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US Navy Patent Antigravity Device
- glitchc 6y agoA bit late for April Fools...
- pwpwp 6y agoIs this related to the EmDrive?
- pp19dd 6y agoThink this is from June of last year. The Drive broke the story about the patents: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-got-ufo-patent-granted-by-warning-of-similar-chinese-tech-advances https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g... The journalists pursued a two prong strategy for this story. First one was verifying the cockpit videos released years ago via FOIA requests (that was a surprise) that only recently got released by the Navy (a bigger surprise.) The second prong was their investigation of a supposed scientist working for NAWCAD, named "Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais." Think physicists have looked at the patents and called it word spaghetti. One of the patents literally starts defining how to control gravity. The journalists are still not sure whether this is a real person doing fraud backed by ignorant leadership trying to save face desperately or a purposeful psyop operation headed by a made-up name and designed to drain foreign government research budgets.
- polytely 6y agoI think this is the most recent article they had about this subject https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-inventor-of-the-navys-bizarre-ufo-patents-finally-talks https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31798/the-secretive-in... It's a fascinating story, I hope someone gets to the bottom of this.
- kipchak 6y agoThere are a few explanations I can think of, and each of them is rather strange. 1. The whole thing is a dis-info campaign to hook a near adversary into thinking we have spooky next gen technology. This all being public makes me lean this way. Similarly perhaps this is being used as a cover story for some impressive but not physics defying drones, similarly to how "UFOs" were used as an diversion away from projects like Mogul or the f-117 and B-2. 2. Pais is a conman, scamming the military into funding his fraudulent tech. 3. Pais is a breakthrough genius. The Tech is real and in years it will be revealed to the public. 4. The "Bob Lazar" option. "UFOs" as in foreign objects exist and occasionally crash, and are studied and reverse engineered when they do. It's interesting to note that Pais was recently transferred to submarine command.
- m4r35n357 6y ago1. It would need to be a _very_ stupid adversary.
- snowwrestler 6y agoThis type of disinformation has a history; look at so-called "red mercury" during the Cold War. An adversary does not need to actually believe everything you say, in order to decide that it's worth looking into what you're trying to hide. This distracts some amount of resources from other investigations, and potentially exposes some of their assets if you've built artificial channels for them to follow. On the other hand, it's also potentially a great way to find the credible/gullible folks within your adversary, to which you could feed other misinformation later on.
- brummm 6y agoIf this were true (I doubt it), that's an insanely short patent (6 pages) with barely any information about the device. How would something like this get approved. That's insane.
- briffle 6y agoMy guess, it, along with the released 'UFO' video's that were leaked a while ago, and released last week, are some sort of an attempt to either make other countries think we have that tech, or waste a TON of money and time trying to do it themselves, while we focus on other things.
- wrkronmiller 6y agoIf the comments section of HN can figure that out then wouldn't an international superpower?
- jerf 6y agoYes, absolutely, an international superpower will realize it's a possibility. However, they may have about as much luck as the comments section of HN in being sure. It's an asymmetrical thing; you spend a drop in the bucket putting out this sort of disinformation, and if they spend $10 million in black ops research following up on it, you win in relative terms. There's other possibilities you can come up with, too; throw the conspiracy theorists a bit of what seems to be red meat every once in a while and they'll maintain a smokescreen of radical disinformation and a thick patina of disbelievability over everything that even remotely resembles this sort of thing for almost free. The truth may well be in that mess somewhere but good luck picking it out.
- philwelch 6y agoIf international superpowers consistently put technical expertise over the whims of bureaucrats, the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl would have never happened. The US wasted a lot of effort during the Cold War investigating parapsychology and remote viewing.
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- WJW 6y agoFrom 2016 already. Note from the wikipedia page of the filer of this patent: "His patent applications on behalf of his employers have attracted international attention for their potential military and energy-producing applications, but also doubt about their feasibility, and speculation that they may be misinformation intended to mislead the United States' strategic adversaries about the direction of United States defense research." In particular it's pretty wild that: - this effect does not seem to have been replicated in outside laboratories - the US military would willingly share details about how it works through the patent system while they can also just not tell anyone.
- bhhaskin 6y agoThe US military also has a mechanism in place to prevent classified tech from being patented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act It is a pretty good example of how the patent system is broken. Like for example someone patenting dropdowns... https://patents.justia.com/patent/10078623 https://patents.justia.com/patent/10078623
- Grimm665 6y agoHave they accidentally invented time travel yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
- mrlala 6y ago[Patent Clerk] Anti-gravity... um... anti-depressant? I could put you through to someone on that?
- amelius 6y agoI don't know anything about quantum vacuum but from reading this I assume that the entire mechanism follows trivially from the underlying physical properties. Or in other words, wasn't this application apparent when physicists theorized these properties in the first place? And shouldn't the IP belong to the public which subsidized the research?
- simiones 6y agoIF the patent were not a fraud or disinformation (it certainly is one of these), then it would not "follow trivially", it would be the biggest discovery in physics in 50-100 years. It would be monumental. Unfortunately, it is either fraud or some kind of disinformation.
- Endlessly 6y agoAppears the scientist [1] that filed this patent has a history of filing patents that “stretch the limits of science” — which to me increases the odds the only thing being stretched is the truth: [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Pais https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Pais
- dplavery92 6y agoRight, and among them are more[0] patents held by the US Navy for high-temperature superconductors and "high frequency gravity wave generators." It's clear he has at least one patron within the DoD; it's a shame that the technical oversight over this program is so credulous. [0] https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Cezar+Pais https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Cezar+Pais
- philwelch 6y agoUnless they’re in on the joke and the goal is to fool foreign governments into chasing down pseudoscientific rabbit holes.
- astronautjones 6y agofar more likely it's a grift (e.g. to the stars academy, remote viewing companies like SRI Int'l in the 60s-80s, etc)
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y agoI’m glad to see this again. This patent is the first thing I thought of when the “UFO” admission news hit last week. I’m guessing what we’re seeing is probably some experimental stuff. Hopefully it’s our stuff.
- dogma1138 6y agoIf it worked it would be classified.
- hirundo 6y ago"As [Baron Vladimir Harkonnen] emerged from the shadows, his figure took on dimension — grossly and immensely fat. And with subtle bulges beneath folds of his dark robes to reveal that all this fat was sustained partly by portable suspensors harnessed to his flesh. He might weigh two hundred Standard kilos in actuality, but his feet would carry no more than fifty of them." As I've gotten older and fatter this seems like a better idea. I'm ready for my portable suspensors now please. This may help to solve the Navy's problem with obesity among recruits.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoYour comment reminds me of a news service reporting on some previous levitation/antigrav tech. The application they suggested was "floating burn victims in hospitals". That's the best you can think of for a floating-things technology???
- dplavery92 6y agoThe "background" section of this particular patent [0] starts pretty sane (if obviously a little grandiose--enough to get one's guard up) but rapidly and suddenly dips off the rails. The trouble is that the mostly unintelligible details about "hyper-frequency" rotational and vibrational coupled modes are interspersed in a bunch of technically correct--if vapid--physical statements about quantum fields pervading all of spacetime, and other phenomena being emergent of excitations in these fields. (Notwithstanding the fact that uniting QFT with gravity is the biggest open problem in Physics today...) I think this is an illustrating case in how much easier it is to create high-falutin' nonsense than it is to debunk it. Most of the claims are somewhat vague but they touch on areas where someone needs a lot of knowledge and precision to coherently dispute them. I highly recommend reading a patent lawyer's research into the history of this particular patent from the last time it was posted here[1]. Apparently the examiner tried to reject the patent claim several times on technical bases, against the protest of some Navy brass, before finally admitting it without comment months later. [0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763445
- phkahler 6y ago>> I think this is an illustrating case in how much easier it is to create high-falutin' nonsense than it is to debunk it. Are there jobs around as debunkers? Sometime I think I'd be good at that. It seems like someone should have a vested interest in having accurate models of reality and being able to spot BS.
- heisenzombie 6y agoI mean, to be a bit reductive, that's what a scientist is. Someone whose job is to "debunk" hypotheses.
- dplavery92 6y agoIronically, in the DoD contracting world there are roles like this; SETA (systems engineering and technical assurance) and SME (subject matter expert) contracting roles from disinterested third parties are usually a required function in DoD acquisition programs. These folks are basically paid skeptics of the work being done by the prime contractors, which is a good failsafe to build in for >$100MM tax-funded programs and for weapons and vehicles that can kill people. In this particular case, though, the hokum is coming internally from a government lab, and the work is early research, so it doesn't have to meet the same validation standards.
- Zenst 6y ago"polarized vacuum" I'm sure those two words could be elaborated upon, certainly does seem to be a couple of nice words when put together make you go - errrm
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simonh 6y agoBuild a craft with a cold fusion power plant, an EM-Drive propulsion system, one of these babies for lift, and an Alcubierre drive for once it breaks orbit you'd really have something.
- peter_d_sherman 6y agoThere's an expression, with respect to rock music: "Before any artist did anything, Elvis did everything..." Or, with respect to classical music, substitute Mozart or Beethoven for Elvis... With respect to this kind of stuff, there was John Ernst Worrell Keely: Hans von Lieven: KeelyTech: Paper on John Ernst Worrell Keely https://merlib.org/node/5064 https://merlib.org/node/5064 "Before the Navy did anything, Keely did everything..." Also, if you're going to study Keely, watch out -- there's a lot of fake news and disinformation...
- historyremade 6y agoLook, In this world there lot of criminals that break the law so what are the odds breaking this universal laws?
- ttizya20 6y agoLet's be clear about one thing, it is far more likely that this object is terrestrial. Going off of this, thee country most likely to pull this off would the the United States.
- paypalcust83 6y agoThe USN has been watching too much Macross in their free time. And couple this with fuzzy deep fake videos, media complicity, and high-ranking "reliable authorities" behaving as actors must be getting a good kick out of trolling the public for "natsec" "reasons." Without independently-verifiable evidence, big claims are most likely big yarns.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoIn macross, the antigrav generators broke through the fuselage and floated away. They needed to use good old rockets/propulsion to get to space.
- rurban 6y agoThe tech behind is sound. There do exist similar "antigravity" devices. And patents. The problem is to make gravitomagnetic fields efficient. Currently it's barely measurable. Pais' idea does look good, esp. the idea to hook up two such spinning superconductors and twist their axis a bit. That's the UFO patent. AFAIK he is trying to build such a thing with the navy right now. In the lab in my city they tried similar things, but their lab is very small, and they cannot verify Pais' idea. The navy should be good enough. Interesting moonshot, but probably nothing will come out of it.