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Emails show Navy's 'UFO' patents went through significant internal review

155 points by weare138 6y ago

jandrese 6y ago
If it's a patent then there should be enough detail for a person to build a working prototype of the invention right? That's the point of the patent process. The inventor claims that they are producible using modern technology, so it seems like they should put their money where their mouth is, choose the simplest device that uses his newly discovered physical effect, and build a demonstration.
- generalizations 6y ago
  Only if the inventor cares if the general public believes him. Sounds like he's doing this for the Navy, and the fewer people take him and the work seriously, the better. The US probably doesn't want China or Russia trying to duplicate his work. The patent doesn't indicate anything more than that the idea exists in some specificity. It's something for the inventor, later, when / if the tech doesn't need to be secret anymore.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    > The US probably doesn't want China or Russia trying to duplicate his work. Many would argue the exact opposite: that these patents are nonsense intended to squander adversarial resources spent on vetting them.
    - generalizations 6y ago
      Either way. So long as no proof is forthcoming, no one is likely to take it seriously or be able to duplicate it. There's no incentive to prove it works.
      - pengaru 6y ago
        Well there have been a bunch of UFO videos circulated as of late, which if taken as legitimate seem likely to incorporate such inventions. It goes without saying that these patents and the release of such complementary "UFO" videos wastes some amount of time assessing their authenticity at the very least. I have no opinion on whether it's an effective tactic or not. But it does seem like one must assume it at least adds noise to be filtered out.
      - jandrese 6y ago
        If these did work they would revolutionize many industries. The mass reduction device for example has enormous implications if it were to work. In fact you could likely build a perpetual motion machine out of such a device. I mean yeah, most people are going to look at these and call them crackpot nonsense, but the drawings look pretty simple, and since they're all apparently based on this one particular effect all you have to do is test the one effect to disprove all of them.
jerry80 6y ago
Does anyone else find it absurd that the Government can own patents? If you consider the purpose of patents is to incentivize investment into research in exchange for securing a limited-time monopoly, then what is the purpose of Government owned patents? Since Government exists for the public good, it should already be incentivized to produce research. Patenting that research so that people can't utilize it defeats the whole point. What am I missing?
- sneak 6y ago
  It is already such that the US government can't own copyrights, as I understand it. Crown copyright is a thing in the UK, though. I am still a little surprised that they are allowed to keep secrets, for the same reason.
  - gowld 6y ago
    It's important to keep secrets from other countries. The general public can't be forced to keep secrets, and therefore can't be privy to national secrets.
    - wolco2 6y ago
      Copyright doesn't keep secrets it provides a way to stop others from using it. A trade secret does. A patent doesn't.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > It is already such that the US government can't own copyrights Yes, it can. US-government created works are automatically public domain in the US, but the government, IIRC, still holds international copyrights on them, and moreover can own (even American) copyrights on anything whose creation makes it subject to copyright.
- wcarss 6y ago
  Not trying to justify it, but one could read it defensively in the same light that all employer-patent-grabs share: If you invent something directly in the course of your assigned tasks as an employee, i.e. they instruct you to invent X and you then do so, for pay, they want some legal basis to prevent you from turning around and charging them for a license to use/sell the invention they just paid you to create.
generalizations 6y ago
Interesting quote. > Every one of Pais' recent inventions depends on what the inventor calls “the Pais Effect,” described in numerous publications by the inventor as the “controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration under rapid (yet smooth) acceleration-deceleration-acceleration transients.” Since it all seems to boil down to that Pais Effect, I wonder what details there are to analyze what it actually is. Rather than critiquing the designs, that effect seems to be the thing to look at. Edit: found another article, which quoted Pais on what that effect is. > Mr. Tingley, do realize that my work culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect (original physical concept). The Pais Effect comprises the generation of extremely high electromagnetic energy fluxes (and hence high local energy densities) generated by controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma states) subjected to accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin, via rapid acceleration transients. > Such high energy EM radiation can locally interact with the Vacuum Energy State (VES) - the VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence), in other words the fundamental structure (foundational framework), from which Everything else (Spacetime included) in our Quantum Reality, emerges. > The Engineering of the Pais Effect can give rise to the Enablement of Macroscopic Quantum Coherence, which if you have closely been following my work, you understand the importance of. I don't know enough to figure out if this guy is some modern Tesla or another kook.
- beaner 6y ago
  It's fun to think about what this could mean. Can you defeat gravity by somehow energizing matter to affect its spin and acceleration? And if so, could this not only be a technology for space travel, but potentially be an explainer for something like dark matter - maybe there are parts of galaxies that are energized differently than we assume, thereby affecting their gravitational pull? I'm sure this all sounds dumb, I'm not a physicist, but it's fun to think about.
  - deeeeplearning 6y ago
    >Can you defeat gravity by somehow energizing matter to affect its spin and acceleration Except there is no mechanism through which this could work. That would be like me saying "if I flip these bits arranged in a pentagram fast enough surely this will create an AGI." It doesn't make a bit of sense.
wcarss 6y ago
This feels a little bit like reading some parts of the Silmarillion -- back story details expanding on old things we already knew. At the least though, the degree and the tonality of banal detail here, with some public records corroboration, decreases the odds this was ever in any way part of some grand strategy of disinformation, or a leak of something big that had been held under wraps. It reads as just a credentialed (and convincing) kook who got someone with authority to listen to him. Maybe that person in authority thought "well, it doesn't cost much to try", or, "we need to keep this guy (Pais) happy so he'll finish his other more important tasks" -- then again, maybe they did think in terms of grand disinfo strategy. But nothing outlandish is really required to explain what we can now see.
- generalizations 6y ago
  Could very well be. Though, it seems like the attention given by the people in authority was a little too genuine. > After one of his academic papers describing the patents was accepted for publication in 2016, Pais wrote in an email to several NAVAIR employees that “What is most unique about this paper is that it has already won the approval of Dr. [REDACTED], one of the world’s top authorities in Advanced Power and Propulsion/Quantum Vacuum Engineering, who has given his unreserved approval of this paper, calling it “a very good paper.” [REDACTED] has also forwarded the paper to several of his colleagues, including [REDACTED], another top subject matter expert.”
  - wcarss 6y ago
    As the article very briefly notes, that Dr. [REDACTED] may well be Hal Puthoff, whose book Pais likely read, and who then would appear to have perhaps directly inspired Pais' ideas. Said more disparagingly: it may only show that some kook liked hearing their ideas parroted back to them.
    - willis936 6y ago
      Right? Whenever I've looked at the alien Navy stories it always seems to boil down to someone wanting to be conned and a con man willing to oblige. It's embarrassing. The people calling the shots in politics and military do not have good noses and don't appreciate the value of peer review.
subsubzero 6y ago
There has been some news lately regarding UFO's that have been very strange, regarding government knowledge and disclosures. Things started in 2017 with TTSA and the Pentagon's acknowledgment of a series of videos regarding craft that showed strange movements of a unknown craft[1]. The fact is there is a pentagon program looking into this phenomenon, whether they are a psyops organization designed to deceive or mislead the public or a genuine org that is fact finding is yet to be revealed. Couple that with the acknowledgement of a series of fantastic technology patents that show off technologies not known by mainstream science by a engineer in the Navy [2]. Even more interesting is some of the technology in the Navy patents(room temperature superconducting) has recently been shown to be feasible(although with strict environmental controls) by MIT [3]. I am uncertain what is going here, If these craft are indeed genuine my suspicion is the Govt has made a lightspeed advance in technology and these craft being seen are products from a unknown skunkworks, if that is not the case than possibly China has made the leap. If they are not genuine, then the US is running a brazenly deceptive misinformation campaign with the media(and China). The other alternatives which would be a truly unknown source, or a known extraterrestrial source. The last two being least probable. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-u... [2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en [2] - 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... [3] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/14/1010370/room-temperature-superconductivity/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/14/1010370/room-tem...
- wcarss 6y ago
  There is a pretty big misunderstanding in your third point, and the article kind of laid the trap for an uncautious reader to fall into it: room-temperature superconductors, as an idea, are not a new or unusual concept. The breakthroughs from CFS (the MIT fusion spinoff) are in specific production techniques and uses of known superconductor materials that are "high temperature", but not "room temperature". They are (excitingly) industrializing some well-established science. The other 'recent breakthroughs' in room-temperature superconductors are similar to many accomplishments in the past, i.e., they were achieved under extremely high pressures, and do not operate on anything related to the concepts that Pais describes in his navy patents. The Pais patents and these other works are not related; these new 'breakthroughs' do not grant Pais' work any bonus of credulity -- but lots of reporting out there relies on only briefly noting that fact, and hoping that readers may glaze over it and see connections where there are none. edit: furthermore, the relationship between the patents and the videos as a concerted campaign has also been left for readers to make -- it's part of what makes this into some 'overall narrative', and what makes reading about these bits fun, but as I suggested in another comment, this background detail from the article on the patent process, I feel, begins to suggest concretely that the timing of all this UFO-ish stuff is (unfortunately!) just coincidence.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
I think the tl;dr here is that Dr. Pais appears to have gone through the Navy's standard patent process. There's some minor irregularities with some of the boxes he checked on the paperwork (like the discrepancy as to whose time the patents were developed on) but nothing earthshattering. Perhaps a few more hints at what he's actually done. For me, the most interesting aspect of the article was that, with a little bit of detective work and some OSINT, the author was able to deduce nearly every single redaction in the emails.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I admit that the recent UFO <-> Navy <-> Pentagon special UFO division leaks and news can't be easily be dismissed like the usual history channel UFO stuff; But, what's intriguing to me as a non-American is while NASA is spending Billions exploring space, Millions directly into trying to find evidence of life, so much so that a possible evidence of a gas which could only be generated through biological process from microbes could be considered greatest scientific discovery. So attributing these UFO to Aliens doesn't make any sense to me. If not anything, America cares about its money right?
- lwansbrough 6y ago
  To counter: What is more valuable than building its most advanced technology in secret, where it can’t be stolen?
- mattnewton 6y ago
  Americans care about their private money. Public money is other people's money, and there are books, movies and entire college courses on the subject of Americans spending public funds unwisely.
  - tt433 6y ago
    We're just as good at spending our private money badly, really
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  The government's hands don't all talk to each other, especially when there's classified data involved. Duplication of effort is unavoidable. It's very plausible that a military organization would keep a basically civilian organization in the dark on this.
- pp19dd 6y ago
  For what it's worth regarding working at cross-purposes, most people anywhere tend to generally think of U.S. government agencies as these very focused monolithic hives filled with people who are mostly all on the same page. But same as you described the discrepancy between different agencies' priorities, in reality, they're all largely fragmented as individual entities as well. With little fiefdoms here, little fiefdoms there, budget battles, pet projects, clawing of funds, burrowing. Agencies are held together by two things - a dusty org chart that's drifted far away from reality long ago, and procedural stuff like budgeting and delegation of authority that just has to be observed. Between duplicative functions performed by competing departments and counterproductive internal priorities that reflect the coteries they come from, IMO, not that dissimilar from larger established private companies.
tlack 6y ago
Has anyone tried building one of his simpler constructions? https://patents.google.com/patent/US10135366B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10135366B2/en
- binarymax 6y ago
  "The shell may be further doped with radioactive elements which under high frequency vibrations induce gamma ray emission." Wow this sounds like a great idea
  - tlack 6y ago
    There are a lot of "mays" and "might be nice to's" in the document. But even the vibration element seems optional, going by my loose interpretation of the formula and contextual wording.
- h2odragon 6y ago
  > It is a feature of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for deflecting or destroying a large asteroid and preventing a possible collision with earth. The present invention may also deflect or destroy any other type of object. I'm game right there. I think this "[shell with] embedded polycrystalline ferroelectric ceramic material" is probably a bit more ceramics than I have, so there's some work ahead.
  - tlack 6y ago
    The asteroid scale might be a bit much, but I think he's roughly saying any magnetic material that can be energized thats physically linked to the spinning shell. This is way beyond my pay grade. :)
aritmo 6y ago
A patent gives you protection for your idea because you described it in the patent. If the Pais effect is not described in detail, shouldn't that invalidate any patents?
- geuis 6y ago
  Can’t patent physical laws, natural phenomena, etc.
- hcknwscommenter 6y ago
  Sort of. If the Pais effect is described in enough detail, such that an "ordinary" person of "skill in the [technical field relevant to the making or using of the invention]" can use the teachings of the patent in combination with what is already commonly known to practice the invention without "undue experimentation", then the patent is considered enabled. If the patent does not teach enough to meet this criteria, then it is invalid for non-enablement. One subset of non-enablement is that the "invention" is simply not possible (e.g., perpetual motion machine).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
progre 6y ago
I may be paranoid, but this looks like kinda a psyops move to make the adversaries unsure of the us navys real capability.
- jaybrendansmith 6y ago
  Agree. Looks like counter-intelligence or a honeypot to me. It reads like a Larry Niven novel, like technology bought from the outsiders.
  - h2odragon 6y ago
    https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/ https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/
    - jaybrendansmith 6y ago
      That story is fantastic, thank you. Reminds me of one of my all-time favorite Asimov stories, Paté de Fois Gras, about the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs, but with a counter-intelligence twist.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  Or to distract them into spending time and resources looking into these crazy ideas. The more evidence there is of “official” support for these ideas, the more effective the distraction.
  - meowster 6y ago
    > distract them into spending time and resources looking into these crazy ideas. Admiral A: What happens if they actually discover something groundbreaking? Admiral B: Oh uh, we better have our people work on it too, just in case there's something there, so we're not left in the dust in case the other people find something first.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  Salvatore Pais = nation’s savior?
h2odragon 6y ago
There's been a decade or so of stories about the worsening state of the Navy overall, haven't there? Things like ships colliding and commanders being caught up in large corruption schemes? Perhaps the existing, "floats on water Navy" feels abandoned and unregarded because their only remaining function is to be a cover story? Assume for a moment this is true; and there's these new interlinked technologies available now that are hard to make at present, but it's like the first Gatling gun: people are going to figure it out. The world can be kept in the dark only so long once you actually show this and make any use of it, so how to maximize your advantage in that time?
- derefr 6y ago
  > Perhaps the existing, "floats on water Navy" feels abandoned and unregarded because their only remaining function is to be a cover story? I wouldn't say "cover story." The boats — especially the subs — are still pretty crucial to a lot the Navy's functions. Laying/tapping undersea cables, for example; or shipping and escorting classified cargo and workers to set up bases and outposts Think of it like: an Army Engineering Corps is just a bunch of skilled labor that can march around. A Naval Engineering Corps, meanwhile, is a bunch of skilled labor and a handy, defended floating base full of heavy equipment and building material. The Navy hasn't been about "gun boats" in the sense of "boats that themselves project power" for a while; but the Navy's boats do still need to be "gun boats" in the sense of being fortresses that can defend themselves from a nation-state trying to claim the big pools of mobile resources they house.
  - ak217 6y ago
    What a strange take. SSBNs remain the ultimate weapon and most naval warfare is geared toward either neutralizing enemy SSBNs or missile attack (a Burke can carry 5+ times more armament than a B-52 and stay on station for months). The Navy has a logistics arm and a spec ops arm, just like the other branches do, but their core capability revolves around SSBNs.
    - derefr 6y ago
      Sure, but that’s like saying the Secret Service’s main job is to protect the President against assassination. Sure, they do that — and if their budget were heavily constrained, that’s the one thing they wouldn’t be able to de-prioritize doing — but with their budget as large as it is, they don’t spend most of their time or resources doing that. And, just the same, the Navy doesn’t spend most of its time, budget, or manpower on “naval warfare”! What naval warfare the Navy does accomplish, can almost be seen as a secondary concern to the larger purpose the US government puts the Navy to: serving as a logistics and spec ops arm through which the non-military departments of the Executive can accomplish military goals. Who runs and mans the Hawaii Cryptologic Center? The Navy. Guantanamo Bay? Technically a Naval base. All our spy satellites? Naval. That kind of thing, when you add it all up, costs more money, and has more military members working on it, than all the actual direct war-fighting the Navy gets up to.
hcknwscommenter 6y ago
This whole thing is beyond bizarre to me. The posted article references another article about the appeals process. 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... . In that one, it is clear that in response to the non-enablement argument by the patent office, the Navy simply agreed that the technology is not possible today but they are doing experiments that they hope will work, and any way you better grant the patent because the Chinese are working on this. That was apparently enough to get a patent. That is not how it works for any normal inventor/applicant.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 6y ago
  Why does the Navy care about patents? Why do Skunkworks projects need patents? This seems totally counterintuitive. Why reveal any details about the work being done?
  - nvrspyx 6y ago
    IANAL, but from what I gather I t's....complicated. The Navy and other US military organizations cannot produce what's described in the patents alone and need outside companies, like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Those companies themselves often need imported parts from other countries. IP law (and patents) help define the legal boundaries of each involved party's responsibilities and capacity. Although companies based in like China or Russia may be protected in their respective countries for potential espionage, they may still face legal repercussions in the countries they do business in. With that said, I believe most US military patents are kept confidential, so your final question is still pertinent: "Why reveal any details about the work being done?"
    - ericmay 6y ago
      > "Why reveal any details about the work being done?" So we're talking about it instead of watching what they're actually doing. The Dr. in this story seems like a made up persona to my untrained eye. Maybe a real person, but not sure about what else. Maybe even a useful idiot (term, not derogatory toward Dr. Pais) who thinks they are patenting things, causing the Drive and others to chase down all these meaningless stories and dead ends to keep everyone busy.
CptFribble 6y ago
There's another possible explanation, though I forget where I heard it: Patents like these are coded signaling to USA's adversaries of a new-but-no-so-exciting advancement in weapons tech. For example, Chinese military scientists would be able to read this and see some new tech in these patents, but it's buried under layers of nonsense in order to obscure it from the general public - a sort of coded threat to announce without announcing, the secret-military-science version of test flights with new aerial platforms. It sounded bogus to me the first time I heard it, but then I imagine hearing about what the codebreakers were up to in WWII would sound pretty bogus to a layman then, too.
polytely 6y ago
Why do you need patents for secret technology anyway? Like if they were working on UFO-like crafts, why wouldn't you just keep it completely secret. It's not like China is going to care about US patents, so whom is it for, US companies? Or is this just a show for the media to a. normalize UFO's for some reason (make pilots more likely to report strange things they encounter)? b. some kind of psy-op to either distract the public or adversaries
- bdowling 6y ago
  > Why do you need patents for secret technology anyway? A government contractor who invents something would like to prevent other government contractors from infringing on their invention. Also, if an inventor keeps an invention secret and private then another inventor may be able to independently invent the same thing, patent it, and then prevent the first inventor from using the invention.
deeeeplearning 6y ago
This is the equivalent of someone working at Cisco claiming to have created a conscious AGI. You would immediately be extremely skeptical, rightly so. But as soon as we get outside of typical SWE topics HN seems to lose all sense of reality.
mring33621 6y ago
Is this simply a weird government agency recruiting tool? As in, look for people that have something interesting to say about these ideas?
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
I am bit confuse, if we are able to read this then it is not interesting to NAVY. Please correct me if I am wrong, but if patent is interesting for military purpose or it is crucial for the defense they can simply take it, and declare something as top secret? What is even more troubling for inventor is that they do not need to pay any royalties or fees.
msandford 6y ago
Initially these patents made sense to me. The idea seems to be to throw off EM at a sufficiently high frequency that you get around Planck's constant and none of the local matter is allowed to "relax" and interact. Which sounds great in theory but then you realize that your local matter might be things like electrons and thus currents which are what you need to throw off that EM. So while in theory it might work if you could find things that can move faster than they're allowed to, we don't really know how to do that just yet. Or so it seems to me.
cbHXBY1D 6y ago
God, the Salvatore Pais patents are so interesting and you find such little information about them online. Hacker News was pretty much the only place to discuss the first Pais article from The Drive.
cosmiccatnap 6y ago
A theoretical man with a theoretical plan, but that's all it is, just a weird patent grab by generating jargon too difficult to outright call bullshit.
graderjs 6y ago
I think it's arrogance that underlies the belief when weird stuff is in the sky, that it couldn't be extra-terrestrials. The arrogance of thinking, sure, we (or another "nation") could have built this, and the arrogance of thinking that in the enormous universe, there's no other life that could have figured out more than we could have. In this case, it's another type of arrogance, that these patents couldn't work because it seems to violate "what we know", which is arrogance that "what we know" encompasses "everything that is." Arrogance can be comfortable, but it's not scientific. It seems there's a reflex to insist that sky ships "can't be alien" and "weird propulsion" can't be possible. I think this reflex is crazy. Just keep an open mind, because "there's so much we don't know."
- graderjs 6y ago
  Sorry if this came across as harsh to some people. Next time I could try replacing "arrogance" with a less confrontational word. I think my goal was to convince a couple of people, but the unfortunate thing about words like "arrogant" is they put people on the defensive, which makes them unlikely to change their minds. Next time I might try a different approach.
gyroscope1 6y ago
The real fun thing about this UFO patent story is that separate to the patent story, recently the Navy acknowledged UFOs (which they referred to UAPs) which the pilots described the object as if it was ignoring inertia. Strangely, one of Pais’s patent claims to achieve the same thing. The fun is that we have only two options to explain these. 1. Pais’s work is moot. Therefore the UAP must be from aliens. 2. The UAP that the pilots saw were secret demos of Pais’s work. This rules out aliens from being involved in the UAP. But this means the Navy now has an anti-gravity engine and a fusion reactor.
- krapp 6y ago
  Both of these presuppose "ignoring inertia" is possible. It isn't, so both can be ruled out. Pais' work is obvious crackpot nonsense. Whatever objects the pilots saw, or think they saw, weren't actually breaking the laws of physics even if they appeared to be.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gyroscope1 6y ago
    Then what do you make of this? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-... The problem with discounting Pais’s work is that by doing so, UAP becomes left unexplained. From the news so far, the object was accelerating at a rate no human could withstand, with no detectable propulsion. Discounting UAP would be much more difficult.
    - krapp 6y ago
      Accepting a solution that requires the entirety of known physics to be scrapped isn't really a solution. Einstein has a very good track record of not being wrong. Just because something appears to defy the laws of physics, doesn't mean it does, and informed opinion is still just opinion. When someone can independently validate Pais' work by constructing an alternative model of physics that allows for gravity control and withstands experimental and predictive scrutiny, and maybe also build one of these UFOs and demonstrate in a repeatable manner that the claims being made are possible, then it's plausible. Until then, everything we have is speculation. The most likely interpretation is still that this phenomenon can be entirely explained by conventional physics, and possibly cutting-edge classified technology, and that the "UFO patents" are unrelated to what's actually going on here.

155 points by weare138 6y ago

If it's a patent then there should be enough detail for a person to build a working prototype of the invention right? That's the point of the patent process. The inventor claims that they are producible using modern technology, so it seems like they should put their money where their mouth is, choose the simplest device that uses his newly discovered physical effect, and build a demonstration.

generalizations 6y ago
Only if the inventor cares if the general public believes him. Sounds like he's doing this for the Navy, and the fewer people take him and the work seriously, the better. The US probably doesn't want China or Russia trying to duplicate his work. The patent doesn't indicate anything more than that the idea exists in some specificity. It's something for the inventor, later, when / if the tech doesn't need to be secret anymore.
- pengaru 6y ago
  > The US probably doesn't want China or Russia trying to duplicate his work. Many would argue the exact opposite: that these patents are nonsense intended to squander adversarial resources spent on vetting them.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    Either way. So long as no proof is forthcoming, no one is likely to take it seriously or be able to duplicate it. There's no incentive to prove it works.
    - pengaru 6y ago
      Well there have been a bunch of UFO videos circulated as of late, which if taken as legitimate seem likely to incorporate such inventions. It goes without saying that these patents and the release of such complementary "UFO" videos wastes some amount of time assessing their authenticity at the very least. I have no opinion on whether it's an effective tactic or not. But it does seem like one must assume it at least adds noise to be filtered out.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      If these did work they would revolutionize many industries. The mass reduction device for example has enormous implications if it were to work. In fact you could likely build a perpetual motion machine out of such a device. I mean yeah, most people are going to look at these and call them crackpot nonsense, but the drawings look pretty simple, and since they're all apparently based on this one particular effect all you have to do is test the one effect to disprove all of them.

jerry80 6y ago

Does anyone else find it absurd that the Government can own patents? If you consider the purpose of patents is to incentivize investment into research in exchange for securing a limited-time monopoly, then what is the purpose of Government owned patents? Since Government exists for the public good, it should already be incentivized to produce research. Patenting that research so that people can't utilize it defeats the whole point. What am I missing?

sneak 6y ago
It is already such that the US government can't own copyrights, as I understand it. Crown copyright is a thing in the UK, though. I am still a little surprised that they are allowed to keep secrets, for the same reason.
- gowld 6y ago
  It's important to keep secrets from other countries. The general public can't be forced to keep secrets, and therefore can't be privy to national secrets.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    Copyright doesn't keep secrets it provides a way to stop others from using it. A trade secret does. A patent doesn't.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > It is already such that the US government can't own copyrights Yes, it can. US-government created works are automatically public domain in the US, but the government, IIRC, still holds international copyrights on them, and moreover can own (even American) copyrights on anything whose creation makes it subject to copyright.
wcarss 6y ago
Not trying to justify it, but one could read it defensively in the same light that all employer-patent-grabs share: If you invent something directly in the course of your assigned tasks as an employee, i.e. they instruct you to invent X and you then do so, for pay, they want some legal basis to prevent you from turning around and charging them for a license to use/sell the invention they just paid you to create.

generalizations 6y ago

Interesting quote. > Every one of Pais' recent inventions depends on what the inventor calls “the Pais Effect,” described in numerous publications by the inventor as the “controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration under rapid (yet smooth) acceleration-deceleration-acceleration transients.” Since it all seems to boil down to that Pais Effect, I wonder what details there are to analyze what it actually is. Rather than critiquing the designs, that effect seems to be the thing to look at. Edit: found another article, which quoted Pais on what that effect is. > Mr. Tingley, do realize that my work culminates in the enablement of the Pais Effect (original physical concept). The Pais Effect comprises the generation of extremely high electromagnetic energy fluxes (and hence high local energy densities) generated by controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma states) subjected to accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin, via rapid acceleration transients. > Such high energy EM radiation can locally interact with the Vacuum Energy State (VES) - the VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence), in other words the fundamental structure (foundational framework), from which Everything else (Spacetime included) in our Quantum Reality, emerges. > The Engineering of the Pais Effect can give rise to the Enablement of Macroscopic Quantum Coherence, which if you have closely been following my work, you understand the importance of. I don't know enough to figure out if this guy is some modern Tesla or another kook.

beaner 6y ago
It's fun to think about what this could mean. Can you defeat gravity by somehow energizing matter to affect its spin and acceleration? And if so, could this not only be a technology for space travel, but potentially be an explainer for something like dark matter - maybe there are parts of galaxies that are energized differently than we assume, thereby affecting their gravitational pull? I'm sure this all sounds dumb, I'm not a physicist, but it's fun to think about.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  >Can you defeat gravity by somehow energizing matter to affect its spin and acceleration Except there is no mechanism through which this could work. That would be like me saying "if I flip these bits arranged in a pentagram fast enough surely this will create an AGI." It doesn't make a bit of sense.

wcarss 6y ago

This feels a little bit like reading some parts of the Silmarillion -- back story details expanding on old things we already knew. At the least though, the degree and the tonality of banal detail here, with some public records corroboration, decreases the odds this was ever in any way part of some grand strategy of disinformation, or a leak of something big that had been held under wraps. It reads as just a credentialed (and convincing) kook who got someone with authority to listen to him. Maybe that person in authority thought "well, it doesn't cost much to try", or, "we need to keep this guy (Pais) happy so he'll finish his other more important tasks" -- then again, maybe they did think in terms of grand disinfo strategy. But nothing outlandish is really required to explain what we can now see.

generalizations 6y ago
Could very well be. Though, it seems like the attention given by the people in authority was a little too genuine. > After one of his academic papers describing the patents was accepted for publication in 2016, Pais wrote in an email to several NAVAIR employees that “What is most unique about this paper is that it has already won the approval of Dr. [REDACTED], one of the world’s top authorities in Advanced Power and Propulsion/Quantum Vacuum Engineering, who has given his unreserved approval of this paper, calling it “a very good paper.” [REDACTED] has also forwarded the paper to several of his colleagues, including [REDACTED], another top subject matter expert.”
- wcarss 6y ago
  As the article very briefly notes, that Dr. [REDACTED] may well be Hal Puthoff, whose book Pais likely read, and who then would appear to have perhaps directly inspired Pais' ideas. Said more disparagingly: it may only show that some kook liked hearing their ideas parroted back to them.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Right? Whenever I've looked at the alien Navy stories it always seems to boil down to someone wanting to be conned and a con man willing to oblige. It's embarrassing. The people calling the shots in politics and military do not have good noses and don't appreciate the value of peer review.

subsubzero 6y ago

There has been some news lately regarding UFO's that have been very strange, regarding government knowledge and disclosures. Things started in 2017 with TTSA and the Pentagon's acknowledgment of a series of videos regarding craft that showed strange movements of a unknown craft[1]. The fact is there is a pentagon program looking into this phenomenon, whether they are a psyops organization designed to deceive or mislead the public or a genuine org that is fact finding is yet to be revealed. Couple that with the acknowledgement of a series of fantastic technology patents that show off technologies not known by mainstream science by a engineer in the Navy [2]. Even more interesting is some of the technology in the Navy patents(room temperature superconducting) has recently been shown to be feasible(although with strict environmental controls) by MIT [3]. I am uncertain what is going here, If these craft are indeed genuine my suspicion is the Govt has made a lightspeed advance in technology and these craft being seen are products from a unknown skunkworks, if that is not the case than possibly China has made the leap. If they are not genuine, then the US is running a brazenly deceptive misinformation campaign with the media(and China). The other alternatives which would be a truly unknown source, or a known extraterrestrial source. The last two being least probable. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-ufo-program.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/insider/secret-pentagon-u... [2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en [2] - 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... [3] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/14/1010370/room-temperature-superconductivity/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/14/1010370/room-tem...

wcarss 6y ago
There is a pretty big misunderstanding in your third point, and the article kind of laid the trap for an uncautious reader to fall into it: room-temperature superconductors, as an idea, are not a new or unusual concept. The breakthroughs from CFS (the MIT fusion spinoff) are in specific production techniques and uses of known superconductor materials that are "high temperature", but not "room temperature". They are (excitingly) industrializing some well-established science. The other 'recent breakthroughs' in room-temperature superconductors are similar to many accomplishments in the past, i.e., they were achieved under extremely high pressures, and do not operate on anything related to the concepts that Pais describes in his navy patents. The Pais patents and these other works are not related; these new 'breakthroughs' do not grant Pais' work any bonus of credulity -- but lots of reporting out there relies on only briefly noting that fact, and hoping that readers may glaze over it and see connections where there are none. edit: furthermore, the relationship between the patents and the videos as a concerted campaign has also been left for readers to make -- it's part of what makes this into some 'overall narrative', and what makes reading about these bits fun, but as I suggested in another comment, this background detail from the article on the patent process, I feel, begins to suggest concretely that the timing of all this UFO-ish stuff is (unfortunately!) just coincidence.

Rebelgecko 6y ago

I think the tl;dr here is that Dr. Pais appears to have gone through the Navy's standard patent process. There's some minor irregularities with some of the boxes he checked on the paperwork (like the discrepancy as to whose time the patents were developed on) but nothing earthshattering. Perhaps a few more hints at what he's actually done. For me, the most interesting aspect of the article was that, with a little bit of detective work and some OSINT, the author was able to deduce nearly every single redaction in the emails.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I admit that the recent UFO <-> Navy <-> Pentagon special UFO division leaks and news can't be easily be dismissed like the usual history channel UFO stuff; But, what's intriguing to me as a non-American is while NASA is spending Billions exploring space, Millions directly into trying to find evidence of life, so much so that a possible evidence of a gas which could only be generated through biological process from microbes could be considered greatest scientific discovery. So attributing these UFO to Aliens doesn't make any sense to me. If not anything, America cares about its money right?

lwansbrough 6y ago
To counter: What is more valuable than building its most advanced technology in secret, where it can’t be stolen?
mattnewton 6y ago
Americans care about their private money. Public money is other people's money, and there are books, movies and entire college courses on the subject of Americans spending public funds unwisely.
- tt433 6y ago
  We're just as good at spending our private money badly, really
andrewflnr 6y ago
The government's hands don't all talk to each other, especially when there's classified data involved. Duplication of effort is unavoidable. It's very plausible that a military organization would keep a basically civilian organization in the dark on this.
pp19dd 6y ago
For what it's worth regarding working at cross-purposes, most people anywhere tend to generally think of U.S. government agencies as these very focused monolithic hives filled with people who are mostly all on the same page. But same as you described the discrepancy between different agencies' priorities, in reality, they're all largely fragmented as individual entities as well. With little fiefdoms here, little fiefdoms there, budget battles, pet projects, clawing of funds, burrowing. Agencies are held together by two things - a dusty org chart that's drifted far away from reality long ago, and procedural stuff like budgeting and delegation of authority that just has to be observed. Between duplicative functions performed by competing departments and counterproductive internal priorities that reflect the coteries they come from, IMO, not that dissimilar from larger established private companies.

tlack 6y ago

Has anyone tried building one of his simpler constructions? https://patents.google.com/patent/US10135366B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10135366B2/en

binarymax 6y ago
"The shell may be further doped with radioactive elements which under high frequency vibrations induce gamma ray emission." Wow this sounds like a great idea
- tlack 6y ago
  There are a lot of "mays" and "might be nice to's" in the document. But even the vibration element seems optional, going by my loose interpretation of the formula and contextual wording.
h2odragon 6y ago
> It is a feature of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for deflecting or destroying a large asteroid and preventing a possible collision with earth. The present invention may also deflect or destroy any other type of object. I'm game right there. I think this "[shell with] embedded polycrystalline ferroelectric ceramic material" is probably a bit more ceramics than I have, so there's some work ahead.
- tlack 6y ago
  The asteroid scale might be a bit much, but I think he's roughly saying any magnetic material that can be energized thats physically linked to the spinning shell. This is way beyond my pay grade. :)

aritmo 6y ago

A patent gives you protection for your idea because you described it in the patent. If the Pais effect is not described in detail, shouldn't that invalidate any patents?

geuis 6y ago
Can’t patent physical laws, natural phenomena, etc.
hcknwscommenter 6y ago
Sort of. If the Pais effect is described in enough detail, such that an "ordinary" person of "skill in the [technical field relevant to the making or using of the invention]" can use the teachings of the patent in combination with what is already commonly known to practice the invention without "undue experimentation", then the patent is considered enabled. If the patent does not teach enough to meet this criteria, then it is invalid for non-enablement. One subset of non-enablement is that the "invention" is simply not possible (e.g., perpetual motion machine).

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progre 6y ago

I may be paranoid, but this looks like kinda a psyops move to make the adversaries unsure of the us navys real capability.

jaybrendansmith 6y ago
Agree. Looks like counter-intelligence or a honeypot to me. It reads like a Larry Niven novel, like technology bought from the outsiders.
- h2odragon 6y ago
  https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/ https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/
  - jaybrendansmith 6y ago
    That story is fantastic, thank you. Reminds me of one of my all-time favorite Asimov stories, Paté de Fois Gras, about the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs, but with a counter-intelligence twist.
snowwrestler 6y ago
Or to distract them into spending time and resources looking into these crazy ideas. The more evidence there is of “official” support for these ideas, the more effective the distraction.
- meowster 6y ago
  > distract them into spending time and resources looking into these crazy ideas. Admiral A: What happens if they actually discover something groundbreaking? Admiral B: Oh uh, we better have our people work on it too, just in case there's something there, so we're not left in the dust in case the other people find something first.
ethanbond 6y ago
Salvatore Pais = nation’s savior?

h2odragon 6y ago

There's been a decade or so of stories about the worsening state of the Navy overall, haven't there? Things like ships colliding and commanders being caught up in large corruption schemes? Perhaps the existing, "floats on water Navy" feels abandoned and unregarded because their only remaining function is to be a cover story? Assume for a moment this is true; and there's these new interlinked technologies available now that are hard to make at present, but it's like the first Gatling gun: people are going to figure it out. The world can be kept in the dark only so long once you actually show this and make any use of it, so how to maximize your advantage in that time?

derefr 6y ago
> Perhaps the existing, "floats on water Navy" feels abandoned and unregarded because their only remaining function is to be a cover story? I wouldn't say "cover story." The boats — especially the subs — are still pretty crucial to a lot the Navy's functions. Laying/tapping undersea cables, for example; or shipping and escorting classified cargo and workers to set up bases and outposts Think of it like: an Army Engineering Corps is just a bunch of skilled labor that can march around. A Naval Engineering Corps, meanwhile, is a bunch of skilled labor and a handy, defended floating base full of heavy equipment and building material. The Navy hasn't been about "gun boats" in the sense of "boats that themselves project power" for a while; but the Navy's boats do still need to be "gun boats" in the sense of being fortresses that can defend themselves from a nation-state trying to claim the big pools of mobile resources they house.
- ak217 6y ago
  What a strange take. SSBNs remain the ultimate weapon and most naval warfare is geared toward either neutralizing enemy SSBNs or missile attack (a Burke can carry 5+ times more armament than a B-52 and stay on station for months). The Navy has a logistics arm and a spec ops arm, just like the other branches do, but their core capability revolves around SSBNs.
  - derefr 6y ago
    Sure, but that’s like saying the Secret Service’s main job is to protect the President against assassination. Sure, they do that — and if their budget were heavily constrained, that’s the one thing they wouldn’t be able to de-prioritize doing — but with their budget as large as it is, they don’t spend most of their time or resources doing that. And, just the same, the Navy doesn’t spend most of its time, budget, or manpower on “naval warfare”! What naval warfare the Navy does accomplish, can almost be seen as a secondary concern to the larger purpose the US government puts the Navy to: serving as a logistics and spec ops arm through which the non-military departments of the Executive can accomplish military goals. Who runs and mans the Hawaii Cryptologic Center? The Navy. Guantanamo Bay? Technically a Naval base. All our spy satellites? Naval. That kind of thing, when you add it all up, costs more money, and has more military members working on it, than all the actual direct war-fighting the Navy gets up to.

hcknwscommenter 6y ago

This whole thing is beyond bizarre to me. The posted article references another article about the appeals process. 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... . In that one, it is clear that in response to the non-enablement argument by the patent office, the Navy simply agreed that the technology is not possible today but they are doing experiments that they hope will work, and any way you better grant the patent because the Chinese are working on this. That was apparently enough to get a patent. That is not how it works for any normal inventor/applicant.

deleted 6y ago
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echelon 6y ago
Why does the Navy care about patents? Why do Skunkworks projects need patents? This seems totally counterintuitive. Why reveal any details about the work being done?
- nvrspyx 6y ago
  IANAL, but from what I gather I t's....complicated. The Navy and other US military organizations cannot produce what's described in the patents alone and need outside companies, like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Those companies themselves often need imported parts from other countries. IP law (and patents) help define the legal boundaries of each involved party's responsibilities and capacity. Although companies based in like China or Russia may be protected in their respective countries for potential espionage, they may still face legal repercussions in the countries they do business in. With that said, I believe most US military patents are kept confidential, so your final question is still pertinent: "Why reveal any details about the work being done?"
  - ericmay 6y ago
    > "Why reveal any details about the work being done?" So we're talking about it instead of watching what they're actually doing. The Dr. in this story seems like a made up persona to my untrained eye. Maybe a real person, but not sure about what else. Maybe even a useful idiot (term, not derogatory toward Dr. Pais) who thinks they are patenting things, causing the Drive and others to chase down all these meaningless stories and dead ends to keep everyone busy.

CptFribble 6y ago

There's another possible explanation, though I forget where I heard it: Patents like these are coded signaling to USA's adversaries of a new-but-no-so-exciting advancement in weapons tech. For example, Chinese military scientists would be able to read this and see some new tech in these patents, but it's buried under layers of nonsense in order to obscure it from the general public - a sort of coded threat to announce without announcing, the secret-military-science version of test flights with new aerial platforms. It sounded bogus to me the first time I heard it, but then I imagine hearing about what the codebreakers were up to in WWII would sound pretty bogus to a layman then, too.

polytely 6y ago

Why do you need patents for secret technology anyway? Like if they were working on UFO-like crafts, why wouldn't you just keep it completely secret. It's not like China is going to care about US patents, so whom is it for, US companies? Or is this just a show for the media to a. normalize UFO's for some reason (make pilots more likely to report strange things they encounter)? b. some kind of psy-op to either distract the public or adversaries

bdowling 6y ago
> Why do you need patents for secret technology anyway? A government contractor who invents something would like to prevent other government contractors from infringing on their invention. Also, if an inventor keeps an invention secret and private then another inventor may be able to independently invent the same thing, patent it, and then prevent the first inventor from using the invention.

deeeeplearning 6y ago

This is the equivalent of someone working at Cisco claiming to have created a conscious AGI. You would immediately be extremely skeptical, rightly so. But as soon as we get outside of typical SWE topics HN seems to lose all sense of reality.

mring33621 6y ago

Is this simply a weird government agency recruiting tool? As in, look for people that have something interesting to say about these ideas?

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

I am bit confuse, if we are able to read this then it is not interesting to NAVY. Please correct me if I am wrong, but if patent is interesting for military purpose or it is crucial for the defense they can simply take it, and declare something as top secret? What is even more troubling for inventor is that they do not need to pay any royalties or fees.

msandford 6y ago

Initially these patents made sense to me. The idea seems to be to throw off EM at a sufficiently high frequency that you get around Planck's constant and none of the local matter is allowed to "relax" and interact. Which sounds great in theory but then you realize that your local matter might be things like electrons and thus currents which are what you need to throw off that EM. So while in theory it might work if you could find things that can move faster than they're allowed to, we don't really know how to do that just yet. Or so it seems to me.

cbHXBY1D 6y ago

God, the Salvatore Pais patents are so interesting and you find such little information about them online. Hacker News was pretty much the only place to discuss the first Pais article from The Drive.

cosmiccatnap 6y ago

A theoretical man with a theoretical plan, but that's all it is, just a weird patent grab by generating jargon too difficult to outright call bullshit.

graderjs 6y ago

I think it's arrogance that underlies the belief when weird stuff is in the sky, that it couldn't be extra-terrestrials. The arrogance of thinking, sure, we (or another "nation") could have built this, and the arrogance of thinking that in the enormous universe, there's no other life that could have figured out more than we could have. In this case, it's another type of arrogance, that these patents couldn't work because it seems to violate "what we know", which is arrogance that "what we know" encompasses "everything that is." Arrogance can be comfortable, but it's not scientific. It seems there's a reflex to insist that sky ships "can't be alien" and "weird propulsion" can't be possible. I think this reflex is crazy. Just keep an open mind, because "there's so much we don't know."

graderjs 6y ago
Sorry if this came across as harsh to some people. Next time I could try replacing "arrogance" with a less confrontational word. I think my goal was to convince a couple of people, but the unfortunate thing about words like "arrogant" is they put people on the defensive, which makes them unlikely to change their minds. Next time I might try a different approach.

gyroscope1 6y ago

The real fun thing about this UFO patent story is that separate to the patent story, recently the Navy acknowledged UFOs (which they referred to UAPs) which the pilots described the object as if it was ignoring inertia. Strangely, one of Pais’s patent claims to achieve the same thing. The fun is that we have only two options to explain these. 1. Pais’s work is moot. Therefore the UAP must be from aliens. 2. The UAP that the pilots saw were secret demos of Pais’s work. This rules out aliens from being involved in the UAP. But this means the Navy now has an anti-gravity engine and a fusion reactor.

krapp 6y ago
Both of these presuppose "ignoring inertia" is possible. It isn't, so both can be ruled out. Pais' work is obvious crackpot nonsense. Whatever objects the pilots saw, or think they saw, weren't actually breaking the laws of physics even if they appeared to be.
- deleted 6y ago
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- gyroscope1 6y ago
  Then what do you make of this? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-and-a-with-navy-pilot-chad-underwood.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/tic-tac-ufo-video-q-... The problem with discounting Pais’s work is that by doing so, UAP becomes left unexplained. From the news so far, the object was accelerating at a rate no human could withstand, with no detectable propulsion. Discounting UAP would be much more difficult.
  - krapp 6y ago
    Accepting a solution that requires the entirety of known physics to be scrapped isn't really a solution. Einstein has a very good track record of not being wrong. Just because something appears to defy the laws of physics, doesn't mean it does, and informed opinion is still just opinion. When someone can independently validate Pais' work by constructing an alternative model of physics that allows for gravity control and withstands experimental and predictive scrutiny, and maybe also build one of these UFOs and demonstrate in a repeatable manner that the claims being made are possible, then it's plausible. Until then, everything we have is speculation. The most likely interpretation is still that this phenomenon can be entirely explained by conventional physics, and possibly cutting-edge classified technology, and that the "UFO patents" are unrelated to what's actually going on here.