Build Your Own UFO

Are Belong To Us dept. writes "Guess where the billions of dollars in the super-secret Air Force program are going? Build your own for $10 in parts. They're popularly called "Lifters" and they're flying (one of many videos) without engines and can hover in place. Admit it, it would have been cool to see a UFO. Never mind if you didn't, because now you can build your own (another, step-by-step instruction, here), like lots of people around the globe already have, for $10 in parts. A number of patents surround the technology, some by NASA. The best introduction site to all of this is Jean-Louis Naudin's site. There goes your sleep - this is fascinating stuff. ;-)" Any website that uses the phrase "a simple 30KV power supply" is okay in my book.

Comments

Try this out

[EricKrout.com]

I found this via Google recently:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/pagrosse/ ownufo.htm

A feasible project?

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Re:Ah... Antigravatics

[Anonymous Coward]

Electrogravitc research is NOT necessarily pseudoscience - in fact, to reject a possibility out of hand is the antithesis of the scientific method.

Some of the more advanced electromagnetic/gravitational unification theories are taken very seriously (probably not the ones JLN comes out with thought :-) )- if you do quantum physics, you'll be told that "the longitudinal and scalar components of photons cancel out". Physicists often don't mention it, but this is NOT the same as saying they are identically equal to zero. There's plenty of room for gravity to be a maxwellian electromagnetic field (or if you prefer, for electromagnetism to be a warping in a higher dimensional space - kaluza-klein...). I think in some sense one of the elecrogravitic theories and the (well established, undergraduate physics) kaluza-klein higher-dimensional unification will eventually be found to be equivalent...

Reactionless thrusters

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a reactionless thruster, it just uses whateven matter is surrounding it. The sharp edge is ionizing the air or other matter, leaving it with a negative charge (this is called corona discharge). since the aluminium foil is also negatively charge, the ionised air is repelled, pushing the "verhicle" away from it (up).

Re:Reactionless thrusters

[Rhinobird]

Notice how they say it's been tested in a vacuum, but don't show any video of that particular test. Still look like a ionocraft to me. See this link

Re:Reactionless thrusters

[Anonymous Coward]

i quote from a person who apparently did a few more experiments with his own lifter:

(013)
Sujet : [Lifters] Preliminary results
Date : 13/11/01 14:02:10
De : Mark Snoswell.( Australia )
A : JNaudin509@aol.com
Envoyé via Internet

Today we had the opportunity to do a number of preliminary tests to determine which direction to do proper tests in.

The results are briefly summarized here:

Lift achieved with either positive or negative applied to upper wire. There was no apparent difference in the degree of lift or voltage required for lift-of with either polarity. This would indicate that with the current apparatus and power supply configuration the filed asymmetry effects dominate over polarity. This would also tend to indicate that ion-wind is not a driving force in this apparatus.
Positive up and the apparatus inverted resulted in a down force. This would tend to indicate that electrostatic interactions with the nearby table surface are not contributing to lift.
A symmetrical two wire design showed no lift. Nor did a design with 3 lower wires connected to the negative and a single upper wire connected to the positive. This tends to support the idea that thrust is only generated with a large field asymmetry.
A device with a horizontal triangular plate almost lifted - it would lift briefly on power application. In the steady state it was close to lifting. This would indicate two things: Reduced field asymmetry leads to reduced thrust; and lift is greater during the initial charging phase.
A fully insulated circular device showed no indication of any lift. Along with the above result this would tend to indicate that a current flow through the asymmetric field may indeed be a requirement for generating thrust.
All tests were carried out with the same power supply with applied voltage in the 5 - 40KV range. In all cases the apparatus weighed less that 2g - usually 1.2 - 1.6g.

Thus far the results have been consistent with previous reports of the Biefield - Brown effect

Many further tests and control experiments are now indicated. In particular we will be constructing a filtered power supply so we can introduce AC ripple current directly on top of a clean DC bias potential. -

Today we picked up capacitors to make a 0.025uF 50KV single capacitor and other HV parts required to construct a 50KV isolated ferrite transformer. We hope to do further tests this weekend.

Dr Mark Snoswell. ( Adelaide 5153, Australia )

Re:Ah... Antigravatics

[PurpleFloyd]

Your post is so riddled with errors, it's hard to decide where to begin. First of all, it's not "magnitizam", it's "magnetism". To my knowledge there exist no currently working magnits. Magnets, on the other hand, are quite common.

As far as the electrogravatics, I don't have any URLs handy for that one, but I believe it has to do with exploiting the connection between electricity and gravity. People are working on this because of the unified field theory that brings together the different forces like electritcy, magnitizam, gravity, and acceleration. The link between electritcy and magnitizam is already apparent and we exploit it (motors, solonids, maglev trains). This has now become known as the electro-weak force and gravity is due to the strong force. The strong and weak forces are what hold the nucleus of atoms together. And I think that it's the 6 flavors of quarks that form the forces.

My oh my, this is where it starts to get hairy. There are four "fundamental" forces: electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity. The strong force holds protons to protons, and acts on a very small scale, even in the atomic realm. This is why the nucleus of an atom is so dense: the protons have to be right up next to each other to hold the nucleus together, otherwise electromagnetic repulsion takes over. The weak force holds protons to neutrons, and neutrons to neutrons. Electromagnetism and gravity people are probably familar with. IIRC, the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces have been shown to have the same roots and are very similar at extreme energies (like a few milliseconds after the big bang). Gravity is still quite a mystery on the atomic scale: its effect is so small it is very hard to measure. Thus, a "theory of everything" that could relate all the fundamental forces of the universe is considered the Holy Grail by many in physics. Unfortunately, it seems just as hard to obtain as a certain chalice was for the Crusaders ;-).

Re:Ah... Antigravatics

[gilroy]

See, the problem with beginning a post like

Your post is so riddled with errors, it's hard to decide where to begin.

is that, then, you have to get everything right yourself, or you look like an idiot. Alas,

The weak force holds protons to neutrons, and neutrons to neutrons.

isn't so. The strong force binds nucleon to nucleon -- so p-p, n-n, and p-n are all strong interactions. IIRC (and it's been a while, so no guarantees), the weak nuclear force changes the "flavor" of heavy leptons and quarks, leading to instability. (Of course, the Standard Model has unified EM and weak into electroweak.)

Re:so what

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Any real scientist or expert in physics knows anti gravity is possible, they also know our government most likely have anti gravity,

Well, that's a sweeping generalization that isn't true. Assuming by "antigravity" you mean an actual fundamental interaction, I haven't met a single "real scientist" who believes in it strongly. ("Antigravity" meaning "opposing gravity" is trivial... jump, for example.) Many believe there might be something fundamental -- for instance, a difference in how antimatter and matter couple to the gravitational field, leading antimatter to have a repulsive compoent to its gravitational interaction -- but as far as I've ever heard, no peer-reviewed paper has ever been published claiming to have seen that effect experimentally.

Re:First!

[Doctor K]

I skimmed through the the NASA patent in question.

It's not a reactionless drive. The propellant photons. The patent proposal seems to be a variant of an end-fire phased array antenna. (Or a less sophisticated version of laser propulsion system.)

However, if you have a background in propulsion, you are probably aware that photons are terrible for thrusters. It you want to spit off directed momentum, photons give you the _least_ bang for your buck. Photons are classically massless and only give you h_bar omega / c momentum. Only if your are talking about hard gamma do photons even start to compete with propellants of current rockets.

As far as the lifter page is concerned:

What is the damn frequency of the power supply? Heck, I have all the equipment (even a dead 14" monitor for salvage). I would build it for fun.

Monitors use both a high DC voltage for acceleration of electron beams and an two sawtooth-ish AC components for sweeping the beam (vertical at 70Hz and horizontal at 100KHz). Is this a purely DC phenomena or should I tap the sweep signals?

All in all, he didn't give sufficient details to replicate his work so it sets my BS detector humming. Or more likely, if I replicate it and it doesn't work, I'll probably be told that only magical NEC monitors from the mysterious Hokkaido forest manufacturing plant work ... not my crappy dead 14" CTX.

Kevin

Dean Drive, anyone?

[dpbsmith]

Remember the Dean Drive, a frequent subject of articles and editorials in Astounding (or was it Analog then) in the sixties? Dean had discovered that Newton's laws of motion were only approximate, f didn't equal ma, there was a tiny little high-order nonlinear term in it... which meant that big, massive, unbalanced, counter-rotating linear weights could generate a tiny little linear component. Without any reaction mass.

There were all sorts of photographs of the device in action. They were all marred by little details. Somehow it could never quite lift its own weight, although a simple scaling up would, of course, do it. The device was always tethered, or on a surface...

The best one was the before-and-after shot of it sitting on a bathroom scale. When turned off, the scale showed one reading. When turned on, the scale showed a lighter reading. Unfortunately the pointer was a little, well, BLURRED, but the accompanying text vouched that there was a net weight reduction and that the camera had not just captured an extreme swing of an oscillating pointer.

Whatever... HAPPENED to the Dean Drive? You don't suppose it could have been a fraud, do you?

Re:Dean Drive, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some info on the fate of the Dean Drive:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/sciences/dean.html

If this account is correct, the thing gives off a decided aroma of crackpot/fraud.

power sourcesRe:Interesting quotes from the patent

[vinsci]

It works on high-voltage electricity alone. To be able to do an autonomous flight (i.e. have the power source on board) you nee a power source with a specific mass of somewhat less than 1kg/kWe (kilowatt electric). Naudin used a pulsed HV power supply to achieve 886W/kg lifted (see Lifter Tests with a PULSED High Voltage). You could maybe fly for a couple of seconds by draining a battery very fast, otherwise this kind of energy is nuclear. NASA has some plans on NEP power plants with a specific mass of less than 1kg/kWe. See:

f. Prospects for Nuclear Electric Propulsion Using Closed Cycle MHD Energy Conversion, Ron Litchford, NASA MSFC [abstract] [presentation]

g. Ultralight Vapor Fueled Cavity Reactors with MHD for Powering Multi- Megawatt NEP Systems , Travis Knight et al., New Era Technologies (NeTech), Inc. [abstract] [presentation .

Apparently these power sources could be built for a couple of billion dollars, this is where the military dark budget of $30bn comes into play (see the New York Times quoted in the story).

Re:UFOs electrogravity antigravity ghosts and gobl

[vinsci]

It's not antigravity, the thrust is directional. It works in vacuum (as tested by NASA, sorry no link). The Ion wind has been insulated, and it still works, see both of these pages: Wind tests, and The Ion Wind Tests on Transdimensional's Lifter.

The vacuum tests

[vinsci]

Finally, I found a reference to vacuum tests. It's at Gravitec's corporate page: "The initial vacuum test showed as suspected that field propulsion did not require any exhaust gasses to operate. These tests, while good, are not enough to bring to the scientific community, because something this extraordinary in nature needs extraordinary proof. We currently need to perform a more controlled and metered vacuum experiment to eliminate all doubts that have surrounded the phenomenon in the past."