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)

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 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.

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.

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. "

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.

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.

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

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.

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 guess you can actually patent a perpetual motion machine"

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

    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] 

    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]