The IVO Quantum Drive's Orbital Test & Quantised Inertia Physics

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

In March 2025, a SpaceX Falcon 9 carried Rogue Space Systems’ OTP-2 satellite into orbit with an unusually consequential passenger: IVO Ltd.’s Quantum Drive, a compact electrical propulsion device designed to generate thrust without expelling onboard propellant. Physicist Mike McCulloch, whose Quantised Inertia theory inspired the drive, described the mission as, as far as he knew, the first orbital test of a reactionless propulsion system and “a bit of a watershed.” The experiment didn’t deliver the dramatic orbit-raising maneuver its developers had hoped for. A problem involving the testing hardware and command-and-control system limited drive operation to less than about a minute. Yet the test wasn’t empty. The team reported apparent movement during a July activation, and McCulloch later found that the spacecraft lost approximately 600 meters less altitude than a comparison satellite over three months. That difference was close to the rough scale he calculated for intermittent drive operation—but it could also have resulted from atmospheric drag, spacecraft attitude, electromagnetic forces, another propulsion payload, or the limitations of public orbital data. The result sits in the most scientifically uncomfortable and productive category: intriguing, potentially important, and nowhere near conclusive.

From a Question About Inertia to a Spacecraft Payload

McCulloch’s route into unconventional propulsion began far from rocket laboratories. He earned a physics degree from the University of York in 1991 and a doctorate in ocean physics from the University of Liverpool in 1995. From 1998 to 2008, he worked as an ocean and wave-model scientist at the UK Met Office, later joining the University of Plymouth as a lecturer in geomatics—the mathematics of positioning and measurement in space. He’s now a Visiting Specialist at Plymouth. Over roughly two decades, McCulloch says he has produced 28 papers and four books on Quantised Inertia, along with a multiyear DARPA-supported effort to investigate whether the theory could produce measurable thrust.

The question driving that work sounds almost elementary: what physically causes inertia? Newtonian mechanics describes inertial behavior with extraordinary accuracy. Objects continue moving unless a force changes their motion, and their resistance to acceleration is proportional to inertial mass. But to McCulloch, that’s a description rather than a mechanism. While modeling waves at the Met Office, he imagined a speedboat accelerating across water. The boat encounters more waves in front than behind, producing a pressure imbalance that resists its acceleration. Far enough behind the accelerating boat lies a horizon beyond which waves can never catch up. McCulloch began asking whether an analogous process involving quantum fields and relativistic horizons could generate inertia itself.

The path from that theoretical question to IVO began in May 2019, when company CEO Richard Mansell contacted McCulloch. IVO had already experimented with high-voltage lifters, capacitors, and a wireless-power system known as Capacitive Based Aerial Transmission, or CBAT. The system treated a transmitter and remote receiver like the opposing sides of an enormous capacitor, with the surrounding air acting as a dielectric. Mansell found McCulloch’s Physics From the Edge blog while investigating unconventional gravitational and capacitor effects. McCulloch then connected IVO with engineer Frank Becker and collaborator A. Bhatt, who had reported force measurements from high-voltage capacitors and compared them with Quantised Inertia calculations.

IVO didn’t simply reproduce the earlier apparatus. Becker and Bhatt had placed capacitors on a digital balance, leaving the experiment potentially vulnerable to cable tension, electrostatic effects, vibration, heat, and electronic interference. IVO used a pendulum to reduce those problems. It replaced the Kapton plastic dielectric used in earlier work with naturally oxidized aluminium, allowing the metal to serve as the conductor while its oxide layer acted as a thin dielectric. The company also arranged multiple capacitors in a proprietary stack. McCulloch advised that the elements couldn’t be packed too closely because, within his model, their relevant Rindler horizons could interfere with one another. IVO later tested stacked hardware in vacuum below (10^{-5}) Torr at E-Labs in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Those company-reported results encouraged the team to attempt the much harder experiment: operating the device aboard a spacecraft.

Two Flights, Two Very Different Setbacks

The first IVO hardware reached orbit aboard Rogue Space Systems’ BARRY-1 satellite, launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission on November 11, 2023. BARRY-1 was Rogue’s first orbital platform and carried the Quantum Drive as a hosted payload alongside Rogue’s own computing technology. The plan was to commission the spacecraft, establish a stable orbital baseline, and then activate the IVO hardware to look for a measurable change in the satellite’s trajectory.

That test never happened. Rogue reported persistent spacecraft-bus power problems during the Launch and Early Orbit Phase. Although the company completed some testing of its Scalable Compute Platform, it lost communications with BARRY-1 after approximately two months and suspended active operations in February 2024. Rogue stated unambiguously that it “never had the opportunity to test the IVO drive.” BARRY-1 therefore wasn’t a negative propulsion result. The spacecraft entered orbit with IVO hardware aboard, but no controlled Quantum Drive campaign was completed. At most, the mission demonstrated partial flight heritage: the payload survived integration, launch, deployment, and some time in orbit.

Rogue offered IVO another flight, this time aboard the larger OTP-2 platform. SpaceX launched OTP-2 at 11:43 p.m. Pacific time on March 14, 2025—March 15 in UTC—from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Transporter-13. Rogue now lists the 8U spacecraft as active in sun-synchronous orbit. OTP-2 hosts Rogue’s second-generation onboard computing platform as well as several customer payloads, including IVO’s Quantum Drive and a separate water-based ion thruster. That multi-payload architecture expanded what could be tested, but it also created additional variables that would later complicate any attempt to attribute a small orbital change to one device.

The hoped-for IVO demonstration was not subtle. The team wanted to operate the drive long enough to produce an orbital rise approaching 100 kilometers—an effect far beyond ordinary tracking uncertainty or minor changes in drag. Instead, the activation campaign was curtailed. McCulloch said, “Movement was seen and it caused some excitement,” but the drive could operate for less than approximately one minute before a technical problem interrupted the test. In a statement relayed through McCulloch, Mansell attributed the difficulty to the surrounding test system: “It isn’t the Drives themselves that were acting up, but something with the command & control mechanism.” That distinction may be correct, but it doesn’t establish that the movement came from the drive. It means only that the planned decisive experiment was interrupted before it could produce a decisive answer.

The 600-Meter Clue

Without access to all of IVO’s internal telemetry, McCulloch began monitoring publicly available tracking data. He followed OTP-2 under NORAD catalog number 63235 and compared it with object 63220, another satellite deployed by the same Falcon 9 into a broadly similar orbit. His reasoning was straightforward: if two spacecraft began at comparable altitudes and experienced the same broad atmospheric and solar conditions, their relative rates of orbital decay might reveal an additional force acting on one of them.

Between September 30 and December 30, 2025, object 63235—the IVO spacecraft—fell from approximately 506.30 kilometers to 501.42 kilometers, a loss of 4.88 kilometers. Over the same period, object 63220 fell from roughly 504.98 kilometers to 499.50 kilometers, a loss of 5.48 kilometers. The difference was approximately 600 meters over 90 days, or about 6.6 meters per day. McCulloch published the comparison under the title “A Tale of Two Satellites” and argued that the smaller decline of the IVO spacecraft was at least compatible with intermittent thrust.

His back-of-the-envelope calculation used a proposed force of 1.75 millinewtons and a spacecraft mass of 20 kilograms, producing an acceleration of (8.75 \times 10^{-5}) meters per second squared. A 60-second activation would add approximately 0.00525 meters per second to the spacecraft’s velocity. Under his simplified orbital calculation, one such activation would increase orbital height by about 9.5 meters. If the drive operated for one minute every other day, the average effect would be roughly 4.75 meters per day—close in scale to the observed 6.6-meter daily difference. That numerical resemblance is why McCulloch considers the result encouraging.

But almost every important input remains uncertain. The assumed firing schedule wasn’t a publicly released command log. McCulloch used 20 kilograms in his calculation, while describing the spacecraft in the interview as approximately 11 kilograms. The comparison satellite was lower in the atmosphere, which could increase drag, while the IVO spacecraft reportedly had a larger cross-sectional area—about 0.05 square meters versus 0.04—which could increase its drag instead. Their attitudes, tumbling rates, thermal behavior, ballistic coefficients, and operational histories weren’t demonstrated to be identical. Public orbital elements are fitted estimates rather than precision onboard navigation records. Atmospheric density changes with solar activity, electrical currents can interact with Earth’s magnetic field, and OTP-2 carried another propulsion experiment. The 600-meter difference is therefore a clue worth investigating, not a measurement that uniquely identifies Quantum Drive thrust.

The careful conclusion is that the orbital campaign produced an interesting but statistically weak anomaly. It may be consistent with IVO’s expected force, but consistency isn’t causation. It doesn’t yet establish that a non-drag force acted on the spacecraft, that the IVO device produced that force, or that Quantised Inertia explains it. McCulloch himself acknowledged the ambiguity, noting that IVO had considered a Lorentz-force explanation for at least part of the apparent movement. He estimated that the Lorentz force was too small, but he didn’t have the detailed circuit geometry and current data required to settle the issue. The mission gave researchers a reason to run a better experiment—not permission to skip one.

What Quantised Inertia Is Trying to Explain

Quantised Inertia begins with McCulloch’s claim that inertial mass isn’t an intrinsic label permanently attached to matter. Instead, he proposes that inertia emerges from an object’s acceleration and its relationship with the surrounding quantum field. In the speedboat analogy, waves pile up unevenly around an accelerating vessel. In the quantum version, an accelerating object experiences Unruh radiation, while a Rindler horizon forms behind it. McCulloch argues that the horizon suppresses some available quantum modes, leaving more radiation pressure in front of the object than behind it. The resulting imbalance resists acceleration and appears macroscopically as inertia.

Several ingredients in that picture belong to established theoretical physics. Rindler horizons arise in the description of accelerating observers. The Unruh effect predicts that an accelerating observer perceives a thermal field where an inertial observer sees a vacuum. The Casimir effect demonstrates that physical boundaries can alter the allowed modes of a quantum field. Quantised Inertia adds the controversial steps: that Unruh radiation is the physical cause of inertial resistance, that horizons can function like mode-restricting boundaries, and that engineered cavities can manipulate those restrictions to generate net force. Acceleration-induced thermality has been investigated experimentally, but direct detection and interpretation of the Unruh effect remain debated.

A commonly presented Quantised Inertia relation takes the form

[
m' = m\left(1-\frac{2c^2}{a\Theta}\right),
]

where (m') is the modified inertial mass, (m) is conventional mass, (c) is the speed of light, (a) is acceleration, and (\Theta) is a cosmic-scale horizon dimension. At ordinary accelerations, the correction is negligible and familiar Newtonian behavior emerges. At extremely low accelerations, the correction becomes significant and inertial mass is predicted to decline. McCulloch applies that limit to stars at the edges of galaxies. Instead of adding unseen dark matter to keep fast-moving stars gravitationally bound, he argues that their centrifugal response is weaker because their inertial mass is lower. He says the model reproduces galaxy rotation using visible matter, the speed of light, and a cosmic horizon scale, without adjustable dark-matter halos.

The proposed drive mechanism applies the same concept at a radically smaller scale. Inside a capacitor, electrons undergo Fowler–Nordheim tunneling through a strong electric-field barrier. McCulloch argues that their effective acceleration can reach approximately (10^{22}) meters per second squared, making their associated Unruh wavelengths short enough to interact with micrometer-scale plate spacing. The conducting plates suppress modes inside the capacitor more strongly than outside it, reversing the ordinary radiation gradient. In his model, the electron receives an extra impulse toward the anode and transfers that momentum to the structure. That’s why “propellantless” is the cleaner term for the IVO concept. “Reactionless” implies no momentum exchange at all, while Quantised Inertia proposes an open-system interaction with horizons and quantum fields—even though that mechanism remains unconfirmed.

The Long Experimental Trail

The modern capacitor experiments began with Becker and Bhatt, who reported tests using small high-voltage capacitors with plate separations from roughly 10 to 60 micrometers and diameters around 2.5 centimeters. They observed forces reaching approximately 6 millinewtons as the plate separation decreased. McCulloch calculated a Quantised Inertia prediction for the force-versus-separation trend and said it matched the reported values without tunable parameters. That agreement helped redirect his DARPA-supported work toward capacitors, but the original balance-based setup remained susceptible to cable forces, electrostatic coupling, thermal drift, vibration, and electronic artifacts.

McCulloch and engineer Richard Arundal later built a more systematic apparatus at Plymouth University’s Mayflower Labs. Their test stand placed a foil capacitor on an ADAM LPB 223i digital balance with 0.1-milligram sensitivity and a 120-gram capacity. A calibrated Vitrek V71 high-voltage tester charged the device through a Galinstan liquid-metal connection intended to isolate mechanical cable forces, while a surrounding shield cage reduced electrical and environmental interference. The team spent approximately 16 months developing the stand and conducted at least 182 numbered test runs while refining shielding, capacitor fabrication, and data collection.

The Plymouth team reported anodeward weight changes as large as 25 milligrams, equivalent to about 0.25 millinewtons. Successful signals appeared when capacitors were heated above 50 degrees Celsius—sometimes to 64 degrees—and operated within approximately 5 to 10 percent of dielectric breakdown. Turning a capacitor over reportedly reversed the direction of the measured force. Their working prediction was

[
F=\frac{0.00014IA}{d^2},
]

where (I) is leakage current, (A) is plate area, and (d) is plate separation. Because force varies inversely with the square of separation, halving the dielectric thickness should produce four times the force. Selected tests were reported to follow that prediction. Yet about half the runs produced no measurable mass change, and those null events weren’t included in the predicted-versus-observed plot. Reliability therefore remains one of the central unsolved problems.

IVO’s program added a pendulum, oxidized-aluminium dielectrics, proprietary stacking, and thermal-vacuum operation. McCulloch’s presentation describes one first stacked test using a 0.4-kilogram device, a 15-by-15-centimeter active area, a 17.8-micrometer separation, and an observed force around 0.9 millinewtons. A separate summary in the same presentation lists an IVO vacuum result near (6 \pm 2) millinewtons compared with a predicted 5.25 millinewtons, apparently representing a different configuration or campaign. McCulloch says several groups have reported forces in the range predicted by QI, but much of that record remains unpublished, presented at conferences, awaiting formal publication, or dependent on incomplete technical information. The body of evidence is broader than a single experiment, but it’s not yet the kind of independent, repeatable literature required for a new propulsion technology.

The Experiment That Could Settle It

A decisive orbital test would need to be designed around attribution. The cleanest mission would use a dedicated spacecraft with no second propulsion payload, precision GNSS orbit determination, calibrated onboard accelerometers, continuous attitude data, magnetometers, temperature sensors, electric-field monitoring, and complete current and voltage telemetry. An active drive should be paired with a dummy device drawing the same electrical power but designed not to produce thrust. The spacecraft should execute randomized forward, reverse, and off sequences, with the command schedule hidden from at least one independent analysis team until data processing is complete.

The result would need to be synchronized and reversible. Acceleration should begin when the drive is energized, stop when it’s switched off, and reverse when its polarity or orientation is reversed. The signal should follow a numerical prediction made before the data are examined. A matched dummy load should produce no acceleration. Long activation periods should create a velocity change far larger than the uncertainties from drag, tracking, thermal recoil, radiation pressure, magnetic interaction, outgassing, attitude control, and orbital fitting. Raw telemetry and the analysis protocol should be released so independent researchers can reproduce the result.

McCulloch also proposes a laboratory discriminator that he believes would be specific to Quantised Inertia: resonance. If electron acceleration and cavity dimensions are tuned so that particular Unruh wavelengths fit—or are excluded—between the capacitor boundaries, the measured force should rise to a predicted peak and then fall as the system moves away from resonance. He argues that conventional thermal, electrostatic, or magnetic artifacts wouldn’t naturally produce a peak at the geometry specified by QI. He has applied for funding for an unambiguous test associated with the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, while pursuing numerical optimization, new papers, another textbook, and a possible future American space collaboration.

The practical reward, if repeatable thrust were confirmed, would begin with satellites rather than starships. Spacecraft often reach the end of their useful lives because they exhaust station-keeping propellant even while their electronics and solar arrays remain functional. A compact electric drive with no propellant tank could maintain orbits, reposition satellites, reduce launch mass, and operate without an exhaust plume. McCulloch contrasts the concept with the Dawn spacecraft’s ion propulsion, which generated roughly 90 millinewtons but required substantial xenon propellant and about 2,100 watts of power. The proposed IVO unit produced far less force—about 1.75 millinewtons—but its advocates argue that eliminating hundreds of kilograms of spacecraft and propellant changes the acceleration equation. As McCulloch summarized it, “Finally, we can travel light.”

Beyond that lie possibilities that remain speculative even if the basic effect proves real. McCulloch estimates that a very small continuously accelerating probe could reach the predicted inner region of the Oort Cloud, roughly 3,000 astronomical units away, in about a year. He has also calculated a 10-to-15-year journey to Proxima Centauri by accelerating to a substantial fraction of light speed, reversing the drive, and decelerating into the destination system. He discusses nanoscale “quantum launch,” levitating materials, and possible energy-generation concepts as longer-range consequences of the same physics. None is an engineering forecast, and none follows automatically from a millinewton-scale anomaly. But that’s why the IVO mission matters despite its inconclusive outcome. It carried Quantised Inertia out of papers and laboratory balances, placed a physical device in orbit, exposed the weaknesses of the existing experiment, and showed exactly how much better the next one must be.

References

Podcast and Background

IVO Quantum Drive and the Orbital Missions

Quantised Inertia: Foundational Papers

Capacitor-Thrust Experiments and Theory

General Explanation and Further Reading


The Warp Drive Interpretation of UAP Observables

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-e4FLN4sLA

For decades, reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena have included the same seemingly impossible capabilities: hovering without wings or rotors, abrupt acceleration, hypersonic motion without obvious shock waves or exhaust, intermittent visibility, and transitions between air and water without the violent effects conventional vehicles would experience. Chad Wanless, co-author of Hidden in Plain Sight: Evidence of Exotic UFO Propulsion, thinks those observations may be telling us something fundamental about how at least some UAP move. Rather than violating physics, he argues, the objects may be exploiting one of its strangest consequences—curved spacetime. In a recent interview, Wanless described five additional UAP observables that he believes could represent secondary signatures of a warp-like propulsion field: gravitational lensing, leading-edge vapor cones, oscillation blur, gravity-counterbalancing tilted flight, and the classic “saucer-like” skipping motion. None proves that operational warp drives exist, but together they form a provocative engineering hypothesis: instead of pushing themselves conventionally through air, water and space, some UAP may be altering the geometry of the space around them.

From Five Observables to Ten

The starting point is the familiar set of five UAP observables popularized in recent years by former Pentagon AATIP official Luis Elizondo: positive or “anti-gravity” lift, sudden acceleration, hypersonic velocity without conventional signatures, low observability and transmedium travel. They’re essentially a catalog of performance. A reported UAP may remain stationary without wings, cross large distances rapidly, make abrupt changes in velocity, become difficult to detect, or enter water without behaving like an aircraft striking a fluid hundreds of times denser than air.

Some official U.S. government reporting supports the narrower point that unusual flight characteristics have been reported and sometimes captured by multiple sensors, although it doesn’t establish an exotic explanation. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s landmark 2021 UAP assessment examined 144 government reports covering incidents from 2004 through early 2021. Eighty involved observations by multiple sensors, and 18 incidents described unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics, including objects that appeared stationary in winds aloft, moved against the wind, maneuvered abruptly or traveled at considerable speed without discernible propulsion. The report explicitly left open possibilities ranging from sensor errors and spoofing to unknown technologies.

Attempts to quantify some of the more dramatic historical cases illustrate why conventional propulsion can become difficult to reconcile with the reports if the observed trajectories are taken literally. Physicist Kevin Knuth and colleagues analyzed several UAP cases in a 2019 paper, including the 2004 Nimitz encounters. Depending on assumptions about distance and timing, some modeled accelerations reached hundreds or even thousands of g. One hypothetical reconstruction produced approximately 5,370 g and a peak velocity on the order of 46,000 mph. Those figures aren’t direct measurements of a known spacecraft; they depend heavily on the assumptions behind the reconstruction. But they demonstrate the scale of the engineering problem.

Wanless sees the original five observables as describing what the objects appear to do. His five new observables are intended to move one step deeper, toward how they might do it. “These are actually more of an observational signature that indicates that a UAP is using some form of warping propulsion,” he said during the interview. That distinction is central to his argument. Extraordinary acceleration by itself says little about mechanism. A repeatable distortion in background imagery immediately before the acceleration might.

Moving Spacetime Instead of Moving Through It

The theoretical reference point for Wanless is Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre’s famous 1994 warp-drive metric. Alcubierre showed mathematically that general relativity permits a spacetime geometry in which space contracts ahead of a bounded region and expands behind it. A spacecraft inside the region wouldn’t locally accelerate through space faster than light. Instead, the geometry containing it would move relative to distant observers.

That distinction is important because the Alcubierre concept doesn’t simply discard Einstein’s relativity. It uses it. Locally, the spacecraft remains inside the rules governing matter and light. The unusual motion arises from the geometry of spacetime itself. In popular language, the craft “rides” a distortion rather than firing propellant backward like a rocket. It’s mathematically elegant, but creating such a geometry is another matter entirely.

The original Alcubierre solution requires negative energy density in configurations far beyond anything known to engineering. Subsequent researchers have explored alternative warp geometries, including positive-energy subluminal configurations and ways of reducing the exotic-energy requirements of the original metric. None amounts to a practical warp-drive blueprint. There’s no demonstrated device capable of producing an Alcubierre bubble around a spacecraft, much less controlling one in atmosphere or underwater.

Wanless therefore approaches the problem in reverse. He doesn’t claim to know what machine would generate the field. “I took the point of view of what if these craft are warping space,” he explained. From there, he began asking an engineer’s question: if a vehicle really were surrounding itself with a controllable spacetime distortion, what observable consequences should appear outside it? In his view, the answer may already be present in decades of anomalous imagery.

Five New Signatures of a Warp Field

Wanless and electrical engineer Dave Palachik formalized the concept in Five New Observables of UAP: Empirical Evidence of Dark Operational Warp Propulsion Systems, published in the Open Journal of Applied Sciences in 2025. Their proposed observables are gravitational lensing, leading-edge vapor cones, oscillatory blur, low-velocity tilted disc flight and saucer-like skipping motion. The paper doesn’t identify who built the objects or what machinery might generate the fields. Its central claim is narrower: a hypothetical spacetime-manipulating propulsion system should leave secondary effects that can potentially be detected.

Gravitational lensing is the most direct connection to established relativity. Massive objects curve spacetime, and light follows that curved geometry. Astronomers routinely observe the resulting effects around galaxies, galaxy clusters and other massive objects: background sources can appear displaced, stretched, magnified or multiplied. Wanless asks whether a sufficiently intense artificial spacetime curvature around a UAP could produce miniature versions of the same general optical phenomenon. Instead of the craft literally changing shape, its apparent geometry—or the scene behind it—could become distorted.

The second observable, a leading-edge vapor cone, concerns the atmosphere rather than light. Conventional aircraft can produce visible condensation when pressure and temperature change rapidly near transonic speeds. Wanless proposes that a warp field could create a different configuration. If incoming air experiences a rapid increase in effective volume near the compressed region of spacetime ahead of the craft, it could expand, cool and temporarily condense into a visible cloud. The location matters: the condensation should appear ahead of or above the vehicle rather than simply as an ordinary trailing aerodynamic effect.

The other three observables relate more directly to flight control. Oscillation blur could arise if the propulsion field is rapidly pulsed. Tilted disc flight could result when a gravity-like acceleration vector is angled slightly forward while still counteracting Earth’s gravity. And the classic skipping motion—famously compared by Kenneth Arnold in 1947 to saucers skipping across water—could represent repeated corrective maneuvers while a vehicle is navigating through an optically distorted field. These interpretations remain hypotheses, but they’re more specific than saying simply that an object behaved strangely.

When “Shape-Shifting” Might Really Be Lensing

Reports of shape-changing UFOs have always presented an awkward question. Why would a spacecraft physically morph while flying? Some observers have described objects becoming elongated, flattened or irregular. Others have reported apparent changes between round and elliptical shapes or sudden changes in apparent size. Wanless thinks at least some of those descriptions could be artifacts of spacetime geometry rather than structural transformation.

During the interview, he described government-released imagery in which spherical objects appear round in one moment, elliptical in another and then return to their original appearance. He interprets the changes as potentially consistent with a gravitationally distorted region changing orientation relative to the camera. “As the light bouncing off the UAP and background objects as well reaches the observer, it’s going to look slightly different,” Wanless said. From the light’s own local perspective, its path remains straight through curved spacetime; to an outside observer, the apparent path is distorted.

The idea produces a useful prediction. Lensing shouldn’t affect only the outline of the UAP. It should also alter background features when their light passes through the same region. Wanless says this is what he looks for in old photographs and modern video: background terrain or clouds that smear, shift or deform only while the UAP crosses in front of them. He’s particularly interested in historical images because analog film eliminates some forms of modern digital compression artifact, although it obviously introduces other potential problems involving focus, camera motion, film development and uncertain geometry.

One photograph in the 1965 Rex Heflin sequence is particularly interesting to Wanless. He describes the object as appearing in two slightly different positions or states within the exposure, with one comparatively symmetrical and the other visibly distorted. “You see the oscillation at the same time you see the gravitational lensing,” he said. That interpretation is far from universally accepted, but it illustrates how his framework changes the question researchers ask. A blurred image stops being automatically useless; the blur itself becomes something to measure.

Vapor Cones, Pulsed Fields and Flying by Gravity

Wanless considers leading-edge condensation one of the most distinctive proposed signatures because it could connect an invisible field to an ordinary physical substance: atmospheric moisture. He uses a deliberately simple analogy borrowed from Doctor Who. Imagine air flowing into the TARDIS, whose fictional interior is vastly larger than its exterior. The air suddenly encounters a much larger volume, expands and cools. Under suitable humidity conditions, moisture condenses. Wanless proposes that altered spacetime ahead of a UAP could create an analogous expansion from the air’s perspective.

That idea could also help explain another long-standing puzzle: why some allegedly hypersonic UAP don’t appear to produce the spectacular heating, shock waves and plasma effects expected from ordinary vehicles at extreme speeds. Wanless argues that a field altering the effective volume and acceleration of the air ahead of the craft could reduce the density encountered by the vehicle. During the interview, he offered an illustrative comparison: a craft physically near sea level could experience local aerodynamic conditions more like much higher altitude if the field sufficiently lowered the effective density.

The oscillation observable adds a time-dependent signature. Wanless compares the concept to pulse modulation in ordinary engineering. A motor too powerful for the required output can be rapidly switched on and off to produce a lower average effect. If a warp propulsion system had a similarly high minimum continuous output, pulsing it could potentially allow a craft to hover or maneuver slowly. The switching might simultaneously produce visual artifacts as the surrounding geometry alternates between distorted and undistorted states.

Wanless suggests that such pulsing could also help pilots see outside their own field. An external camera could theoretically be synchronized to operate during the brief intervals when the warp field is off, providing an undistorted view. To an outside observer whose eyes or camera integrate multiple cycles, the object could appear blurred or displaced. Wanless compared the principle to the stroboscopic hazard of rotating machinery under flickering lights: at the wrong frequency, something moving rapidly can appear stationary or occupy misleading positions.

Tilt, Skipping Motion and the Problem of Inertia

The tilted-disc observable is easier to visualize. If the vehicle’s propulsion resembles an artificial gravitational field, hovering would require an upward acceleration that counteracts the downward acceleration produced by Earth. To move horizontally, the total acceleration vector could simply be tilted. Part of it still opposes gravity, while another component accelerates the vehicle forward. Wanless compares it to a helicopter pitching forward, except there’s no rotor producing aerodynamic lift.

He says this may explain why discs in some photographs and videos appear to fly at pronounced angles instead of remaining level like conventional aircraft. “If you want to go in a certain direction and you have two different forces you have to deal with, they have to add up together,” Wanless explained. It’s basic vector addition applied to an exotic assumed force.

The proposed skipping motion is more speculative. Wanless imagines a pilot attempting to navigate while the warp field continuously distorts incoming light. The outside world could effectively resemble a scene viewed through eyeglasses whose prescription changes whenever the steering controls move. The pilot corrects upward, realizes the apparent trajectory was misleading, corrects downward, then repeats. The result, viewed from outside, might resemble a rhythmic bouncing or skipping path.

A gravity-based propulsion model also offers a conceptual answer to the enormous acceleration problem. In a conventional aircraft, every component must transmit force mechanically. A pilot experiencing 50 g is accelerated by the seat pushing against the body; an airframe experiences enormous structural loads. If an artificial gravitational field accelerated the craft, occupants and internal components approximately equally, however, they could follow the same local free-fall trajectory. “Not only is the vehicle falling forward, the occupants are falling forward at the exact same rate,” Wanless said. To someone inside without an external view, enormous coordinate acceleration might not feel like conventional high-g acceleration at all.

Transmedium Travel and Low Observability

That same reasoning gives Wanless a proposed explanation for perhaps the strangest original observable: transmedium travel. Water is roughly 800 times denser than air. An aircraft entering it at high speed doesn't gently transition into underwater flight—it experiences catastrophic hydrodynamic loads. Yet some UAP reports describe objects entering the ocean with surprisingly little splash or deceleration.

Wanless argues that if the propulsive field extends ahead of the craft, the surrounding water could itself be accelerated before physical contact with the vehicle. “The water directly in front [would] fall forward and also push the other water that’s there out of the way,” he explained. The craft would therefore not be punching through stationary water in the conventional sense. The medium would already be responding to the artificial gravitational geometry.

Whether a realistic warp metric actually produces the detailed fluid behavior Wanless envisions remains an open theoretical question. It would require coupled relativistic and fluid-dynamics modeling far beyond simple diagrams. But the interpretation makes a concrete prediction: water around an entering object should behave differently from the shock, cavity formation and spray produced by a conventional projectile.

Low observability could similarly emerge from optical geometry rather than traditional stealth. If light from the background were bent around a craft before reaching a particular observer, the object could be partially obscured or appear very different depending on viewing angle. Wanless emphasizes that this wouldn't necessarily mean invisibility from every direction or at every wavelength. A geometry that hides an object from one visible-light camera could produce a different signature in infrared or radar.

The Difference Between a Hypothesis and Proof

The most important caution is that unresolved UAP aren't synonymous with exotic propulsion. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office continues to resolve large numbers of reports as balloons, satellites, aircraft, birds, unmanned systems and other ordinary phenomena. Its FY2025 reporting stated that hundreds of cases had been resolved to prosaic sources, while many more remained unresolved primarily because there wasn't enough information for a confident assessment.

That matters enormously for Wanless’s framework. A photograph that could contain gravitational lensing might also contain motion blur. A cloud could be an ordinary cloud. A doubled object might be an optical reflection. A skipping point of light might involve camera motion. Exotic interpretations only become compelling when ordinary alternatives can be excluded using measurements rather than visual intuition.

Wanless himself stresses a related point through his engineering background. He objects to declaring something a balloon merely because it could be one, calling the leap an “unverified assumption.” But the same standard has to apply in both directions: an image can't be declared evidence of a warp drive merely because a warp field could produce something similar. The useful part of the framework is precisely that it can potentially move beyond subjective resemblance.

The next step should therefore be prediction and replication. A strong gravitational-lensing test would track known background geometry and quantitatively predict displacement. A strong vapor-cone test would correlate temperature, humidity, position and acceleration. Oscillation should produce measurable periodicity. Disc tilt should correlate systematically with acceleration vectors. Skipping trajectories should contain reproducible dynamics rather than random camera jitter. If those relationships don't survive controlled analysis, the warp interpretation weakens.

From UFO Videos to a Testable Engineering Problem

Modern sensor networks offer a way to perform those tests that simply didn't exist during most historical UFO cases. A dedicated UAP observatory could combine synchronized high-frame-rate visible cameras, thermal infrared, radar, atmospheric instrumentation and widely separated optical stations. Multiple cameras would make it possible to distinguish a scene-level distortion from an artifact inside a single lens or sensor.

Researchers could preregister the criteria before examining candidate events. How much background displacement qualifies as lensing? What spatial relationship must a vapor cloud maintain relative to the object's trajectory? What frequency stability constitutes oscillation? How much vehicle tilt is associated with a given acceleration? The same processing pipeline could then be run blindly against aircraft, drones, balloons, birds, atmospheric phenomena and deliberately created optical artifacts.

Artificial intelligence could eventually automate much of this work. Wanless suggested during the interview that an AI system might examine individual frames and learn to recognize background distortions associated with subsequent maneuvers. He cautioned that clouds make poor reference points because they naturally evolve in the wind. Ground terrain filmed from above would be considerably better because mountains, roads and buildings provide stable geometry from frame to frame.

A sufficiently sophisticated system wouldn't need to decide whether something “is a warp drive.” It would measure displacement fields, apparent object geometry, acceleration, oscillation frequency, atmospheric changes and sensor correlations. Competing hypotheses could then be fitted to those measurements. That would be a profound improvement over the traditional cycle of blurry video followed by competing declarations that the object is either extraordinary or mundane.

What Comes Next

Wanless’s own research is continuing beyond the five observables. He told Ventura that he has been developing another paper dealing with engineering standards for evaluating evidence under uncertainty. He draws heavily on forensic engineering, where incomplete information, witness testimony and physical evidence frequently have to be combined after accidents or equipment failures.

He argues that engineers operate under an important constraint that is sometimes missing from casual UAP debate: they can't simply discard an observation because the witness might theoretically be wrong. In one fatal accident investigation from his professional experience, Wanless recalled that investigators possessed photographs of the equipment and construction materials involved, but the testimony of the sole eyewitness remained crucial. “The most important evidence is the sole witness’s testimony,” he remembered the lead engineer explaining.

That doesn’t mean witnesses are automatically correct. Wanless emphasizes evaluation rather than acceptance: testimony has to be checked against physical evidence, sensors, geometry and competing explanations. He argues that this standard is especially relevant to aviation encounters, where trained pilots, radar operators and other specialists effectively become human sensors inside a larger evidence system.

Near the end of the podcast, Wanless also adopts a more measured formulation of the warp-drive argument than the sensational version might suggest. He doesn’t claim to possess a recovered propulsion system or a laboratory demonstration of engineered spacetime. What he believes researchers currently possess are “visible clues”—ten behavioral and observational signatures that, in his interpretation, are consistent with some form of spacetime manipulation. The real importance of the proposal may therefore be less about proving UFOs have warp drives today than about giving researchers something specific to test tomorrow.

The central question remains open: do UAP use warp drives? General relativity tells us that spacetime can curve, that curved spacetime affects light and matter, and that mathematical warp geometries can be written down. UAP reports tell us that observers occasionally encounter objects whose apparent behavior is difficult to reconcile with ordinary flight. Wanless and Palachik are proposing a bridge between those facts. If that bridge is wrong, careful measurement should eventually expose where it fails. But if the predicted signatures repeatedly appear across independent, calibrated sensors, the most interesting thing about the next extraordinary UAP video may not be the object in the center of the frame. It may be what happens to the universe immediately around it.

References


The UnLab's Coherent Matter Wave Beam & Vacuum-Fluctuation Propulsion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rwSdg3bY18

Charles Chase spent more than three decades at Lockheed Martin, including over 25 years inside Skunk Works, learning that serious innovation often means watching nine ideas fail so that one can change the world. Today, as co-founder, director and CTO of UnLAB, he’s carrying that tolerance for risk into a realm where the line between visionary engineering and experimental artifact may be measured in piconewtons: a patented system intended to make massive particles behave coherently like laser light, Casimir structures that might turn differences in quantum noise into electricity, and nanoscale devices designed to test whether asymmetric vacuum fluctuations can generate thrust. In a new interview with Tim Ventura, Chase offered a rare combination of enormous ambition and laboratory candor, describing not only a theoretical propulsion system that would require no conventional propellant, but also the moment an apparent positive result disappeared after his team discovered that the measuring device itself had been distorted during fabrication.

The Skunk Works Rule: Ten Percent Is Success

Chase’s résumé gives him an unusual position in the world of frontier physics. He spent more than 32 years at Lockheed Martin in aerospace research and development, including work involving advanced materials, vehicle systems, multispectral stealth and high-risk technology programs. He eventually became a Senior Tech Fellow, a distinction his professional biography describes as being reserved for the top 0.1 percent of the corporation’s technical workforce. He also helped establish and lead Revolutionary Technology Programs at Skunk Works, where multidisciplinary teams were tasked with transforming unconventional scientific ideas into systems that could be built, tested and potentially moved into operational use.

That experience taught Chase to treat failure differently from most conventional research organizations. He told Ventura that he has always wanted to work “at the edge,” but only when an idea has enough scientific grounding to justify a serious engineering effort. His Skunk Works group considered itself successful when approximately 10 percent of its projects came to fruition. The other 90 percent might fail technically, prove uneconomical, encounter an insurmountable manufacturing barrier or simply arrive before the surrounding technology was ready. To Chase, that didn’t mean the program was poorly run. It meant the team was attempting things difficult enough to matter.

UnLAB extends that philosophy outside the structure of a major aerospace corporation. The nonprofit says its mission is to turn breakthrough science into technologies that benefit people, the planet and the biome, while also increasing human understanding. Rather than maintaining a single large laboratory, UnLAB assembles distributed teams around particular problems. Chase has participated in projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation and the Limitless Space Institute, while collaborating with researchers associated with Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, Technion and national laboratories.

Chase’s management philosophy is as unconventional as some of the physics. He wants research teams to operate in an atmosphere of what he calls “joy and ease,” where creative people are given room to think, collaborate and take intelligent risks without pretending that every experiment will succeed. That culture connects projects separated by radically different technological horizons. UnLAB may investigate whether microscopic semiconductor structures can interact asymmetrically with the quantum vacuum, but it’s also developing simpler systems for refrigeration, water collection and air purification. Chase judges both kinds of work by the same question: Can it eventually help people?

A Laser Made of Matter

A conventional laser creates an organized beam of light in which photons maintain well-defined relationships in frequency and phase. Chase and his former Lockheed Martin colleague Moe J. Arman proposed creating something analogous with massive particles. Their patent, US9502202B2, “Systems and Methods for Generating Coherent Matterwave Beams,” was filed in 2011, granted in 2016 and assigned to Lockheed Martin. It describes an array of microscopic beam-generating units that produce streams of charged particles, guide them through interconnected channels and combine them into a coherent matterwave output.

The central challenge is that massive particles don’t behave exactly like photons. Changing a particle’s energy changes its momentum and de Broglie wavelength, potentially making synchronization harder rather than easier. Chase and Arman therefore proposed controlling phase without directly exchanging energy with the particles. Their concept uses the Aharonov–Bohm effect, in which an electromagnetic vector potential can alter the quantum phase of a charged particle even when the particle travels through a region without a conventional magnetic field acting on it. The current UnLAB version also invokes synchronization among coupled oscillators and resonant cavities. Chase calls the vector-potential phase shift the system’s “secret sauce.”

The most dramatic possibility would be a streaming beam of coherent matter with far greater mass and momentum density than a beam composed only of light. Chase has described such a beam as potentially being a million times more powerful than a laser, although that comparison remains a theoretical claim and depends on exactly which measure of intensity is being compared. The nearer-term objective is less cinematic but perhaps more technologically plausible: using phase-controlled particles over a very short working distance to manipulate how atoms and molecules combine. UnLAB says its calculations indicate possible feature sizes around 0.2 nanometers, approaching the dimensions of individual atoms and chemical bonds.

That could create a new route to maskless, wafer-scale atomic manufacturing. Instead of merely depositing material and etching away what isn’t wanted, a phase-controlled matter system might help guide atomic assembly, construct new material structures or encourage chemical combinations that are difficult to produce with existing tools. The concept combines established phenomena—the wave nature of matter and the Aharonov–Bohm phase shift—with a proposed synchronization architecture that hasn’t yet been demonstrated as an operating beam generator. UnLAB is seeking funding to build a prototype. Until that hardware produces a measurable interference signature or another unambiguous marker of coherence, the system remains an inventive patent and engineering proposal rather than a demonstrated matter laser.

The Casimir Effect and the Reality of the Vacuum

The Casimir effect provides a foundation for much of the vacuum-engineering research discussed by Chase. In its classic form, two closely spaced conductive plates change the electromagnetic modes permitted in the space between them. Fewer modes fit within the narrow cavity than exist in the surrounding region, creating a measurable attractive force between the plates. The effect is well established experimentally and matters in nanotechnology, where Casimir and related van der Waals forces can influence microscopic structures.

What the Casimir effect proves about the underlying vacuum is more subtle. It’s commonly described as direct evidence that empty space contains fluctuating electromagnetic fields, but Chase emphasized that the measurable force can also be calculated using formulations based on interactions between charges and radiation reaction without treating vacuum fluctuations as a literal reservoir pushing on the plates. Quantum electrodynamics requires a ground-state structure to remain mathematically consistent, and the theory produces extraordinarily accurate predictions. Whether the fluctuating vacuum should be regarded as an engineerable physical medium, however, remains partly a question of interpretation.

The uncertainty becomes even more striking at cosmological scales. The effective dark-energy density inferred from the accelerating expansion of the universe is extremely small, while a naive quantum-field calculation using a Planck-scale cutoff produces a vacuum-energy density larger by roughly 120 orders of magnitude. That staggering mismatch is known as the cosmological-constant problem. Chase sees the discrepancy as evidence that physicists don’t yet understand the vacuum’s structure or its relationship to gravity, matter and spacetime, rather than as evidence that vacuum effects don’t exist.

There are still firm restrictions on what ordinary equilibrium systems can do. A symmetric device in thermal equilibrium shouldn’t generate sustained net force, torque or electrical power. A useful effect therefore requires breaking symmetry, creating a nonequilibrium condition or using a material whose response depends on direction. In a 2021 Physical Review B paper, Chase joined researchers from Stanford, UCLA and Princeton in predicting that a particle near a nonreciprocal material could experience a lateral force and torque when the particle and its environment were held at different temperatures. That is a peer-reviewed example of fluctuation-driven motion, but the energy comes from the temperature difference. It isn’t evidence that an isolated spacecraft can draw unlimited momentum from an otherwise uniform vacuum.

Fluctuation Flow Propulsion—and the Signal That Disappeared

UnLAB’s most direct attempt to convert vacuum asymmetry into propulsion received a $275,000 National Science Foundation Phase I SBIR award in 2024. The project, Award 2432831, “Fluctuation Flow Propulsion,” proposes a compact propulsion system whose first application could be spacecraft attitude and reaction control. Because a satellite using conventional thrusters eventually exhausts its stored propellant, even a small force that could operate for years without expelling reaction mass could allow far more extensive changes in orientation, altitude and orbital inclination.

Chase’s proposed device is based on resonant tunneling structures. A resonant tunneling diode contains extremely thin semiconductor barriers surrounding a quantum well, which Chase described as being on the order of two nanometers in one design. Electrons that don’t have enough classical energy to cross the barriers can still tunnel through them quantum mechanically. When an applied voltage creates an asymmetric potential across the structure, Chase predicts that fluctuations coupling to the tunneling current will develop a preferred direction and transfer net momentum to the device.

The theoretical performance is extraordinary. Chase estimates that a sufficiently dense array could generate approximately nine newtons of force per kilogram of active device. Because the device wouldn’t consume propellant in the conventional sense, its formal specific impulse would be infinite, while its total operating impulse would be limited by electrical power, heat rejection, material degradation and device lifetime. Chase compares the goal to combining the endurance of a solar sail with thrust approaching that of chemical propulsion. No experiment has yet demonstrated that level of performance, and there is not yet a publicly established thrust-to-power value for a complete practical system.

The first tests revealed how treacherous the path from calculation to measurement can be. Chase’s team fabricated asymmetric structures on the tips of micron-scale cantilevers and used white-light interferometry to measure tiny deflections. The controls bent downward under gravity as expected, while some cantilevers carrying asymmetric devices appeared to move in the opposite direction. Chase recalled the team’s immediate reaction: “shit, it’s working!” Further analysis showed that mechanical stress introduced while depositing the structures had warped the cantilevers and contaminated the result. The experiment couldn’t support a propulsion claim. Chase said new structures were being fabricated with Sandia National Laboratories for another round of testing—an example of frontier research becoming more credible, not less, when an exciting result is discarded because the controls aren’t good enough.

Three Routes to Vacuum Power

Garret Moddel, an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is pursuing a related idea through electrical devices rather than propulsion. His patent US11258379B2, “Quantum Noise Power Devices,” describes circuits intended to exploit a difference between the quantum-noise environment near a Casimir structure and the environment in free space. The proposed architecture combines electrical components exposed to different fluctuation densities so that the imbalance can drive a current through a circuit.

Moddel and his collaborators reported experimental results in a 2021 paper in Physical Review Research. Metal-insulator-metal devices connected to Casimir cavities showed changes in differential conductance that increased as the cavities became thinner, along with anomalous voltage and current offsets. The authors interpreted the measurements in terms of an imbalance in hot-carrier injection associated with suppressed vacuum modes. Those findings are intriguing, but they don’t by themselves establish a continuously operating source of useful net power. Conductance changes, voltage offsets and extractable energy delivered through a complete cycle are different evidentiary thresholds.

Chase regards Moddel’s work seriously while emphasizing how easily tiny solid-state currents can mislead an experimenter. Contact potentials, trapped charge, thermoelectric gradients, dielectric relaxation and slow electrochemical reactions can behave like microscopic batteries and produce signals for long periods. A result becomes persuasive only when those conventional mechanisms are measured and excluded. Chase’s position is deliberately cautious: the data may be showing something important, but the interpretation isn’t settled merely because the signal appears correlated with cavity geometry.

Harold “Sonny” White is taking another route through US12302769B2, “Casimir Power Cell,” assigned to the Limitless Space Institute. The patent describes conductive cavity walls with a conductive antenna positioned between them, intended to detect and harvest a proposed polarization field within the cavity. White’s earlier worldline-numerics research modeled a custom Casimir geometry whose calculated negative-energy distribution qualitatively resembled a two-dimensional cross-section of the energy distribution associated with an Alcubierre warp metric. That was a theoretical and numerical result, not a demonstration of a warp field. Chase sees his resonant-tunneling device, Moddel’s quantum-noise circuits and White’s Casimir cell as variations on one broad strategy: create an asymmetric fluctuation environment and attempt to convert the difference into work. As Chase put it, “proof is always in the pudding.”

Why Replication Is the Real Frontier

The history of advanced propulsion is crowded with devices that have generated exciting signals without producing broad scientific agreement. Electromagnetic cavity thrusters, asymmetric capacitors, Mach-effect devices, Quantised Inertia experiments, gravitational coupling proposals and other systems have all produced reported anomalies. Independent teams have also reported null results or identified thermal, electromagnetic and mechanical artifacts capable of imitating thrust. Chase offered a concise assessment of the field: “lots of ideas, nothing really proven yet.”

Measuring extremely small forces is brutally difficult. Heating can expand a component and shift the center of mass. Current flowing through wires can create magnetic forces. Residual gas can produce radiometric effects. Electric fields can interact with grounded chamber walls. Patch potentials can arise on imperfect metal surfaces. Outgassing can create a tiny jet. Vibration can travel through a building, vacuum pump or support table. Even the tension in a power cable can be larger than the effect being sought. Chase’s warped cantilevers provide a nearly perfect case study: the fabrication process altered the sensor before the proposed force was ever applied.

A convincing vacuum-propulsion experiment would therefore need much more than an apparent deflection. It would require symmetric control devices, inert dummy loads, reversal of the proposed asymmetry, operation at multiple voltages and temperatures, continuous monitoring of magnetic and electric fields, and enough thermal diagnostics to model every relevant expansion and gradient. The force should change sign when the device is physically reversed, vanish when the asymmetry is removed and follow a quantitative scaling law predicted in advance. Ideally, the protocol would be preregistered and the data independently analyzed before anyone knew which runs contained active devices.

Chase also argues that accepted models can become “mode-closing” when researchers use conservation laws and symmetry assumptions to dismiss unfamiliar mechanisms before conducting an experiment. There is a provocative truth in that warning: every theory is a representation of observed nature, not nature itself. But conservation of energy and momentum aren’t arbitrary academic preferences; they’re supported by enormous bodies of successful measurement. A new propulsion effect wouldn’t make careful accounting irrelevant. It would require identifying the previously unknown field, reservoir or interaction that completes the accounting. Chase’s willingness to tolerate failure matters most when it is paired with an equally strong willingness to let a cherished hypothesis die.

Unlimited Abundance Begins at Home

When Ventura asked Chase which current project excited him most, the answer wasn’t quantum propulsion, Casimir energy or a coherent beam of matter. It was household resilience. Chase is exploring comparatively straightforward technologies that could help families cope with hurricanes, extended electrical outages, interruptions in municipal water and future climate-related disruptions. The objective is to begin with one home, expand to a neighborhood and ultimately strengthen the surrounding community.

One concept would connect a dedicated solar panel more directly to a refrigerator or freezer, reducing the conversion equipment required to keep food cold during an outage. Chase recalled power failures lasting roughly two weeks in Savannah, Georgia—long enough for an ordinary household to lose refrigerated food and basic independence. UnLAB is also investigating compact systems for gathering water from atmospheric moisture and a quiet plasma-vortex filtration device intended to remove airborne contaminants while functioning as an attractive household object rather than a noisy industrial appliance.

These projects may sound almost mundane beside a propellantless spacecraft, but they reveal the moral center of Chase’s work. “UnLAB” refers partly to an organization without a single central laboratory, but Chase also uses it as shorthand for “unlimited abundance.” He believes scarcity isn’t always an unavoidable physical fact; it can also be the result of limited imagination, poor distribution, inefficient systems and a failure to collaborate. Abundant clean energy would transform civilization, but so would a modest device that keeps medicine cold, produces safe water or reduces respiratory disease in a vulnerable community.

Chase’s portfolio spans an almost absurd range of scale: angstrom-level manufacturing, microscopic Casimir cavities, spacecraft propulsion, refrigerators, clean water and the social conditions that allow unusual ideas to survive long enough to be tested. What connects them is the Skunk Works habit of identifying a consequential problem, assembling people from different disciplines and building the smallest experiment capable of producing a meaningful answer. Quantum propulsion may fail. Casimir power may turn out to be a subtle solid-state artifact. A coherent matter beam may encounter insurmountable decoherence. But Chase’s argument is that civilization can’t discover the transformative 10 percent without giving serious people permission to explore the other 90—and insisting that, when the data arrives, they tell the truth about what it says.

References

Interview and Background

Coherent Matter Waves

Fluctuation Flow Propulsion

Garret Moddel and Quantum-Noise Power

Harold “Sonny” White and the Casimir Power Cell


Chance Glenn's Experimental Spacetime Distortion & Warp Research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8nnitDwYzU

Inside a shielded enclosure, a high-voltage spark gap will sit at one end of a carefully balanced arm, with an equal mass mounted at the other. The arm will hang from a thin tungsten wire, while a laser reflected from a small mirror magnifies any minute rotation onto a distant sensor. Dr. Chance Glenn believes the apparatus may detect movement created not by expelled propellant, air currents, or ordinary electromagnetic forces, but by a localized distortion of spacetime. The claim is extraordinary, and Glenn knows the next result must be harder to dismiss than the optical fringe shifts he previously reported. Supported by an Innovate Alabama Supplemental Grant, his new experiment is designed to search for force in the micronewton range and possibly below. It won’t build a starship, and it may not move at all. But if the arm produces a repeatable, reversible deflection that survives vacuum testing, electromagnetic shielding, control runs, and independent replication, Glenn argues that it could represent an early step toward an electrically powered propulsion system that doesn’t consume propellant.

A New University, an Old Ambition

Glenn is pursuing that experiment while beginning a demanding new chapter at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Founded in 1856, Wilberforce is the nation’s oldest private historically Black university owned and operated by African Americans. Glenn joined the institution in 2026 in engineering and graduate-studies leadership and as Special Assistant to the President, with a mandate to strengthen engineering, technology, scientific research, academic partnerships, and graduate education. The opportunity arrived after he’d deliberately stepped away from senior academic administration so he could concentrate on teaching, laboratory work, paper writing, and collaboration. A former colleague who had become Wilberforce’s president eventually persuaded him to return to institutional leadership. Glenn told podcast host Tim Ventura that the new assignment has been “nonstop,” but he added, “I love it.”

The role draws on a career spanning approximately four decades. Glenn worked as an engineer at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory from 1986 to 1997, where his interests included microwave systems, nonlinear dynamics, physics, and advanced engineering. He later founded Syncrodyne Systems Corporation, taught electrical engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and served as RIT’s associate dean of graduate studies. From 2012 to 2019, he led Alabama A&M University’s College of Engineering, Technology and Physical Sciences. He then served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Houston–Victoria before returning to Alabama A&M as a professor and research director. His academic training includes a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland and master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, along with management studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

Running parallel to that institutional career is Morningbird Space Corporation, which Glenn has led since 2012. He describes the company as a mechanism for moving ideas from concept to research, from research to prototype, and eventually from prototype to commercial product. Its interests extend beyond advanced propulsion into robotics, additive manufacturing, autonomous construction, STEM education, workforce development, and interplanetary transportation. Glenn told Ventura that Morningbird is the practical embodiment of a fascination he’s carried since childhood. “Space and being able to go out there and see what’s out there and extend humanity’s reach beyond planet Earth,” he said, “that’s something that’s always been a part of me.” He’s also attempting to connect the company’s commercial programs with educational opportunities through Alabama A&M, Wilberforce, and a planned technical-training initiative called Morningbird Academy.

The latest financial support comes from the Innovate Alabama Supplemental Grant Program, which provides non-dilutive state funding to companies that have already received federal Small Business Innovation Research or Small Business Technology Transfer awards. Under the program’s published rules, Phase I recipients may seek up to half the value of their federal award, capped at $100,000, while Phase II recipients may seek as much as $250,000. Morningbird hasn’t publicly disclosed the amount of its award. Glenn’s 2025 experimental paper identifies the underlying federal support as an NSF Phase I SBIR grant. Morningbird says the state supplement will fund construction of an apparatus intended to measure and quantify possible force from its Experimental Spacetime Distortion system, in collaboration with Alabama A&M through the AAMU-RISE Foundation. Glenn summarized the philosophy behind the work in the grant announcement: “Reaching the farthest destination requires the first step.”

Beyond Alcubierre’s Negative-Energy Barrier

The theoretical starting point is physicist Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 warp-drive metric, a mathematical solution to Einstein’s field equations in which spacetime contracts ahead of a craft and expands behind it. The craft wouldn’t locally accelerate through space faster than light. Instead, the geometry surrounding it would change, allowing the enclosed region to move relative to distant observers without the spacecraft itself breaking the local light-speed limit. The idea was elegant enough to make “warp drive” a legitimate subject for general-relativity research, but it arrived with severe physical problems. The original configuration appeared to require negative energy density, enormous total energy, unusual stress-energy distributions, and a means of creating and controlling a stable spacetime geometry that no known technology can produce.

Researchers have spent the last three decades exploring whether modified geometries, positive-energy configurations, subluminal shells, soliton-like structures, or alternative stress-energy distributions might reduce those problems. The literature has produced interesting mathematical constructions, but no working warp device, and physicists continue to disagree about which formulations can satisfy physically reasonable energy conditions. Glenn entered that debate through a 2026 paper in the Journal of Material Sciences and Engineering Technology titled “Overcoming the Negative Energy Density Requirements in the Alcubierre Warp Field Equations with a Complex Shaping Function.” Rather than accepting the original real-valued shaping function, Glenn proposed treating it as a complex quantity whose imaginary component is equal to or larger than its real component.

In Glenn’s formulation, that mathematical change alters the sign of the energy-density result, allowing the equations to yield a positive, non-exotic requirement under the assumptions of his model. The paper examines several candidate shaping functions and simulates the corresponding spacetime profile, time deformation, and energy-density distribution around a hypothetical warp region. To translate the mathematics into hardware, Glenn proposed a radio-frequency resonant cavity filled with a lossy dielectric material. A lossy dielectric has both real and imaginary components in its electromagnetic response, which gave him a possible physical analogue for the complex shaping function. He identified ethylene glycol—the principal ingredient in many antifreeze products—as one candidate because, at relevant frequencies, its dielectric response can have a sufficiently large imaginary component.

Glenn built an early cavity experiment, filled it with the dielectric, energized it with radio-frequency power, and passed a laser through the system to search for a change in optical path length. The experiment didn’t produce a convincing positive result. He concluded that he couldn’t place enough energy into the cavity to create a measurable effect, and rather than treating the failed attempt as proof that the underlying idea was impossible, he changed the engineering question. “I pivoted because I asked the question in a different way,” he told Ventura. The cavity concept appears in a published U.S. patent application titled “Method and System for Generating a Warp Field.” A second application, “System for the Generation of Gravitational Waves,” covers the later spark-gap architecture. Both are applications rather than issued patents, and neither constitutes experimental validation.

The Fringe Shift at the Center of the Claim

Glenn’s pivot was based on a simple observation: if a large resonant cavity couldn’t reach the required energy density, perhaps a tiny plasma could. His experimental apparatus begins with a signal generator feeding a 100-watt amplifier, which drives a high-voltage transformer capable of producing potentials around 400,000 volts. That voltage breaks down the gas between two sharpened tungsten electrodes, creating a brief spark plasma. The electrode separation can be adjusted, with the published experiments using gaps on the order of a few millimeters. Because the plasma occupies a tiny volume and forms rapidly, Glenn argues that its local energy density and rate of change can become extremely high even though the total input energy remains modest by propulsion standards.

The paper models the plasma as a narrow cylindrical volume with a radius near 0.25 millimeters. Depending on which portion of the analysis is used, its estimates span several orders of magnitude. The theoretical discussion describes possible energy densities in the range of (10^{11}) to (10^{12}) joules per cubic meter, while plotted experimental comparisons include approximately 1.4 and 2.4 gigajoules per cubic meter. The conclusion states that the reported effect appeared once the plasma exceeded roughly 1 gigajoule per cubic meter. Glenn’s argument also depends on how rapidly that density changes as the spark forms. The paper estimates power densities near (8\times10^{10}) to (10^{11}) watts per cubic meter for its tested gap lengths, although those values depend on assumptions about the spark’s geometry, current, pulse duration, and energy distribution.

To detect a possible optical-path change near the spark, Glenn used a Michelson interferometer in a common-path configuration. A beam splitter divided laser light into mirrored paths and recombined it to form alternating bright and dark interference fringes. The setup used both a 532-nanometer green laser and a 650-nanometer red laser, with mirrors about 150 millimeters from the splitter, a screen about 500 millimeters away, and a stated optical path length of 725 millimeters. A camera recording at 30 frames per second tracked the fringe positions while the spark repeated at rates no greater than about five pulses per second. The two wavelengths were important because ordinary changes in refractive index frequently vary with wavelength; a genuinely geometric change in the optical path should be less dependent on the laser’s color.

The paper reports maximum fringe displacements of approximately 140 to 160 nanometers, synchronized with the spark. The displacement reportedly increased with input power, decreased as the spark was moved away from the beam, and disappeared when the spark was about 20 millimeters or more from the laser path. Tests with the gap oriented at zero and 90 degrees relative to the beam produced broadly similar results. Glenn also reported that helium didn’t eliminate the shift, that the effect appeared more pronounced under some helium conditions, and that multiple gaps produced apparently additive displacements. In the interview, he summarized the central observation without qualification: “Every time it sparked, you see the fringes move.” The published interpretation is that something near the spark increased the optical path length and that spacetime distortion remained after attempts to mitigate vibration, shock, heat, refraction, and electromagnetic interference.

The Measurement Problem

An interferometer fringe shift establishes that the optical conditions changed somewhere in the system. It doesn’t, by itself, identify the cause. A high-voltage spark is a difficult object to place near a precision optical instrument because it simultaneously creates plasma, light, heat, acoustic impulses, pressure waves, ionized gas, mechanical vibration, electrostatic fields, magnetic fields, radio-frequency emissions, and potentially tiny movements in wiring and structural components. Any one of those effects can influence a beam, a mirror, the surrounding air, the camera, or the electronics. Glenn’s paper discusses efforts to reduce those alternatives, including vibration isolation, varying distance and orientation, comparing two laser wavelengths, testing helium, looking for chromatic dispersion, and observing whether the effect vanished when the spark was moved farther away.

The wavelength and orientation tests are among the most important features of the experiment. Glenn argues that if hot plasma were simply changing the refractive index, the 532- and 650-nanometer beams should respond differently because dispersion depends on wavelength. The similar measured displacement therefore weighs against at least some refractive explanations. He also argues that an ordinary pressure wave should travel farther than 20 millimeters and show a stronger dependence on the spark’s orientation. Those are reasonable control ideas, but they don’t exhaust the possibilities. Thermal lensing can be complicated, plasma density can evolve faster than a 30-frame-per-second camera resolves, electromagnetic interference can enter through cables or sensors, and common-path interferometers can still respond to local mechanical or optical changes.

The numerical scale makes rigorous controls especially important. Glenn’s paper uses the standard strain relationship (h=\Delta L/L), where (\Delta L) is the optical-path change and (L) is the original path length. Applying that formula to a 140-to-160-nanometer displacement over 725 millimeters yields a nominal strain of approximately (1.9\times10^{-7}) to (2.2\times10^{-7}). For comparison, the peak strain measured during LIGO’s first direct detection of an astrophysical gravitational wave was about (10^{-21}). The two situations aren’t directly comparable: LIGO measured a wave that had traveled from a black-hole merger roughly 1.3 billion light-years away, while Glenn describes a localized near-field optical-path effect only millimeters from its source. Still, the roughly 14-order difference shows why conventional explanations must be excluded with exceptional care.

The paper has attracted substantial attention, but attention isn’t replication. As of August 2026, the publisher’s page showed roughly 17,400 reads, more than 1,000 downloads, and no listed citations. Glenn says the major components are available to a conventional laboratory and that the paper provides enough information for another group to attempt a reproduction. “I would welcome that,” he told Ventura. Independent teams would ideally bring complementary expertise in precision interferometry, high-voltage plasma, thermal modeling, electromagnetic compatibility, vibration analysis, and general relativity. Replication won’t be established by reproducing a moving fringe alone. It will require reproducing the signal under matched controls, confirming the same scaling laws, and showing that independent instruments identify the same physical mechanism.

The Pendulum Test

The new experiment is intended to move beyond light and ask whether the device produces force. Glenn’s team is constructing a torsion balance designed in computer-aided design software by engineer Corey Mack. A horizontal arm will be suspended from a thin tungsten wire. The spark-gap assembly and its shielding will be mounted on one side, with an appropriate counterweight on the other. If the source generates a lateral force, the arm should rotate slightly and twist the wire. Because the torsional properties of the wire can be calibrated, an observed angular displacement can be converted into torque and then into an estimated force.

A small mirror mounted near the balance will provide the optical readout. A laser beam reflected from that mirror will travel to a distant screen or position-sensitive detector, creating an optical lever that magnifies an extremely small rotation into a larger displacement of the laser spot. Glenn says the system is being designed to search for forces at the micronewton level and perhaps smaller. The spark-gap assembly will operate inside a Faraday cage to suppress electrostatic and radio-frequency coupling. Glenn also intends to conduct testing in a vacuum, which would reduce ion wind, convection, buoyancy, pressure pulses, and other effects associated with air. “It’s a standard physics experiment,” he explained. “We’re just applying it to our particular concept to see if and how much thrust is actually created.”

Even a vacuum chamber and Faraday cage won’t automatically make the result unambiguous. High-voltage systems can produce forces through charged surfaces, magnetic interaction, cable motion, thermal expansion, asymmetric outgassing, vibration, shifting centers of mass, and mechanical relaxation in the suspension wire. At the force levels Glenn hopes to measure, a small temperature gradient or slow structural drift can look like propulsion. Precision-force experiments have repeatedly shown that the hardest part isn’t making a pendulum move; it’s demonstrating that the movement follows the proposed mechanism rather than an overlooked environmental coupling.

A persuasive test would therefore require more than a simple comparison between power off and power on. Runs should be randomized, and the analyst should be blinded to the operating sequence where practical. The source should be rotated so that a genuine directional force reverses while the thermal load remains similar. Electrically equivalent dummy loads should reproduce power consumption and heating without creating the same plasma geometry. Accelerometers, magnetometers, temperature sensors, vacuum gauges, and high-voltage diagnostics should record continuously. The decisive pattern would be a signal that appears on command, scales predictably with a defined electrical parameter, reverses when the apparatus is reversed, persists under vacuum and shielding, disappears in controls, and reappears in another laboratory. Glenn has framed the threshold succinctly: “If it’s non-zero and it’s scalable, then we can go to the next step.”

From Micronewtons to Starflight

If the apparatus detects only a very small force, Glenn sees satellite station-keeping as a more plausible first application than a crewed warp ship. Satellites carry finite propellant for orbit adjustment, momentum management, collision avoidance, and eventual disposal. Once that propellant is exhausted, an otherwise functional spacecraft may lose much of its operational value. An electrically powered device that could generate continuous force without consuming reaction mass might extend a mission as long as the spacecraft retained electrical power and the propulsion hardware remained reliable. Even a tiny force could be useful if the maneuver is gradual and the system can operate for months or years.

The arithmetic also exposes the distance between a laboratory signal and interstellar travel. A continuous force of one micronewton applied to a one-kilogram object produces an acceleration of (10^{-6}) meters per second squared. If that force acted perfectly and continuously for a full year, it would change the object’s velocity by about 31.6 meters per second. Applied to a 10-kilogram spacecraft, it would add roughly 3.16 meters per second per year. By contrast, reaching one-tenth the speed of light in 10 years would require an average acceleration of approximately 0.095 meters per second squared—around 95,000 times greater than one micronewton per kilogram. Continuous operation matters, but so do force-to-mass ratio, electrical efficiency, waste heat, control authority, structural mass, and scalability.

Glenn and his collaborators have proposed other applications that are even more speculative. His 2025 paper introduces “gwavelets,” multiple spark-gap elements driven with controlled phase, amplitude, and frequency so their reported effects might combine into a shaped or steerable field. A conceptual 4-by-4 array is presented as a possible route toward reinforcing the disturbance. Glenn has also worked with researcher Greg Hodgin and fusion-propulsion specialist Jason Cassibry on the idea that a controllable spacetime gradient might redirect escaping neutrons and improve fusion confinement. The paper mentions communications, biological processes, reaction-rate changes, and localized time effects as additional possibilities.

Each of those ideas sits farther down the evidentiary chain than the torsion balance. Before researchers can discuss steering a field, confining fusion products, modifying reaction rates, or generating useful propulsion, they must establish that the optical shift is reproducible, identify its physical cause, demonstrate a controlled mechanical effect, and quantify how that effect scales with power and geometry. A null torsion-balance result wouldn’t make the interferometer data worthless, but it would undercut the assumption that the reported optical-path change can generate propulsion. A positive result wouldn’t prove warp drive either. It would create a narrower and more productive question: what force is being measured, and can every conventional mechanism be ruled out?

Faith, Star Trek, and the Permission to Be Wrong

The machinery is only part of Glenn’s story. His book, Chasing God, traces his upbringing in a deeply religious Southern family, his years singing and writing gospel music, and the questions that emerged as he became an engineer and scientist. Those questions include the age of the Earth, the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere, the relationship between evidence and belief, and whether unexplained personal experiences reveal anything beyond human psychology. Glenn doesn’t present the book as a proof of God or a tidy reconciliation between science and religion. “I don’t try to tie it into a neat bow,” he told Ventura. “I just ask questions, and I let the reader ask the questions along with me.”

That attitude parallels the way Glenn describes scientific research, although he draws a sharp distinction between faith and evidence. Religious beliefs may be treated as immutable, he said, while scientific beliefs must change when the evidence changes. He discussed the “God of the gaps,” the tendency to place divine action inside whatever science hasn’t yet explained, and noted that many of those gaps shrink as knowledge advances. At the same time, he sees conviction and curiosity as psychologically important to invention. A researcher has to believe an experiment is worth attempting without confusing that motivation with proof that the hypothesis is correct.

His other formative mythology is Star Trek. Glenn has described Morningbird Space as a practical expression of the future the series taught him to imagine. After William Shatner’s Blue Origin flight, Glenn encountered the actor at South by Southwest and approached him to say that Star Trek had inspired his work. According to Glenn, Shatner looked up and asked, “Do I know you from somewhere?” Glenn later joked that perhaps a future version of himself had traveled back to the original television set. The conversation became serious enough that Shatner repeatedly called him back to continue discussing warp-drive research. The anecdote adds warmth to Glenn’s story without turning cultural inspiration into scientific evidence.

The most revealing statement Glenn made during the interview was also the least romantic. “Nature doesn’t care about our equations and our theories and hypotheses,” he said. “It’s just going to do what it does.” That sentence contains both the attraction and the danger of his research program. Equations can suggest possibilities, interferometers can reveal anomalies, patents can describe inventions, and grants can fund better instruments, but none of them can compel nature to produce a warp field. The tungsten wire and reflected laser will get the next vote. For now, the question isn’t whether Glenn has built a starship engine. It’s whether a spark inside a shielded, calibrated apparatus can make a pendulum move—and whether another laboratory can make it move again.

References


APEC 8/29: Exodus Propellantless Propulsion & Quantized Inertia


Charles Buhler will discuss his continuing work on the the physics model for Exodus Propellantless Propulsion, Andrew Aurigema will discuss his ongoing experimental research with Exodus, and Mike McCulloch will be discussing the theory, applications, and experimental validation of his physics model of Quantized Inertia. We’ll also hear updates from our lab partners, then close with an open discussion and Q&A with attendees.

12:00pm PT – Charles Buhler – Exodus Propellantless Propulsion Physics

Charles Buhler discusses a new quantum physics model that explains propellantless propulsion in asymmetrical field-effect thrusters. His team has built and patented a new type of propulsion device currently producing over 1 Earth Gravity of force, using no propellant, and careful testing in hard-vacuum indicates that the force generated isn’t based on known effects such as ion-wind or conventional electrostatic forces. His partner, Andrew Aurigema from Exodus, presents experimental updates regularly at APEC – in this presentation, Buhler will provide theory to support Drew’s remarkable experimental results and provide updates on what has changed now that Exodus is growing as an organization with a dedicated research laboratory and team growth and development.

1:00pm PT – Andrew Aurigema – Exodus Propellantless Propulsion Engineering

Aerospace engineer Andrew “Drew” Aurigema will be describing his ongoing experimental testing and development of Exodus Effect propulsion devices, which utilize a novel approach to asymmetrical electrostatic pressure. Over the last few years, Drew has increased the propulsive thrust output by many orders of magnitude, and he will describe his latest refinements and experiments. He will also discuss some of the experimental methodologies used, including how his team attempts to exclude ion wind, electrostatic attraction, thermal drift, cable forces, vibration, and other possible sources of false-positive results. He'll also be updating us on what has changed now that Exodus has a dedicated research laboratory and is beginning to build a professional engineering team.

2:00pm PT – Mike McCulloch –Quantized Inertia Theory & Application

Mike will provide a high-level overview of his model of Quantized Inertia and how it relates to the concept of the Horizon Drive, as well as discussing potential real-world validation of his model via anomalous orbital changes in recent IVO space experiments. Dr. McCullough's work proposes that the phenomenon called inertia is caused by relativistic horizons making the quantum vacuum non-uniform in space and this offers a new way to engineer thrust for any type of vehicle or spacecraft (horizon engineering). The prediction is that we can use electrical conductors or nano-engineered materials to make ‘synthetic horizons’, damping the quantum vacuum, in a similar way to the Casimir effect, and engineer thrust without propellant.

3:00pm PT – Lab Partners – Experimental Research Updates

Learn about hands-on engineering & technical research on advanced propulsion experiments by our lab partners. Mark Sokol's team at Falcon Space is full engaged in Dynamic Nuclear Polarization research & testing; Drew Aurigema continues testing and refinement on the Exodus effect propulsion device, and Curtis Horn is focused on Mach effect propulsion on the MEGA-Drive team.

4:00pm PT – Open Discussion & Ad-Hoc Presentations

Conference guests interested in presenting experimental info to the group are invited to participate at this time, and our presenters will be available to take questions & discuss experiments.


APEC 7/11: Torsion Cavitation Drives, ZPF Tech & Mass Displacement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USIpPbGUOH0

Al Baur on Advancements in Electrostatic Levitation, Gabriel Dias will discuss Boundary Conditioned Vacuum Interaction Systems and ZPF Tech research, Jennifer Nielsen will discuss torsion cavitation drives in the TUFTS model of physics, and Denny Okudinani will be presenting on A Brief Historical and technical Look at Solid-State Spatial Mass Displacement. We’ll also hear updates from our lab partners, then close with an open discussion and Q&A with attendees.

12:00pm PT – Al Baur – Advancements in Electrostatic Levitation

Al Baur's updated & revised presentation will explore the practical design, testing, and scientific implications of electrostatic levitators. The talk will cover how to measure levitator energy use, what makes a levitator stable and high quality, and how tools such as AM radios and EMP detectors can be used to identify ion activity. Baur will also discuss the challenges of handmade levitators, the potential and current limitations of conductive PLA and 3D-printed materials, and demonstrate multiple levitators operating within the same trajectory. The presentation then expands into the broader physics behind electrostatics, gravity, Maxwell’s equations, Einstein’s mass-energy relationship, and the difference between speculative “anti-gravity” devices and legitimate fundamental research into gravity, electromagnetism, and possible deviations from current theory.

1:00pm PT – Gabriel Dias – Boundary Conditioned Vacuum Interaction Systems

Gabriel Corradini Lourenço Dias presenting on Boundary Conditioned Vacuum Interaction Systems and introducing a diagnostics framework for dynamic electrodynamic environments. Gabriel is a volunteer with Douglas Miller's ZPF Technologies startup, and will be discussing the team's efforts to incorporate a huge level of governance into their research. This is focused on removing overstated claims and developing a solid diagnostics framework.  Miller suggests that if all particles and subatomic particles are “jittered” by the ZPE and it’s responsible for keeping electrons in their orbits then it is a variable and a “third body problem” that is unaccounted for in certain areas of physics like fusion. Dynamic Casimir effects, Josephson Junction, and Aharanov-Bohm all justify further pursuing this.  Even if the ZPF Array never produces thrust it would serve as a perfect measuring and diagnostics device of ZPE participation and organization.

2:00pm PT – Jennifer Nielsen – Torsion Cavitation Drives

Jennifer Neilsen is presenting a hypothesis that begins with the Standard Navier–Stokes equations failing to reproduce four key quantitative features of the Barger experiment that were published in 1964 and have never been retracted or explained away. In contrast, the TUFT model reproduces all four from first principles with the same equations that also predict the UAP performance envelope. She argues that not only does TUFT explain real physics that Navier–Stokes cannot, but also that the Barger 1964 experiment was not producing an acoustic analog of torsion, but instead an actual, macroscopic, low-energy spacetime torsion. In this hypothesis, the cavitation shells were the visible hydrodynamic signature of a real torsion domain wall.

3:00pm PT – ⁨Denny Okudinani⁩  – Solid-State Spatial Mass Displacement

Denny will be providing an follow up presentation to his earlier work on "A Brief Historical and Techincal Look at Solid-State Spatial Mass Displacement". This includes principles that he has described that apply to the model used to explain the Schauberger Repulsine, along with research and experiments Denny has done to refine his model and provide insights into how implosion cab be used for solid-state mass displacement.

4:00pm PT – Lab Partners – Experimental Research Updates

Learn about hands-on engineering & technical research on advanced propulsion experiments by our lab partners. Mark Sokol's team at Falcon Space is full engaged in Dynamic Nuclear Polarization research & testing; Drew Aurigema continues testing and refinement on the Exodus effect propulsion device, and Curtis Horn is focused on Mach effect propulsion on the MEGA-Drive team.

5:00pm PT – Open Discussion & Ad-Hoc Presentations

Conference guests interested in presenting experimental info to the group are invited to participate at this time, and our presenters will be available to take questions & discuss experiments.


The Third Observable: Hypersonic Velocity without Signatures

A UAP moving through the air at hypersonic speed should have a glowing plasma sheath and massive sonic boom, while one entering the ocean should produce impact forces, vapor, cavitation and an acoustic pulse. Yet a recurring claim in the modern UAP literature describes objects that appear to do none of these things, which Lue Elizondo first popularized as "The Third Observable: Hypersonic Velocity Without Signatures." Either the estimated velocities are wrong, the expected effects weren't detected, or the UAP simply isn't interacting with the surrounding medium in the way we expect. The difference among those possibilities may be found not by staring harder at the object, but by measuring what happens to the air and water around it.

The Third Observable

The “Five Observables” are a popular framework for describing the most unusual capabilities attributed to unidentified anomalous phenomena. The list includes lift without visible flight surfaces, sudden acceleration, hypersonic velocity without signatures, transmedium travel and low observability. It was popularized in discussions of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and has since appeared in scientific and advocacy literature. It isn’t a law of nature, an official diagnostic standard or proof that any particular object possesses these capabilities. It’s a way of grouping claims that seem difficult to reconcile with ordinary aircraft.

The third item is more precise than it first sounds. “Hypersonic” generally refers to flight faster than five times the local speed of sound. “Without signatures” refers to an alleged absence of the effects expected from that motion: sonic booms, atmospheric heating, shock waves, exhaust, luminous plasma, turbulence, contrails or other environmental disturbances. In stronger versions of the claim, an object also appears to change direction at extreme speed without an accompanying pressure wave or heat release.

But an eyewitness who doesn’t report a boom hasn’t demonstrated that no shock wave existed. A camera that doesn’t record a fireball hasn’t shown that no infrared heating occurred. The word “without” can mean that a signature was absent, that it wasn’t noticed, that no suitable instrument was operating, or that the report simply didn’t mention it. A scientifically useful version of the Third Observable therefore requires more than a fast-looking light and a quiet witness. It requires an independently measured trajectory and a deliberate search for the expected effects.

That distinction makes the Third Observable unusually valuable. Most UAP questions focus on the object’s appearance, origin or purpose. This one can be reframed as an environmental test. If the velocity is real, the surrounding medium should independently record the motion. If the air and water don’t respond as conventional physics predicts, either the kinematic estimate has failed or the interaction itself has changed. Both outcomes would be informative.

The Atmosphere Keeps the Score

Air feels insubstantial because people move through it slowly. To a fast vehicle, it’s a continuous stream of mass that must be accelerated, compressed and displaced. The faster the object moves, the more rapidly it encounters new molecules and the more energy it transfers to them. That transfer appears as pressure, heat, motion and sound. The atmosphere, in this sense, is a distributed detector that surrounds every aerial object.

Aerodynamic drag has several components. Skin-friction drag develops in the boundary layer, the thin region where viscosity causes the gas near a solid surface to slow relative to the outer flow. Pressure drag arises because the object has to push air out of its path. At transonic and supersonic speeds, wave drag becomes important as the vehicle generates compression waves and shocks. Changing the hull’s shape can redistribute these effects, but it can’t make the surrounding mass irrelevant.

A supersonic body creates a shock system because pressure disturbances can’t move ahead through the air fast enough to prepare it for the object’s arrival. The disturbances accumulate into abrupt jumps in pressure, density and temperature. As the shock propagates toward the ground, it may be heard as a boom. A vehicle moving along a long supersonic path creates a continuing corridor of shocks rather than emitting one isolated sound at the instant it crosses the sound barrier.

Not everyone beneath that corridor will necessarily hear it. Altitude, weather, temperature gradients, terrain and the direction of propagation can bend or weaken a shock before it reaches a particular observer. A small object high in the atmosphere might produce a signal that’s difficult to detect. Low-boom aircraft can spread pressure changes into a softer sound. These qualifications matter, but they don’t mean the shock disappeared. They mean a local failure to hear it isn’t the same thing as an instrumented null result.

When Hypersonic Becomes Meteoric

The label “hypersonic” covers an enormous range. A vehicle at Mach 5 is operating in a difficult but recognizable aerospace regime. The Mach 40 to Mach 60 velocities cited in parts of the UAP literature correspond, depending on atmospheric conditions, to roughly 30,000 to 45,000 miles per hour. Those speeds are comparable to the atmospheric entry velocities of meteoroids, not to ordinary aircraft.

At such speeds, the familiar explanation that heating comes from air “rubbing” on a hull is incomplete. The dominant process near the nose is rapid compression. Air in the shock layer is forced to slow and redirect over a very short distance, converting organized motion into internal energy. Molecules begin to vibrate, then break apart. At sufficiently high temperatures, electrons separate from atoms and molecules, creating a partially ionized plasma.

That environment should produce several kinds of evidence. Hot gas may radiate in visible and infrared wavelengths. Ionized material can absorb, reflect or scatter radio waves. It can alter radar returns and interrupt communications. The shock deposits momentum into the atmosphere and eventually generates sound. A long atmospheric path may leave excited chemical species, turbulence and an ionized trail that persists after the object has passed.

A visible fireball isn’t guaranteed every time something exceeds Mach 5. Size, altitude, shape, duration and atmospheric density all matter. But a substantial object moving at the much higher speeds sometimes claimed for UAP in the lower atmosphere would be hard to reconcile with a complete absence of energy deposition. That’s the basis of Avi Loeb and Sean Kirkpatrick’s argument that such an object should produce a luminous, ionized disturbance. When the disturbance is missing, they contend, the first suspicion should fall on the inferred distance and speed.

The Measurement Problem

A camera measures direction, brightness and angular motion. It doesn’t automatically measure distance. A small nearby object can sweep across a camera’s field of view as rapidly as a large distant one. Without range, the same angular motion can represent a drifting balloon, a bird near the sensor or a vehicle traveling at extraordinary speed many miles away. Platform motion, lens distortion, zoom, image stabilization and tracking behavior can further alter the apparent motion.

The Navy’s widely circulated “GoFast” video is a useful example. Its name and the aircrew’s reactions encouraged the impression that the object was racing just above the ocean. A later analysis by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office concluded that the apparent velocity was primarily a parallax effect created by the aircraft’s own motion and viewing geometry. The object was assessed as moving at an unremarkable speed rather than displaying anomalous performance.

The 2013 Aguadilla video has produced a sharper disagreement. An analysis associated with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies interpreted the infrared imagery as showing a single object traveling rapidly, dividing or appearing to divide, and entering the ocean without slowing or splashing. AARO’s 2025 resolution reached a different conclusion: it identified two objects, probably sky lanterns, drifting over land, with parallax and obscured terrain creating the illusion of high speed and water entry.

These examples don’t prove that all extraordinary UAP motion is illusory. They show how easily the Third Observable can be manufactured by incomplete geometry. A compelling case needs synchronized views from separated locations, independent range measurements, calibrated sensor metadata and access to the original files. If the velocity exists only after an analyst assumes the distance, the missing sonic boom may be evidence against the assumption rather than evidence for exotic propulsion.

The Cases Behind the Claim

The 2004 Nimitz encounter remains central because it involved trained military witnesses, shipborne radar reports and an infrared recording. Navy aviators described a white, oblong object maneuvering above a patch of disturbed water. Radar operators later reported that unusual tracks had appeared at high altitude and descended rapidly. The object seen by the pilots reportedly accelerated away without visible exhaust, wings or an obvious sonic disturbance.

Knuth, Robert Powell and Peter Reali used published accounts of the encounter and several older cases to estimate the accelerations involved. Their 2019 analysis produced values ranging from almost 100 times Earth’s gravity to several thousand times it. They noted that the reported maneuvers weren’t accompanied by proportional heat, sonic booms or atmospheric disruption. Knuth’s larger 2025 review presents such reports as examples of the Third Observable.

Those calculations deserve attention, but they’re only as reliable as the inputs. Much of the Nimitz radar evidence available to the public consists of operator recollections and summarized performance rather than original track files. Exact range, timing and target association can’t always be reconstructed. Older estimates associated with rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth and other early investigators relied on visual timing, witness geometry and early radar reports. They aren’t equivalent to a modern, openly available multisensor track.

NASA engineer Paul Hill argued in his posthumously published analysis of UFO reports that unusual craft, if they existed, should obey rather than defy physics. That remains a useful standard. The Third Observable shouldn’t be established by selecting the largest reported speed and pairing it with silence. It has to emerge from a chain of measurements strong enough that errors in range, timing, identity and sensor interpretation can no longer explain the discrepancy.

Green Fireballs and the Signature Paradox

The Third Observable is often framed around a missing fireball, but UAP history contains another puzzle: luminous objects that looked like fireballs while behaving, according to witnesses, unlike ordinary meteors. Beginning in late 1948, pilots, military personnel, residents and scientists reported brilliant green objects over New Mexico. Some appeared to follow flat trajectories near Los Alamos, Sandia and other sensitive facilities.

Meteor specialist Lincoln La Paz investigated the reports and attempted to reconstruct trajectories to predicted impact sites. He reportedly found no meteorites. At a 1949 scientific meeting, La Paz emphasized the flat flight paths, unusual color and absence of recovered material. Physicist Edward Teller focused on the reported lack of sound and argued that an ordinary meteor should’ve produced an acoustic or shock-wave effect. The meeting settled provisionally on an unidentified electro-optical or natural phenomenon.

That uncertainty led to Project Twinkle, an Air Force effort intended to photograph and measure the events using cine-theodolites. Plans called for several stations capable of triangulation, but limited funding left the project with one mobile camera that repeatedly missed the reported activity. Some photographic observations were made during missile tests, yet the resulting geometry was inadequate. The project ended without a persuasive explanation.

The episode shouldn’t be read as proof that the green fireballs were engineered vehicles. Meteors can appear green, recoverable fragments are rare, and high-altitude acoustic signals may not reach a witness. What the history shows is that “fireball” isn’t a complete diagnosis. Spectrum, trajectory, altitude, duration, infrasound, radar, ionization and debris all matter. Project Twinkle failed largely because it couldn’t collect those measurements together.

The Ocean Penalty

The Fourth Observable, transmedium travel, is the Third Observable under harsher conditions. Liquid water near the surface is roughly 800 times as dense as air. An object entering the ocean must suddenly accelerate far more mass out of its path. At high speed, the resulting pressure can damage a vehicle before it has penetrated very far. Energy is transferred into impact waves, spray, heat, vapor, bubbles and underwater sound.

The Nimitz witnesses’ report of roiling water may indicate that some physical disturbance was present, although its cause remains uncertain. The Aguadilla interpretation goes further by claiming an object repeatedly crossed the air-water boundary without significant deceleration, splash or wake. Because AARO disputes that interpretation, Aguadilla illustrates both the importance of the transmedium claim and the danger of relying on a single viewing geometry.

Supercavitation provides a real engineering comparison. A specially designed vehicle can form a gas or vapor cavity around most of its body, greatly reducing the area in contact with liquid water. This permits underwater speeds far above those of conventional submarines and torpedoes. But the technique doesn’t abolish drag. The nose must still interact with water, the cavity must be created and stabilized, and the system produces bubbles, a wake, noise and severe control challenges.

A genuinely all-media vehicle would need more than an aerodynamic hull. It would need an adaptive interface capable of operating in vacuum, thin Martian air, Earth’s atmosphere, dense planetary gases and liquid oceans. The system might use different mechanisms in each regime, but its purpose would be the same: prevent the surrounding matter from depositing destructive momentum and heat into the vehicle.

Can Plasma Control the Shock?

A conventional hypersonic vehicle already creates a potentially controllable interface. Shock-heated gas around it can become partially ionized, forming a plasma sheath. Aerospace engineers usually treat this sheath as a hazard because it increases thermal complexity, modifies radar scattering and can block radio communications. But plasma also contains charged particles that respond to electric and magnetic fields.

Magnetohydrodynamic flow control attempts to exploit that response. Electric currents in an ionized flow can interact with a magnetic field to produce forces on the plasma. Models and experiments have examined whether this can move a bow shock farther from a vehicle, change pressure distribution, reduce local heat flux or open a temporary communications window. Plasma actuators can also alter boundary-layer separation and flow near surfaces.

These effects are real, but their limitations are severe. A weakly ionized gas is still mostly neutral. Charged particles must transfer momentum to neutral molecules through collisions before the bulk flow changes. Preionizing the air, generating strong fields and supplying electrical power all have costs. Any energy that’s kept away from one part of the hull must be stored, redirected or released elsewhere.

Plasma control therefore offers a plausible way to reshape signatures, not erase them. A smaller pressure peak might be accompanied by radio emissions. Reduced wall heating might produce a larger luminous sheath farther from the vehicle. Magnetic control might alter radar appearance while creating detectable field disturbances. An advanced craft could conceivably trade one signature for another, but it couldn’t simply make the surrounding air cease to carry energy and momentum.

Would a Warp Bubble Have Drag?

A classical aerodynamic boundary layer requires a material surface. Viscosity brings the gas directly beside that surface toward the same velocity as the vehicle, creating the shear gradient responsible for skin friction. If a spacecraft were enclosed inside an engineered region of spacetime and the air never reached its hull, ordinary skin-friction drag on the craft might be absent.

That possibility is often associated with Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 warp-drive metric, which describes a region of spacetime contracting in front of a craft and expanding behind it. In the idealized construction, the craft rests inside the moving region rather than accelerating conventionally through local space. The original solution requires negative energy, and most discussions assume a vacuum rather than a bubble traveling through an atmosphere or ocean.

The external medium remains a problem. Air molecules approaching the field must pass through it, bend around it, become trapped, move with it or be accelerated away. Studies of matter interacting with idealized warp geometries have found that particles may accumulate, gain energy or be released in dangerous bursts. The field might shield the hull while creating a new shock or radiation hazard at the bubble boundary.

A warp bubble therefore wouldn’t automatically be an aerodynamic cloak. A broad, gradually varying field might begin redirecting matter far ahead of the craft, spreading momentum transfer across a large volume and weakening a sharp shock. A compact field could behave like an invisible solid obstacle and create a strong disturbance of its own. Hull drag might disappear, but environmental interaction wouldn’t. Drag would have been outsourced to the field.

Warp-Assisted Hypersonics: A Quantitative Reality Check

The supplied Warp-Assisted Hypersonics concept begins with the plasma sheath rather than with a complete warp bubble. Its one-page proposal treats the naturally regenerated sheath around a vehicle above Mach 7 as a lossy, complex dielectric medium. The bow shock, side sheath and wake provide an asymmetric structure that might, in principle, be shaped by radio-frequency energy, electrostatic bias and magnetic forces.

The longer unfinished draft takes a deliberately more conservative approach. It models a front-loaded plasma and electromagnetic source around a blunt hypersonic body, then asks what gravitational effect that source would produce under ordinary weak-field general relativity. The model creates the desired geometry: a tiny gravitational depression and acceleration gradient concentrated ahead of the nose.

Its magnitude is nowhere near useful. In the baseline case, the modeled gravitational effect is about one hundred quadrillion times too weak to supply a nose-to-body acceleration equal to one tenth of Earth’s gravity. An intentionally optimistic scenario involving higher speed, stronger shock compression, radio-frequency pumping, magnetic confinement and focused plasma increases the result dramatically, but it still falls short by roughly 3.4 million times.

That negative result is the draft’s most important contribution. It separates a suggestive shape from an adequate physical mechanism. Ordinary plasma doesn’t become a propulsion system merely because it can be described as stress-energy. The useful next steps are laboratory ones: measure how controlled fields alter shock position, electron density, pressure, radio absorption, momentum flux and heat transfer, then compare those results with a full plasma and fluid model before making any claim about engineered spacetime.

The Search for Substitute Signatures

“Without signatures” may be the wrong phrase if an advanced propulsion system merely changes which signatures appear. A vehicle that spreads a shock over a wide region might reduce a recognizable boom but create infrasound over a larger area. A field that keeps hot gas away from the hull could produce a detached luminous shell. A transmedium system might suppress a surface splash while generating a deep acoustic pulse or broad displacement beneath the water.

A press release accompanying a 2025 paper on alleged “dark warp propulsion” proposes gravitational lensing, leading-edge vapor cones, field oscillations, disc tilt and skipping trajectories as possible warp-related observables. None is uniquely diagnostic. Condensation can arise from ordinary pressure changes, apparent oscillation can result from tracking or turbulence, and optical distortion can be produced by hot air, plasma or camera processing. The claims need independent replication before they can support a propulsion model.

Hessdalen, Norway, offers another caution. Researchers there have recorded unusual luminous phenomena, sometimes with radar, radio or magnetic correlations. These observations are scientifically interesting, but they haven’t established that the lights are vehicles. Plasma-like atmospheric processes can produce light, electromagnetic emissions and unusual motion without representing engineered craft.

A credible substitute-signature hypothesis would predict a coordinated pattern. A plasma-control system might produce a detached shock, radio-frequency absorption, magnetic perturbations and a particular optical spectrum at the same time. A metric field might create a reproducible relationship among optical distortion, pressure changes and particle trajectories. One suggestive vapor cone or one missing boom wouldn’t be enough.

The All-Media Machine

The same boundary problem exists in space. Interplanetary and interstellar space contain gas, charged particles and dust. At ordinary spacecraft speeds, engineers manage these hazards with physical shielding, trajectory planning and hardened electronics. As velocity increases, even tiny particles become dangerous projectiles, and individual atoms can generate damaging radiation when they strike a hull.

Electric and magnetic fields can deflect charged particles, but neutral dust is harder. It must be avoided, intercepted by sacrificial shielding, vaporized at a distance or electrically charged before it can be redirected. Each solution produces secondary particles, heat or radiation. The science-fiction idea of a navigational deflector corresponds to a genuine engineering need, even though no known field system provides the effortless protection shown on television.

A craft capable of extreme planetary flight might use the same basic interface for several purposes. In space, it would redirect charged particles and dust. In an atmosphere, it would shape ionized gas and move shocks away from the hull. In water, it might generate a cavity or begin displacing liquid before physical contact. A gravitational or metric component, were one possible, might alter trajectories of both charged and neutral matter.

This design logic doesn’t establish that any UAP is extraterrestrial. It shows why the extraterrestrial hypothesis, considered strictly as an engineering exercise, implies far more than a powerful engine. An interstellar probe that couldn’t survive atmospheric entry, precipitation, dust or ocean contact would be a poor exploration vehicle. Its most consequential technology might be the system that controls the boundary between craft and environment.

How to Test the Third Observable

The ideal experiment wouldn’t chase isolated lights. It would continuously monitor a region where extraordinary movement could be tested against several independent physical channels. A coastal site would be especially valuable because it could observe the sky, the sea surface and the water below. Multiple stations separated by known distances would provide triangulation rather than guessed range.

Each station would need synchronized visible and infrared cameras, radar, passive radio receivers, microphones, infrasound sensors, weather instruments and magnetometers. Hydrophones and sonar would extend the measurement into the ocean. Spectrometers could identify excited gases or plasma, while high-speed cameras could record shock structures, condensation and water entry. Ordinary aircraft, satellites, meteors, balloons, birds and ships would provide the calibration set.

An event would qualify as evidence for the Third Observable only if the speed were independently established and the missing signatures were actively constrained. Researchers would calculate the pressure, heat, sound, ionization and displacement expected from a conventional object of the measured size and trajectory. They’d then compare those predictions with simultaneous sensor limits. An unrecorded boom isn’t enough; the instruments must have been capable of detecting the boom that should’ve arrived.

No publicly available UAP case reviewed for this story provides that complete package: known size and range, independently confirmed extreme velocity, and simultaneous null measurements across acoustic, optical, infrared, radar, radio and fluid-disturbance channels. That doesn’t disprove the Third Observable. It places it where a scientifically productive claim belongs—between an intriguing pattern and an established fact. Before asking where an anomalous craft came from, science has to determine what happened to the air.

References


Viktor Schauberger’s Repulsine: Exploring a Lost Propulsion Mystery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXwa9kybxns

Denny Okudinani’s presentation on Viktor Schauberger’s Repulsine offers a unique invitation to look again, build again, and give one of the most mysterious machines in alternative propulsion the patient, hands-on treatment it’s rarely received. With humor, historical curiosity, technical imagination, and sincere respect for Schauberger’s legacy, Okudinani doesn’t simply retell the Repulsine legend. He tries to bring it back to the workbench using 21st century tools and technology.

The Mysterious Origins of Viktor Schauberger’s Repulsine

Denny Okudinani begins his Repulsine presentation in a way that immediately tells the audience what kind of researcher they’re listening to. He’s trained in physics and computer science, but he doesn’t lean on credentials as a shield. Instead, he presents himself as someone drawn to hands-on research — someone who got curious, gathered what he could, opened CAD software, and started trying to understand Viktor Schauberger’s machine from the inside out.

That tone matters. The Repulsine has spent decades surrounded by mystery, speculation, wartime fragments, and arguments over whether it was a real breakthrough or a misunderstood artifact. Okudinani doesn’t flatten that mystery into a simple yes or no. He approaches it as a living problem: part historical investigation, part engineering puzzle, part philosophical dispute over how science should treat ideas that don’t fit comfortably inside accepted categories.

His central proposal is careful in an important way. He suggests that the photographed Repulsines known today may not have been the machines that actually flew. They may have been prototypes, principle demonstrators, or developmental versions pointing toward something more complete. At the same time, he argues that the historical accounts are too persistent and too technically suggestive to dismiss without serious examination.

That balance gives the talk its heartbeat. Okudinani isn’t merely asking the audience to believe in a famous lost flying machine. He’s asking them to consider that the surviving artifacts, the reported missing components, the glow described in historical accounts, and Schauberger’s broader body of work may belong to a larger technical story that still hasn’t been properly reconstructed.

Science, Speculation, and Stigma

A large part of the opening is devoted to pseudoscience, heresy, and the scientific method. In a colder presentation, that might feel like throat-clearing. Here, it feels more personal. Okudinani knows the Schauberger world has often been dismissed from the outside, and he wants to define the terms before the audience enters the machine.

His definition of pseudoscience is not simply “something strange.” It’s a way of thinking that rejects or sidesteps the scientific method, or treats belief as equal to tested knowledge. That distinction lets him make room for unconventional research without giving up standards. For Okudinani, an idea can be unfashionable, incomplete, or difficult to explain without automatically being pseudoscience.

The “white raven” theme is one of the presentation’s most useful moments. Scientific consensus matters, but one verified exception can force a revision. That’s the spirit he brings to Schauberger. He’s not arguing that every extraordinary claim should be accepted. He’s arguing that claims should be tested with patience, intelligence, and enough humility to admit that the world has surprised experts before.

This is also where the talk connects emotionally with an audience already open to Schauberger’s ideas. Many people who follow implosion research, alternative propulsion, or natural energy systems have seen good questions brushed aside too quickly. Okudinani gives that frustration a constructive outlet. Don’t retreat into belief, he implies. Don’t accept ridicule as proof either. Build, test, compare, revise, and keep going.

Schauberger as Forest Inventor

When Okudinani turns to Viktor Schauberger himself, the presentation warms into a portrait of a man whose ideas grew from observation rather than abstraction. Schauberger appears as a forest warden, naturalist, inventor, environmental thinker, and lifelong student of water, motion, temperature, pressure, and form. The family motto, “Faithful to the silent forest,” becomes more than a biographical detail. It becomes a key to the entire worldview.

Okudinani treats Schauberger’s unusual language with generosity. He compares reading him to reading Carl Jung: dense, symbolic, pictorial, and sometimes difficult for technically trained readers to parse. That’s a fair and helpful frame. Schauberger often described processes in words that don’t map neatly onto modern engineering terminology, but Okudinani’s point is that unusual language doesn’t necessarily mean empty language.

The presentation is especially strong when it shows that Schauberger’s work wasn’t limited to the Repulsine. Okudinani walks through log flumes, meandering flow principles, water-treatment devices, vortex mixing, home-generator ideas, trout-engine concepts, and the later efforts of Walter Schauberger and the Pythagorean-Kepler School. The Repulsine then becomes one expression of a wider pattern rather than a lonely object floating in myth.

This wider context helps readers and listeners understand why Schauberger still matters. Whether one approaches him as inventor, natural philosopher, environmental pioneer, or misunderstood technologist, his core intuition remains powerful: nature moves in curves, spirals, gradients, vortices, and living rhythms. Okudinani’s presentation honors that intuition and asks what might happen if it were translated into a serious modern research program.

Implosion as Operating Myth and Mechanism

At the center of the talk is the contrast between explosion and implosion. Okudinani presents modern technology as largely explosive: outward, hot, expansive, and waste-producing. Schauberger’s world is different. It’s inward, cooling, formative, vortical, and organized around concentration rather than dissipation.

This is where the Repulsine becomes more than a machine. It becomes a symbol of another technological imagination. Instead of forcing nature through heat and pressure in the usual way, Schauberger tried to work with natural forms of motion. The Repulsine, in that reading, is not just an aircraft or turbine. It’s an attempt to embody a different relationship between energy, matter, motion, and medium.

Okudinani connects this to fluid dynamics through solitons, Bernoulli effects, vortex behavior, and Helmholtz-style thinking. He doesn’t turn those ideas into a finished engineering proof, but he uses them to sketch a possible working language. In his view, the Repulsine belongs to a family of implosive systems that retain, redirect, and organize motion rather than simply expelling mass in the familiar explosive manner.

For a sympathetic audience, this is one of the presentation’s most compelling themes. It gives language to something many Schauberger readers already sense: that the Repulsine can’t be understood if it’s judged only as a conventional fan, duct, turbine, or rocket. It may have to be studied as a vortex machine, a pressure transformer, and perhaps a resonant geometry whose effects depend on subtle relationships among flow, form, speed, material, and surrounding medium.

Lore, Missing Parts, and the Upper Chamber

Okudinani labels the historical-account section “Lore,” but he doesn’t use the word dismissively. He treats lore as a clue field: not laboratory proof, not something to swallow whole, but not something to throw away either. The accounts from Callum Coats and Olof Alexandersson become pieces of a puzzle that still asks to be sorted.

The most dramatic reports are familiar to many Schauberger readers: a device rising unexpectedly, damage to a ceiling, a powerful levitational force, American investigators appearing, parts being seized, and a key component allegedly missing or removed. Okudinani doesn’t present these as settled engineering data. He presents them as stories that may preserve technical hints, especially around the question of what the known Repulsines lack.

His missing-component argument is one of the talk’s strongest historical threads. If the surviving photographed machines didn’t fly, and if an operational version did exist, then the crucial difference may have been in the upper assembly: the cowl, cone, impeller-like form, acorn structure, or another part not fully understood from the surviving images. That gives the lore a practical direction. The mystery is no longer just “Did it fly?” It becomes “What configuration would have made flight possible?”

Okudinani also challenges the repeated idea that an emulsifier was the missing key to the Repulsine. In his reading, that association may have drifted in from other Schauberger mixture devices or from later commentary. He argues that the flight accounts themselves don’t require an emulsifier. For researchers trying to untangle decades of Schauberger interpretation, that kind of distinction is valuable. It clears away one possible confusion so attention can return to the machine’s geometry and operating principle.

The Builder’s Contribution

The most persuasive part of the talk is Okudinani’s own reconstruction work. This is where the presentation moves from interpretation to craft. He gathered images, studied historical photographs, counted slots, counted rills or gills, studied diaphragm waves, modeled features in Fusion 360, adapted delicate parts for 3D printing, and produced a physical Repulsine-style object.

That matters because the Repulsine has often lived as an image, a rumor, or a diagram. Okudinani brings it back into physical form. Even if the printed version isn’t a working machine, it’s a serious step toward making the discussion concrete. Once geometry becomes buildable, it can be shared, inspected, modified, machined, spun, measured, and improved.

He’s also admirably honest about what his model is and isn’t. He says he didn’t test the 3D-printed version and that it probably wouldn’t be good for testing because it’s weak. That honesty strengthens the whole presentation. He’s not selling the print as proof. He’s offering it as a reconstruction, a reference point, and an open-source starting place for others who may have better tools, materials, or test facilities.

For a community that cares about Schauberger, this may be the presentation’s most important contribution. Okudinani doesn’t merely defend the Repulsine in words. He moves the conversation toward files, forms, tolerances, fabrication, and future experiments. That’s how a mystery becomes a research program.

A Presentation with Too Much in It

Part of the charm of Okudinani’s presentation is that it’s unmistakably his. The slides mix gothic fonts, historical images, AI-enhanced sketches, memes, cats, diagrams, screenshots, CAD models, and speculative propulsion graphics. It’s not a sterile academic deck. It’s a personal map of one researcher’s mind moving through Schauberger’s world.

That style will appeal to many readers who are tired of lifeless technical presentations. Okudinani is funny, candid, occasionally self-deprecating, and willing to show the messy path by which independent research often happens. He talks about being a millennial and Zoomer, about scraping the internet for images, about sneaking time on library 3D printers, and about keeping quiet around people who would’ve mocked the work before understanding it.

At the same time, the presentation does try to carry a lot. It moves from pseudoscience and scientific heresy to Schauberger biography, implosion theory, Mach’s principle, solitons, Bernoulli’s principle, Helmholtz vortex theorems, ionization, lightcraft analogies, historical accounts, Repulsine variants, emulsifier misattribution, and CAD reconstruction. That breadth gives the talk richness, but it also means the most original material arrives after a long runway.

A future version could become even stronger by trusting the Repulsine earlier. The reconstruction work, upper-chamber mystery, and open-source modeling are strong enough to lead the talk. The philosophy of science material still belongs, but it could be tightened so that the audience reaches the machine sooner and spends more time with the evidence, geometry, and next experiments.

What the Talk Proves, and What It Doesn’t

A warmer reading of the presentation doesn’t require pretending every claim has been proven. In fact, Okudinani’s own best instincts point in the opposite direction. He returns again and again to experiment, repeatability, falsifiability, and the need to examine claims rather than simply defend or dismiss them.

The talk doesn’t prove that the Repulsine flew. It doesn’t establish a complete working lift mechanism, and it doesn’t provide measured thrust, power, torque, pressure, airflow, charge, temperature, or vibration data from a functioning build. Those are still the questions ahead. But it does show that the Repulsine can be treated as a serious reconstruction problem rather than only as a legend.

That’s the right path for the Repulsine. The next stage isn’t another argument over whether the story is beautiful or impossible. The next stage is controlled testing: stronger builds, careful machining, measured RPM, input power, torque, pressure, airflow, vibration, temperature, acoustic effects, electrostatic behavior, and any measurable vertical force. The question deserves instruments.

For believers and open-minded readers, that shouldn’t feel like a retreat from the mystery. It should feel like the natural fulfillment of it. If Schauberger was right that nature hides power in inward, vortical, temperature-sensitive motion, then carefully designed tests are the way to reveal it. If the known designs are incomplete, testing can help show what’s missing. If certain geometries produce unusual pressure or charge effects, measurement can separate the real signal from the noise.

The Value of Caring

The Repulsine has always attracted extremes. Some people treat it as a proven lost technology. Others treat it as a fantasy unworthy of a second look. Okudinani’s presentation is refreshing because it lives between those poles. It’s warm toward Schauberger, open to the possibility of something extraordinary, but still oriented toward experiment.

That makes it especially useful for a community that already feels the importance of Schauberger’s work. A presentation like this doesn’t need to convert the converted. It needs to help believers become better researchers, better builders, better documentarians, and better testers. Okudinani does that by showing both reverence and method.

The real gift of the talk is not certainty. It’s momentum. It gathers historical fragments, theoretical possibilities, visual evidence, CAD reconstruction, and personal conviction into a single forward-facing question: what happens if we rebuild this carefully enough to let the machine speak for itself?

That question is worth asking. It’s worth asking because Schauberger’s ideas still stir the imagination, because nature’s forms still exceed our habits of engineering, and because mysteries only become knowledge when someone cares enough to do the work. In this presentation, Denny Okudinani shows that he cares — and he gives others permission to care more rigorously with him.

References


Todd Desiato's Operational Quantum Gravity For Engineers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sOWMupJKzw

Todd Desiato isn't asking you to abandon Einstein - just to imagine that the familiar bending of clocks and rulers may be the visible face of a deeper material process: matter settling into a different equilibrium with the vacuum around it. If that reading can be tested, the first signs would not be a starship lifting from a pad, but a stubbornly universal shift in a clock, a spectral line, or a resonator—a tiny laboratory whisper that gravity-like behavior can be spoken in the language of damping, noise, and scale.

The Core Idea: Start With the Instruments

The most important move in Operational Quantum Gravity for Engineers is not a denunciation of relativity. It is a question about instruments. Time, in Desiato’s framing, is what clocks measure. Length is what rulers compare. Gravity enters our experience through changes in those comparisons: clocks tick differently, light signals accumulate delays, rods and distances are related differently from one region to another.

General relativity captures these relations with extraordinary precision. Desiato does not dispute that success. His question is narrower and more operational: must the mathematical geometry of spacetime be treated as the fundamental thing, or could it be a compact description of something deeper happening to matter, energy, clocks, and rulers?

That distinction is the heart of the paper. In the usual story, gravity is geometry: matter tells spacetime how to curve, and curved spacetime tells matter how to move. In Desiato’s retelling, geometry remains the correct large-scale bookkeeping, but the underlying cause may lie in how matter is scaled by its local environment. The metric becomes a map of comparisons, not necessarily the final substance of reality.

The paper’s central ladder is simple in spirit. First come observables: clocks, rulers, frequencies, signals, and energy scales. Next comes the macroscopic encoding: the familiar language of general relativity or a closely related polarizable-vacuum description. Finally comes the proposed microscopic interpretation: matter treated like an ensemble of damped oscillators interacting with a real stochastic field environment. The same observations are preserved; the meaning assigned to them changes.

The Vacuum as a Medium, Not a Metaphor

To make gravity more engineerable, Desiato borrows from the polarizable-vacuum tradition, which treats the vacuum as though it behaves like an effective medium. In that picture, a single scaling factor summarizes how clocks, rods, and light-speed comparisons change between one region and another. This is not presented as a new replacement for Einstein’s equations, but as a way of translating the same weak and static gravitational effects into a language engineers can picture.

The next step is quantum-mechanical caution. If clocks and rulers scale differently in a gravitational field, the uncertainty principle cannot be ignored. Desiato argues that the relevant quantum uncertainty products can remain intact if the complementary quantities—momentum and energy—are assigned the matching changes. In plain language, the theory is not trying to break quantum mechanics. It is trying to show that the proposed scaling table can live inside its rules.

Then the paper shifts from bookkeeping to mechanism. Matter, for engineering purposes, is treated as a population of oscillators. Oscillators have frequencies, linewidths, quality factors, damping, and energy exchange with their surroundings. This is a familiar world for people who build clocks, resonators, antennas, cavities, lasers, and precision instruments. It is also a natural bridge between abstract gravitational scaling and laboratory observables.

Here Desiato introduces his key interpretive hinge: the same gravitational scaling can be reproduced by a damping picture if a particular damping response is matched to the polarizable-vacuum scaling factor. The important point is not the algebra, but the physical image. In this reading, matter does not merely sit inside spacetime. Matter is continually settling into equilibrium with a surrounding electromagnetic and magnetic field environment, and gravity-like scaling may reflect a change in that equilibrium.

From Oscillators to an Engineering Test

The proposal becomes more interesting when it turns into an experimental program. Desiato does not begin by claiming artificial gravity. He begins with precision metrology: spectroscopy, clocks, resonators, and controlled electromagnetic environments. The question is whether an engineered change in the local environment could produce a residual shift that looks like gravitational scaling after ordinary electromagnetic effects have been removed.

That last phrase is crucial. Ordinary physics already gives many ways to move a spectral line or disturb a clock. Magnetic fields produce Zeeman shifts. Electric fields produce Stark shifts. Cavities, thermal gradients, mechanical strain, and quantum-electrodynamic effects can all move frequencies in ways that have nothing to do with new gravity. A serious experiment would have to subtract, shield, reverse, modulate, and cross-check all of them.

The signature Desiato wants is not merely a frequency shift. It is a universal, geometry-like shift. If a real scaling effect is present, different kinds of clocks or transitions exposed to the same engineered environment should change by the same fraction, at least to leading order. Ordinary electromagnetic disturbances usually depend on the species, transition, geometry, or material. Universality is the difference between “we perturbed an atom” and “we may have perturbed the local scale of matter.”

Modern optical clocks make this question less fanciful than it would have sounded a generation ago. They can detect astonishingly small differences in ticking rates, including relativistic redshift effects over laboratory-scale height differences. That does not validate Desiato’s model. It simply means that if a tiny, controlled, gravity-like scaling effect exists in engineered environments, today’s instruments may be sensitive enough to begin looking.

Why Propulsion Is the Temptation

The word “warp” inevitably changes the emotional temperature of the discussion. A theory that connects gravity, vacuum response, and engineered scaling invites a propulsion question: could one create not just a measurement anomaly, but a useful gravitational effect? Could a vehicle be made to “fall” through an engineered gradient rather than push itself with exhaust?

In the most speculative version, propulsion would not begin with thrust in the ordinary sense. It would begin with control over the same kind of scale-setting environment that, in the model, underlies gravitational behavior. If a region could be made where matter’s equilibrium scale differed from that of its surroundings, and if that difference were universal across the craft and its contents, the result might resemble an artificial gravitational gradient.

But the current paper does not claim that capability. It stays on the passive branch: the branch that reproduces ordinary weak-field gravity, where clocks slow and lengths contract in the adopted comparison scheme. Desiato explicitly leaves any active branch—one that would push the scaling factor beyond the ordinary gravitational regime—outside the present work. A propulsion claim would require a new control law, a new energy analysis, and proof that the effect is not ordinary electromagnetic back-action with exotic vocabulary.

That makes propulsion the horizon, not the result. The near-term path is not a drive unit. It is a hierarchy of tests: first find an anomalous universal clock or spectral shift; then show it follows a damping or loading protocol rather than a conventional field amplitude; then show it applies across materials; then determine whether gradients can be shaped; then confront conservation of energy and momentum. Only after that would propulsion become an engineering problem rather than a speculation.

Applications Before Starflight

Even without a drive, the framework suggests useful applications if any part of the effect proves real. The first would be new precision sensors. A device that responds to changes in a local scale-setting environment could become an unusual probe of materials, fields, resonator states, or gravity-adjacent systematics. It might sharpen clock comparison experiments or reveal hidden couplings in systems that are already pushed to extreme sensitivity.

A second application would be better control of resonant systems. Desiato’s language of damping, linewidth, relaxation channels, and spectral loading naturally points toward cavities, oscillators, solid-state clocks, and materials whose internal states can be tuned reproducibly. Even a null result would be valuable if it sets strict limits on proposed matter-vacuum couplings.

A third application lies in tests of universality. Gravity is strange partly because everything falls the same way. Any engineering model that tries to explain gravity through material response must show why different compositions do not respond differently. That makes equivalence-principle testing not a side issue, but a central proving ground. If the effect depends strongly on material composition, it is probably not gravity-like in the required sense.

The fourth application is conceptual. Engineers need knobs. General relativity gives beautiful geometry, but not an obvious control panel. Desiato’s model reframes the search around quantities that laboratories can manipulate: resonance, damping, spectral noise, environmental loading, clock comparison, and power exchange. Whether or not the model succeeds, that reframing points toward experiments rather than metaphors.

A Useful Speculation On Deeper Physics

The paper also draws strength from a broader movement in physics: the suspicion that gravitational equations may be thermodynamic or emergent in character. In that family of ideas, spacetime geometry could be like pressure or temperature: real, measurable, and powerful, but not necessarily microscopic in the way it appears at large scales. Desiato’s version asks whether matter-vacuum equilibrium could be one such deeper layer.

This analogy is motivational, not conclusive. The paper is careful on that point. It does not prove that spacetime is a fluid, or that damping causes gravity, or that quantum gravity has been solved. It proposes a disciplined reinterpretation of known weak-field relations and identifies the missing pieces: a real microscopic source law, a derived link between the spectral environment and damping response, a demonstration of universal free fall, a prediction beyond general relativity plus quantum electrodynamics, and a strong-field completion.

That honesty matters because the idea sits close to the border between visionary physics and technological mythmaking. The responsible version is not “warp drive is here.” It is “gravity may admit an engineering-language reinterpretation, and that reinterpretation suggests specific precision tests.” A theory that cannot yet move a spacecraft may still be worth pursuing if it tells experimenters where to look and what would count as a real signal.

If gravity is ever engineered, the first evidence will probably not look cinematic. It may look like a clock that refuses to tick quite as expected, a resonator whose line shifts in a way ordinary electromagnetism cannot explain, or two different atomic transitions changing together when they should not. In that quiet laboratory moment, propulsion would still be far away. But the core idea would have crossed an important threshold: gravity would have begun to look less like a background stage and more like a response that matter can, in principle, reveal.

References


APEC 6/6: UAP Anomalous Transit, SEG, Gyroscopes, Repulsine & QG Engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGtjmY4lrTA

Greg Cathcart will provide a detailed hypothesis on Anomalous Transit in the Informational Lattice, Isaiah Ritchey will provide updates & insights on the Searl Effect Generator, Eric Biggio on Gyroscopic Thrust Experiments, Denny Okudinani will discuss his replication of Viktor Schauberger's Repulsine, and Todd Desiato will show a pre-recorded presentation discussing quantum gravity for engineers. We’ll also hear updates from our lab partners, then close with an open discussion and Q&A with attendees.

12:00pm PT – Greg Cathcart – IR in Anomalous Transit and Adjacency Compression Theory (ACT)

Greg will discuss IR technology and its use in detection, tracking, and targeting in military and space applications and it's relevance in anomalous transit scenarios. In addition, Greg will discuss his current work in Adjacency Compression Theory (ACT). ACT is a proposed framework in which spacetime, fields, and gravitational behavior emerge from compression dynamics over a deeper discrete adjacency structure and could provide clues regarding some aspects of anomalous transit.

1:00pm PT – Isaiah Ritchey – Searl Effect Generator Engineering

Isaiah will be providing detailed updates on his replication of the legendary Searl Effect Generator, including work on an upcoming 2-ring system, as well as his research on roller magnetization aligned with John Searl's original process. Isaiah is currently one of the foremost builders in the SEG space, and is working to follow Searl's descriptions as precisely as possible. In his research, he claims to have found evidence of anomalous effects from Delfin and others, along with notable new insights into the work of Godin & Roschin, Murad & Brandenburg, and others.

2:00pm PT – ⁨Eric Biggio – Gyroscopic Thrust Experiments

Eric has described recently achieving 1.5 inches of propellentless lift on a 20Lb. prototype. The patented concept he's based on work by Eric Laithwaite. Biggio did a deep dive scientific exploration of the "gyroscopic" effect, leading him to conclude that you can't get a gyroscopic flywheel to "pull" you upward (IE: Sandy Kidd), but you can, in fact, get it to "push" upwards on a supporting structure. His experiments have led him to conclude that the gyroscopic force is created by an imbalance in the nuclear electromagnetic structure of a solid substance.

3:00pm PT – ⁨Denny Okudinani⁩ – Replication of Viktor Schauberger's Repulsine

Denny will be discussing the design & construction of a replication of Viktor Schauberger's Repulsine, a 1940s experimental turbine based on implosion technology, designed to generate lifting power and energy through high-speed vortex motion, mirroring natural flows. The Repulsine is truly legendary in the Alt Propulsion community, with nearly a century of lore associated with it, and Denny's replication brings Schauberger's work into the 21st century, using CAD design and 3D printing techniques.

4:00pm PT – Todd Desiato – Operational Quantum Gravity For Engineers

In this pre-recorded presentation, Todd Desiato will discuss a model published in a new ResearchGate paper on Operational Quantum Gravity For Engineers, which describes a revised damping, vacuum-polarizability, and uncertainty-based interpretation of gravitational scaling. His paper does not present itself as a replacement for general relativity in the weak/static regime. Its central claim is interpretive: the same observed weak-field gravitational relations can be read operationally as changes in clocks, rulers, frequencies, energies, and matter-scale equilibrium, rather than as proof that spacetime geometry is the unique fundamental ontology.

5:00pm PT – Lab Partners – Experimental Research Updates

Learn about hands-on engineering & technical research on advanced propulsion experiments by our lab partners. Mark Sokol's team at Falcon Space is full engaged in Dynamic Nuclear Polarization research & testing; Drew Aurigema continues testing and refinement on the Exodus effect propulsion device, and Curtis Horn is focused on Mach effect propulsion on the MEGA-Drive team.

6:00pm PT – Open Discussion & Ad-Hoc Presentations

Conference guests interested in presenting experimental info to the group are invited to participate at this time, and our presenters will be available to take questions & discuss experiments.