Shrike
7mo ago
Assuming the combination of very high cooling power, an enhanced magnetic field, and a lightning-fast computer to control the superconducting plates, this system can go from hover to high subsonic speeds and stop and turn at 90-degree angles. But crossing the transonic barrier and dealing with a bow shock wave requires a very different type of technology like plasma actuators that we will save for another time.
I read three power expenditures:
- Very high cooling power
- An enhanced magnetic field [I think he's just describing using the superconductors to create magnetic fields by running current through the superconductors, this...isn't controversial, I don't think?]
- A lightning-fast computer
Shrike
7mo ago
So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.
Correct, but either can produce a plasma field in the atmosphere.
Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard.
That's the thing about proton beams - the accelerated particles will lose velocity and at a certain point they will release their remaining energy. If you're using the proton beam for cancer treatment, it releases that energy into the cancer cells. If you aim it at the sky, it will create an ionized patch of plasma. Tom Mahood goes into the numbers here.
There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of tech I'm thinking of. Look, if you're telling me you don't think this sort of tech was sufficient to create a Tic-Tac event, I am not going to argue with you! I'm not convinced that it was responsible. I just find it interesting that the tech exists, if even in a modest form, and that the US military has been doing research on particle beams and radar decoys for decades (and thus might be ahead of civilian technology in this area) and that they started putting lasers on submarines at a time which would make sense if the Tic-Tac was an IOC/prototype test. Am I convinced? No. Do I think it makes a certain amount of sense? Sure.
I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR.
I think this makes sense, but wouldn't account for the eyewitness reports unless there was something visible to the naked eye. (Obviously ECM could account for the radar detection.)
Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes)
Fravor, the pilot who reported the water disturbance, wasn't able to capture any footage of the Tic Tac as I understand it. That was captured by a subsequent jet.
To expand on this a bit, I'll add that I don't think this is a good assumption, nor do I think it tracks how the military uses its sensors. The military prefers IR sensors, and the Tic-Tac footage was from an ATFLIR pod (YMMV on whether this counts as visible-light). But as far as I know, the F-18 has no feature to continuously record all of its surroundings. The ATFLIR pod would need to be pointed at a specific target (in this case, the Tic-Tac), and not all aircraft carry ATFLIR pods, nor does the ATFLIR pod necessarily always function. I believe the F-18 also has a "gun camera" that captures, essentially, the view of the HUD - very far from a 360 degree recording, and I do not know if those are even routinely turned on. Likewise for any other in-cockpit cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. In short, as far as I know, there's no particular reason to believe that any given event would be captured visually on any equipment besides the HUD camera by a Navy fighter unless it was especially equipped with a reconnaissance/sensor pod. And to catch something in the HUD, you'd need to "pull it into the HUD" (point your aircraft at it) and have the HUD recorder on.
the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).
From what I've seen of the accounts, the water was what Fravor noticed first - then the Tic-Tac. I doubt the adrenaline kicked in just from seeing an ocean disturbance. But as long as we're postulating extra details manifesting from stress, I'd say that cuts towards the "plasma holography" theory, as one could just as easily assume that the pilot's brain "filled in" a blobby shape with solid details, and then contaminated other aircrew's perceptions by describing it, causing them to report the same thing. Not saying I think this is what happened, but I think it's more parsimonious an explanation than Fravor stress-hallucinating an ambiguous water feature.
Shrike
7mo ago
It's particularly interesting when you realize that the implications of (e.g.) quantized inertia are something similar to "gravetics."
Unfortunately I don't have the credentials to evaluate the relative merits of string theory and dark matter in a way that's particularly persuasive, but I do think that they (or at least dark matter, I know even less about string theory) are the sort of wild goose chase you'd want to send everyone on if you were trying to cover up physics breakthroughs. "Just build another multi-billion dollar supercollider, maybe you'll find dark matter THIS time!"
Shrike
7mo ago
But he's not proposing lifting anything for free - he's proposing power in using beamed power, right?
Shrike
7mo ago
You definitely might be right about the article, but I'm not following your analysis (probably a me problem!)
Shrike
7mo ago
I'll once again note that various excuses about how a treating physician probably can't really know what things cost ring hollow for anyone with a decent veterinarian. That end of things is admittedly a newish experience for me, but when I take my dog to the vet and he presents treatment options, I can inquire what they cost and his reply is, "about [$X], but I can get the exact number for you if you want".
Bingo. It's been a while since I went to the vet, but when I was a kid we had our dog neutered and they asked us to put a budget on lifesaving efforts if things went south for some reason (they didn't, everything turned out fine).
Anyway, yes, I think doctors could do this and it might help everyone involved think a lot more clearly about treatment plans. In fact, because people are so leery of hidden fees, I would not be surprised if it would save lives if doctors were required to post consultation prices and then notify patients of the cost of treatment beforehand. Nobody wants to get a surprise $1000 bill in the mail, if people knew that going to the doctor to check out that weird lump or whatever was only gonna cost them $50 it might be more effective than all the work Obamacare put into making annual visits free.
Shrike
7mo ago
The idea that the huge uptick in UFO sightings in the last ~5 years is due to china catching up to the US in whatever this secret "antigravity" propulsion system is holds some water with me.
The contrary question is this – why were their UFO flaps well before China was a military power at all? "China sending antigravity drones over the White House as a show of force" tracks, but in 1952? I think the contrary position is that sometimes there are UFO flaps, and if there are other things (US government testing, lots of drone use, balloons/drones as a use-of-force/recon assets) happening at the same time, they get mixed in with the reporting.
(With that being said, though, it kinda seems like Mr. Berg may have been [intentionally?] pattern-matching with a specific "'leak'" alleging Chinese reverse-engineered antigravity tech that came out on the world's only reliable website back in 2023. I don't think I buy it, but certainly that would make neat narrative work of both the "Chinese antigravity drones" and the Cold War flaps.)
Shrike
7mo ago
To spoon-feed you:
-
The fantastical negation of gravity claim in this instance comes about because of the word "antigravity" in the email, which as far as I am concerned could mean anything that looks like "antigravity" in the movies (and of course there's still the whole question of "was this guy sane" and "did this guy even send this email"?)
-
This pattern-matches to weird UAP that have been interfering with US Navy flights off of the coast. People's minds start to think "antigravity" because the reported characteristics of the drones are "long-duration, high altitude, supersonic speeds" and their designs are not aerodynamic, but "antigravity propulsion" isn't part of the reported characteristics of those objects – "no visible means of propulsion" is.
But you don't need to believe in "antigravity" to believe that those UAP are real, and you don't need to believe the email mentioning "antigravity" is anything other than somebody making stuff up to believe in...well, antigravity. It's just pattern-matching.
Shrike
7mo ago
The reason "sphere" makes me think "balloon" is because balloons are one of the few cases where spherical shape makes sense, although I suppose if you wanted to troll people you might choose a suboptimal shape to confuse.
There are some interesting drone designs ("SpICED" and "ZeRONE") that are propelled balloons that greatly resemble the reported "metallic orbs," and from what I understand (besides using the spherical balloon shape because they are balloons) they use the spherical balloon shape because it gives them a lot of maneuverability when fitted with thrusters. But it seems like these are mostly designed for indoor use, although I wouldn't be surprised if designs along those lines are responsible for more-than-zero "UAP" sightings.
Shrike
7mo ago
Yeah, I don't literally think the X-37 is mining antimatter. But if you were trying to mine antimatter in the Van Allen belts, the X-37 would be the platform to do it.
Of course if it was me, I would mine antimatter from bananas under the cover of being a zoo.
Shrike
7mo ago
military orbital launches aren't that rare.
Come to think of it, this is a great use for the X-37!
Meissner effect always pushes from stronger field to weaker field, and at any point on the Earth's surface that direction is fixed.
Okay. But (and bear with me, it's a long time since I've been in college physics) – you can use magnetic fields for both suspension and propulsion – this is how maglevs work, using linear induction motors – right? The difference here would be that Earth's gravity field isn't an alternating set of magnetic polar forces, but but if you were activating electromagnets on different ends of a sphere, wouldn't that generate linear motion just the same?
I guess this wouldn't technically only be using the Meissner effect. But then again, granting you can pump enough power remotely to a bundle of superconductors to keep it afloat (which maybe we shouldn't grant, for several reasons, but I like pushing these ideas to see how far they will go) perhaps it might be simpler to turn to ionic thrust, which another poster mentioned.
Tether(s). Or engine(s), I suppose, although technically that would make it an airship and not a balloon. Again, though, you really want ground-crew observations to rule out optical illusions regarding movement (even then there are still some possible ones).
Presumably it would be the engines, as the lil guys were clocked going supersonic. (Graves doesn't specify, but I assume he's making that judgment off of radar data and not Mk 1 eyeball observation.)
Shrike
7mo ago
I figure the whole 'military technology is so far advanced!' thing is only in areas where the military has far more of an interest than civilian scientists, like radar stealth/detection.
I agree with you, but "antigravity" is very much one of those things where the military has a definite if apparently pointless interest, to the point that you can read about its exploits (or lack thereof) on Wikipedia – which now also mentions the Las Vegas bombing.
I think that during the Cold War various agencies threw cash at a variety of off-the-wall projects. If there was a Road Not Taken lying around for bizarre experimentation to detect, it doesn't seem insane to think they might have found it. However, conversely, just because the US military/CIA researched something during the Cold War doesn't mean it was real. If someone had written an op-ed to say that beating Communism required imagining a dozen impossible things before breakfast, you can bet the CIA, DIA, and J. Edgar Hoover would have all had their best and brightest in a pilot program within the month.
Shrike
7mo ago
I dunno if you read the linked article, but it goes into depth about Lazar's many and varied lies.
Shrike
7mo ago
You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect.
Right – the article postulates charged superconductors to repel the magnetic field as needed. (It specifically doesn't postulate room-temperature superconductors, which I find interesting. I'd be surprised if the US government was mining antimatter in the Van Allen belts and storing it in Area 51, but not if they had stumbled on a room-temp superconductor. Maybe I'm out of touch?)
I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions
Presumably you could just thrust against the magnetic field at an angle, yeah?
When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".
And when you see "balloon holding still in 120 knot winds" what do you think?
Shrike
7mo ago
US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings.
The US government [almost certainly] developed a way to generate plasma balls using a particle beam and tested it at Groom Lake back in the day as an electronic warfare weapon. This is why you might have heard of Bob Lazar.
I think there's something to the UFO weirdness (in part because of how the US security state moves around it) but my best guess for a "prosaic" explanation for the Tic-Tac is laser holography deployed from a submarine (recall the pilots mention a water disturbance). Since plasmas can reflect radar waves, this would be a great electronic warfare asset that would also be visible with the naked eye.
Probably in unrelated news, the US Navy started putting lasers on their submarine masts a few years ago.
Shrike
7mo ago
The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny
Do you know who Ning Li is? Mike McCullough? Both of those people might be/have been full of it/wrong, but their work wasn't exactly secret (until it was, anyway). If Ning Li made an anti-gravity breakthrough, you probably read about it on Wired before it went into a special access program.
But secondly, I don't think what you're describing is as far-fetched as you might thing. Apparently, during the late unpleasantness (World War Two), the Soviets and perhaps others deduced that the United States was working on nuclear weapons specifically because we stopped publishing on nuclear weapons research.
Any future classified research into fundamental physics would need to be more than suppressed, it would need to be overlaid with a misleading theory that was nevertheless embraced by most scientific gatekeepers, and the actual line of research or any breakthroughs would need to be kept carefully out of the realm of respectable science by ridicule and gatekeeping. And I don't think this would be as hard as it sounds: in the United States, the research world is very beholden to the US government, and universities did lots of classified and sometimes shady research on behalf of the US government. I'm not sure it would be hard to keep the lid on something, for a while, particularly if you had an alternative hypothesis that was unfalsifiable or elusive but made the math work (I'm looking at you, dark matter!)
Shrike
7mo ago
TO BE FAIR, New Year's Day is the one day that you would expect people to inadvertently coordinate violent action. But how close were the attacks, are we talking hours or minutes?
Shrike
7mo ago
I'm going to check this out, thanks for posting. FWIW I once straight-up asked a B-2 engineer in a casual setting about this, and he denied it. But perhaps he misunderstood, or was doing his job.
Shrike
7mo ago
There are a couple of pretty boring "anti-gravity" explanations that don't violate "the laws of physics," - I don't think negative mass does, but more prosaically propulsion utilizing the Meissner effect is quite possible.
Of course, that isn't technically anti-gravity in the sense that there's no spacetime manipulation, but they would function like "antigravity" does in the movies (and wouldn't get picked up by e.g. LIGO). The released email doesn't go into specifics, so it's hard to tell if it's antigravity or "antigravity."
The war crimes claims seem at least somewhat founded, which in my mind enhances the credibility of the report, but OTOH if the guy had a break with reality he might mix fact with fiction. Or maybe he was upset about the war crimes and decided to mix it in with the UAP stuff he had read about on the news or 4chan, knowing that would get the war crimes story more traction.
Shrike
7mo ago
What I find objectionable is the mentality that teenage pregnancies just randomly fall on some proportion of the population. In fact, they are far more likely to occur in some subcultures than others, specifically those that treat it as something that just randomly happens.
From what I've seen, conservative and particularly religiously conservative communities – and there's a strong overlap here with pro-lifers (and, you might be relieved to hear, National Review!) are much more likely to articulate getting pregnant out of wedlock as a moral choice rather than a sort of chance occurrence [although I am unpersuaded that anyone really believes that] – so I think perhaps you're misattributing that mentality to pro-lifers.
But I also think pro-lifers have noticed that one driver of abortion is shame, and (since their view is that an unborn child shouldn't be aborted) they think "see, pregnancy is not the end of your life, you can be a happy and successful person even if you get pregnant unexpectedly" is a better message than "you moron, you complete idiot, you skank, you got yourself knocked up."
I think it can be hard to articulate a holistic message of "women shouldn't get pregnant out of marriage, that is a moral failing on their part if it is volitional, but if they do they should bring the child to term and trust that good things can still come out of that life" because there is some degree of tension or mixed messaging there, but I do think this is what a majority of strong pro-lifers in the United States believe and a position National Review is much more likely to air than, say, the New York Times.
Shrike
7mo ago
This wasn't unheard of for American women (for instance, Rachel Plummer married at 14).
I suspect that it was more common on the frontier, though.
Shrike
7mo ago
I think, technically, the pro-life position is "do not abort your child" - but it's true that Pro Life Tribe is bigger than that, and does have broader positions.
I don't understand the complaint you have here, though - based on the article, there's no recommendation of trailer-park behavior like getting pregnant at 15. There's an isolated instance where, from what I can tell, someone chose not to abort their child and has now been married for 34 years and has grandchildren. (It's unclear to me if she married the father of her child). This outcome seems good to me and I don't take the story to be recommending the route used to get there. Similarly, given that some number of people will, I am told, get pregnant at 15, keeping the child and getting married seems to me to be a preferable outcome to aborting the child and remaining unwed.
Maybe you can elaborate on what you find objectionable? Or did I miss something? As far as I can tell, National Review is not promoting out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancies as being a starting route to successful marriages, and if Veronica Keene married as a teenager the article doesn't mention it.
This may be a very long-winded way of saying "I agree with you," but I suppose we'll see:
I agree that UFOs are or have been used to cover other sensitive programs, but if you read US released government correspondence from the 1940s, it seems that there was a bottom-up aspect to this (coming through reporting channels, including official ones) and legitimate concern in official circles. For instance, in a July 1947 FBI memo (post-Roswell), we learn that General Schulgen reached out to the FBI to take initial reports of UFOs from citizens. Mr. Fitch, writing the memo for D.M. Ladd, head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, says that he was told by Schulgen that research was underway to see if UFOs were celestial objects, mechanical objects, or hysteria, possibly spread by "individuals of Communist sympathies". Fitch adds his personal note, saying that a lot of the alleged sightings are pranks and that it would, essentially, accomplish nothing to sic the Bureau on this.
There are several handwritten notes on the memo. One of them, possibly from Clyde Tolson, reads "I think we should do this." The other, believed to be from Hoover himself (although I can't read handwriting so I can't personally vouch for that) concurs, but says that "before agreeing...we must insist upon full access to discs recovered...in the ?? case the Army grabbed it & would not let us share[?] it for cursory examination"
Possibly the US disinformation apparatus is so advanced that it creates breadcrumbs in private documents that aren't likely to be released until after the death of the authors, but that seems unlikely to me. More likely is that J. Edgar Hoover was having the wool pulled over his eyes by General Schulgen. But Schulgen wrote a memo in October of 1947 (again, post-Roswell) expressing concern that the flying saucers were real – and were Soviet. He articulated the characteristics of flying saucers as seen by observers and requested technical data on the characteristics of a flying disk. He was particularly interested in the possibility that the disks had an ancestry in the Horten designs developed for Nazi Germany during World War Two and mentions a report indicating the Russians were "planning to build a fleet of 1,8000 Horten VIII (six engine pusher) type flying wing aircraft" (needless to say, the Russians never did this).
Now, interestingly (and to your point) a fake version of this document was circulated that was altered to play up a potential extraterrestrial explanation and downplay or remove the Russian angle – make of that what you will. But it seems clear that if there was an alien psyop shortly after Roswell then not only did Schulgen not get the memo but he didn't even get the intended message about the flying saucers being aliens.
But the evidence I've seen suggests strongly that, in the 1940s, either USAF general staff were hoisted by their own disinformation petard, or they were legitimately concerned about the reported characteristics of "flying discs" and the geopolitical implications. I think it's more likely that there were reported genuinely anomalous UFO phenomena, which were reported during the Second World War and in years prior. In fact there's some surviving evidence from alleged Italian government correspondence that not only were they sighted in the 1930s, but one crashed in Italy in 1933; unfortunately I am not familiar enough with things like "the norms of Italian government telegrams in the 1930s" to have a strong opinion about this. To the extent that it's a US/USAF psyop (which I agree is more than 0%) I suspect they are piggybacking on an existing, genuine phenomena (which may not be "real" but was real enough to be a genuine cause for concern).
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