Salvatore Pais

Salvatore Cezar Pais (born September 7, 1967) is a Romanian-American aerospace engineer and inventor. He currently works for the United States Space Force, having previously been employed at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, the U.S. Navy's Strategic Systems Programs (SSP), and the United States Air Force. Beginning in 2015, Pais filed a series of patent applications on behalf of the U.S. Navy describing technologies with radical claims, including a room temperature superconductor, a compact fusion reactor, an inertial mass reduction device, and a high-frequency gravitational wave generator. Collectively dubbed the "UFO patents" in the media, these inventions attracted widespread attention for their potential energy and military applications, but also significant skepticism from physicists who questioned their scientific basis. The Navy spent over $500,000 testing Pais's core concept, the "Pais Effect," from 2016 to 2019, but NAWCAD concluded that the effect could not be proven. No working prototype of any of the patented inventions was ever produced, and multiple physicists consulted by journalists described the patents as containing pseudoscientific language. Some commentators have speculated that the patents may constitute disinformation intended to mislead the United States' strategic adversaries about the direction of American defense research.

Education and doctoral research

Pais was born in Romania in 1967 and emigrated to the United States at approximately age thirteen. He was raised in New York City and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. Pais then attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1990 and a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering in 1993. His master's thesis was titled "Design of an experiment for observation of thermocapillary convection phenomena in a simulated floating zone under microgravity conditions." Pais received his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Case Western Reserve in 1999. His doctoral dissertation, "Bubble Generation in a Continuous Liquid Flow Under Reduced Gravity Conditions," examined bubble generation behavior under both co-flow and cross-flow configurations, requiring multiple parabolic flights to simulate a microgravity environment. His doctoral advisors were Yasuhiro Kamotani and Simon Ostrach, both of whom had conducted Spacelab experiments in microgravity conditions aboard the Space Shuttle mission STS-50 in 1992. Pais's doctoral research was sponsored by NASA.

Career Pais has presented at American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conferences over the years.

Early career at NAWCAD After completing his doctorate, Pais worked as a scientist and aerospace engineer at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), headquartered at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. According to a 2019 author biography published in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, his work with the Department of Defense involved "advanced knowledge of theory, analysis, and modern experimental and computational methods in aerodynamics, along with an understanding of air-vehicle and missile design, especially in the domain of hypersonic power plant and vehicle design."

Transfers within the defense establishment In June 2019, Pais left NAWCAD and transferred to the U.S. Navy's Strategic Systems Programs (SSP), the organization responsible for the development and sustainment of the Navy's submarine-launched ballistic missiles. In January 2021, he transferred to the United States Air Force. As of 2025, Pais works for the United States Space Force and is reportedly based in Bonn, Germany.

Patents

Beginning in 2015, Pais filed a series of patent applications on behalf of the U.S. Navy that attracted significant media attention. These patents, often referred to collectively as the "UFO patents," describe technologies that would, if feasible, represent dramatic advances beyond the current state of physics and engineering. He reported that he began in 2015 to publish his patents "after rejections from academic publishing". Pais stated in an interview that he accepted no royalties for the Navy patents and said he had filed them out of "pure patriotic duty." He told The Times that a U.S. Navy invention evaluation board approved all five of his patent filings, which he described as unprecedented for such a controversial subject. No working prototype of any of the patented inventions was ever developed. Pais's patent applications include:

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