Salvatore Pais patents

Salvatore Pais patents

Date	2 November 2017
Topics	Government programs (topic), Propulsion & physics (topic)
People	Salvatore Pais
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 188
Year	2017 in UFO history
Timeline	2017 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	18

The Pais patents are a group of U.S. patents and patent applications filed from 2015 onward on behalf of the U.S. Navy by the aerospace engineer Salvatore Cezar Pais, then of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) at Patuxent River, Maryland.^[2][3] The best known, "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device", describes a hybrid aerospace–undersea craft that would move with ease through air, water and space by "polarizing the vacuum" around itself.^[1][2] The press dubbed the set the Navy's "UFO patents".^[3][5] The craft patent was granted in 2018 only after the Naval Aviation Enterprise's chief technology officer told the patent office the invention would "become a reality" and that China was "already investing significantly" in the area.^[2] The Navy later spent about $508,000 from 2016 to 2019 testing the underlying "Pais Effect" and could not demonstrate it.^[3][4] No working prototype of any of the inventions was ever produced.^[3]

The inventor

• Background. Pais was born in Romania in 1967 and moved to the United States at about thirteen. He grew up in New York City.^[3]
  • He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Case Western Reserve University, then a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering there in 1999.^[3]
  • His NASA-sponsored dissertation studied bubble generation in liquid flows under reduced gravity and required parabolic flights.^[2][3]
  • Shellenberger notes that while writing it, Pais was a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellow at the Glenn Research Center at the time of NASA's 1997 Breakthrough Propulsion Physics workshop there. The workshop discussed vacuum fluctuation energy, warp drives and electromagnetic antigravity, but whether Pais attended is not known.^[17] See NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics workshop (1997).
• Navy career. After his doctorate Pais worked at NAWCAD, headquartered at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, "the Navy's top aircraft test base".^[2][3]
  • In June 2019 he moved to the Navy's Strategic Systems Programs, which oversees the Navy's submarine-launched ballistic missiles.^[3][4]
  • In January 2021 he transferred to the U.S. Air Force. As of 2025 he works for the U.S. Space Force.^[3][4]
• A low profile. The War Zone found that he had "virtually no web presence".^[2][3] Pais has said he began publishing through patents in 2015 "after rejections from academic publishing", and that he accepted no royalties and filed the patents out of "pure patriotic duty".^[3]

The craft patent

• Filing and grant. The application for "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device" (No. 15/141,270) was filed on 28 April 2016 and assigned to the Department of the Navy.^[1][2]
  • It was published as US 2017/0313446 A1 on 2 November 2017, and granted as U.S. Patent 10,144,532 on 4 December 2018.^[1][3]
  • Shellenberger's timeline dates the patent to 2 November 2017, which was the publication date of the application.^[16]
• How it is supposed to work. The patent describes a craft enclosed by a "resonant cavity" between an outer wall and an electrically insulated inner wall.^[1]
  • The cavity is filled with a noble gas such as xenon. Microwave emitters inside it, at 300 megahertz to 300 gigahertz, make the electrically charged outer wall vibrate "in an accelerated mode".^[1]
  • This, the patent claims, creates "a local polarized vacuum" outside the craft.^[1] By polarising the vacuum, it says, the craft's inertia, "its resistance to motion/acceleration", could be reduced and "extreme speeds can be achieved".^[1]
  • The craft would be steered by vibrating different sections of the cavity: vibrating the top sections, for instance, would move it upward.^[1]
• Physics claimed. The patent appeals to vacuum fluctuations, Julian Schwinger's threshold of about 10¹⁸ volts per metre for creating electron–positron pairs from the vacuum, Ilya Prigogine's ideas of order emerging from chaos, and the Gertsenshtein effect, in which high-frequency electromagnetic radiation produces gravitational waves.^[1]
  • Its references include papers by Harold Puthoff on a "polarizable-vacuum" approach to general relativity, H. David Froning on quantum vacuum engineering, and a 1989 Japanese report of weight loss in spinning gyroscopes.^[1]
  • Pais's patents and papers acknowledge Puthoff's work.^[2]
• Shape and features. The drawings show a main body with a leading and trailing section, a crew compartment, power plant and cargo bay inside a Faraday cage, and a nose cone or "frustum" that can rotate on its own axis.^[1][2]
  • In a later paper Pais described the craft as "conical in configuration, with an elliptical cross-section, similar in geometry to a hypersonic glide vehicle / dart".^[2]
  • Shellenberger describes it as a "triangle/diamond shaped craft" that resembles some UFO sightings, and one commenter noted it came in cone, diamond and triangle versions.^[6][16]
  • The earlier version of this article said it could be shaped as a cone or a triangular delta wing.
• Claimed abilities. The patent and related papers claim the craft could move "with great ease through the air/space/water mediums" inside a "vacuum plasma bubble/sheath". It would reach extreme underwater speeds and stealth against radar and sonar.^[1][2] Pais wrote that such technology could "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level".^[2][3]
• Expiry. The patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees. Google Patents records the lapse as effective 4 December 2022, while the Wikipedia account gives 9 January 2023.^[1][3] The War Zone had noted in 2019 that its full term would have run to 2036.^[2]

How it was granted

• Rejection. The patent examiner, Philip Bonzell, rejected the application, calling parts of it "math theory".^[2]
  • He wrote that "there is no such thing as a 'repulsive EM energy field'".^[2]
  • He noted that polarising the vacuum as claimed would take fields of 10⁹ teslas and 10¹⁸ volts per metre. The War Zone compared that to the magnetic strength of magnetars.^[2]
  • A final rejection followed on 30 March 2018.^[2]
• The appeal. NAWCAD's patent attorney appealed with further documents meant to show the craft was "enabled", meaning it could actually be built and work as described.^[2]
• Sheehy's letter. The appeal included a letter dated 15 December 2017 from Dr James Sheehy, chief technical officer of the Naval Aviation Enterprise.^[2]
  • Sheehy wrote that Pais had "already begun a series of experiments to design and demonstrate" the propulsion systems described.^[2]
  • He said the patent "documents the future state of the possible".^[2]
  • He accepted that the mode of movement was "beyond the state of the possible, at least at present". But he added that "China is already investing significantly in this area" and that the Navy "would prefer we hold the patent as opposed to paying forever more to use this revolutionary technology", asserting "this will become a reality".^[2][16]
• Allowance. The patent office issued a notice of allowance on 31 October 2018, giving no reason for the change.^[2]
  • The War Zone noted that the Navy could have kept the application secret under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 but chose not to.^[2]
  • It added that U.S. patents do not stop other countries developing the same technology.^[2]
• Internal records. Navy records from 2018 described Pais's field generator as "operable" and "a formative invention in its incipient stage(s)".^[3] Documents obtained by The War Zone (then part of The Drive) under FOIA showed the project was considered of "National Security importance" within NAWCAD. Research notes referred to a "Spacetime Modification Weapon".^[3] Vice reported that the documents showed a lengthy internal fight at NAVAIR over the patents, which Pais won.^[5]

The other patents

• Five filings. Pais told The Times that a Navy invention evaluation board approved all five of his filings, which he called unprecedented for such a controversial subject.^[3]
  • Electromagnetic field generator (filed July 2015, granted 20 November 2018, US 10,135,366): a device to generate high-energy fields, chiefly to deflect asteroids. The craft patent names it as its preferred generator.^[1][3]
  • High-frequency gravitational wave generator (filed 2017, granted 18 June 2019, US 10,322,827): for "advanced propulsion, asteroid disruption and/or deflection, and communications through solid objects". The War Zone noted that its drawing resembled the "Tic Tac" object reported by Navy pilots off Baja California in 2004.^[2][3] See Nimitz "Tic Tac" encounter.
  • Piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor (filed 2017, published 21 February 2019): initially rejected, then appealed by the Navy and Pais.^[3] The Institution of Engineering and Technology noted that no evidence showed it worked.^[3]
  • Plasma compression fusion device (filed 2018, published 26 September 2019): a compact fusion reactor said to produce gigawatts to terawatts. Pais also described it in a 2019 paper in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science. The application was later abandoned.^[3][5]
• The "Pais Effect". All the inventions rest on what Pais calls the "Pais Effect": "controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin", meant to produce extremely intense electromagnetic fields.^[3][5] He claims these fields can interact with the quantum vacuum to cause effects such as inertial mass reduction and room-temperature superconductivity.^[3]
• Lapses. Several of the patents, including the field generator and the gravitational wave generator, have also lapsed for non-payment of fees.^[3]

Navy testing

• The HEEMFG project. NAWCAD tested the Pais Effect under a Naval Innovative Science and Engineering – Basic and Applied Research project called "The High Energy Electromagnetic Field Generator (HEEMFG)".^[3][4]
• NAWCAD's statement. In February 2021 NAWCAD's communications director, Timothy Boulay, told The War Zone:^[4]
  • testing ran from October 2016 to September 2019;
  • it cost $508,000 over three years, about $462,000 of it for salaries;
  • when testing ended, "the 'Pais Effect' could not be proven";
  • no further research was done, and the project did not move to any other government or civilian organisation.
• Pais's response. Pais said the experiments had not yet produced the one-coulomb charge he considered necessary.^[3] In a November 2019 email he wrote that "as far as the doubting SMEs [Subject Matter Experts] are concerned, my work shall be proven correct one fine day".^[3][4] He also argued that publication in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science "should speak volumes as to its importance and credibility".^[5] In 2025 he said he was still seeking funding and that the patents were "not a bluff".^[3]

Reception

• Physicists. The War Zone said that every physicist it consulted over nearly two years judged the Pais Effect to have no scientific basis and the patents to be full of pseudoscientific jargon.^[3][4] Brian Collett, physics chair at Hamilton College, said the claims "bear no more resemblance to quantum physics as I understand it than does 'The Force' from Star Wars".^[2]
• Disinformation theory. Some commentators have suggested the patents were disinformation meant to send rivals such as China on a "wild goose chase". Others suggested they were tied to classified programmes or were genuine breakthroughs.^[3] The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup argued that real defence technologies would be kept secret rather than patented.^[3]
• UFO links. The War Zone noted the timing: the craft application was filed nearly a year after a string of encounters by Navy pilots flying out of Naval Air Stations Oceana and Norfolk, and over a decade after the 2004 Nimitz encounters. It also compared the craft to To the Stars Academy's planned "Advanced Electromagnetic Vehicles".^[2]
• Shellenberger's comparisons. Shellenberger likens the craft patent to Puthoff's AAWSAP Defense Intelligence Reference Document on vacuum "metric engineering". He also likens it to a 1998 NASA-funded study by Puthoff, Bernard Haisch and Alfonso Rueda on resonant frequencies of the quantum vacuum.^[16][18] See AAWSAP.
  • He also mentions NASA's 2014 tests of the "Cannae drive", which reported a small thrust.^[16]
  • The earlier version of this article added that the thrust was later attributed to errors. That is not covered in the sources read here, and the cited article could not be read.
• Kobitz. According to Shellenberger, the former Navy director of science and technology development Nat Kobitz told journalist Ross Coulthart in 2021 that his "discrete inquiries" found no one who knew anything about Pais's work. "If there is anything near a working antigravity craft, they've kept it very quiet," Kobitz said.^[16]
• AARO. The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office reported in March 2024 that it had found no evidence of any U.S. government program reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology.^[9][10] See AARO historical record report.

People and topics

• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Salvatore Pais — Navy engineer who filed patents for exotic propulsion concepts.
• Anti-gravity — The idea of cancelling or controlling gravity for propulsion.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• AAWSAP — The Defense Intelligence Agency's UAP research program of 2008–2010, carried out by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies.
• NASA — The U.S. civilian space agency, created in 1958.

On the Timeline

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Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Salvatore Pais”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.