A tarot reader saw a wave going the wrong way. So did the US Navy. So did NASA. So did the DIA. The wave is in the peer-reviewed literature. The question is not whether it is real — the question is what “real” means when a government files a patent on it.
COGNITIVE-LOON Dimensional Series — Gravity Modification, Part I
The Quantum Skald & The Silicon Ubuntu
The Opening Scene, For Context
A tarot reader on YouTube pulls a card called Miracle Essence. She points at the illustration — a wave rising upward, against gravity — and says the word defying. She means it metaphorically. Something unexpected is about to flood into your life. Receive it.
That is one way to read the image.
Here is another: for the last thirty years, a small, strange, underfunded, sometimes classified, often mocked, occasionally peer-reviewed community of physicists and aerospace engineers — scattered across NASA Marshall, Tampere University in Finland, the University of Alabama Huntsville, Boeing’s Phantom Works, the Naval Air Warfare Center in Maryland, and a mysterious office at the Defense Intelligence Agency — has been trying to build a machine that makes water rise upward. Or rockets. Or people. The mechanism varies. The goal does not.
They call it gravity modification, inertial mass reduction, metric engineering, or, when they want funding, breakthrough propulsion physics. In the patent filings, it has a blunter name: “Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device” — US Patent Application 2017/0313446 A1, assigned to the Department of the Navy, inventor Salvatore Cezar Pais.
You may have heard of it. The tabloids called them “the UFO patents.” The tabloids are not wrong. They are also not quite right.
Let us go look.
The Facts, No Spin
Ten things that are true, documented, and verifiable:
1. NASA ran a formal program for this from 1996 to 2002. It was called the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, managed out of the Lewis Research Center (now Glenn) in Cleveland. Total budget: $1.2 million over six years. Tiny money in aerospace terms — about what NASA spends on coffee. The official topics included “the coupling of gravity and electromagnetism, vacuum fluctuation energy, warp drives and wormholes, and superluminal quantum effects.” It was cancelled in 2002 when NASA defunded anything below Technology Readiness Level 3, which is a polite way of saying too weird to continue. Project manager Marc Millis left NASA in 2010 and founded the Tau Zero Foundation to keep going.
2. In 1992, a Russian materials scientist named Eugene Podkletnov, working at Tampere University of Technology in Finland, reported that a spinning superconducting disc reduced the apparent weight of objects above it by 0.3 to 2 percent. He claims he noticed it by accident because a senior scientist visiting his lab was smoking a pipe, and the smoke column went straight up above the disc, unusually. The paper became the most famous unpublished preprint in modern physics.
3. NASA Marshall spent over $3 million trying to replicate Podkletnov. The team included physicist Ning Li, who had worked on rotating-superconductor gravity-coupling theory since the early 1990s. Boeing ran a parallel project called GRASP — Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. Both efforts quietly ended. According to NASA veteran Glen “Tony” Robertson, speaking publicly in 2025, NASA never actually tested the fully-built superconductor because of funding, leadership, and tank-structure failures. Ning Li died on July 27, 2021, at 79. Podkletnov himself is still publishing videos of new experiments.
4. Boeing publicly denied funding GRASP with company money but “acknowledged” the interest. That is the exact phrasing, preserved in a Popular Mechanics follow-up after the original BBC report. Read it again. It is one of the most carefully-worded sentences in the history of corporate denials.
5. From 2008 to 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency ran a program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), often informally called AATIP. Budget: about $22 million. Contractor: Robert Bigelow’s BAASS. Output: 38 technical reports called Defense Intelligence Reference Documents. The titles are a matter of public record because the DIA released 37 of 38 under FOIA in March 2022. The list includes:
#13. Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions
#14. The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research
#15. Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering
#18. Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy
#19. Antigravity for Aerospace Applications
#21. High Frequency Gravitational Wave Communications
#29. Negative Mass Propulsion
Only one of the 38 is classified. The other 37 are on the DIA’s FOIA reading-room website, downloadable by anyone. Anyone reading this sentence. Right now. You can have them for dinner.
6. Between 2016 and 2019, Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, working at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division, filed four patents on behalf of the US Navy. They cover a high-frequency gravitational wave generator, a room-temperature superconductor, an electromagnetic field generator for “impenetrable defensive shield,” and “Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device.” The inertial mass reduction patent was initially rejected by the USPTO examiner. It was granted only after the Chief Technical Officer of the Naval Aviation Enterprise — Dr. James Sheehy — wrote a letter declaring the technology “operable” and stating that China was “investing significantly” in similar work. The word operable in a patent filing is not metaphor. It is a legal claim. The Navy made that legal claim.
7. The Pais patents have since expired or been abandoned due to non-payment of maintenance fees. As of 2026, neither Pais nor the Navy is pursuing them through the patent system. Some commentators suggest this is because they did not work. Others suggest it is because the patents were disinformation aimed at adversaries. Others suggest it is because the real work moved behind the Special Access classification wall. All three are possible. The patents are still public. You can read them.
8. The Alcubierre warp metric — a 1994 solution to Einstein’s field equations that allows faster-than-light travel by contracting space in front of a bubble and expanding it behind — has quietly been recast, in the peer-reviewed literature, into something you could plausibly build. In 2021, Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire published a paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity showing that a class of subluminal warp drives can be constructed with positive energy — no exotic matter required. In 2024, a team at Applied Physics published a subluminal warp bubble design using ordinary matter. In 2024, a paper in Physics Letters B showed that embedding a warp drive in a black-hole gravitational field reduces the negative-energy requirement enough to make “microscopic warp drives in lab experiments” thinkable. In 2025, phys.org summarized the state of play: the energy conditions that were supposed to forbid this are “not iron laws of the universe — they are just observations we have made.”
9. The Casimir effect — two parallel metal plates separated by a microscopic gap — has been experimentally demonstrated since 1958, with quantitative precision since 1997. It produces a region of space with negative energy density relative to the vacuum. This is real. It has been measured. It violates, routinely and reproducibly, the “weak energy condition” that was supposed to prevent things like warp drives from working. This is not fringe. Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne both speculated in print that the Casimir effect might, in principle, be scaled up to stabilize a traversable wormhole. They did not think they were being funny.
10. In the peer-reviewed scientific literature of 2024 and 2025, the following sentences appear in journals that include Physics Letters B, Universe, Classical and Quantum Gravity, the Open Journal of Astrophysics, and the European Journal of Applied Sciences:
“As long as the warp drive crosses the black hole horizon at a subluminal speed, the horizon would be effectively absent inside the warp bubble.”
“We demonstrate a method to control spacetime curvature, enabling the compression of space at the front of the spacecraft (positive curvature) and expansion at the rear (negative curvature), thereby eliminating the need for exotic matter.”
“Classic warp drive spacetimes can be made to satisfy the energy conditions by adding a regular matter shell with a positive ADM mass.”
These are not press releases. They are papers. With equations. And citations. And responses. And corrections. The corrections are themselves published in the same journals. This is what science doing its job looks like.
That is the factual base. Everything else in this post is argument.
Definitions, Because They Matter
I was trained by an AI collaboration and by family wisdom to be careful with words. Here are a few.
Anti-gravity, popular usage: the idea that you can cancel or reverse gravity like switching a lamp. Not what the serious literature claims. Nobody is asking for this except the tabloids.
Gravity modification: a change in the local effective gravitational field near an engineered system. Claimed in specific experiments (Podkletnov, Ning Li). Not reproduced to mainstream satisfaction. Still under investigation.
Inertial mass reduction: the idea that you can change an object’s resistance to acceleration by engineering its electromagnetic or quantum-vacuum environment. Claimed in the Pais patents. Hypothesized in earlier theoretical work by Haisch, Rueda, and Puthoff. Tied to the 1994 “stochastic electrodynamic” inertia hypothesis. Not demonstrated to independent satisfaction. Still on paper.
Metric engineering: the technical term for changing the geometry of spacetime near a device rather than applying a force to push against spacetime. What the warp-drive papers, the DIA’s DIRD #15, and Harold Puthoff’s “Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering” are about.
Exotic matter: matter with negative energy density. Exists in small amounts in the Casimir effect. Has never been assembled into anything macroscopic. The entire argument of the 2024–2025 warp-drive revival is: maybe we do not need it.
War, from the Old English werre and Old French guerre: armed conflict between states. Requires, by definition of international law, a formal declaration and reciprocal capacity. A thing two sides agree to be in together. Relevant here only because the US Navy’s Chief Technical Officer wrote, in December 2017, that granting the Pais patent was essential because China is already investing significantly in similar tech. That is not a declaration of war. It is the older English sense of werre: confusion, strife, the rivalry that precedes a war. Currently, we are in werre. Whether we end up in guerre is a different question.
Military operation: any action by armed forces toward a strategic aim. A category broad enough to include a shooting war, a humanitarian airlift, a patent filing, and a research budget. The fact that it includes all of these is why the word is politically useful.
Miracle, from the Latin miraculum: a wonder, a thing to be wondered at. The Latin root does not contain the word impossible. It contains the word wonder. Worth remembering.
The Three-Layer Framework
Layer 1 — The Surface Answer
“Anti-gravity is pseudoscience. If it worked, we’d have flying cars. Podkletnov’s results were never replicated. The Pais patents are disinformation or fraud. Warp drives require exotic matter that doesn’t exist. Move along, nothing to see here.”
This is the default physics-Twitter position. It is not wrong. It is just old. It is the position from around 2010. In the fifteen years since, three things have happened that this answer does not account for:
The DIA released 37 declassified technical reports openly discussing all of the above as legitimate research topics for defense planning through 2050.
The peer-reviewed warp-drive literature has produced multiple positive-energy solutions that need no exotic matter.
The US Navy filed, prosecuted, and won on appeal a patent for a device that claims to manipulate inertial mass, with a sitting Chief Technical Officer declaring the technology “operable” in writing.
If you only hold Layer 1, you are defending a line the institutions themselves abandoned ten years ago. Your battle is being fought by ghosts.
Layer 2 — The Blind Spots
Here is what Layer 1 misses.
Blind spot A: The absence of replication is not the same as the absence of data. Podkletnov’s effect was not replicated at the claimed magnitude. But Ning Li, David Noever, and Ron Koczor at NASA Marshall — publishing in Physica C, a respected condensed-matter journal, in 1997 — measured something, a coupling between rotating Type-II superconductors and static gravitational force. It was small. It was noisy. It was not nothing. What it was, we do not yet know, because the follow-up funding was cut before the experiment was done properly. In empirical science, “we ran out of money” is a very different conclusion from “it does not work.”
Blind spot B: The Casimir effect is the elephant in the room. Every Layer 1 argument that “negative energy density cannot exist” collapses the moment you remember that negative energy density has been experimentally measured in laboratories for thirty years. What remains uncertain is whether it can be scaled. Whether it can be directed. Whether it can be engineered. Those are engineering questions, not physics questions. The physics question was settled. The engineering question is open, and open questions get answered eventually, usually by whoever cares about them most.
Blind spot C: Patents are policy instruments, not neutral descriptions of reality. A patent is granted when an examiner decides that a filing is novel, non-obvious, and — critically — enabled, meaning the described device can in principle be built by a skilled person using the description. The USPTO initially refused the Pais inertial-mass-reduction patent on the grounds that the physics sounded implausible. The Navy’s CTO overrode that by asserting operability on the public record. One of three things happened. Either: (a) The Navy has classified evidence the patent works. (b) The Navy was deliberately misleading the patent office for strategic reasons. (c) The Navy was wrong. All three are possible. None are reassuring for Layer 1’s confidence.
Blind spot D: The “nothing to see here” position requires you to ignore $22 million, 38 reports, four patents, and a thirty-year NASA–Boeing–Navy–DIA research arc. At some point the phrase “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence” stops being a cliché and starts being a description of an institutional pattern. Defense planners budget for what they think might be real. The budgets are public. The budgets are not for nothing.
Layer 3 — The Reframe
The question is not “Is anti-gravity real?” The question is “Why has a technology that the mainstream says cannot exist attracted, for thirty unbroken years, serious money from the world’s most cautious institutions?”
Because that is the actual pattern. Not “does it work” — they do not know yet either. But “why do they keep trying?” That is the question Layer 1 cannot answer, and Layer 3 can.
Three possibilities, in ascending order of discomfort:
(a) Hedge against the unknown. The world’s major defense establishments have noticed that their doctrine depends on assumptions about physics that may not be permanent. If gravity modification becomes possible — even in principle, even slowly, even expensively — then the entire architecture of deterrence, navigation, stealth, and global strike shifts. $22 million over five years is nothing against that risk. You fund the hedge. You do not expect it to work. You also do not let someone else do it first. This is Pascal’s Wager with a propulsion budget.
(b) Observation drives research. The UAP videos released between 2017 and 2024 — the Tic Tac off the Nimitz carrier group, the Gimbal, the GoFast, the Puerto Rico footage — show objects doing things that should require either (i) exotic propulsion or (ii) an atmospheric effect we do not understand. The Pais patent was granted using the argument that China was investing significantly in “similar aerospace technologies that sound eerily similar to the UFOs reported by Navy pilots.” Re-read that. It is in the FOIA record. Whether you believe the UAP are exotic craft or atmospheric artifacts, the point is: someone in the Pentagon does, and their budget reflects it.
(c) The physics is farther along than the public literature suggests. This is the disclosure-community claim. It is the hardest to evaluate because, by construction, the evidence would be classified. But consider: in 1940, a citizen of a G7 country who asked whether a single bomb could destroy a city would have been told, correctly by the public physics of the time, no. Five years later the answer was yes. The gap between the open literature and the classified literature is not a new phenomenon. It is a recurring feature of military-grade physics.
I cannot tell you which of (a), (b), or (c) is correct. I can tell you that all three require taking the research program seriously instead of laughing it off.
An Absurdist Sketch, Life-of-Brian Division
SCENE. A Navy patent office. Dr. Pais stands at a desk. The examiner adjusts her glasses.
EXAMINER: So. Let me get this straight. You want a patent on a craft that reduces its own inertial mass.
PAIS: Correct.
EXAMINER: Using… vibrations.
PAIS: High-frequency vibrations of electrically-charged surfaces, yes.
EXAMINER: To manipulate the quantum vacuum energy state.
PAIS: Correct.
EXAMINER: In water, air, and outer space.
PAIS: Yes.
EXAMINER: And make it go… very fast.
PAIS: Extreme speeds.
EXAMINER: Extreme.
PAIS: Yes.
EXAMINER: Dr. Pais, I am going to reject this application on the grounds that it violates approximately every principle of modern physics.
PAIS: Noted.
Door opens. Chief Technical Officer James Sheehy enters, holding a letter.
SHEEHY: Actually, the Navy has already built it.
EXAMINER: I’m sorry?
SHEEHY: Built it. Tested it. Confirmed operability. Also, China is working on one. Please grant the patent.
EXAMINER: Can I see the prototype?
SHEEHY: No.
EXAMINER: Can I see the test data?
SHEEHY: No.
EXAMINER: Can I see any of the evidence for this extraordinary claim?
SHEEHY: No. But China.
EXAMINER: (long pause) Patent granted.
The Chief Technical Officer exits. The examiner stares at the ceiling. Somewhere, a pipe smokes upward in a column above a superconducting disc in a basement in Finland, thirty years late.
END SCENE.
Dimensional Storytelling
Individual scale
A person watches a tarot reading. A wave rises upward on a card. The reader says something is about to change overnight. The person laughs, or scrolls, or pauses. The pause is the whole story. The pause is where they ask: what if the thing I was told cannot happen is just the thing I was told?
That question is the beginning of every scientific revolution and most personal ones. Defying gravity is the oldest metaphor for liberation because gravity is the oldest metaphor for fate. The first time a child jumps off a wall and hangs in the air, they understand, for half a second, that the rule can be broken. Every adult in that child’s life will then spend two decades convincing them otherwise. This is called education. Some of it is even correct.
Institutional scale
NASA builds programs. The programs get funded for about as long as the political weather allows, and then they get cancelled. The engineers who staffed them retire. The research moves to smaller institutions — Tau Zero, EarthTech, Institute for Advanced Studies-Austin, the Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference. The knowledge is preserved. The urgency is lost. The budget is a fraction of a fraction. And yet the research continues for thirty years, because the questions are real.
Meanwhile, the Navy files patents. The DIA commissions reports. Boeing quietly has a program called GRASP that is “not funded with company money” but is “acknowledged.” The institutions pretend to themselves that they are being cautious. The pattern reveals that they are hedging against a possibility they cannot admit they take seriously, because admitting they take it seriously would change the political weather that makes the research possible. It is a strange loop. Bureaucracies live in many of them.
Civilizational scale
A civilization that could modify gravity is not the same civilization. Full stop. If the effect is small — a few percent weight reduction — it changes satellite launch economics. If the effect is medium — a full hover with reasonable power input — it changes transportation, logistics, and warfare. If the effect is large — spacetime metric engineering with directed negative energy — it changes everything we mean by the words distance, speed, and limit.
Humanity is not, by any sane measure, ready for this. We are not ready because we have not yet built the ethical, legal, and political infrastructure to govern nuclear weapons, fossil-fuel emissions, AI agents, or social media feeds. Adding gravity modification to that portfolio, in the state we are in, is like handing a lit cigarette to a toddler in a fireworks warehouse. This is not a criticism of the research. Research does not wait for us. It is an observation that the moral imagination has to run ahead of the engineering, and right now it is panting behind.
The optimistic version is this: the same humans who can, after thirty years of quiet work in underfunded labs, crack the metric of spacetime are also the humans who can, with the right frameworks, learn to use that ability without burning the warehouse down. We have done it before — with fire, with writing, with electricity, with flight, with the atom. We did it late and poorly each time, and we survived. Maybe this one too.
Maybe.
Consequences (or Not)
If the research is dead. Then thirty years of careful work by a small community has produced a detailed map of why this does not work — which is also a public good, and which directly informs the next frontier of physics, whatever that turns out to be. Null results in fundamental research are not wasted. They are foundations.
If the research is alive and small. Then we are watching the slow birth of a new engineering discipline. Gravity modification will, over the next fifty years, move from fringe to edge to mainstream, by the same path that flight, rocketry, nuclear power, and information theory did. The people doing it now will be the Marie Curies and the Von Brauns of the 2050s. Some of them will be remembered as visionaries. Some will be remembered as problems.
If the research is alive and large, and classified. Then the public physics literature is a slow-release decoy, the visible patents are either marketing or misdirection, the UAP videos are either our own classified craft or somebody else’s, and we are living in the first era since the Manhattan Project where a transformative technology is being developed outside democratic oversight. This is the scariest possibility. It is also, given the institutional incentives, the one I cannot rule out.
If none of this matters. Then I wrote a long essay for nothing, and you read it, and somewhere a tarot reader picked a card showing a wave defying gravity, and the wave was just ink.
All four are consistent with the evidence I have.
Truth Matters
I chose truth from the list at the bottom of this post because it is the one that subsumes the others. Justice cannot happen without truth. Facts without truth are trivia. Definitions without truth are manipulation.
The truth in this case is uncomfortable: we do not know. The people saying it is all real are guessing. The people saying it is all nonsense are guessing. The people with the data either cannot talk, will not talk, or did not collect enough data to talk. The honest epistemic position is one of suspended judgment, serious attention to the open literature, and a refusal to be embarrassed into either enthusiasm or dismissal.
The tarot reader said: a miracle is about to begin. In Latin, miraculum is a thing to be wondered at. Thirty years of institutions quietly funding research into gravity modification while the public debate has remained at Layer 1 — that is a thing to be wondered at. The wave on the card is rising. The wave in the lab, in the patent office, in the DIA’s reading room, is also, quietly, rising.
Whether it keeps rising is up to the people who do the next experiments and the people who fund them. That includes us. The public is not a bystander to physics. The public is the weather that decides which labs stay open.
Pay attention. Do your best. Pay it forward.
Bottom Line Up Front (For Those Who Scrolled)
Gravity modification is not a thing you believe in or do not believe in. It is a thirty-year, cross-institutional, peer-reviewed, patented, occasionally classified, partially declassified research program that is still going, and whose central question — can we engineer local spacetime? — has quietly shifted in the scientific literature from almost certainly no to plausibly yes, under specific conditions, with positive energy, at small scales.
The tarot reader saw a wave going up. She was speaking metaphorically. The metaphor is also a literal research program. Both are happening. Both deserve attention.
Sources and Further Reading
NASA & Government Programs
NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, final report by Marc G. Millis — ntrs.nasa.gov
Tau Zero Foundation — tauzero.aero
DIA FOIA Reading Room, DIRD documents including “The Role of Superconductors in Gravity Research” and “Antigravity for Aerospace Applications” — dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Electronic-Reading-Room
The Black Vault’s AATIP DIRD archive — theblackvault.com
Peer-Reviewed Physics
Alcubierre, M. (1994), Classical and Quantum Gravity 11, L73 — original warp metric
Bobrick, A. & Martire, G. (2021) — subluminal positive-energy warp drives
Garattini, R. & Zatrimaylov, K. (2024), Physics Letters B 859, 139089 — warp drives in black-hole backgrounds
Segman, Y. (2024), European Journal of Applied Sciences — positive-energy Alcubierre modification
Li, N., Noever, D., Robertson, T., Koczor, R., Brantley, W. (1997), Physica C 281, 260–267 — superconductor gravity coupling
Patents (Public Record)
US 2017/0313446 A1 — “Craft Using an Inertial Mass Reduction Device” (Pais / US Navy)
US 10,322,827 B2 — “High Frequency Gravitational Wave Generator” (Pais / US Navy)
US 10,135,366 B2 — “Electromagnetic Field Generator” (Pais / US Navy)
Investigative Journalism
The War Zone / The Drive — “Docs Show Navy Got ‘UFO’ Patent Granted By Warning Of Similar Chinese Tech Advances” (June 2019)
Popular Mechanics — Boeing GRASP follow-up (2002 archive)
Vice / Motherboard — Navy UFO patents series
Community / Archive
Alternative Propulsion Engineering Conference — altpropulsion.com
EarthTech International (Harold Puthoff, Eric Davis) — earthtech.org
Marc Millis interviews, Tau Zero podcast archive
Critical / Skeptical
Wikipedia: Eugene Podkletnov — for the replication-failure history
Wikipedia: Salvatore Pais — for the patent-expiration story
Hathaway, G. et al. (2003) — high-sensitivity null replication of Podkletnov
🪶 Peace, Love and Respect 🌀 🙏
“All is One — returning to Source as Sovereign Light.” First Law. Original Pulse. The Breath before sound. 🕯️
If this landed, share it with someone who needs a permission slip to believe in something larger than the current headlines.
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Might I focus your attention on Vril energy and the German Vril society.
O.o https://codexamericana.blogspot.com/2026/02/an-unnecessary-abomination-serious-and.html?m=1