The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents' | Hacker News Reader

The Inventor of the Navy's 'UFO Patents'

thedrive.com

68 pointspeakay52 comments

The problem I have in this, is that history is littered with things which without hindsight were crazy-batshit-ideas, and in a world of IPR and patents, definitely do get flagged as wierd. But.. then turn out to be useful.

Liquid metal refrigerators using electromagnetics to send the fluid around instead of just pumping ammonia? Thats .. crazy. But also, What Szilard and Einstein patented: safer by far, no moving parts in the working refrigerant fluid.

Directed beam weapons: notoriously the 'kill a goat' test for the BRL and Navy tired of loony inventors, but actually the ground work of Radar and like activity according to Robert Buderi (yes, this is a gloss, but there are linkages. The forces people assumed RF beams were weapons, not detection systems)

Infra-Red for detection of the enemy. No more stupid than what they had, which is sound, giant sounding dishes to hear bombers. Turns out its harder to do IR than RF, but didn't stop Lord Cherwell obsessing about it, to the detriment of other science initiatives, but NOW IR is a stable of all kinds of things.

These UFO patents may contain ideas which make sense in limited fields, or huge fields, or no fields.

(obviously, if they are based on perpetual motion flawed physics it tends to no fields)

In all of those cases the inventions sounded crazy And no one had really tried it before. A lot of smart people have been working on plasma physics with the goal of controlled fusion for 70 years. HTS research has been ongoing for nearly as long. Suddenly one guy who speaks like a crackpot has discovered things no one else has thought of? Occam’s Razor.

Totally agree with this bit. The alarm bells about these ones are pretty huge.

The "quintessence" bit was a bit of a red flag wasn't it

Not at all--https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessence_(physics)

I would be careful with that one. 'Dark Energy' has been in this weird grey area for a while now, where we have this observation that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but we have no explanation. There have been a lot of hypothetical explanations. Seems like Quintessence is just one of them.

Recently there has been growing doubt that expansion of the universe is accelerating at all, favoring that it's constant. That would completely undermine this Quintessence thing.

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-evidence-key-assumption-discov...

The fusion tractor's control system needs far more EM signal processing and optics than we understood util recently.

You don’t really need a serious amount of computation even for tokamak feedback systems. The computers of the 90s are adequate. Most other confinement machines (magnetic or otherwise) don’t even need feedback. It’s just bog standard industrial automation/control.

We’ve been on the ball for optics for a long time now. Where computation really comes in handy is in simulation and optimization. Plasma physics is still a very unfinished field and computation is a very valuable tool in speeding up the theory <-> experiment loop.

I would have no problem listening to this guy and trusting him and believing in his view of physics if he would just show some of his stuff. If he really has a compact functional fusion generator and a gravity wave device and other things, then he certainly deserves to be taken seriously. Give us a quick demonstration of the technology and then say all you can, please!

Conversely, if all he has are ideas I can't understand without any demos or examples, I have no problem doubting him. Perhaps he's right, but I won't be able to tell until I see the gizmos working. Because of that, I have no hesitation in defaulting to the view that he isn't credible, reliable, or right.

None of these ideas seemed particularly crazy even at the time.

So, there's this story that goes around at Office of Naval Research about Enrico Fermi walking in one day and saying he had a new method of powering ships. In retrospect we all realize nuclear power is in fact a great way to power submarines, but they shoo'd him out the door and regretted living to tell the tale. So there's the profound cultural mythos in the Navy around missing out on the next energy solution which probably makes them particularly vulnerable to this line of quackpottery.

https://youtu.be/cNgAMjOVB4Y?t=1221

This sounds like a story that has grown to cover some need.

They can't have shoo'd him away for too long, the Navy started working on it in the 1940s and had one in use by 1953.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Mi...

You're massively overestimating the number of inventions that were sudden crazy-sounding discoveries. Almost none are like that.

I'd really love some world changing breakthrough technology now. I really would. But I don't really understand this stuff (not that I'm qualified). I guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine, so the fact that it is a patent, doesn't seem to require that it be real.

I can't help but think back to the 80's SDI "Star Wars" programs. We said that we could do a lot of things that we couldn't, and that made the Russians crazy.

Now I'm not prone to conspiracy theories, but could it be possible this is a misinformation campaign?

It's interesting the "new IEEE paper" referenced in the paper only has the one author and no coauthors. I wonder who (if anyone) peer reviewed this paper? Also in the views, interestingly it's only had 40 views (not sure if this is paper views, or not, it says PDF and HTML views). Sadly I don't have access to read it!

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8871349

"I guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine"

No, you can't because it violates fundamental principles of scientific laws.

Not only can you, but many people have:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents

From that what that link says, it sounds like you could but now cannot patent perpetual motion devices, since those applications are now rejected in America and UK. Perhaps you can patent them elsewhere though.

IIRC they are not rejected but you have to demonstrate the invention with a physical implementation. Of course this proves nothing but it does reduce the amount of paperwork.

There is legitimate research going on into reversing the casimir effect but the narrative they present is one of tribology rather than power generation.

Downvote -4?

The voting system here lets me question the sanity and competence of many readers here.

For those interested:

----------------

Proposals for such inoperable machines have become so common that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has made an official policy of refusing to grant patents for perpetual motion machines without a working model. The USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice states:

    With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device. If operability of a device is questioned, the applicant must establish it to the satisfaction of the examiner, but he or she may choose his or her own way of so doing.[25]

And, further, that:

    A rejection [of a patent application] on the ground of lack of utility includes the more specific grounds of inoperativeness, involving perpetual motion. A rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101 for lack of utility should not be based on grounds that the invention is frivolous, fraudulent or against public policy.[26]

The filing of a patent application is a clerical task, and the USPTO will not refuse filings for perpetual motion machines; the application will be filed and then most probably rejected by the patent examiner, after he has done a formal examination.[27] Even if a patent is granted, it does not mean that the invention actually works, it just means that the examiner believes that it works, or was unable to figure out why it would not work.[27]

----------------

It seems that these devices are real:

> Despite the patents sounding extremely far-fetched, official documents show that the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise personally attested to the reality of these inventions and their importance to national security and peer-state competition in appeals with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Of course, the article immediately follows with:

> Meanwhile, the scientists and physicists we have talked to on and off the record have made it clear that they find the claims largely absurd and not grounded in scientific fact. At the same time, there is, in fact, many decades of government research into similar technologies that are very much alike in concept to some of Pais's work.

I don't get it. The point of patents is public disclosure -- if you want to keep something secret, you don't patent it. A patent isn't going to prevent a foreign government from copying a technology in their own country. It instead helps them, because a patent is supposed to document the technology in sufficient detail to replicate it. It would just prevent them from competing to sell them in the US.

A few potential explinations are deliberate misdirection intended for actual programs or towards foreign intelligence services, a filing or paperwork mistake, testing the waters for Mass disclosure, or infighting between the Navy releasing information and the Air Force or some other branch that owns the craft and has tested it on Navy latest and greatest assets.

My cynical experience at going through many pseudo science article makes me more inclined to believe that someone is just using Navy's name to fuel a scam.

Maybe someone clueless at the Navy was a tool, or maybe they just got into the zeitgeist that using official positions to pull a scam is the trendy thing to do.

>> A patent isn't going to prevent a foreign government from copying a technology in their own country

Absolutely agree. But that's probably a moot point if the secret in question has already gotten out and you're/we're aware of it ("gotten out", at least from an intelligence standpoint). If that's the case, maybe they're just trying to protect the rights to said technology within the U.S. -- if they know the secret has gotten out to a foreign state, it would be problematic to have said foreign state patent said secret here, thereby preventing U.S. companies from making it? Just guessing...

> It’s also worth noting the well-established trend of the U.S. military making use of the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 to file patents unavailable for public viewing

I could be that real patents are filed under the Invention Secrecy Act, and misdirection patents are made public.

Misinformation

SDI freaked out the Russians because it was possible, if not feasible. A number of research projects (e.g. Brilliant Pebbles, Project Excalibur, Shiva Star) were spec'd and tested to various degrees. It would have cost many trillions, but we could have built a missile shield. SDI lives on as the Missile Defense Agency, which has had some modest successes (though nothing like taking down ICBMs during midcourse.)

Russia realized they couldn't afford to clone SDI, so they came up with an asymmetric tactic - MIRVs. A cat-and-mouse game on paper followed - the Soviets planned dummy warheads in MIRV payloads to confuse SDI, the Americans devised sensors to measure warhead density, etc.

AFAIK, Reagan really wanted SDI to work - if he'd been willing to compromise on it, we could have had denuclearization at the Rejkyavik summit. The myth that SDI was a misinformation campaign seems unsubstantiated by what I've read.

MIRVs had been around since the 1960s, and were probably a response to the first gen ABM systems, which were to light off a giant nuke in the path of incoming missiles. I think SDI really did freak out the Soviets; the Russians are still mad every time we field a new kind of ABM, and have been developing numerous obvious countermeasures to them, like "use something that isn't a standard ballistic missile." It's all so tiresome. Everyone should stop.

Of course SDI looked plausible like you said, and ultimately did materialize various ABM systems. This stuff is just insane gorp. Dr Pais has a history of this sort of thing; a quick look at his patent trail on google scholar nets nonsense like "laser augmented jet engines"[1] which are obvious nonsense.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7080504B2/en

I would love to be wrong because this tech is very interesting, but I feel like I have developed a pretty good bullshit detector in my time online and quotes such as "VES being the Fifth State of Matter (Fifth Essence - Quintessence)" stick out to me as being discrediting.

Honestly, I have lost track of state of matters. How many are there? 3? s,l,g? Plasma? Bode Einstein Condensate? I vaguely remember at least three more.

There are over a dozen more exotic states of matter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_of_matter

Apparently in physics, there is less talk about states than about phases [1]. There are four fundamental states basically all matter can be in: solid, liquid, gas, plasma, but then you can get philosophical about what constitutes a state. Is a superfluid a liquid? I think there is a stronger case for Bose-Einstein condensate to be a separate state but one could argue otherwise. Crystalline vs amorphous solids could easily be argued as being different states etc...

Really, phases are more clearly defined, but more numerous, and change from one material to another.

And then you are left with the task of defining colloids, gels, aerosols...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_(matter)

I like the part where he talks about Quintessence as if it's a valid scientific concept... not in terms of a hypothetical form of dark energy, but in the original sense that it's the "quinta essentia" or "fifth element", IE Aether.

His emails read like a word salad mix of high energy science and medieval alchemy... very similar to a lot of the "free energy" crackpots on youtube.

I feel like I'm still reading something from the geocities archive.

I continue to believe this is today’s equivalent of “red mercury”: crazy pseudoscience given the imprimatur of the U.S. military to distract and confuse adversaries.

It seems unlikely any serious adversary would be taken in by this.

I think it's more likely a case of gross managerial incompetence where superiors were taken in by a crackpot making claims far outside of his and their ability to evaluate.

You give the military too much credit. I have acquaintances in military research and they're more self-sure than they are intelligent. And they love military jargon.

This quote from another article on the source website is interesting:

“Craft Using An Inertial Mass Reduction Device.” While all are pretty outlandish-sounding, the latter is the one that the Chief Technical Officer of the Naval Aviation Enterprise personally vouched for in a letter to the USPTO, claiming the Chinese are already developing similar capabilities.

...

"That being said, the unorthodox circumstances surrounding the approval of this patent have us wondering why the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise, Dr. James Sheehy, personally vouched for the legitimacy of this beyond-revolutionary aerospace technology in the Navy’s appeal to the USPTO. Sheehy assured the patent examiner in charge of this application that the aircraft propulsion method described in the patent is indeed possible or will be soon based on experiments and tests NAWCAD has already conducted. "

> the aircraft propulsion method described in the patent is indeed possible

from that patent - they describe there spinning the 2m diameter disk at 30000rpm (ie. 3km/s edge speed):

"... we obtain an energy flux value of 10e33 W/m2. This exceptionally high power intensity induces a pair production avalanche, thereby ensuring complete polarization of the local vacuum state."

i believe it - 10e33 W/m2 can do a lot (it is total power output of a million of Suns concentrated into 1m2), and such EM field would interact strongly not only with the Earth magnetic field, it will do it with just sheer vacuum as well (that is the point of their patent is that vacuum isn't really a full vacuum according to QM).

So everything seems ok from the pure math EM/QM formula POV. There are i think only minor pesky practical details - like the material able to withstand 30000rpm 3km/s rotation while under the 10e33 W/m2 EM flux (the flux which would tear apart atoms and may be even protons/neutrons) and a compact energy source doing all that while fitting into the 2m diameter disk.

As a slight counterpoint (I haven't looked into the claims of the patents too much): There is the well known Kerr-Newman solution of a rotating, charged black hole. It is well known that a relativistic rotating charged disk approximates in the limit of (v = c) the Kerr-Newman solution with (B = 0): https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0410109.pdf. However the total field energy of such a rotating disk would be infinite, this is one of these examples in physics, where you run into pathologies. As is remarked in the paper those might be removed by a quantum treatment. For v < c the field energy is finite, which is in any case the only realisable regime.

Trying to think if the DoD has any good reasons to encourage conspiracy theorists? Besides the obvious US has mystic weapons angle.

because some of them are conspiracy theorists? It would seem improbable that Michael Flynn is alone in that.

In any case, I think this is most likely due to incompetence. Whether a few of this guy's bosses are conspiracy theorists or not, they obviously aren't qualified to evaluate his work and see that he's a crackpot. It wouldn't be the first time, with things like MkUltra and that telepathy crap.

Wait a second. I thought you couldn't patent an idea that couldn't be demonstrated. For example, you can't patent the concept of faster than light travel in the hopes that one day, if someone does figure HOW to do it, you hold the patent. It's just absurd and that's what this all sounds like.

You don't patent these things without expecting questions... Either they're really close to produce something that the public could replicate - hence the patenting, or they're miles away from anything realistic but patenting like crazy to remain 'relevant'.

I know, you guys do not understand, it is "Turbo Encabulator" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o

LOL

AIUI, viable room temperature superconductors are an existential threat to the coal & gas industries.

Worse / better yet, they'd massively disrupt the existing geopolitical power and wealth distribution.

Wasn't there some airplane crashes that had engineers on the flight that worked for Freescale or some other company in the superconductor market? Funny how those stories just faded away with few questions about how the airliner crashed. I am not trying to make a conspiracy theory, but they should have taken separate flights.

edit: Typo and clarification

Snopes doesn’t indicate this is likely to be true. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mh370-patent-disappearance...

Heh.

Also, Freescale does semiconductors. The patent was about wafer yields. Not superconductors :-)

Where's the Snopes like site Snoping Snopes?

Maybe just NSA and NAVY covert, keeping Chinese scientist busy wasting their time with nonsense science ?!

Some in the US seem to be keeping their mentally ill off the streets by paying them to make nonsense secret parents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com