[cmroanirgo]

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.

[jbay808]

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.

[kipchak]

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.

[Iv]

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.

[daveslash]

>> 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...

[close04]

> 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.

[_8j50]

Misinformation