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In December 2018, the U.S. Patent Office approved one of the strangest applications in its 231-year history, from a Navy engineer who was confident he could design nothing less than a physics-denying craft that could fly at massive speeds, not just across the sky but into outer space and even under the ocean.

Sound familiar? Indeed, if the dreams of Salvatore Cezar Pais, an engineer at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division at Patuxent River, Md., had borne fruit, the Defense Department itself might have given birth to one of those objects that have struck shock and awe into pilots around the world in recent years—and which provoked U.S. intelligence into studying the phenomenon.

In its long awaited report on Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did little if anything to provide answers to the strange midair encounters with what it calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, which everyone else calls UFOs. It lists 143 sightings of unkn…