[jonmrodriguez]

I feel like part of the cultural fascination with flying saucers is that we intuitively feel like it should be possible for someone with advanced technology to levitate without expending power.

We are starting to get there, with quantum locking, which can levitate a type-II superconductor relative to a supporting magnetic field.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA

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

I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass?

[Laaw]

I realize I'm going to sound absolutely bonkers, but I definitely read an article in Wired about devices which used very large amounts of electricity to hover feet in the air. They were triangularly shaped, built in garages, used aluminium somehow, and could hover in the air.

I really wish I could find a link to that Wired article...

Edit: Found it! http://www.wired.com/2003/08/pwr-antigravity/

Edit2: Doing some research (it's coming back to me now), it runs off of ionic wind, which is apparently a well understood phenomena. I'm guessing this was/is being thoroughly researched, and any outcomes have apparently not been fruitful (yet?).

I realize I sound bonkers, but come on, this is pretty cool, even if nothing of value has resulted.

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

Guy explains it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzZy1Aqleno

[rl3]

>I realize I'm going to sound absolutely bonkers, ...

At the risk of sounding even more bonkers, The Hunt for Zero Point[0] claims that most UFOs are attributable to an exotic man-made propulsion technology first developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

While I don't particularly believe the book's claims, it's worth mentioning because Nick Cook wrote it. Cook was the former aviation editor for Jane's Defence Weekly, which was quite a prestigious position during his tenure.

Though I read the book over a decade ago, I'm still puzzled.

The book basically claims the U.S. launched an anti-gravity program based on technology it extracted from Nazi Germany in the later stages of WW2, and that the subsequent rash of UFO sightings in the U.S. were related. Supposedly the technology then started to make its way into the mainstream[1], and was abruptly quashed.

It also advanced a couple of theories suggesting the B-2 bomber is more than the public was led to believe—ranging from having hypersonic propulsion capability at altitude (unlikely), to a more benign theory of an electrified leading edge for both aerodynamic and stealth purposes. If I recall, the latter theory required the use of a highly toxic substance, and I could see that given the Air Force's troubled history[2] with stealth coating toxicity.

The book also made claims of seemingly impossible transmutations being conducted by a fringe experimenter in his apartment, using high-voltage electricity. I'm sure there was more crazy stuff I failed to mention.

The reason the book continues to puzzle me is that, while it's easy to just say "Nick Cook went off the deep end", that isn't necessarily true. Despite the book being published in 2003, Cook remained as a consultant to Jane's from 2002 until 2008. In 2006 he uncovered a classified high-altitude UCAV program[3] by digging through budget requests. Now he runs his own consultancy[4]. Not exactly crazy.

My opinion is that while the majority of the book is probably not true, Cook may have been on to something. What exactly I'm unsure, other than that when you apply ridiculous amounts of electricity to objects in novel state or material configurations, you get interesting results. Whether that means there's some long-running government conspiracy to conceal such things is another question.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunt-Zero-Point-Antigravity/dp/076...

[1] http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=18892220&postc...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/area-51-secre...

[3] http://defensetech.org/2006/04/23/air-forces-secret-drone-pr...

[4] http://www.dynamixx.co.uk/index.php/conferences/

[logicallee]

I didn't click any of your links, just read your comment with attention, because you have the same perspective I would. I'd like to ask your opinion about one thing in particular.

Why do you think this editor and writer would conceivably mention "claims of seemingly impossible transmutations being conducted by a fringe experimenter in his apartment, using high-voltage electricity"?

While you don't specify what it is, let's take it literally, a transmutation, so, whatever, iron goes in, electricity is applied, aluminum comes out (two different elements). Some non sequitur. That just so happens to be done in his apartment???

What I mean is if this impossible transmutation is done in a field unrelated to aviation, the area of his expertise, why would he even report? I mean if he was very, very sure, he might refer the person via an anonymous letter to a chemistry professor or something, but to report it in his book?

If I (or I would think anyone else) were in his position and literally saw someone transmute aluminum to gold, then short of letting me take the machine (in a faraday cage) whereever I want in any undisclosed city (bringing cash and no electronic devices whatsoever, trying to lose any tails via taxis and hitchiking ) and verify his claim by renting an apartment there for cash, buying aluminum foil in a random corner store (along with reasonable generic stuff that can be used for baking), then transmuting it myself within the faraday cage and selling the resulting gold at some appraiser, repeating this at different local stores and different baskets of goods, until I had more gold than the total weight of the machine involved... then I would wait for the electricity bill at the apartment and compare with the value of the gold I generated. Short of all that I literally wouldn't even report literally seeing someone transmute aluminum to gold. I just wouldn't report it. It's absurd. It's totally non-credible. By the way against state actors even the above process would fail, since the machine could generate electricity usage that's very easy for a central location to notice, just spikes at certain times for example (certain tenths of seconds on highly synchronized clocks), even above all of the noise of households. I guess I need a diesel power generator too. You get the idea.

What I'm saying is that the chances of the CIA getting a magician to come to my apartment and trick me is, I would say, oh, a hundred trillion? a quadrillion? times higher than the chances that someone will show me a machine that does an impossible transmutation. I am not exaggerating. A hundred trillion is fourteen orders of magnitude, and a quadrillion is fifteen. (For comparison, a hundred trillion bytes is just 100 terabytes, or thirteen of these - http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Archive-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp... -- yeah we are talking about 1 byte compared to all that storage.) It's absolutely absurd.

It shows a total lack of any grounding or objectivity for someone to report that.

Why would an aviation expert do it? What does he get out of tarnishing his credibility with that kind of gobbledegook, even if he saw it in front of his own eyes? Seeing something with your own eyes is not very convincing when your prior is one in a hundred trillion.

[rl3]

The fringe experimenter I mentioned was John Hutchinson[0][1]. His personal website[2] appears to be a Geocities-esque relic (with ads of course, but still entertaining).

>Why would an aviation expert do it? What does he get out of tarnishing his credibility with that kind of gobbledegook, even if he saw it in front of his own eyes?

That's what puzzled me. While it probably wasn't so obvious that Hutchinson was a crackpot back in 2002 or 2003, it still begs the question why someone like Cook would become involved and write about the guy in his book.

Any explanation I can think of is simply unfortunate. Still, it's a decent book as long as you treat it as mostly fiction.

[0] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_Hutchison

[1] http://skepdic.com/hutchisonhoax.html

[2] http://www.hutchisoneffect.ca/

[logicallee]

thanks, these are interesting. Hutchison is a hoaxer according to your links (i.e. string was found in his videos of levitation), so perhaps his victims can be given a pass - seems he was pretty good at it, and in retrospect very bald-faced. In the interviews on Youtube that I saw, he seems quite calm and not at all like someone faking something. Still, you would think this possibility wouldn't be discounted by someone reporting scientifically outside his field.

(While writing this reply, I just noticed, how odd that one of your links has his name mispelled in the URL - in fact I had read all of the content of your links in my head in the same way you wrote it in your comment - but it's in fact Hutchison without an n, not Hutchinson.)

[rl3]

Part of what made the book at least somewhat compelling at the time was Cook's reliance on his interactions with former or then-current aerospace industry figures.

I decided to go back and take a cursory look at those parts of the book, and it's almost shocking given ten years hindsight.

For example, here's one excerpt from the book where Cook writes about interviewing Boyd Bushman[0] at a Lockheed Martin facility:

That I had learned nothing of value must have shown on my face, for without warning, Bushman leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. "It's a lonely walk, but a rewarding one," he said, so quietly that I almost missed it. I looked into his eyes, which were quite blue but for that superficial milkiness that sometimes denotes the onset of old age. He smiled at me. "Keep traveling the road and you might just find what you're looking for." "What do you mean?" I asked cautiously. "In all my years with this company, no one has asked me the questions you came here with today." He paused a moment, then said: "Here, I want to show you something."

What Bushman later showed Cook was videos of Hutchison's experiments. The reason this is notable is because at the time that was written, Bushman hadn't yet completely and obviously appeared to have gone off the rails (as a quick Google confirms).

Another excerpt, this time of Cook relating sentiment from a personal interaction with a far more prominent aerospace industry veteran:

Ben Rich and I had sparred on a number of occasions on the stealth question—most recently at an air show where he'd turned up, desperately ill with cancer, to promote his book. I'd respected him utterly and liked him hugely, sensing in his presence the grit and wisdom of a generation of postwar aviation pioneers that wouldn't be around us for much longer. It was Rich who'd once told me of a place—a virtual warehouse—where ideas that were too dangerous to transpose into hardware were locked away forever, like the Ark of the Covenant in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It had almost happened to stealth.

Rich was a former director[1] of Lockheed Skunkworks, and has had many quotes of a similar nature[2] attributed to him (rightly or wrongly).

There's a few more notable excerpts, but they're not worth adding additional weight to this post. There's a copy of the book up on books.google.com that's easy to find, but I didn't cite it since I'm unsure how legitimate it is (I own a hard copy anyways).

My opinion is that neither Bushman nor Rich went off the deep end at all, nor made any truthful near-death confessions. It's far more likely they just had a field day screwing with people in that manner for fun and pleasure. While it could be argued doing so may have had some psyops utility, it was likely miniscule enough not to be their primary motivator.

While normally I'd applaud such behavior, it's kind of sad when it leads to someone as respected as Cook burning their credibility. If there's a moral to this story, I think it's this: never believe a single word black project aerospace engineers say, especially if you're an aviation journalist.

>... but it's in fact Hutchison without an n, not Hutchinson.)

Good catch, completely missed that.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=boyd+bushman

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Rich

[2] http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=5048.0

[krapp]

Well, bear in mind that before it was flying saucers, it was flying airships[0], and before that, many of the phenomena now associated with alien visitations and abductions were attributed to demons or angels. And of course, before it became known that there was no life on Mars of Venus, most aliens claimed to be from Mars or Venus.

Strange how the technology and culture of aliens always seems to align with human cultural and technological norms, and how they always seem to be, biologically, human or humanoid. The aliens created by science fiction authors are often far more alien than the aliens people actually claim to encounter. The diversity of life on Earth is more alien. Never any Tines or Puppeteers or sentient blobs of dark matter or or twelve foot tall squamous hyperdimensional polyps. Just... strangely unusual space people in unusual space cars. But never too unusual.

I'm an extreme skeptic about UFOs as alien spacecraft and of alien visitation because, other reasons aside, the universe they seem to describe is depressingly mundane.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_airship

[kpil]

Oth if someone popped out of a n-dimensional quantumdoor here in my kitchen, I'd say they 'teleported' which probably would be technically wrong :-)

[outworlder]

> I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass?

I bet that THERE IS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Have we even figured out what magnetic fields actually are? Magnetism, and magnetic fields, are always defined in terms of what we observe. Usually called a "force".

For instance: Magnetism, n: "a physical phenomenon produced by the motion of electric charge, resulting in attractive and repulsive forces between objects"

Ok, fine. What is a "force"? That is also defined in terms of things we observe. Which is fine. But what we observe, and what something actually is, are two different things.

I know that Feynman said something along the lines that "we question what magnetism is, but we never question the fact that your hand cannot go through a solid object". Well, I do. And that will boil down to other "forces" in the atoms.

How far have we followed that rabbit hole? I can't find much. If you start from magnetism, you'll be led to electromagnetism, then eventually to quantum electrodynamics. Which, from a layman perspective, just shifts which part of the phenomena we choose to handwave away. So you change from "forces" to "interactions".

In the unlikely chance that there are theoretical physicists on Hacker News reading a thread about UFOs, I'd really like to get an idea how much we actually know about all this. My uneducated hunch is that there is a lot of undiscovered fundamental physics waiting for us.

[FiatLuxDave]

Experimental Physicist here. I don't know how unlikely it is that I'm reading this on a Friday night. No, I have a life, really.

We know quite a bit about electromagnetism. There probably is lots of undiscovered fundamental physics. However, we wouldn't necessarily need to discover new physics in order to do cool stuff like float something on the Earth's magnetic field. The breadth of phenomena which electromagnetism covers is huge, and many people spend a whole career working with just that one force. It might just be that we haven't thought of the right way to use it yet.

The difficulty with floating something on the Earth's magnetic field is actually less about the strength of the field, than it is about its gradient. Because the Earth is so big, for the field to change by a few percent takes many miles of distance This is assuming we are talking about the average field as a whole, and not any anomalies which distort it, because if you are using a distortion of the field, whatever is distorting the field, like a magnet, is really what you will be pushing against.

Because force = energy divided by distance, and the strength of the earth's magnetic field is essentially a energy density, if even a weak field changed over a small distance, an appreciable force could be generated on an object which interacted with that high gradient field.

But since the Earth's field changes very slowly over distance, most of the ways of interacting with the field (like using an electromagnet such as in an electric motor) won't give us very much force. Instead, we would have to use some other means which depended less upon the field gradient. Some of these other effects would be e.g. the Hall effect, or an E x B drift.

[dogma1138]

There is sufficient data about it, electromagnetism is probably the best studied field in physics to date. Magnetism is in it's base not generated due to the modulation of an electric charge but due to a much more basic attribute of charged particles, their magnetic moment which is a result of their spin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_magnetic_moment So until you find a zero spin charged particle with a magnetic moment (which will contradict everything we understand about magnetism) I'll bet on that we understand it quite well.

As far as UFO's using the Earths magnetic field we can pretty much rule that out because we know just how weak it is on average it is about 30 Tesla, and 16 Tesla's is about the force required to levitate a frog. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15420771.600-frog-def...

So unless flying saucers weight just about as 2 mid sized frogs I'll take the bet that if they do exist they use something else to keep them from crashing in the backyards of hillbillies.

[nonbel]

"Earths magnetic field...is on average it is about 30 Tesla, and 16 Tesla's is about the force required to levitate a frog...So unless flying saucers weight just about as 2 mid sized frogs I'll take the bet that if they do exist they use something else to keep them from crashing"

Something about this doesn't make sense. Probably has to do with the answer to this question: Why don't frogs normally float due to the Earth's magnetic field?

[FiatLuxDave]

This is incorrect. The Earth's magnetic field is about 30 microTesla, not 30 Tesla. Also, the flog floating effect (one of my old profs actually did that experiment!) depends upon the field gradient as well as the field strength.

Field strength is not the same as force. The reason why they don't levitate things bigger than frogs with a 16 Tesla field is because bigger things won't fit into the magnet bore, not because 16 T is too weak. One of the techs who worked on one of those serious magnets (at NHMFL) told me that if they put an iron bar in the middle of the bore, it would generate enough force to lift a 747. Of course, that much force would probably break the floor under the magnet, and it's really hard to fit a 747 into the lab.

[themartorana]

As probably the only person who will respond without trying to answer or further your line of questioning, I'd like to say how ridiculously cool that video is. Whenever anyone asks why I armchair-physics, I just show them that. Because, come on.

I mean, sometimes, we have to stop and realize how cool this stuff is. I may or may not be alive when we figure out how to use that sort of quantum locking IRL, but I would love love to be able to get a quick peek at 150 years from now before I go.

[notthegov]

I think if you had a superconducting solenoid that exerted so many teslas of magnetic flux then it would diagrammatically levitate. But not sure.

I think it's possible for a hoverboard-type technology and also, there's some theories that seem like someone would had pursued them by now but no one has or the govt did and it didn't work. In my experience, there is no "new physics" type technology possessed by the government and there is no UFO coverup with the government. However, the USAF polluted things with their psyops or whatever it was they were doing, so it is near impossible to discern anything.

But I am a skeptic.

[purpled_haze]

I think the cultural fascination started with UFOs started with the first sighting on June 24, 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting

After that, it was picked up in movies and TV, with the first movie being the 1950 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer Movies and TV continued to imprint the human psyche with the image of flying saucers for many years.

Flying saucers also had the benefit of being much easier to hoax in pictures and video than cylinders or other shapes, for obvious reasons (an old hubcap or pie pan could be a UFO, and spinning them like a frisbee provides gyroscopic stabilization).

The only thing close to flying saucers in terms of mass recognition and capturing the world's imagination would be greys. The movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_... in 1977 popularized this image of aliens, even though aliens in fiction have included grey skinned beings since at least 1893: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien

Prior to greys, the most common cultural alien in popular culture, or at least in English language, were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men or anything with antennae, sometimes with helmets. Following these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians were popular, probably most popularized in the V series in the early 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29

But, nothing beats the flying saucer.

[13of40]

> I wonder if it would be physically possible to utilize the Earth's extremely weak magnetic field to support any meaningful mass?

Woooo. Woooooooooo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkpPbro-EAk

(Yes, I know.)