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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Holding the patent allow the government to recoup its investment to some degree.
Governments don't necessarily have to treat patents the same way as private companies do, either. Legislation can require a fairly open licensing scheme for reasonable rates, for example, which balances recouping expense with making the publicly-funded work publicly available.
it doesn't really make sense under the model where patents exist solely to incentivize private investment. I don't think that necessarily makes it absurd; at least, I can envision cases where the government owning a patent could ultimately serve the public good.
suppose the government spends a large amount of public funds on research that turns out to have a very narrow commercial application. if the findings can be freely used by a couple niche companies, it's effectively a subsidy to them. not necessarily a bad thing, but we might want the government to be more intentional about granting subsidies. if instead the companies have to negotiate a license, the government can recoup some of the public's money and allocate it to more research.
Given first-to-file, it seems reasonable for the Government to defensively file on research that it's directly produced. Otherwise, you might end up with someone else filing on that research and then demanding the Government pay them to use the products of its own research. Moreover, just because you own a patent, you're not obligated to charge anyone to license it.
While true, government-held patents are a bit more preemptive and should ultimately prevent any profiteering on patents while the patent is challenged.
The purpose of the U.S. patent system is the public dispersion of new knowledge. You publicly disclose how your invention works, and in return you get a limited monopoly on its production.
You don’t need a patent system to incentivize research, people and companies can just treat new inventions as trade secrets and never tell anyone how they work. Plenty of tech companies already do this. Google has not filed patents disclosing exactly how their search system works, for example.
The U.S. military has an additional tool to protect knowledge: classification. Again, there is no patent on public file for a functioning hydrogen fusion bomb.
So why would the Navy file a patent on something? It is plausible that their goal in doing so was to disclose its existence.
>The purpose of the U.S. patent system is the public dispersion of new knowledge.
That's its (stated) purpose from the viewpoint of society. Patents' purposes from the viewpoint of the inventor is to secure the 20-year monopoly on the invention (or to secure a plausible threat). Nobody would file a patent for the sole purpose of disclosure. If you really want to disclose something, there are a million easier, better, and cheaper ways to do it.
>So why would the Navy file a patent on something? It is plausible that their goal in doing so was to disclose its existence.
If they wanted disclosure, they could just post it on their website and issue a press release. Or publish a book. Or a journal article. Or add it to their podcast. They already do all these things. Why not for this?
> 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.
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.
>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.
If he hasn’t published any peer-reviewed material describing "The Pais Effect" then I default to kook. +1 kook points for declaring a new fundamental property of nature and naming it after oneself.
Judging from the above quotes, there wouldn't be anything substantial to peer-review. One does not propose a different set of principals governing the universe without both proving that the these principals reflect previous theories in all applicable energy regimes ( the correspondence principal ) and predicts new physics. The above quotes bear no practical relation to existing physics.
What's claimed here is that he developed such a physical theory, an experimental apparatus which detects affects from this theory and developed a workable device which leverages those affects to achieve ground breaking propulsive effects.
I came across his work because I noodle occasionally on a thread of questions that started with "is there a maximum RF frequency?" and the implications that leads to.
My hypothesis is that there must be such a limit, given that EM waves propagate at the speed of light, thus their wavelength is the c (ms)/ f(Hz) and I could not really imagine a wavelength that is shorter than the Planck constant. But a related question is the propagation of the E and B fields, which change with respect to frequency, and so what is the limit to their change rate (first derivative) with respect to the speed of light (or looked at another way, the ability of space-time to accommodate that change), all very interesting corner cases like looking at gravity on the event horizon of a black hole.
Anyway, you start going down this rat hole you find a lot of "interesting" ideas (and begin to wonder if maybe you're one of the crazies and you just don't know it yet :-)). There are a lot of easily composed questions in that space, like "Can you conduct a current in a wire that is thinner than an electron?" Which have simple answers like (there is no metal smaller than compressed hydrogen so you can't create such a wire so you can't get there from here,) And less simple answers, "What are the electrical properties of a wire made out of compressed hydrogen then?" (which was the focus of one of the room-temperature superconductor experiments).
You may find, as I have, you sometimes get math that "works" in that you've not violated any mathematical principles in deriving it, but doesn't represent a physically realizable system.
My guess, is that this guy ended up down one of those paths and has a nice, mathematically sound, derivation which, if realized into a system, would have some pretty interesting attributes. And yet the tricky bit is that last one. Sort of the mass-less pulley problem. So many interesting things are possible if you can precisely bend (or smooth!) spacetime, but how you get there from here is a still strictly in the realm of science fiction.
It is pretty well understood, but the answer is the opposite (following from special relativity). You can take an ordinary low frequency photon, and just observe it while moving arbitrarily close to the speed of light, and the frequency of the photon will appear arbitrarily large.
Pair production won't happen until two photons collide, with a large /relative/ momentum. So if they have the same frequency and are traveling in the same direction, no pair production.
But, you're absolutely correct in the case of /astrophysical/ photons. A high-energy astrophysical photon will have to pass through, among other things, the background of CMB radiation, and that gives plenty of opportunities to pair-produce, so there is in fact a cutoff to the spectrum of photons we expect from far-away events.
Precisely. That's what the Planck length is: the wavelength of a photon that would be its own black hole. We can't know what happens there without applying both general relativity and quantum mechanics simultaneously, but when you try, you get divide-by-zero errors (singularities).
So it's not a limit of the universe, exactly, but it is a limit to what we can know about the universe with our current theories.
Depending on how you can bend it, construction of Alcubierre fields allows faster-than-light travel. If you can bend it really precisely, even wormhole construction might not be out of the question. On a lower scale, star trek like forcefields and "perfect" cloaking fields would be possible by bending all light/force carrying particles around an object.
If you looked at it head on and something was in a bubble deflecting light around it, could you tell that it's there because that light takes longer to get through/around relative to the immediate surrounding. Probably still not perceptible.
They are mutually exclusive. Tesla's ideas were grounded in real experiments and observations. Kooks live in a fantasy world. Pais is the latter. If you don't have a nose for physics psuedoscience, then ask yourself these questions:
- Is it an outsider?
- Is there a conspiracy to explain why their revolutionary ideas are not accepted by mainstream?
- Do they operate outside of or attack the peer review process?
- Is there one clear egomaniacal leader with a cult of personality?
There are some truly out there ideas in astrophysics and electromagnetics right now (look up magnetic monopoles, as an example). All the ones worth anything are published in peer reviewed journals.
Pais at least claims to have experimental evidence of a new physical effect. I've only got a background in undergraduate physics, but I'd say his description of his theory gives off huge kook vibes. I don't really care about that: plenty of non-kook theories are still not reflected in reality, and if he has found an actual physical effect, then his kookiness becomes brilliance. Or maybe not, but even if his theories are wildly off-base, if he has observed a new phenomenon, that's pretty big.
Of course, I suspect even his claim of observing a new phenomenon is a scam (a scam that he might have conned himself into believing), but someone should be able to reproduce it.
If you don't have one foot in a fantasy world, how does one know what experiments to pursue and how does one persevere to breakthrough past the conventional wisdom?
Jad: The version I know is that he was actually sitting at his desk looking out the window, and he was imagining window washers falling from their scaffolding, but it's the same exact idea.
Sir Isaac Newton, President of the Royal Society, an outsider? The same guy who published laws of motion and helped develop calculus, yet did not publish any of his religious or alchemic studies is a kook? I'm not sure what point you're making here.
No they aren't. It's actually the opposite. Everything we accept as science started off as "kooky". Germ theory was started by a "kooks" who thought there were small invisible organism that made us sick. It wasn't until microscopes were invented that they were validated.
From mendel to copernicus, much of science was viewed as "kooky" and rejected initially by the educated elites. The idea of continental drift was ridiculed and mocked for decades until it was found to be correct.
> All the ones worth anything are published in peer reviewed journals.
Actually, all the ones worth anything aren't published in peer reviewed journals initially. The truly transformational ideas are almost always rejected because journals exist to maintain the status quo.
Also, you have a slavish reverence for "insiders" when they are flawed creatures as well.
"Paradigm-breaking" and "kooky" are different. Pais's language is gibberish, refers to yet-unsupported effects named after himself, and betrays a lack of understanding of basic principles in the field he seeks to revolutionize.
It is overwhelmingly likely that he's simply a crackpot.
>Everything we accept as science started off as "kooky".
An excellent example of this from modern times:
>An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.
“People just laughed at me,” Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him, saying: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”
After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. “I felt rejected,” Shachtman remembered.
So you’re claiming that the physics community is driven by blind tribalism and is in fact, not scientific? That’s a big case condensed into a two sentence defense of psuedoscience.
That's a preposterous overreaction to what I said.
No, I'm not claiming that---but you're doing a good job of making it look that way!!!
It would be nice for you to respond thoughtfully and rationally to what I said instead of merely launching a defensive attack. I wasn't trying to put you on the defensive.
Tesla most likely had undiagnosed and untreated OCD: He was obsessed with the number three, compulsively walking three times around a building before entering it. When swimming he would do 33 laps, and if he lost count would have to stop over before being able to leave.
Tesla was disgusted by earrings. He had to calculate the volume of his food to enjoy it. Pretty clearly he had mental issues, which is usually what the more crude expression "being kooky" implies.
> 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.
Holy cow. This reads like the craziest, most psychotic r/IAmVerySmart post ever. Like that friend from high school who posts batshit stuff on Facebook but practically flunked out of school.
Not sure about spacetime, but there's a similar effect mentioned on HN earlier: Earth's magnetic field has a vertical gradient that tiny spiders use to fly, even in absence of wind. It's plausible that those spiders figured how to alter their magnetic charge to "sail" in this "sea" of electricity.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know if you guys ever had a chance to hear the stories someone with severe mental illness can create.
I had and they seem a lot with what this gentleman is saying.
It's a blend of real and fantastic facts. They give those things names we already now. Think about it: why would a galactic spanning organisation be called "Galactic Federation"?
A federation is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government. A glactic federation is just one that spans the galaxy. It would make sense.
Not that I believe this Israeli guy in any way whatsoever, but:
Think about it: why would a galactic spanning
organisation be called "Galactic Federation"?
Seems reasonable. Might even be the only reasonable part of the story!
Imagine you were in charge of such a galaxy-spanning organization, encompassing multiple worlds, species, and cultures. Needless to say, communication in general and naming things in particular would be quite the challenge.
Literal names and clarity are probably the primary things you want to really value there.
Particularly if you're in charge of saying "hello" to a new species (humans, in this case) who are likely to find the experience a bit overwhelming. There's more than enough new information for them to absorb, right? Keep things as simple as possible.
Yeah, but Galactic Federation is a sci-fi term. The aliens could call it Galactic Brains Network, or even Local Cluster Department of Thinking Devices.
Or Very Massive Ensemble of Genetic Transport Devices.
Or anything totally new, which could gives us a notion of a galactic point of view, non-human point of view, outside of earthly concepts.
Perhaps that's merely _the closest translation_ into our language? :)
I mean, if I were trying to translate the idea of a limited liability corporation into non-English, I'd probably come up with a phrasing that ended up being very similar (if not the same) to whatever they use in Dutch or Japanese or Chinese etc. If you had a multi-star-system government that wasn't an empire, it doesn't seem a stretch that you'd call it something similar to a 'federation'.
> why would a galactic spanning organisation be called "Galactic Federation"?
We called the earth beneath our feet "Earth". Our moon "Moon", our star ("our sun" in common language) "Sun". Our military has a force that deals with flying in the air and we called it "Air Force". Our first space force is called "Space Force". Historically, one of the biggest companies that dealt with the east indian area was called "East India Company" despite being British.
I was going to but it seemed like it was based on one persons word, regardless of the person involved(high level military individual) for me its labelled folklore and not hard data. The other examples I listed all have paper trails with institutions that have rock solid credentials, in addition to the videos released by the pentagon(video evidence).
In just the past few months there have been VIP assassinations/attempts on highly visible people (Lead Iranian Nuclear Scientist, Alexei Navalny, etc.) are we really expected to believe that intelligence agencies of the nations in question would let these kinds of secrets out in the open and not silence people if they were true? Apparently they are incredibly brazen so why are these people allowed to continue talking?
I don't know, we've known Israel has had Nuclear weapons for decades but they still fail to officially acknowledge it.
Plenty of people were saying the NSA was syphoning tons of US citizens' info but before Snowden offered proof they were just dismissed as conspiracy theorists and lunatics...
Honestly killing or trying to silence people coming out about UFOs and alien races on earth might do more to legitimize their claims and if I was trying to keep this secret I would do my best to continue to let the public ridicule their claims and never do anything that might give some proof that I cared about their revelations.
I just want to point out to readers here that the gentleman quoted in this article is 87 years old. While I have no reason to think that this gentleman is being dishonest or exaggerating, I have been around family members the same age - 87 is prime age for picking up an assortment of mental issues.
I found a translation of the interview this article was derived from. It became clear to me that this was not an old man with inside information finally agreeing to disclose it (as is kind of implied by the headline) but rather, is just a normal guy who's read some stuff, and believes it. Very different thing.
More like "The Navy and Air Force realized that UFO reporting was being laughed at, which could result in pilots not reporting new Chinese or Russian aircraft (manned or drone) they saw on patrol but could not identify."
Not reporting sightings that actually happened could lead to major blind spots for DoD planning.
So the DoD is trying to normalize UFO reporting in hopes of keeping tabs on Chinese and Russian aircraft.
Commander: "What do you mean, you've 'seen those fancy new stealth fighters' before?!? They're flying over our base!!!"
Fighter pilot: "Sorry sir, we thought it was a UFO and it wasn't in the briefings before, so we didn't report it because we'd look dumb."
Intel guy: "Uh, yeah, I've got intelligence photos of these from spy sats, but since none of you had ever seen one, you weren't need-to-know... yet. We've seen them on the tarmac, but we have no idea what they're loaded with."
Joe Rogan interviewed David Fravor, a retired Navy pilot, alongside a documentary maker who was interested in UFOs.
The conversation was cautious but not particularly skeptical.
It sounded like Mr. Fravor saw something in his airspace with his own two eyes. I don't know what it was (blimp, foreign aircraft, whatever), though I doubt it was extraterrestrial. (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence)
I couldn't spot anything obviously wrong with Mr. Fravor's story by itself.
On the other hand, if the DoD wanted to nudge their pilots to report things they see, and had a story like David Fravor's to put out there in order to encourage current pilots to report what they see, that would be a propaganda event to encourage, so to speak, at least by declassifying harmless footage and not squashing the story.
I saw the Fravor interview with Joe Rogan. Lex Fridman interviewed him as well and that was pretty detailed. Its an interesting case as you had radar data(unsure if that was released) along with pilot eyewitnesses from both Fravor and the other fighter jet pilot that saw it. What Fravor said about the craft was if it was US based why have it be in an active area where fighter jets are training(this could lead to collisions etc).
If you take him at his word then whatever he saw was not something we know how to build. Not unless you have a blimp that can go from hovering over the ocean to matching a Super Hornet in a tight spiral, cut across the middle and accelerate so fast that it’s gone in a blink. He could be lying though.
Yeah, if you had a crazy new electronic warfare technique you'd probably spread as much FUD as you could. You'd also spread FUD if you had nothing, Star Wars style. It's definitely one of those two things.
What's most odd is that the aliens behave just like they are part of a human conspiracy theory.
What's most disturbing is that openness to crackpot theories now extends into high levels of national institutions. How many make the argument, 'these things are unexplained'. Lots of things are unexplained; the difference between crackpot and real is evidence - publicly available evidence - that supports it. And evidence of odd phenomena is not at all evidence that they was caused by aliens - centuries ago, it would have been attributed to a god or demon. Remember that 'I don't know' is a normal human condition - get used to it.
The Israeli general who claimed that Trump would soon reveal an alien presence among us also said
> Eshed explained that the timing was simply due to how much the academic landscape has changed, and how respected he is in academia. / "If I had come up with what I’m saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized," he explained to Yediot. / "'today, they’re already talking differently [a bout alients]. I have nothing to lose. I’ve received my degrees and awards; I am respected in universities abroad, where the trend is also changing.'"
https://www.jpost.com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chie...
Really? Is that serious? People need to be really, really troubled. Disinformation is flooding society.
It's not a new phenomenon. Heck, this story even has some of the same players: Hal Puthoff is mentioned in the article because he's still a part of the government research scene. (He's the crackpot who did remote viewing experiments for the CIA in the 70s. He helped promote the fradulent spoon-bending "psychic" Uri Geller.) He was involved in the AATIP, a pet project of Senator Harry Reid, and the source of the Navy UFO videos.
The CIA "remote viewing experiments" were part of a PSY-OPS against the American public, and, incidentally, anybody spying. If he was involved there, that ties it all together.
I.e., there were not ever, actually, any such experiments, or any of the other obvious BS. There was, instead, an operation to convince people that there had been such experiments. The operation was a success: people do believe it, to this day.
"Men Who Stare at Goats" is a terrifying book by Jon Ronson exploring the program. You have to read between the lines to pick up the full consequence.
This stuff has all the hallmarks of such an operation. It is hard to imagine what point it could have. What we know that we don't know is what they are up to, or why. The patent language is spume blown off the top of the wave. The wave itself we have no information about.
Talking about "intergalactic flight" is fundamentally the kookiest bit. What galaxy would you fly to, and why? There are a trillion solar systems a thousand times closer, in our own galaxy. Surely one or two of those would be of some interest? Or a planet, a trillion times closer than that?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Have you ever read that story about the NRO just donating two spare spy satellites to NASA, which are basically superior to the Hubble telescope? I feel like the US military has orders of magnitude more money and material compared to NASA.
I think there are probably a couple of technologies that are only used in rare occasions, like how we first learned of the cool stealth helicopters because one crashed during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.
It just doesn't make sense for Aliens to be visiting us in this way. If you have the ability to traverse the Galaxy or Universe then surely you can also stay undetected by our comparatively pathetic technology. At the same time their mere existence would imply the Universe is probably full of intelligent life and why would they be particularly interested in naked apes who can't even agree about simple scientific facts? We're made of meat after all. The only explanation is that they would be conducting a psychological experiment on humanity and we'd better hope they don't decide to end it early.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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-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.
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?"
> "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.
I tend to think it is this. Why would Navy not keep the patents secret if it was truly physics shattering invention. The fact that the patents are out in the open is very damning to the validity of the claims.
Was US military filing public patents for stealth planes or did they make them and keep them secret for as long as possible.
Precisely... We're only discussing this because the Navy CTO got personally involved with the USPTO. This involvement apparently led to the review process being bypassed/relaxed.
Based on the insanity (why try to patent this?), I suspect the author is a kook who convinced non-experts (e.g., patent attorney) to create this patent application, with no effective internal peer review. The author's colleagues and managers either lack the specialization in the field to call B.S., or decided to stay out of it because a patent application is not worth the drama.
The oddity here is still the involvement of the CTO. Who I assume is far detached from the actual research, lacks the expertise to review, and trusted the author's claims.
the most simple answer, the answer with the most historical analogues (think government-funded remote viewing research well into the 1980s): it's a grift.
It is a common misconception, but in this case "the most simple answer" is not correct for your analogue. Take a look at the CIA FOIA reading room and search "Project CENTER LANE".
Over 85% of our operational missions have produced accurate target information...approximately 50% of the 700 missions produced usable intelligence
It's a common mistake, and the above fact is going to be extremely difficult for many people to believe because of the comfort-zone of entrenched beliefs and confirmation bias, but RV is actually not a grift and is a real thing.
If you're still having trouble believing this, but consider yourself an open-minded person I encourage you to try RV for yourself. I believe there is a subreddit that is not terrible. For RV, I don't think you need to believe it works, nor have a theory how it could, in order to get results, however keeping open-minded is useful to getting and interpreting the data you receive in RV.
they weren't, though. the truth is that SRI was running these studies in an unscientific fashion (read some of those results and see how liberally they counted something as "accessing the target") to make money off of several lunatics in the military who were funding their research. the bar is so low for this kind of stuff that you can just continue the grift for decades of "further studies", especially when claiming the soviets were doing it too. and don't you find it alarming that Puthoff from SRI is one of the guys involved in To the Stars, which is inarguably a grift?
Ray Hyman was commissioned (by the same government agency that released the document you posted) to review their work and found it to be disingenuous and a farce - you can read more of what he has to say here:
I get the feeling you want to believe, you'll just take a lot of convincing. Because believing this is such a big thing, so your skepticism is an understandable defense to protect you from investing in a belief you can't rely on. I will make a reply to your comment, I'm just figuring out how I should say it.
In the meantime, take a look at this (I acquired it from Mr Puthoff himself just now, especially for you)
I think it's a testament to the sophistication of the misinformation that so much evidence for this is buried. I don't blame you for being skeptical, and i have these abilities, but I'm still skeptical. I'm okay if it's not true, if I'm just deluded, i can update my beliefs if that's the case. I don't need it to be true... But i just want to look at it clearly, see the evidence, and try to get the best results i can.
Right now i do believe what i can do real, and i believe the results reported in these papers are real also. I would love it if there were a better resource collection for these results and I think I'm going to build a simple website bringing that together.
You make a very strong case for your skepticism, but let me try to add more information to that. What you make of that is up to you.
I think the argument that it's a grift is easiest to unpick because of the paranormal nature of this topic you can see from your own skepticism and widespread skepticism of it that these kind of things are held to a higher standard of evidence and a greater scrutiny then say other defense contractor projects that use more conventional technologies. From that point of view I think it's more likely that a random you know defense contractor tender response is going to be some sort of a grift because it's going to promise that it can deliver XYZ results but it's not actually going to do that and the reality is you see that commonly these projects go over budget and over time. so it's actually more likely that a random defense software project is going to be a grift rather than the sort of paranormal stuff once it's been accepted and funded through multiple rounds of scrutiny and assessment.
Because people are so unwilling to believe it and because it's sort of a dangerous topic to be involved with you know it has to be able to deliver results because people are more likely to pull funding from it. So I think that's a useful heuristic argument and I think it's a valid response to counter the sentiment that it must be a grift because . The fact that it is funded and in a program makes it much more likely that it's not a grift especially that it's relatively less of a grift compared to other more conventional programs.
I also don't think that all of the documents relating to this is some sort of psyop or disinformation because from my assessment maybe I've covered less than 5% of all the documents but they look to be documents from different time periods with different authors different styles and the documents are all in different formats it just seems like it would be too much effort to fabricate all of these documents.
So I believe that the programs were real programs and they're not grifts they did deliver results and I believe that's reflected in the documentation that's been released.
To address your other points
they weren't, though. the truth is that SRI was running these studies in an unscientific fashion (read some of those results and see how liberally they counted something as "accessing the target")
50% of collection missions having usable intelligence is very high because they were producing complex diagrams, locations, layouts. You say they weren't, and perhaps you are claiming that they're not producing these things but here's a list of sample papers where you can clearly see they are producing these things as output of the RV transcript sessions.
What seems most likely to me is that kook negotiated an employee agreement where the Navy would provide the same level of patent expertise and pressures to any personal patents that he wished to file.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I see a lot of people arguing and not a lot of testing. He’s filed several patents all of which describe how to build each invention and all of which rely on the same basic principle. If you really consider yourself a qualified man of science then get building. As for simple ideas, they’re all obvious in hindsight once those tricky details have been worked out and equally obvious paradigms have been broken.
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.
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.
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.
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.
True that it may be the case whatever the objects were using for propulsion could be explained entirely with known physics, and we just don’t have the explanation yet.
However, whether the technology operates within or outside of known physics is not the point.
The point is that discounting Pais’ work rules out the possibility that UAP is a classified human technology, which then the only options we are left with for UAP are it is either aliens or time machines. If we accept that the two events (Pais’ work and the UAP) are unrelated, then since UAP cannot be humans it must be something else. This is where the fun begins.
>The point is that discounting Pais’ work rules out the possibility that UAP is a classified human technology, which then the only options we are left with for UAP are it is either aliens or time machines.
No it doesn't. The relationship between these patents and UFO footage is being made by web articles and HN posters who believe in the UFO narrative, it's simply inferred because the stories became viral at about the same time.
Also, ruling out Pais doesn't rule out the entire rest of the American military industrial complex, which is quite capable of developing cutting edge technology on its own. If we assume for the sake of argument that UAPs are explained by advanced classified technology, Pais and his patent still aren't necessary for humans to be responsible.
> Also, ruling out Pais doesn't rule out the entire rest of the American military industrial complex, which is quite capable of developing cutting edge technology on its own. If we assume for the sake of argument that UAPs are explained by advanced classified technology, Pais and his patent still aren't necessary for humans to be responsible.
Technically that would be possible for the sake of argument.
There is a third option that should have been there for completeness: it’s a psyops. UAPs don’t exist and Pais’ work is a sham. There is no magic tech. This is the safest explanation that does not involve magic, but this requires discounting the pilot who did the interview.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadThe 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.
Many would argue the exact opposite: that these patents are nonsense intended to squander adversarial resources spent on vetting them.
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.
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.
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?
I am still a little surprised that they are allowed to keep secrets, for the same reason.
A trade secret does.
A patent doesn't.
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.
Governments don't necessarily have to treat patents the same way as private companies do, either. Legislation can require a fairly open licensing scheme for reasonable rates, for example, which balances recouping expense with making the publicly-funded work publicly available.
suppose the government spends a large amount of public funds on research that turns out to have a very narrow commercial application. if the findings can be freely used by a couple niche companies, it's effectively a subsidy to them. not necessarily a bad thing, but we might want the government to be more intentional about granting subsidies. if instead the companies have to negotiate a license, the government can recoup some of the public's money and allocate it to more research.
You don’t need a patent system to incentivize research, people and companies can just treat new inventions as trade secrets and never tell anyone how they work. Plenty of tech companies already do this. Google has not filed patents disclosing exactly how their search system works, for example.
The U.S. military has an additional tool to protect knowledge: classification. Again, there is no patent on public file for a functioning hydrogen fusion bomb.
So why would the Navy file a patent on something? It is plausible that their goal in doing so was to disclose its existence.
That's its (stated) purpose from the viewpoint of society. Patents' purposes from the viewpoint of the inventor is to secure the 20-year monopoly on the invention (or to secure a plausible threat). Nobody would file a patent for the sole purpose of disclosure. If you really want to disclose something, there are a million easier, better, and cheaper ways to do it.
>So why would the Navy file a patent on something? It is plausible that their goal in doing so was to disclose its existence.
If they wanted disclosure, they could just post it on their website and issue a press release. Or publish a book. Or a journal article. Or add it to their podcast. They already do all these things. Why not for this?
> 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.
I'm sure this all sounds dumb, I'm not a physicist, but it's fun to think about.
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.
Have you considered the Higgs mechanism [0]?
Perhaps an adjacent theory? I am fascinated with such a concept but I am by no means an expert at all.
I would appreciate if you could expand more on your comment, thanks!
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
More likely? It’s a way to funnel money around.
What's claimed here is that he developed such a physical theory, an experimental apparatus which detects affects from this theory and developed a workable device which leverages those affects to achieve ground breaking propulsive effects.
I came across his work because I noodle occasionally on a thread of questions that started with "is there a maximum RF frequency?" and the implications that leads to.
My hypothesis is that there must be such a limit, given that EM waves propagate at the speed of light, thus their wavelength is the c (ms)/ f(Hz) and I could not really imagine a wavelength that is shorter than the Planck constant. But a related question is the propagation of the E and B fields, which change with respect to frequency, and so what is the limit to their change rate (first derivative) with respect to the speed of light (or looked at another way, the ability of space-time to accommodate that change), all very interesting corner cases like looking at gravity on the event horizon of a black hole.
Anyway, you start going down this rat hole you find a lot of "interesting" ideas (and begin to wonder if maybe you're one of the crazies and you just don't know it yet :-)). There are a lot of easily composed questions in that space, like "Can you conduct a current in a wire that is thinner than an electron?" Which have simple answers like (there is no metal smaller than compressed hydrogen so you can't create such a wire so you can't get there from here,) And less simple answers, "What are the electrical properties of a wire made out of compressed hydrogen then?" (which was the focus of one of the room-temperature superconductor experiments).
You may find, as I have, you sometimes get math that "works" in that you've not violated any mathematical principles in deriving it, but doesn't represent a physically realizable system.
My guess, is that this guy ended up down one of those paths and has a nice, mathematically sound, derivation which, if realized into a system, would have some pretty interesting attributes. And yet the tricky bit is that last one. Sort of the mass-less pulley problem. So many interesting things are possible if you can precisely bend (or smooth!) spacetime, but how you get there from here is a still strictly in the realm of science fiction.
Isn't this already pretty well understood? For photons, E=h*f, so if you get high enough energy you will start to see pair production happening?
Pair production won't happen until two photons collide, with a large /relative/ momentum. So if they have the same frequency and are traveling in the same direction, no pair production.
But, you're absolutely correct in the case of /astrophysical/ photons. A high-energy astrophysical photon will have to pass through, among other things, the background of CMB radiation, and that gives plenty of opportunities to pair-produce, so there is in fact a cutoff to the spectrum of photons we expect from far-away events.
So it's not a limit of the universe, exactly, but it is a limit to what we can know about the universe with our current theories.
Of course, I suspect even his claim of observing a new phenomenon is a scam (a scam that he might have conned himself into believing), but someone should be able to reproduce it.
Jad: The version I know is that he was actually sitting at his desk looking out the window, and he was imagining window washers falling from their scaffolding, but it's the same exact idea.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91726...
Well, Newton had lots of very kooky ideas. And yet...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...
No they aren't. It's actually the opposite. Everything we accept as science started off as "kooky". Germ theory was started by a "kooks" who thought there were small invisible organism that made us sick. It wasn't until microscopes were invented that they were validated.
From mendel to copernicus, much of science was viewed as "kooky" and rejected initially by the educated elites. The idea of continental drift was ridiculed and mocked for decades until it was found to be correct.
> All the ones worth anything are published in peer reviewed journals.
Actually, all the ones worth anything aren't published in peer reviewed journals initially. The truly transformational ideas are almost always rejected because journals exist to maintain the status quo.
Also, you have a slavish reverence for "insiders" when they are flawed creatures as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
All great science is "kooky". But not everything "kooky" is great science. So not mutually exclusive at all.
It is overwhelmingly likely that he's simply a crackpot.
An excellent example of this from modern times:
>An Israeli scientist who suffered years of ridicule and even lost a research post for claiming to have found an entirely new class of solid material was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry on Wednesday for his discovery of quasicrystals.
“People just laughed at me,” Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him, saying: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”
After telling Shechtman to go back and read the textbook, the head of his research group asked him to leave for “bringing disgrace” on the team. “I felt rejected,” Shachtman remembered.
https://www.reuters.com/article/nobel-chemistry/corrected-up...
Tesla would never survive in modern academia or get tenure.
No, I'm not claiming that---but you're doing a good job of making it look that way!!!
It would be nice for you to respond thoughtfully and rationally to what I said instead of merely launching a defensive attack. I wasn't trying to put you on the defensive.
I've been in academia. Have you?
Not that it’s relevant, but I’ve been in academia for the past ten years. I’ve been working with physicists for the past two years.
Tesla was disgusted by earrings. He had to calculate the volume of his food to enjoy it. Pretty clearly he had mental issues, which is usually what the more crude expression "being kooky" implies.
Holy cow. This reads like the craziest, most psychotic r/IAmVerySmart post ever. Like that friend from high school who posts batshit stuff on Facebook but practically flunked out of school.
100% crank.
Full on "You're not even wrong..." territory.
Akakakakakakakakakak
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.
> 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.”
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-u...
[2] - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en [2] - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g...
[3] - https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/14/1010370/room-tem...
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.
https://www.jpost.com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chie...
I don't know if you guys ever had a chance to hear the stories someone with severe mental illness can create.
I had and they seem a lot with what this gentleman is saying.
It's a blend of real and fantastic facts. They give those things names we already now. Think about it: why would a galactic spanning organisation be called "Galactic Federation"?
Why not another name?
uuuurrrrloooop gleeeick flurrrumpa
The moment of first contact with a race of nuclear-armed savages is uh, pretty fraught, I'd imagine.
If I was in charge of that alien delegation, you best believe I'd have a well-rehearsed slide deck translated into the humans' native dialect(s)!
Sincerely, glrorpoepopo pvivinsinoborpo from gleebinimus alpha
Are the aliens using PowerPoint, now? Oh goodness, not sure I welcome our new galactic overlords.
Imagine you were in charge of such a galaxy-spanning organization, encompassing multiple worlds, species, and cultures. Needless to say, communication in general and naming things in particular would be quite the challenge.
Literal names and clarity are probably the primary things you want to really value there.
Particularly if you're in charge of saying "hello" to a new species (humans, in this case) who are likely to find the experience a bit overwhelming. There's more than enough new information for them to absorb, right? Keep things as simple as possible.
Yeah, "Galactic Federation" sounds about right.
Or Very Massive Ensemble of Genetic Transport Devices.
Or anything totally new, which could gives us a notion of a galactic point of view, non-human point of view, outside of earthly concepts.
But anyways, I want to believe!
I mean, if I were trying to translate the idea of a limited liability corporation into non-English, I'd probably come up with a phrasing that ended up being very similar (if not the same) to whatever they use in Dutch or Japanese or Chinese etc. If you had a multi-star-system government that wasn't an empire, it doesn't seem a stretch that you'd call it something similar to a 'federation'.
We called the earth beneath our feet "Earth". Our moon "Moon", our star ("our sun" in common language) "Sun". Our military has a force that deals with flying in the air and we called it "Air Force". Our first space force is called "Space Force". Historically, one of the biggest companies that dealt with the east indian area was called "East India Company" despite being British.
So, I'd answer back with "why not"?
Our residence and office of the leader of our country is The White House.
"Air Force" only sounds more normal than "Space Force" because most of us weren't around when it was the "US Army Air Corp".
Admittedly they could've called it something slightly cooler based off other names, like the US Cyber Command.
Plenty of people were saying the NSA was syphoning tons of US citizens' info but before Snowden offered proof they were just dismissed as conspiracy theorists and lunatics...
Honestly killing or trying to silence people coming out about UFOs and alien races on earth might do more to legitimize their claims and if I was trying to keep this secret I would do my best to continue to let the public ridicule their claims and never do anything that might give some proof that I cared about their revelations.
This is also not the first high-ranking government official to make such claims, see the ex-Canadian Defense minister who made very similar claims in 2015. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3051151/Gove...
It's at least mildly curious/interesting that the stories sound fairly similar to each other.
So the DoD is trying to normalize UFO reporting in hopes of keeping tabs on Chinese and Russian aircraft.
Commander: "What do you mean, you've 'seen those fancy new stealth fighters' before?!? They're flying over our base!!!"
Fighter pilot: "Sorry sir, we thought it was a UFO and it wasn't in the briefings before, so we didn't report it because we'd look dumb."
Intel guy: "Uh, yeah, I've got intelligence photos of these from spy sats, but since none of you had ever seen one, you weren't need-to-know... yet. We've seen them on the tarmac, but we have no idea what they're loaded with."
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/23/us-navy-guidelines...
It sounded like Mr. Fravor saw something in his airspace with his own two eyes. I don't know what it was (blimp, foreign aircraft, whatever), though I doubt it was extraterrestrial. (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence)
I couldn't spot anything obviously wrong with Mr. Fravor's story by itself.
On the other hand, if the DoD wanted to nudge their pilots to report things they see, and had a story like David Fravor's to put out there in order to encourage current pilots to report what they see, that would be a propaganda event to encourage, so to speak, at least by declassifying harmless footage and not squashing the story.
https://youtu.be/Eco2s3-0zsQ
What's most disturbing is that openness to crackpot theories now extends into high levels of national institutions. How many make the argument, 'these things are unexplained'. Lots of things are unexplained; the difference between crackpot and real is evidence - publicly available evidence - that supports it. And evidence of odd phenomena is not at all evidence that they was caused by aliens - centuries ago, it would have been attributed to a god or demon. Remember that 'I don't know' is a normal human condition - get used to it.
The Israeli general who claimed that Trump would soon reveal an alien presence among us also said
> Eshed explained that the timing was simply due to how much the academic landscape has changed, and how respected he is in academia. / "If I had come up with what I’m saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized," he explained to Yediot. / "'today, they’re already talking differently [a bout alients]. I have nothing to lose. I’ve received my degrees and awards; I am respected in universities abroad, where the trend is also changing.'" https://www.jpost.com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chie...
Really? Is that serious? People need to be really, really troubled. Disinformation is flooding society.
I.e., there were not ever, actually, any such experiments, or any of the other obvious BS. There was, instead, an operation to convince people that there had been such experiments. The operation was a success: people do believe it, to this day.
"Men Who Stare at Goats" is a terrifying book by Jon Ronson exploring the program. You have to read between the lines to pick up the full consequence.
This stuff has all the hallmarks of such an operation. It is hard to imagine what point it could have. What we know that we don't know is what they are up to, or why. The patent language is spume blown off the top of the wave. The wave itself we have no information about.
Talking about "intergalactic flight" is fundamentally the kookiest bit. What galaxy would you fly to, and why? There are a trillion solar systems a thousand times closer, in our own galaxy. Surely one or two of those would be of some interest? Or a planet, a trillion times closer than that?
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.
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?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
I think there are probably a couple of technologies that are only used in rare occasions, like how we first learned of the cool stealth helicopters because one crashed during the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10135366B2/en
Wow this sounds like a great idea
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.
This is way beyond my pay grade. :)
If the Pais effect is not described in detail, shouldn't that invalidate any patents?
The more evidence there is of “official” support for these ideas, the more effective the distraction.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Why do Skunkworks projects need patents?
This seems totally counterintuitive. Why reveal any details about the work being done?
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?"
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.
Was US military filing public patents for stealth planes or did they make them and keep them secret for as long as possible.
Based on the insanity (why try to patent this?), I suspect the author is a kook who convinced non-experts (e.g., patent attorney) to create this patent application, with no effective internal peer review. The author's colleagues and managers either lack the specialization in the field to call B.S., or decided to stay out of it because a patent application is not worth the drama.
The oddity here is still the involvement of the CTO. Who I assume is far detached from the actual research, lacks the expertise to review, and trusted the author's claims.
the most simple answer, the answer with the most historical analogues (think government-funded remote viewing research well into the 1980s): it's a grift.
Over 85% of our operational missions have produced accurate target information...approximately 50% of the 700 missions produced usable intelligence
- from https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788...
50% is very high because they are generating things like plans, locations, facility layouts, not yes-no answers.
If you're still having trouble believing this, but consider yourself an open-minded person I encourage you to try RV for yourself. I believe there is a subreddit that is not terrible. For RV, I don't think you need to believe it works, nor have a theory how it could, in order to get results, however keeping open-minded is useful to getting and interpreting the data you receive in RV.
Ray Hyman was commissioned (by the same government agency that released the document you posted) to review their work and found it to be disingenuous and a farce - you can read more of what he has to say here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100709201315/http://www.csicop...
In the meantime, take a look at this (I acquired it from Mr Puthoff himself just now, especially for you)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R8Kop6mFSmjm1gWCxiPotUtgtGT...
Right now i do believe what i can do real, and i believe the results reported in these papers are real also. I would love it if there were a better resource collection for these results and I think I'm going to build a simple website bringing that together.
You make a very strong case for your skepticism, but let me try to add more information to that. What you make of that is up to you.
I think the argument that it's a grift is easiest to unpick because of the paranormal nature of this topic you can see from your own skepticism and widespread skepticism of it that these kind of things are held to a higher standard of evidence and a greater scrutiny then say other defense contractor projects that use more conventional technologies. From that point of view I think it's more likely that a random you know defense contractor tender response is going to be some sort of a grift because it's going to promise that it can deliver XYZ results but it's not actually going to do that and the reality is you see that commonly these projects go over budget and over time. so it's actually more likely that a random defense software project is going to be a grift rather than the sort of paranormal stuff once it's been accepted and funded through multiple rounds of scrutiny and assessment.
Because people are so unwilling to believe it and because it's sort of a dangerous topic to be involved with you know it has to be able to deliver results because people are more likely to pull funding from it. So I think that's a useful heuristic argument and I think it's a valid response to counter the sentiment that it must be a grift because . The fact that it is funded and in a program makes it much more likely that it's not a grift especially that it's relatively less of a grift compared to other more conventional programs.
I also don't think that all of the documents relating to this is some sort of psyop or disinformation because from my assessment maybe I've covered less than 5% of all the documents but they look to be documents from different time periods with different authors different styles and the documents are all in different formats it just seems like it would be too much effort to fabricate all of these documents.
So I believe that the programs were real programs and they're not grifts they did deliver results and I believe that's reflected in the documentation that's been released.
To address your other points
they weren't, though. the truth is that SRI was running these studies in an unscientific fashion (read some of those results and see how liberally they counted something as "accessing the target")
50% of collection missions having usable intelligence is very high because they were producing complex diagrams, locations, layouts. You say they weren't, and perhaps you are claiming that they're not producing these things but here's a list of sample papers where you can clearly see they are producing these things as output of the RV transcript sessions.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-0...
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.
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.
As in, look for people that have something interesting to say about these ideas?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, whether the technology operates within or outside of known physics is not the point.
The point is that discounting Pais’ work rules out the possibility that UAP is a classified human technology, which then the only options we are left with for UAP are it is either aliens or time machines. If we accept that the two events (Pais’ work and the UAP) are unrelated, then since UAP cannot be humans it must be something else. This is where the fun begins.
No it doesn't. The relationship between these patents and UFO footage is being made by web articles and HN posters who believe in the UFO narrative, it's simply inferred because the stories became viral at about the same time.
Also, ruling out Pais doesn't rule out the entire rest of the American military industrial complex, which is quite capable of developing cutting edge technology on its own. If we assume for the sake of argument that UAPs are explained by advanced classified technology, Pais and his patent still aren't necessary for humans to be responsible.
Technically that would be possible for the sake of argument.