The US Navy has filed a patent for a room temperature superconductor and a high-energy electromagnetic field generator, and the patents claim that these technologies are “operable”, meaning that they have working models.
There are a number of requirements for patent, most notably that it be non-obvious and novel, which the claims characteristics fulfill.
There is also a requirement that a patent be public, so that once it expires, a “Skilled person in the art,” can implement their invention.
There is an exception to the public requirement though, the government can classify a patent for national security reason.
For example, the first patent for a laser was classified, and the creator of the patent was refused access to it, because of his political activities in his youth.
If there were actually working models of these two inventions right now, the Navy would have classified the patents.
They don’t, but they want to clear the deck if someone does come up with working models, so those folks cannot restrict the government’s use of whatever is developed:
Last month, The War Zone reported on a series of strange patent applications the U.S. Navy has filed over the last few years and questioned what their connections may be with the ongoing saga of Navy personnel reporting incidents involving unidentified objects in or near U.S. airspace.
We have several active Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of Navy to pursue more information related to the research that led to these patents. As those are being processed, we’ve continued to dig through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Public Patent Application Information Retrieval database to get as much context for these patents as possible.
In doing so, we came across documents that seem to suggest, at least by the Navy’s own claims, that two highly peculiar Navy patents, the room temperature superconductor (RTSC) and the high-energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG), may in fact already be in operation in some manner. The inventor of the Navy’s most bizarre patent, the straight-out-of-science fiction-sounding hybrid aerospace/underwater craft, describes that craft as leveraging the same room temperature superconductor technology and high energy electromagnetic fields to enable its unbelievable speed and maneuverability. If those two technologies are already operable as the Navy claims, could this mean the hybrid craft may also already operable or close to operable? Or is this just more evidence that the whole exotic ‘UFO’ patent endeavor on the Navy’s behalf is some sort of ruse or even gross mismanagement of resources?
At the heart of these questions is the term “operable.” In most patent applications, applicants must assert proof of a patent’s or invention’s “enablement,” or the extent to which a patent is described in such a way that any person who is familiar with similar technologies or techniques would be able to understand it, and theoretically reproduce it.
However, in these patent documents, the inventor Salvatore Pais, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division’s (NAWCAD) patent attorney Mark O. Glut, and the U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise’s Chief Technology Officer Dr. James Sheehy, all assert that these inventions are not only enabled, but operable. To help me understand what that term may mean in these contexts, I reached out to Peter Mlynek, a patent attorney.
Mlynek informed me that the terms “operable” or “operability” are not common in patent applications, but that there is little doubt that the use of the term is meant to assert to the USPTO that these inventions actually work:
If they had working models for this sort of technology, this would a classified submittal, because it would be a a leap forward in the technology.
Later in the article, there is correspondence between senior Navy personnel and the patent examiner advocating for what are a profoundly weird claims, which implies that the Navy, or the Pentagon, has a reason for aggressively supporting the claims.
And all of these documents were publicly available, because????
My guess is that either the Navy finds this credible enough that they want to preempt other patent holders, or this is an attempt to send scientists and engineers from other nations (Russia and China) down a dead end.