Navy “UFO Patent” Documents Talk of “Spacetime Modification Weapon” | Hacker News Reader

Navy “UFO Patent” Documents Talk of “Spacetime Modification Weapon”

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59 pointsjeffreyrogers58 comments

Real secrets don't get released to the public in patent documents.

Right. These look like a PSY-OP, disinformation.

It is usually hard to find the reason for a PSY-OP. Sometimes they are just experiments, like the original reports of CIA ESP projects, to see what people can be made to believe. (That one was a big success: most people believe to this day that there really were CIA ESP experiments.)

Do you have a source about the CIA ESP experiments? Wikipedia doesn’t say anything about that

It was DIA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project

This was the plot to "The men who stare at goats"

This is an interesting read also https://www.history.com/news/cia-esp-espionage-soviet-union-...

If you want (pardon the badly mixed metaphors) to go down a rabbit hole straight from the horse’s mouth:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/search/site/Stargate

But it wasn't really a CIA program it was a DIA program that was transferred to CIA for reevaluation and partial declassification and cancelled as a result of the review.

There is no actual evidence that it was cancelled, and substantial evidence of it continuing into the present. But the nature of the operation -- deception -- is clearly very different from what has been promoted.

Wouldn't other nation states presume it was a psy-op as well?

Also regarding the CIA ESP projects, are you saying that Project Stargate[1] and the Gateway process[2] were disinfo, or not technically run by the CIA? I hadn't thought about them in that regard, I figured it was more a case of "we think the Russians are doing this, so maybe there's something to it".(V.P.Perov's alleged experiments with rabbits on submarines published in 1984)[3]

[1]https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate

[2]https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R0017002...

[3]https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.1148.pdf

> Wouldn't other nation states presume it was a psy-op as well?

Serious magic is just mind tricks, optical illusions, misdirection etc applied skillfully.

Part of the effect often comes from the story that the magician tells around them, planting a story and allowing it to take on a life of its own inside the spectators mind.

"The biggest mistake people do when trying to understand magic tricks is to underestimate how far a (professional) magician will go to cover up what they are really doing" or something to that effect is a quote I could note find a source for at the moment but that I think I might have heard in a Penn and Teller video or something.

I guess this is the same for the military.

(FWIW: Here's a 14 minutes talk where magician Jon Ensor about something similar: https://www.ted.com/talks/jon_ensor_who_needs_tricks_charism... )

The actual target of a PSY-OP can be hard to ascertain, as they are fundamentally deceptions. One mustn't assume other countries are necessarily intended targets.

There is no reason to believe there was ever any expectation that ESP would work for spying, or that any actual effort was undertaken to try. However, a great deal of work went into convincing Americans that it had been attempted. Ultimately, that work has to be seen as the actual point of the operation. There is no clear indication of the purpose of the operation.

Jon Ronson's (terrifying) book, "Men Who Stare at Goats", explored the history of the operation and the group that perpetrated it. He made clear that it is not just historical, but an ongoing operation, a successful attack on the American public.

Ronald Reagan's Star Wars "Strategic Defense Initiative" could very easily have been primarily a PSY-OP against the USSR. A great deal of money was spent with very little direct result, but the USSR military went apeshit over it and crashed their whole economy. (Disclosure: I flew to a semiconductor conference in Hungary in 1987, on SDI money via AFNOR, with a stopover in East Berlin.)

>He made clear that it is not just historical, but an ongoing operation, a successful attack on the American public.

What would be the modern/ongoing equivalent, something like PRISM and surveillance in general serving a role like the Panopticon?

Probably the best recent example was the drumbeat in favor of invading Iraq, despite every scrap of evidence showing that there was no defensible reason for it, and that it would utterly fail its objectives even on its own crack-brained terms.

A military unit whose brief is deceiving the American public will necessarily attract participants whose chosen role in life is that, so will naturally become a center of corruption in an already corrupt enterprise.

What is the point of the Navy/UFO operation? We may never know.

And the Monroe Institute still selling Hemi-/Holo-Sync etc. Have you ever tried binaural beats, btw?

If a long-shot military R&D program is looking like it’s not realistically going to pan out, putting a patent application out there is probably a cheap way of using it as a low-grade deterrent for rival superpowers.

Maybe I put too much faith in military intelligence (aka spying), but I would assume that if a government has a project that goes on for 3 years most other countries know about it, and know what the outcome was.

Two notable counter examples seems to be SR-71 (and related research) as well as the Manhattan project.

The average pay for a GS-xTeen in military intelligence is less than $55k/year

Musk has been quoted a few times saying part of the reason SpaceX don't patent things is because nation-states don't care about patents.

Not as a deterrent to copying it, but as a bluff about their capabilities. That's how I read it anyway.

If they don’t respect the law then a patent is just a way for them to more easily copy a design.

Yeah bluffing is tricky.

I suppose the thing I find most interesting is the number of hours and resources that were actually assigned to these projects, they must have convinced at least somebody in the ranks of the perceived viability of these 'inventions'.

It's also possible that some of this kind of stuff is a psyop to convince adversaries that we have "scary sci-fi technology."

More and more I'm thinking this might be the case, as someone else mentioned below, 'you don't get real secrets through FOI requests'

If that's the case, why assign all the patents to the same individual? Each additional implausible claim just serves to discredit the others by making him look more like a crackpot.

Having worked with many people in government, I can guarantee you he's just a crackpot making his living off government payroll.

So following this line of thought, if a bunch of HNer's can see through it, why couldn't a nation state?

A nation-state has to take it much more seriously, because they have a much bigger downside if it's actually true.

To be fair, if there's a weapon in the works that can manipulate the fabric of spacetime, we probably all share that same downside if its true :P

This psyop narrative never rings true to me. Not knowing why con artists are successful in the military is something that still eludes me.

There are crazy and real things that the military does, so why are there crazy and fake things?

You don’t have to look hard to see the crazy and real things. Here are some highlights.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/06/943531538/microwave-radiation...

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...

Military leaders aren't immune to con artists. Elizabeth Holmes convinced several retired flag officers to join the Theranos board of directors. And they got some small military contracts before the fraud was exposed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-former-board-member...

Militaries have a long history of moon shot type endeavors - 50 years ago most of it was around physic abilities, today it is at least a bit more scientific, albeit fringe.

one of the techniques of war is, get your enemies to expend resources. this is simply a way of doing that. now they have to spend money and time "just in case" there's something there.

Like secrets can be kept by governments or scientists in this era, if it was real we'd be hearing about every other week.

Maybe the closest we have to space-time "modification" is gravitational time dilation, where the further you are away from a massive object the faster time moves (or actually the opposite way around). Hence satellites like GPS and even astronauts are out of sync with people on the surface of the earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation

Now imagine if you could get a spy satellite several seconds into the future from the surface of the earth and yet still have realtime communications somehow back to the earth. Then you'd have something rather interesting.

You're on the right track.

FWIW, secrets are easy to keep.

Hacker News comments, I love you

This must be like the Patents Feynman was talking about where they basically just had the scientists spitball patents-for-a-dollar type things

You don't need a working gizmo to get a patent.

You should do. I've you haven't made a working model, you haven't invented anything.

You might want to patent an idea so that it's protected while you're in the process of raising money to build that first prototype.

If you came up with two great ideas to do the same thing and only want to develop one.

Part of the idea of patents is they are supposed to be able to teach someone else how to make the invention.

How can you teach someone else to do something if you don't know yourself? You can't.

Frank Whittle patented the jet engine years before he successfully built one. His patent couldn't teach anyone how to build a jet engine, because he didn't know himself.

That's fine, though. Building it takes time and money (people, materials, whatever). You're going to have to explain your idea to your investors in order to raise capital. During that process, you need to be protected from them taking your idea and starting a separate business behind your back.

Lots of patents really are just ideas for things which might work rather than things known/proven to work. Possibly these should be differentiated somehow, and maybe have a shorter time horizon on expiry if they're not "upgraded" from an idea patent to a working-device patent. But that's a legit reason for idea patents to exist, and that's the present reality.

I suspect it's just not a big issue. Famously, you need a working prototype in order to patent a perpetual motion machine, so the patent office is apparently willing to implement such a test if necessary.

Let's say you've designed a new CPU, and it's really clever.

You will never be able to make it, end of.

If you speak about it in any context other than a patent Intel or some other large company will take your idea for free.

If you've designed a time machine, I sort of agree, but this principle is really stupid and goes against what the point of a patent is in the first place.

Maybe don't make a whole CPU, but a proof of concept of your core ideas?

Allowing patent squatting with ideas instead of prototypes is more damaging than requiring a proof of concept.

So a “Spacetime Modification Weapon” might just be dropping a bomb down an earthquake fault to trigger an earthquake right?

How does one get about to getting hired by the government to write sci-fi disinfo for public consumption?

First you need to make up a mysterious-sounding name

Just deduct it from your taxes like I do

If you have an actual "Spacetime Modification Weapon" I doubt you need a patent to protect it.

I doubt it even needs to be a weapon. Maybe we can just transport disagreeable humans to other planets and forget about having wars with them?

How else will you keep other people from selling spacetime modification weapons? You gotta lock that down for at least 20 years.

I guess they got their grant money.

Every number in this story, from the half a million dollars, to the 10 engineers, to the 1600 hrs, is basically nothing compared to the full goings on of our military. It's like pulling your toothbruch across your front teeth one more time before spitting. An equivalent amount of time, money and effort are probably spent daily, on even less interesting things.

Looks like something fake designed to find leakers at the patent office.

If that were the case, they wouldn’t have been granted.

"field propulsion-based aerospace-undersea craft" - really. That's just 007's car.

This Pais guy seems to have discovered exactly one thing - the more star trek level technobabble you pile into a document, the more likely the US Government is to pay your salary. There's simply no way anybody working on this project believed any of it. As the years went by I bet he got more bold, trying to see how much random babble he could get away with.

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