qualified to evaluate his work and see that he's a crackpot. It wouldn't be the first time, with things like MkUltra and that telepathy crap.
guerrilla 7y ago
I feel like I'm still reading something from the geocities archive.
keyle 7y ago
You don't patent these things without expecting questions... Either they're really close to produce something that the public could replicate - hence the patenting, or they're miles away from anything realistic but patenting like crazy to remain 'relevant'.
mrnobody_67 7y ago
This quote from another article on the source website is interesting: “Craft Using An Inertial Mass Reduction Device.” While all are pretty outlandish-sounding, the latter is the one that the Chief Technical Officer of the Naval Aviation Enterprise personally vouched for in a letter to the USPTO, claiming the Chinese are already developing similar capabilities. ... "That being said, the unorthodox circumstances surrounding the approval of this patent have us wondering why the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise, Dr. James Sheehy, personally vouched for the legitimacy of this beyond-revolutionary aerospace technology in the Navy’s appeal to the USPTO. Sheehy assured the patent examiner in charge of this application that the aircraft propulsion method described in the patent is indeed possible or will be soon based on experiments and tests NAWCAD has already conducted. "
- trhway 7y ago
  > the aircraft propulsion method described in the patent is indeed possible from that patent - they describe there spinning the 2m diameter disk at 30000rpm (ie. 3km/s edge speed): "... we obtain an energy flux value of 10e33 W/m2. This exceptionally high power intensity induces a pair production avalanche, thereby ensuring complete polarization of the local vacuum state." i believe it - 10e33 W/m2 can do a lot (it is total power output of a million of Suns concentrated into 1m2), and such EM field would interact strongly not only with the Earth magnetic field, it will do it with just sheer vacuum as well (that is the point of their patent is that vacuum isn't really a full vacuum according to QM). So everything seems ok from the pure math EM/QM formula POV. There are i think only minor pesky practical details - like the material able to withstand 30000rpm 3km/s rotation while under the 10e33 W/m2 EM flux (the flux which would tear apart atoms and may be even protons/neutrons) and a compact energy source doing all that while fitting into the 2m diameter disk.
orbifold 7y ago
As a slight counterpoint (I haven't looked into the claims of the patents too much): There is the well known Kerr-Newman solution of a rotating, charged black hole. It is well known that a relativistic rotating charged disk approximates in the limit of (v = c) the Kerr-Newman solution with (B = 0): https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0410109.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0410109.pdf. However the total field energy of such a rotating disk would be infinite, this is one of these examples in physics, where you run into pathologies. As is remarked in the paper those might be removed by a quantum treatment. For v < c the field energy is finite, which is in any case the only realisable regime.
NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago
Maybe just NSA and NAVY covert, keeping Chinese scientist busy wasting their time with nonsense science ?!
- willis936 7y ago
  Some in the US seem to be keeping their mentally ill off the streets by paying them to make nonsense secret parents.
davidhyde 7y ago
Wait a second. I thought you couldn't patent an idea that couldn't be demonstrated. For example, you can't patent the concept of faster than light travel in the hopes that one day, if someone does figure HOW to do it, you hold the patent. It's just absurd and that's what this all sounds like.
NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago
I know, you guys do not understand, it is "Turbo Encabulator" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o LOL

68 points by peakay 7y ago

Jedd 7y ago

AIUI, viable room temperature superconductors are an existential threat to the coal & gas industries. Worse / better yet, they'd massively disrupt the existing geopolitical power and wealth distribution.

orionblastar 7y ago
Wasn't there some airplane crashes that had engineers on the flight that worked for Freescale or some other company in the superconductor market? Funny how those stories just faded away with few questions about how the airliner crashed. I am not trying to make a conspiracy theory, but they should have taken separate flights. edit: Typo and clarification
- mmcconnell1618 7y ago
  Snopes doesn’t indicate this is likely to be true. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mh370-patent-disappearance/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mh370-patent-disappearance...
  - imglorp 7y ago
    Heh. Also, Freescale does semiconductors. The patent was about wafer yields. Not superconductors :-)
  - aldoushuxley001 7y ago
    ew Snopes, that site's a propaganda rag
  - x__x 7y ago
    Where's the Snopes like site Snoping Snopes?

snowwrestler 7y ago

I continue to believe this is today’s equivalent of “red mercury”: crazy pseudoscience given the imprimatur of the U.S. military to distract and confuse adversaries.

tgflynn 7y ago
It seems unlikely any serious adversary would be taken in by this. I think it's more likely a case of gross managerial incompetence where superiors were taken in by a crackpot making claims far outside of his and their ability to evaluate.
georgeburdell 7y ago
You give the military too much credit. I have acquaintances in military research and they're more self-sure than they are intelligent. And they love military jargon.

ggm 7y ago

The problem I have in this, is that history is littered with things which without hindsight were crazy-batshit-ideas, and in a world of IPR and patents, definitely do get flagged as wierd. But.. then turn out to be useful. Liquid metal refrigerators using electromagnetics to send the fluid around instead of just pumping ammonia? Thats .. crazy. But also, What Szilard and Einstein patented: safer by far, no moving parts in the working refrigerant fluid. Directed beam weapons: notoriously the 'kill a goat' test for the BRL and Navy tired of loony inventors, but actually the ground work of Radar and like activity according to Robert Buderi (yes, this is a gloss, but there are linkages. The forces people assumed RF beams were weapons, not detection systems) Infra-Red for detection of the enemy. No more stupid than what they had, which is sound, giant sounding dishes to hear bombers. Turns out its harder to do IR than RF, but didn't stop Lord Cherwell obsessing about it, to the detriment of other science initiatives, but NOW IR is a stable of all kinds of things. These UFO patents may contain ideas which make sense in limited fields, or huge fields, or no fields. (obviously, if they are based on perpetual motion flawed physics it tends to no fields)

willis936 7y ago
In all of those cases the inventions sounded crazy And no one had really tried it before. A lot of smart people have been working on plasma physics with the goal of controlled fusion for 70 years. HTS research has been ongoing for nearly as long. Suddenly one guy who speaks like a crackpot has discovered things no one else has thought of? Occam’s Razor.
- ggm 7y ago
  Totally agree with this bit. The alarm bells about these ones are pretty huge.
- tragomaskhalos 7y ago
  The "quintessence" bit was a bit of a red flag wasn't it
  - Khelavaster 7y ago

Accujack 7y ago

I like the part where he talks about Quintessence as if it's a valid scientific concept... not in terms of a hypothetical form of dark energy, but in the original sense that it's the "quinta essentia" or "fifth element", IE Aether. His emails read like a word salad mix of high energy science and medieval alchemy... very similar to a lot of the "free energy" crackpots on youtube.

smhinsey 7y ago

I would love to be wrong because this tech is very interesting, but I feel like I have developed a pretty good bullshit detector in my time online and quotes such as "VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence)" stick out to me as being discrediting.

bra4you 7y ago
Honestly, I have lost track of state of matters. How many are there? 3? s,l,g? Plasma? Bode Einstein Condensate? I vaguely remember at least three more.
- akiselev 7y ago
  There are over a dozen more exotic states of matter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter
- Iv 7y ago
  Apparently in physics, there is less talk about states than about phases [1]. There are four fundamental states basically all matter can be in: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, but then you can get philosophical about what constitutes a state. Is a superfluid a liquid? I think there is a stronger case for Bose-Einstein condensate to be a separate state but one could argue otherwise. Crystalline vs amorphous solids could easily be argued as being different states etc... Really, phases are more clearly defined, but more numerous, and change from one material to another. And then you are left with the task of defining colloids, gels, aerosols... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_(matter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_(matter)

cbanek 7y ago

I'd really love some world changing breakthrough technology now. I really would. But I don't really understand this stuff (not that I'm qualified). I guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine, so the fact that it is a patent, doesn't seem to require that it be real. I can't help but think back to the 80's SDI "Star Wars" programs. We said that we could do a lot of things that we couldn't, and that made the Russians crazy. Now I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, but could it be possible this is a misinformation campaign? It's interesting the "new IEEE paper" referenced in the paper only has the one author and no coauthors. I wonder who (if anyone) peer reviewed this paper? Also in the views, interestingly it's only had 40 views (not sure if this is paper views, or not, it says PDF and HTML views). Sadly I don't have access to read it! https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8871349 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8871349

bra4you 7y ago
"I guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine" No, you can't because it violates fundamental principles of scientific laws.
- cbanek 7y ago
  Not only can you, but many people have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents
  - catalogia 7y ago
    From that what that link says, it sounds like you could but now cannot patent perpetual motion devices, since those applications are now rejected in America and UK. Perhaps you can patent them elsewhere though.
    - ganzuul 7y ago
      IIRC they are not rejected but you have to demonstrate the invention with a physical implementation. Of course this proves nothing but it does reduce the amount of paperwork. There is legitimate research going on into reversing the casimir effect but the narrative they present is one of tribology rather than power generation.

mNovak 7y ago

Trying to think if the DoD has any good reasons to encourage conspiracy theorists? Besides the obvious US has mystic weapons angle.

guerrilla 7y ago
because some of them are conspiracy theorists? It would seem improbable that Michael Flynn is alone in that. In any case, I think this is most likely due to incompetence. Whether a few of this guy's bosses are conspiracy theorists or not, they obviously aren't qualified to evaluate his work and see that he's a crackpot. It wouldn't be the first time, with things like MkUltra and that telepathy crap.

guerrilla 7y ago

I feel like I'm still reading something from the geocities archive.

keyle 7y ago

You don't patent these things without expecting questions... Either they're really close to produce something that the public could replicate - hence the patenting, or they're miles away from anything realistic but patenting like crazy to remain 'relevant'.

mrnobody_67 7y ago

This quote from another article on the source website is interesting: “Craft Using An Inertial Mass Reduction Device.” While all are pretty outlandish-sounding, the latter is the one that the Chief Technical Officer of the Naval Aviation Enterprise personally vouched for in a letter to the USPTO, claiming the Chinese are already developing similar capabilities. ... "That being said, the unorthodox circumstances surrounding the approval of this patent have us wondering why the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise, Dr. James Sheehy, personally vouched for the legitimacy of this beyond-revolutionary aerospace technology in the Navy’s appeal to the USPTO. Sheehy assured the patent examiner in charge of this application that the aircraft propulsion method described in the patent is indeed possible or will be soon based on experiments and tests NAWCAD has already conducted. "

trhway 7y ago
> the aircraft propulsion method described in the patent is indeed possible from that patent - they describe there spinning the 2m diameter disk at 30000rpm (ie. 3km/s edge speed): "... we obtain an energy flux value of 10e33 W/m2. This exceptionally high power intensity induces a pair production avalanche, thereby ensuring complete polarization of the local vacuum state." i believe it - 10e33 W/m2 can do a lot (it is total power output of a million of Suns concentrated into 1m2), and such EM field would interact strongly not only with the Earth magnetic field, it will do it with just sheer vacuum as well (that is the point of their patent is that vacuum isn't really a full vacuum according to QM). So everything seems ok from the pure math EM/QM formula POV. There are i think only minor pesky practical details - like the material able to withstand 30000rpm 3km/s rotation while under the 10e33 W/m2 EM flux (the flux which would tear apart atoms and may be even protons/neutrons) and a compact energy source doing all that while fitting into the 2m diameter disk.

orbifold 7y ago

As a slight counterpoint (I haven't looked into the claims of the patents too much): There is the well known Kerr-Newman solution of a rotating, charged black hole. It is well known that a relativistic rotating charged disk approximates in the limit of (v = c) the Kerr-Newman solution with (B = 0): https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0410109.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0410109.pdf. However the total field energy of such a rotating disk would be infinite, this is one of these examples in physics, where you run into pathologies. As is remarked in the paper those might be removed by a quantum treatment. For v < c the field energy is finite, which is in any case the only realisable regime.

NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago

Maybe just NSA and NAVY covert, keeping Chinese scientist busy wasting their time with nonsense science ?!

willis936 7y ago
Some in the US seem to be keeping their mentally ill off the streets by paying them to make nonsense secret parents.

davidhyde 7y ago

Wait a second. I thought you couldn't patent an idea that couldn't be demonstrated. For example, you can't patent the concept of faster than light travel in the hopes that one day, if someone does figure HOW to do it, you hold the patent. It's just absurd and that's what this all sounds like.

NiceWayToDoIT 7y ago

I know, you guys do not understand, it is "Turbo Encabulator" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o LOL