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Comment by dev_dull | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a UFO-interested person, but some of the news around this stuff is just... bizarre. For example, this patent[1] from the secretary of the navy activated last Friday for “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”?

The circumstances around the patent are even more intriguing. Here’s a quote from a patent lawyer here on HN regarding this patent[2]:

Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum.

1. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fncypants

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Here's an interesting summary by The Drive.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28729/docs-show-navy-g...

It goes in depth on other "psuedoscience" patent by the US Navy and how the math involved is almost gibberish.

This paragraph in particular about the initial rejection but subsequent approval was odd.

"According to documents available to the public at the USPTO website, the Patent Office rejected Pais' and the Navy's application for this craft on March 30, 2018. After it was rejected, the NAWCAD’s patent attorney, Mark O. Glut, appealed the decision and submitted further documentation to ensure the patent office that this craft is indeed "enabled," meaning it can actually be built and can perform as described in the patent."

I feel like these patente are a red herring to throw off Chinese and Russian scientists. If this research was real, it would probably be classified and the Navy would've used the mechanisms that exist for keeping patents secret.

That doesn't make sense unless one assumes Chinese and Russian scientists are idiots who can't tell real science from BS... in which case there would be no reason to throw them off to begin with.

That's my thought too. Someone else mentioned the math being basically nonsense, but surely if it was there to misdirect other scientists there must be some grain of sense to it - otherwise it'd just be an exercise in futility?

The misdirection would only work until someone actually read it and pointed the nonsense out, though. If it were actually intended to fool someone, it would probably be less obviously wrong. A patent for something feasibly advanced but not too out of the ordinary, or something hidden as a red herring in an actual classified document intended to be intercepted. I have a hard time believing a foreign government would waste a significant amount of time and money on American patents on woo-woo antigravity and things.

In another thread, I thought it could just be someone trolling the patent office, but I don't know.

I think I'll just file this one under "interesting but probably not worth thinking about"

It sounds like the Patent Examiner's issue is not necessarily with the fundamental science so much as with the enormous amount of energy required to make use of the ideas. Though this doesn't mean the science is sound (I'm definitely not one to judge!), if the patents are combined with leaked (fabricated) videos of Navy pilots encountering exotic craft then maybe this is enough to send rival states down some rabbit hole.

Agreed. In the military world, there is just too much cloak and dagger stuff going on to take everything at face value.

> “Craft using an inertial mass reduction device”

My internal cynic would guess that it's a joint public-private promotional stunt for Mass Effect. The whole backstory of this sci-fi was that they found a substance that could do exactly that.

"Oh look, US Navy has a patent for eezo-powered drive!"

My reaction: "Ohhhhh, duh!"

You don't normally expect this kind of nonsense from government, but the US military is heavily into media tie-ins, mainly film and video games. I'd bet 5 dollars you just nailed it.

Is that also why they put literal SKYNET [0] in charge of telling us who to drone?

Just can't get over that one, either somebody in the NSA has a really dark sense of humor or people working there must be living in some kind of pop-culture vacuum.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

Is there any sane element to that Patent? I tried to follow the explanations, but reeks of magic thinking to me... which is indistinguishable from high level technology.

I want to believe it, but I don't know which way Occam's razor falls on this. It's probably more reasonable to believe that these lawyers managed to game the patent office into accepting it...

What if, and bare with me here, there's some super exotic technologies that we've been working on for a long time and we're this close to making it work and are concerned that the Chinese, notorious patent trolls, will get there first - and then as a preemptive strategy the Navy files these but intentionally obscures the relevant (almost real) physics?

Of course the question then becomes: why even mention this stuff at all? It's not the the Military would really care about a patent in that sense.

I don't believe it either, but The X-Files fan in me can't help but wonder.

Is it? Or is it more likely that a well-funded US government branch aimed at researching new technology actually managed to discover, or replicate, new technology?

There's something buzzing around in the skies. Most sightings most likely have more simple explanations, but there are enough sightings to convince me that there's probably someone buzzing around the skies with shinier hardware than we would expect them to. I'm not saying they're extraterrestrial but they do come from somewhere, and if someone has something that advanced it's only logical that US armed forces are looking into it -- _especially_ if we assume the source is Chinese or Russian and there are intelligence reports backing it up.

This is odd indeed since the government cannot really appreciate the benefits of IP it develops on its own

The easy workaround, which it does do often, is that it has IP assigned to it via employment agreements or work for hire or purchasing

Here it was filed by an appointed/elected official operating in the official capacity, with a clear note that the government derives no monetary benefits

This whole thing is very out of character.

Elon Musk said that Space X is not big on patenting stuff because it would not gain anything out from it and the competitors in other countries would just copy it blatantly.

Your point with that factoid being..... that my comment and yours happened to mention patents?

SpaceX

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