> We see this in action in the "Go Fast" and "Gimbal" videos released by the Pentagon that supposedly show UFOs. I don't believe these videos show anything really out of the ordinary at all, and certainly nothing definitively so, and there has been some very good forensic analysis done on them already that reinforces this point of view. Nick West, in particular, has really done compelling work on this topic. Some of his videos are posted below and are worth consideration. The third video that was released, the one of the infamous "Tic Tac" from 2004, looks like, well a Tic Tac, at least to me. Regardless, they all show FLIR footage taken by Hornets' targeting pods.
My theory is that many of the observations are ball lightning maintained and transported by radar. If so, studying the phenomena could have fantastic implications for nuclear fusion, which would make the investment well worth it.
The metallic cigar shapes could, within the realm of possibility, be free electrons in a similar toroidal path, giving the appearance of a shiny surface. That in turn could perhaps shield our spacecraft in the future.
The odd part is the radar-visual claims, and why would someone like Navy Cmdr. David Fravor (who claimed to have visual contact and was in pursuit of the object), would throw all of his legacy out the window, all for a lie that could easily be debunked.
I find it hard to pin that the US Navy pilots aren't as sharp as we perceived to be, or that these actors had something to gain with this, or if it was easily debunked why weren't the actors involved briefed on what it was.
I agree - and with this kind of stuff, somehow we're prone to looking at the government like it's a perfectly running black box, with an all-reaching, all-encompassing power and control over information. But if you look at these pieces of information that have gone out - "something is being reported by our people, we don't actually know what is it, people are talking about it to the outside as well, we thought we add some equipment to see if we can find out more" - it seems much more realistic to me, and much more in line with inefficient, clumsy and sometimes incompetent government that it is...
More sensors means more measurement, which means more control of time and space, and the further enabling of an outward-looking stance. All of which is going to be of benefit as humanity leans harder on the science of the natural world and begins reaching for new ways to prevent catastrophic wars and disasters and explores space travel options. The more sensors, and the smarter they can operate, the better.
The 20th century was in many ways a huge list of reasons why we shouldn't cocoon ourselves and "not explore" things that are what I call NO-NOs: Next order natural occurrences. Think we know it all, have seen it all, and can predict it all? Nope! And sensors are going to help us navigate and push through to new levels of understanding.
It sounds crazy but there are still influential people in the military affairs community who don't believe we should look into UFOs. Not because they claim they don't exist, but because they claim the tech is too far beyond us, and there's nothing we can do about it! So why try? This is literally their reasoning. For a good example, listen to Lt. Col. Halt USAF (RET) recap his experience at Rendlesham in recent interviews.
This psychology is exactly what will keep us from moving forward and exploring whatever else is really out there. No cover-up conspiracies needed, just plain old heads-down psychology. Keep the world the way it is. You can't argue with the psychology and expect to get anywhere; it is too self-protective. So arguing for more and better sensors is probably the best stance we have right now.
I wonder what people here think of Bob Lazar. On one hand I have a very hard time believing the physics he describes without hard proof, on the other his story has been remarkably consistent, there's bits of tangential evidence and as a whole it AFAIK wasn't falsified for 30 years now. It's certain to me at least that he worked at Los Alamos. I have only two explanations:
1) he was a Los Alamos employee that came up with a scheme to sell books and such, and has a remarkable gift for acting and telling that story consistently for decades. But then why the FBI raids and such, is that invented too?
2) pretty much his entire story is true. But could such a huge project be kept secret?
From what I understand, records show he worked at Los Alamos, but not his role, so he could have been a janitor for all we know.
We also know he didn't actually go to MIT like he claims, and the way he explains the "alien tech" are not the way a real engineer would talk about these things. So I'd say definitely a crackpot...
There’s a video of him being asked who his professors were at Caltech and MIT. He names two people, one was from a community college and a high school I think.
And he doesn’t explain the science in a detailed or verbose way.
Neither of those explanations are very satisfying. At best they might make the story suspicious, but that doesn’t seem like enough to say we know something.
Sure, but that’s besides the point. Once parent comment asserts a fact about a specific detail, they now have an obligation to cite the evidence for that particular fact. Lazar’s obligation to prove his own claims is a legitimate but separate issue.
He was registered at some vocational school is Los Alamos at the time he said he attended MIT, besides the fact that MIT says they've never heard of him.
He says shit like "the gravity orb was activated by a an electric pressure", which is just nonsense.
Thanks! Still watching it, but I gotta say this YouTuber plays it rather fast and loose. One of his first points (that finally comes after a good 20min of pushing his own ego and going through the 'offial' story) is that a small yield 'nucular' explosion would have been detected. Fusion explosions can go down to kilojoule range, fission - undergoing explosive chain reaction accidentally - may be in tens of tons of TNT range. There's some recent paper that describes the first smaller explosion of Chernobyl as such a small yield nuclear explosion.
When someone just claims (s) he is thorough I immediately get suspicious.
That being said, the central thesis might hold up and I still have to watch the rest.
I think he is a fraud. He constantly states he hates the media attention but then does a Netflix show and goes on Joe Rogan. Why would you want the maximum possible exposure to yourself when you stated so many times that you don’t like the attention. Don’t mind the fact that he has presented zero proof towards anything of extraterrestrial nature. He makes many claims none of which can be verified. Ok, so you had a biometric device on base you were not aware of, so what? Just because YOU don’t think the tech doesn’t exist, doesn’t make it true.
You might be interested in Annie Jacobsen's interview on the JRE. She argued that the 'flying saucers' were actually just an elaborate Soviet attempt at psychological warfare. I have no idea if it's true or not but it's entertaining at least, so I'll summarize it here.
The theory states that at the end of WWII, Stalin was feeling vulnerable because the US had the atomic bomb but the USSR did not. So he was interested in ways to try to destabilize the US and level the playing field.
So Stalin decided to have his engineers build some flying saucers and fly them into the continental US in order to freak people out. He also had some human cadavers surgically altered to look like aliens and them stuck them in the capsule for good measure.
By flying the saucers into the US mainland, the USSR hoped to put the US government in a bind. If the civilians who would inevitably find the craft were left to believe that it really was an alien ship, the prospect that 'we are not alone' would stir mass social unrest. On the other hand, if the govt identified the vessel as a Soviet aircraft, it would have to admit that the Russians were able to sneak into US airspace without the US military noticing, which would be a scandal in and of itself.
I think that story - as crazy as it is - is more plausible than actual aliens visiting Earth (though its not exactly a high bar). Stalin was certainly psycho enough to consider running such a harebrained scheme. It would also explain why the US govt would cover the whole thing up even if there were no aliens involved.
In any case, I am far more inclined to believe that any UFOs sighting is military-related than any kind of alien encounter.
Annie Jacobsen is incredibly fringe in her theories and I'd take everything she says with a healthy dose of salt.
Case in point: Jacobsen reported in one of her books that "Josef Stalin recruited ex-Nazi Josef Mengele to be part of a scheme where a “UFO with aliens” was created to scare Americans. According to the tale, Mengele — the infamous Nazi “angel of death” who experimented on children at concentration camps — surgically altered a group of youngsters to look like aliens." [1]
Sure. I wish I had the time to really vet her work.
I will say that in my book a deranged dictator running a insane scheme to try to scare Americans is still FAR more plausible than real extra-terrestrials visiting earth. Or perhaps there was some other secret government project that got covered up. But I am highly skeptical that aliens showed up. (no offense if you disagree)
I figure whatever the truth is we'll probably find out in a couple of decades once more information becomes part of the public domain.
I find it uninspiring that we still only get grainy video or flir video from these jets. They claim multiple jets detected on but there was no ground based radar, satellites, or other sources that could correlate these "sightings"? The evidence always seems so thin and from a single source, almost on purpose.
But this is the nature of UFO! They're always zipping about in the gray area of "barely detectable". If an object is easy to detect, it's also easy to identify with our array of sensors. If it's not detectable we don't know there's an UFO. So we'll always puzzle over grainy footage and blips on the radar.
These cameras are going to clear up some of the mysteries we've seen in the past. But they are going to find more, further out.
Cool, wake me up when something more than one or two jets in the same area meaning their auto-targeting computers + pilots voice logs are all we have to work with.
What has struck me a few times with the videos from fighter jets is that the UFO does not seem to move relative to the camera, that is, it's stuck in the middle or something. Which of course to me implies it's a speck or something on the camera.
(I'm not a photographer though. I did read that e.g. scratches on a camera lens don't really have a noticeable effect on the final picture as well)
If they are taking those videos with their targeting pods, then the pod follows the locked target, keeping it in the frame center.
It would be different if they took the videos with their gun sight, which is fixed in a single direction.
It seems the usually happen out at sea so it would make sense there's no ground based sensors or satellites watching a random spot in the ocean. As for the camera fuzziness, I can't help but think how it would look if I saw something and tried to record it. I have a decent camera on my phone, but if there's something in the sky it's going to be far away and my natural reaction would be to increase my zoom. Anybody that has ever done this knows that it gets extremely fuzzy. As for cameras on jets, I would thin that if the are any good high resolution cameras that they would be face down to capture the ground.
That’s no excuse. These jets were doing a multi-agency testing operation to test out the new networking features for the jets sensors. Which means ships and satellites and other things were deployed in the area during the sighting in question.
I find it highly questionable during such a deployment only two jets in the same area (ie, the same light refraction area) saw the anomaly but nothing else did.
The entire point of these new networked systems is to have multiple sources to increase accuracy.
It's probably a logical fallacy of some kind on my part, but does it seem to anyone else that stories about UFO's are recently becoming more common in the mainstream media?
I listened to a podcast interview with Dan Aykroyd recently and he talked about the exact same thing. He is convinced they are doing
soft preparation to begin unveiling extraterrestrial life to us. Dan Aykroyd is definitely not a legitimate source haha, but he is someone who is very ear to the ground on this stuff, and you are not alone in noticing a recent uptick in sightings , news, leaks, etc. about UFOs.
It would be quite the movie plot if extraterrestrial life were revealed right when the humanity needs to work together in a massive push to avoid the climate catastrophe.
That would basically just be "Day the Earth Stood Still," but with an environmental, rather than anti-war message.
And it's too late to avoid the climate catastrophe anyway, so the only reason aliens would actually show up is for the free real estate after humanity completes its self-fumigation.
I don’t believe it’s anything that extraordinary. It’s just the news with their algorithms catering to the public’s whims, and the public just happens to be momentarily more interested in spooky UFO stuff than usual.
I think most likely the government’s not involved. They’re just individuals being scammed by unscrupulous people. There are certainly counter intelligence aspects and perhaps secret testing of technology but neither are primary to the claims of ‘disclosure’.
Yes, but not UFOs as in aliens. UFOs as in there's a ton of unidentified aircraft in any given airspace that no one is claiming responsibility for. This is happening because the US Navy recently released a bunch of UFO info to the public and admitted that UFO encounters are a pretty frequent occurrence for Navy pilots (again, not in the aliens sense).
Bearing in mind that this is the same Navy that apparently has such difficulty seeing other ships that they ram into them on a regular basis. There is such an institutional culture of sleep deprivation that it's not really surprising they have a high incident rate for this sort of thing.
I don't understand what you're getting at. They have a large number of recorded UFO incidents with captured evidence, usually from the aircraft instrumentation itself.
If you're trying to imply they're imagining it due to sleep deprivation, that's a bit crass.
Not imagining it, as such. There are many odd optical phenomena when flying in the sky - specular reflections may present as moving objects, and small close objects can easily be mistaken for large distant ones. It takes some measure of critical thinking to identify these things at the time, and it's not always possible to reconstruct what they were afterwards. Sleep deprivation will sap this critical thinking ability.
Lest you think I'm being unfair, consider your link; that's clearly dirt in the lens. The clue? The camera wobbles at the precise instant the "object" rotates, on several occasions. What you're seeing is a gimbaled camera with software auto-leveling; the camera rotates, and the dirt with it. You see a similar phenomenon in other UFO videos that seem to show the UFO "suddenly accelerating" at the end - the camera gimbal reaches the end of its travel, and the object is yanked out of shot.
The Navy has the resources to check for dirt on a lens before they release a video like this. I maintain that the quantity of UFO videos coming out of the Navy tells us more about the Navy than about UFOs.
>Lest you think I'm being unfair, consider your link; that's clearly dirt in the lens. The clue? The camera wobbles at the precise instant the "object" rotates, on several occasions. What you're seeing is a gimbaled camera with software auto-leveling; the camera rotates, and the dirt with it.
You can clearly see that the object rotates at a different rate to the camera. You can also see the targeting box adjust itself as the object rotates.
Also I can only presume you think the audio is fake, given what the pilots say about there being a "fleet of them" on the SA display, and the comment about them moving into the wind?
> Lest you think I'm being unfair, consider your link; that's clearly dirt in the lens.
Mate, it's an object being tracked by multiple planes with multiple cameras (more footage of this incident on youtube), two of which are shown in the video (ir and visual). The only reason it's being tracked at all is because they had RADAR lock on it, as indicated by the two vertical lines encompassing it on the display. The reason it appears to be 'stuck' to the view is because the tracking system is that good.
Spend 5 minutes picking up a cursory understanding of a topic before confidently stating outright silliness.
I’m not a UFO-interested person, but some of the news around this stuff is just... bizarre. For example, this patent[1] from the secretary of the navy activated last Friday for “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”?
The circumstances around the patent are even more intriguing. Here’s a quote from a patent lawyer here on HN regarding this patent[2]:
Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum.
Is there any sane element to that Patent? I tried to follow the explanations, but reeks of magic thinking to me... which is indistinguishable from high level technology.
I want to believe it, but I don't know which way Occam's razor falls on this. It's probably more reasonable to believe that these lawyers managed to game the patent office into accepting it...
What if, and bare with me here, there's some super exotic technologies that we've been working on for a long time and we're this close to making it work and are concerned that the Chinese, notorious patent trolls, will get there first - and then as a preemptive strategy the Navy files these but intentionally obscures the relevant (almost real) physics?
Of course the question then becomes: why even mention this stuff at all? It's not the the Military would really care about a patent in that sense.
I don't believe it either, but The X-Files fan in me can't help but wonder.
Is it? Or is it more likely that a well-funded US government branch aimed at researching new technology actually managed to discover, or replicate, new technology?
There's something buzzing around in the skies. Most sightings most likely have more simple explanations, but there are enough sightings to convince me that there's probably someone buzzing around the skies with shinier hardware than we would expect them to. I'm not saying they're extraterrestrial but they do come from somewhere, and if someone has something that advanced it's only logical that US armed forces are looking into it -- _especially_ if we assume the source is Chinese or Russian and there are intelligence reports backing it up.
It goes in depth on other "psuedoscience" patent by the US Navy and how the math involved is almost gibberish.
This paragraph in particular about the initial rejection but subsequent approval was odd.
"According to documents available to the public at the USPTO website, the Patent Office rejected Pais' and the Navy's application for this craft on March 30, 2018. After it was rejected, the NAWCAD’s patent attorney, Mark O. Glut, appealed the decision and submitted further documentation to ensure the patent office that this craft is indeed "enabled," meaning it can actually be built and can perform as described in the patent."
This is odd indeed since the government cannot really appreciate the benefits of IP it develops on its own
The easy workaround, which it does do often, is that it has IP assigned to it via employment agreements or work for hire or purchasing
Here it was filed by an appointed/elected official operating in the official capacity, with a clear note that the government derives no monetary benefits
Elon Musk said that Space X is not big on patenting stuff because it would not gain anything out from it and the competitors in other countries would just copy it blatantly.
I feel like these patente are a red herring to throw off Chinese and Russian scientists. If this research was real, it would probably be classified and the Navy would've used the mechanisms that exist for keeping patents secret.
That doesn't make sense unless one assumes Chinese and Russian scientists are idiots who can't tell real science from BS... in which case there would be no reason to throw them off to begin with.
That's my thought too. Someone else mentioned the math being basically nonsense, but surely if it was there to misdirect other scientists there must be some grain of sense to it - otherwise it'd just be an exercise in futility?
The misdirection would only work until someone actually read it and pointed the nonsense out, though. If it were actually intended to fool someone, it would probably be less obviously wrong. A patent for something feasibly advanced but not too out of the ordinary, or something hidden as a red herring in an actual classified document intended to be intercepted. I have a hard time believing a foreign government would waste a significant amount of time and money on American patents on woo-woo antigravity and things.
In another thread, I thought it could just be someone trolling the patent office, but I don't know.
It sounds like the Patent Examiner's issue is not necessarily with the fundamental science so much as with the enormous amount of energy required to make use of the ideas. Though this doesn't mean the science is sound (I'm definitely not one to judge!), if the patents are combined with leaked (fabricated) videos of Navy pilots encountering exotic craft then maybe this is enough to send rival states down some rabbit hole.
My internal cynic would guess that it's a joint public-private promotional stunt for Mass Effect. The whole backstory of this sci-fi was that they found a substance that could do exactly that.
"Oh look, US Navy has a patent for eezo-powered drive!"
You don't normally expect this kind of nonsense from government, but the US military is heavily into media tie-ins, mainly film and video games. I'd bet 5 dollars you just nailed it.
Is that also why they put literal SKYNET [0] in charge of telling us who to drone?
Just can't get over that one, either somebody in the NSA has a really dark sense of humor or people working there must be living in some kind of pop-culture vacuum.
Assuming UFO != alien, then this is definitely interesting. There are definitely atmospheric phenomena we know little or nothing about. Sprites, elves, jets, ball lightning and so on. More data on that would be exciting.
2019: "Quick get my worst camera so I can snap this UFO!"
78 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadCan we talk about events with complete information? Can we not hypothesize about speculative nonsense.
Wake me when someone has an answer. I don't care about questions.
The metallic cigar shapes could, within the realm of possibility, be free electrons in a similar toroidal path, giving the appearance of a shiny surface. That in turn could perhaps shield our spacecraft in the future.
I find it hard to pin that the US Navy pilots aren't as sharp as we perceived to be, or that these actors had something to gain with this, or if it was easily debunked why weren't the actors involved briefed on what it was.
More sensors means more measurement, which means more control of time and space, and the further enabling of an outward-looking stance. All of which is going to be of benefit as humanity leans harder on the science of the natural world and begins reaching for new ways to prevent catastrophic wars and disasters and explores space travel options. The more sensors, and the smarter they can operate, the better.
The 20th century was in many ways a huge list of reasons why we shouldn't cocoon ourselves and "not explore" things that are what I call NO-NOs: Next order natural occurrences. Think we know it all, have seen it all, and can predict it all? Nope! And sensors are going to help us navigate and push through to new levels of understanding.
It sounds crazy but there are still influential people in the military affairs community who don't believe we should look into UFOs. Not because they claim they don't exist, but because they claim the tech is too far beyond us, and there's nothing we can do about it! So why try? This is literally their reasoning. For a good example, listen to Lt. Col. Halt USAF (RET) recap his experience at Rendlesham in recent interviews.
This psychology is exactly what will keep us from moving forward and exploring whatever else is really out there. No cover-up conspiracies needed, just plain old heads-down psychology. Keep the world the way it is. You can't argue with the psychology and expect to get anywhere; it is too self-protective. So arguing for more and better sensors is probably the best stance we have right now.
1) he was a Los Alamos employee that came up with a scheme to sell books and such, and has a remarkable gift for acting and telling that story consistently for decades. But then why the FBI raids and such, is that invented too?
2) pretty much his entire story is true. But could such a huge project be kept secret?
We also know he didn't actually go to MIT like he claims, and the way he explains the "alien tech" are not the way a real engineer would talk about these things. So I'd say definitely a crackpot...
And he doesn’t explain the science in a detailed or verbose way.
The burden on proof is on him to prove the story is real, not on others to disprove the stuff he makes up.
He says shit like "the gravity orb was activated by a an electric pressure", which is just nonsense.
When someone just claims (s) he is thorough I immediately get suspicious.
That being said, the central thesis might hold up and I still have to watch the rest.
Money doesn't last forever, and sometimes you need more of it
The theory states that at the end of WWII, Stalin was feeling vulnerable because the US had the atomic bomb but the USSR did not. So he was interested in ways to try to destabilize the US and level the playing field.
So Stalin decided to have his engineers build some flying saucers and fly them into the continental US in order to freak people out. He also had some human cadavers surgically altered to look like aliens and them stuck them in the capsule for good measure.
By flying the saucers into the US mainland, the USSR hoped to put the US government in a bind. If the civilians who would inevitably find the craft were left to believe that it really was an alien ship, the prospect that 'we are not alone' would stir mass social unrest. On the other hand, if the govt identified the vessel as a Soviet aircraft, it would have to admit that the Russians were able to sneak into US airspace without the US military noticing, which would be a scandal in and of itself.
I think that story - as crazy as it is - is more plausible than actual aliens visiting Earth (though its not exactly a high bar). Stalin was certainly psycho enough to consider running such a harebrained scheme. It would also explain why the US govt would cover the whole thing up even if there were no aliens involved.
In any case, I am far more inclined to believe that any UFOs sighting is military-related than any kind of alien encounter.
Case in point: Jacobsen reported in one of her books that "Josef Stalin recruited ex-Nazi Josef Mengele to be part of a scheme where a “UFO with aliens” was created to scare Americans. According to the tale, Mengele — the infamous Nazi “angel of death” who experimented on children at concentration camps — surgically altered a group of youngsters to look like aliens." [1]
1. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/area-51-ufos-aliens-annie-jac...
I will say that in my book a deranged dictator running a insane scheme to try to scare Americans is still FAR more plausible than real extra-terrestrials visiting earth. Or perhaps there was some other secret government project that got covered up. But I am highly skeptical that aliens showed up. (no offense if you disagree)
I figure whatever the truth is we'll probably find out in a couple of decades once more information becomes part of the public domain.
These cameras are going to clear up some of the mysteries we've seen in the past. But they are going to find more, further out.
I was originally interested in all of this new buzz but I now know to skip it.
(I'm not a photographer though. I did read that e.g. scratches on a camera lens don't really have a noticeable effect on the final picture as well)
I find it highly questionable during such a deployment only two jets in the same area (ie, the same light refraction area) saw the anomaly but nothing else did.
The entire point of these new networked systems is to have multiple sources to increase accuracy.
Additionally, satellites are always watching everything all the time. Multiple catch asteroids flying extremely fast all the time. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-asteroid-peril-isnt-science... (scroll down to see videos)
Where's MH370?
Besides, if they were seen they would just blow up aircraft anyway.
And it's too late to avoid the climate catastrophe anyway, so the only reason aliens would actually show up is for the free real estate after humanity completes its self-fumigation.
The avalanche has begun, it's too late now for the pebbles to vote.
Maybe it's to let foreign adversaries "know that we know" that they're watching us.
Maybe deflecting something deeper about these craft, my guess is that they're nuclear powered.
Or, it could be real. Maybe ET is watching us. I find this the least likely explanation though
Also remember that little of what gets posted to HN counts as sources within the "mainstream media."
If you're trying to imply they're imagining it due to sleep deprivation, that's a bit crass.
We're talking about stuff like this: https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000005607812/look-at-tha...
Could be a falling piece of debris, could be evil space aliens, they don't know what it is - hence UFO.
Lest you think I'm being unfair, consider your link; that's clearly dirt in the lens. The clue? The camera wobbles at the precise instant the "object" rotates, on several occasions. What you're seeing is a gimbaled camera with software auto-leveling; the camera rotates, and the dirt with it. You see a similar phenomenon in other UFO videos that seem to show the UFO "suddenly accelerating" at the end - the camera gimbal reaches the end of its travel, and the object is yanked out of shot.
The Navy has the resources to check for dirt on a lens before they release a video like this. I maintain that the quantity of UFO videos coming out of the Navy tells us more about the Navy than about UFOs.
You can clearly see that the object rotates at a different rate to the camera. You can also see the targeting box adjust itself as the object rotates.
Also I can only presume you think the audio is fake, given what the pilots say about there being a "fleet of them" on the SA display, and the comment about them moving into the wind?
Mate, it's an object being tracked by multiple planes with multiple cameras (more footage of this incident on youtube), two of which are shown in the video (ir and visual). The only reason it's being tracked at all is because they had RADAR lock on it, as indicated by the two vertical lines encompassing it on the display. The reason it appears to be 'stuck' to the view is because the tracking system is that good.
Spend 5 minutes picking up a cursory understanding of a topic before confidently stating outright silliness.
Here, see another one and watch how the RADAR symbology works when the pilot gets a lock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fd6ssvcBoM
The circumstances around the patent are even more intriguing. Here’s a quote from a patent lawyer here on HN regarding this patent[2]:
Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum.
1. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants
Of course the question then becomes: why even mention this stuff at all? It's not the the Military would really care about a patent in that sense.
I don't believe it either, but The X-Files fan in me can't help but wonder.
There's something buzzing around in the skies. Most sightings most likely have more simple explanations, but there are enough sightings to convince me that there's probably someone buzzing around the skies with shinier hardware than we would expect them to. I'm not saying they're extraterrestrial but they do come from somewhere, and if someone has something that advanced it's only logical that US armed forces are looking into it -- _especially_ if we assume the source is Chinese or Russian and there are intelligence reports backing it up.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g...
It goes in depth on other "psuedoscience" patent by the US Navy and how the math involved is almost gibberish.
This paragraph in particular about the initial rejection but subsequent approval was odd.
"According to documents available to the public at the USPTO website, the Patent Office rejected Pais' and the Navy's application for this craft on March 30, 2018. After it was rejected, the NAWCAD’s patent attorney, Mark O. Glut, appealed the decision and submitted further documentation to ensure the patent office that this craft is indeed "enabled," meaning it can actually be built and can perform as described in the patent."
The easy workaround, which it does do often, is that it has IP assigned to it via employment agreements or work for hire or purchasing
Here it was filed by an appointed/elected official operating in the official capacity, with a clear note that the government derives no monetary benefits
This whole thing is very out of character.
In another thread, I thought it could just be someone trolling the patent office, but I don't know.
My internal cynic would guess that it's a joint public-private promotional stunt for Mass Effect. The whole backstory of this sci-fi was that they found a substance that could do exactly that.
"Oh look, US Navy has a patent for eezo-powered drive!"
You don't normally expect this kind of nonsense from government, but the US military is heavily into media tie-ins, mainly film and video games. I'd bet 5 dollars you just nailed it.
Just can't get over that one, either somebody in the NSA has a really dark sense of humor or people working there must be living in some kind of pop-culture vacuum.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
Assuming UFO != alien, then this is definitely interesting. There are definitely atmospheric phenomena we know little or nothing about. Sprites, elves, jets, ball lightning and so on. More data on that would be exciting.
2019: "Quick get my worst camera so I can snap this UFO!"