Ages 8–12 · about 6 minutes
Could a Ship Become Lighter?
Could a craft make itself lighter and then move any way it likes?
The big idea
If space makes things heavy, quieting space could make a craft light.
- transmedium
- Able to move through air, water and space without having to stop.
- if-then chain
- A row of ideas where each one only works if the one before it does.
- parallax
- The way near things seem to jump when you move, while far things do not.
Could a craft make itself lighter and then move any way it likes?
This is the boldest idea in the whole book. It is built out of two earlier ones. Lesson three asked whether heaviness comes from space pushing back. Lesson seven described a claimed way to disturb that space.
Put them together and you get a startling picture. A craft that barely felt its own weight could stop and turn instantly. Nothing inside would be crushed. It could slip from air into water without slowing down. That is what transmedium means.
What we know for sure
The arithmetic here is simple and certain. How fast something speeds up equals the push divided by the heaviness. Make the heaviness tiny and the same gentle push produces an enormous change of speed.
Notice the shape of the argument though. It is an if-then chain. If heaviness comes from the vacuum, then quieting the vacuum lightens a craft. Harold Puthoff and his colleagues wrote it up carefully in 2002.
An if-then chain is only as strong as its weakest if. This one rests on a question nobody has answered.
There is a second thread too. The United States Navy released videos taken by its own aircraft. In 2019 a former NASA scientist named Kevin Knuth published a paper with colleagues. If the sensor readings are taken at face value, he wrote, the accelerations are astonishing. He put that if in himself, and that is what makes the paper useful.
What scientists are testing right now
The first question is not about exotic physics at all. Was the strange motion the object, or the camera?
Mick West and others showed something important. One famous video's spin can be produced by the camera's own turning mount. Parallax may explain another. Parts of a 2024 United States government review agreed. Scientists measured these things, frame by frame.
Other cases stay open. In August 2026 an official report came out. It covered a military exercise over the Gulf of Oman. It describes small cold orbs and dozens of contacts. It is still unresolved on the record.
Meanwhile the cleanest test is on a bench. Charles Buhler and Andrew Aurigema work at a company called Exodus Propulsion Technologies. They report a drive that pushes with nothing thrown out the back. They plan a public test in orbit. A flight settles things that a video never can.
Why it matters
Picture a craft landing in a field with no runway and no noise. Medicine could reach a village with no road. The solar system would shrink from years to days.
Your turn
Why do scientists check the camera before checking the physics? And what would a video have to show before you believed it?
Nobody knows yet whether a craft can be lightened. The tests are being built now. Maybe you will fly one.
Try this at home
The jumping thumb
You need: Your thumb, both of your eyes, and a window or a long hallway
- 1.Hold your thumb up at arm's length and look past it at something far away.
- 2.Close your left eye, then open it and close your right. Swap back and forth.
- 3.Now hold your thumb close to your nose and swap eyes again.
Notice: Your thumb jumps sideways and the far wall barely moves. The nearer it is, the bigger the jump. Cameras have this problem too. A slow faraway object can look like a fast nearby one, and that is the very first thing scientists check.
For grown-ups and older readers
This lesson comes from Chapter 8: Inertial Mass Reduction and Transmedium Craft and the map unit Inertial mass reduction and transmedium craft.