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

Re:Flight

[Faux_Pseudo]

I have a few issues with the examples you used to illustrate your point. I have pulled out my old trusty copy of Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan and have turned to the section on baloney detection. We have here the following points that match your post.

Appeal to ignorance - Claiming that what has not been proved false must be true.

Observational selection - Enumeratioon of Favorable Circumstances -- aka you have pointed out the hits of the past but have not pointed out the failiurs.

Non sequitur -- you make points that are not realy related in any form other than they are in the same feild (aviation) but assume that because it happend one way in the past that it will happen again the same way in the future.

Re:First!

[Doctor K]

Sorry to respond to my own (once again typographically challenged) post.

However, thinking about it, assuming the lifter is using the AC from the horizontal monitor sweep, what you are probably seeing is an induced dipole effect.

This is nothing new. Take a balloon. Rub it against the carpet (charge it up statically). Stick it to the wall.

Why does the balloon stick?

The static electricity induceds dipoles in the wall. These dipoles attract the balloon.

In the case of the lifter, the + wire on top and the grounded foil forms a dipole. This dipole induces a mirror image dipole in the ground beneath it. However, if the AC is near at frequency that is in the general vicinity of the horizontal sweep frequency of the monitor, the induced dipole in the surroudings (table/ground/floor) will be out of phase with the regular dipole. This will cause a repulsive force.

As it stands though, the lifter is highly not optimized. The frequencies could be optimized which in turn would give you a stronger force (or conversely require a lower voltage power supply). The lifter layout could be redone to for a strong dpole moment or made out of studier materials (as the system currently is put together, the force would be very very weak).

Here is the difference between science and pseudo-science. The above is _testable_.

- The device should exhibit power supply frequency dependent characteristics. Notably there should be frequencies ranges exhibiting repulsive and attractive forces and these the ranges are dictated by the speed of light and the effective distance of the induced dipole.

- The device should be sensitive to the surroundings. i.e. it would have different operational characteristics if you operated it starting from a wooden table or a metal table.

No dubious "electrogravitics" required.

Kevin

Re:so what

[gilroy]

OK, your argument leaves me confused. You say NASA spent $600K, which I will believe, and quote extensively from an abstract of a proposal. You don't actually quote any results. The proposal itself says it will look for evidence or refutation -- meaning they hadn't, at that stage, found any evidence (or it would be redundant). It's now three years later and no followup seems to have come about.

You then have a bunch of slashdot-imposed link boxes [lanl.gov], etc., but no actual links.

The space.com article starts off with "NASA's Controversial Gravity Shield Experiment Fails to Produce" (my emphasis). They also comment "What has dogged the research, experts say, is that Podkletnov failed to adequately document his findings." This seems to be a bad habit of people proposing these sorts of exotic, revolutionary theories.

Ning Lee's proposal, which is not yet accepted anyway, isn't true antigravity. It's just another kind of motor. We can create "antigravity" by exclusion of magnetic field lines from a superconductor, in that this generates lift. Wait, wait, we can create "antigravity" by running air past a suitably shaped wing!

On the other hand, true antigravity -- say, a shielding of gravity's effects -- requires a complete change in how we perceive the laws of nature. I'm all for that, but not until you show me the peer-reviewed, well-documented, empirical evidence. I don't buy into the bullcrap conspiracy theories that act like the physicists of the world would engage in sinister collaboration to suppress wild new results. The fact is, most physicists would love to hear about easily-accessible fundamentally new physics.

But first they need proof. And so do I.