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This Defense Intelligence Agency reference document is dated 30 March 2010. The Defense Warning Office prepared it under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It compares lone maverick inventors with corporate inventors who work in think tanks and other large organizations, focusing on unconventional energy and propulsion, including antigravity. It sorts inventors into five types. It concludes that formally trained mavericks (Types 3 and 4) are the most likely source of the next innovations. Untrained inventors are expected to contribute nothing substantial.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/30/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD compares lone “maverick” inventors with researchers working inside larger organizations in order to ask where major future breakthroughs are most likely to come from, especially in unconventional energy and propulsion. It concludes that the strongest candidates are technically trained, relatively independent, and flexible researchers working with some freedom from institutional constraint. Because that preferred profile closely resembles the kind of researcher who appears to have authored or shaped much of the broader AAWSAP DIRD effort, the document reflects a notable methodological circularity, validating the program’s operational model rather than neutrally assessing the innovation ecosystem.
UNCLASSIFIED/ I FOR 8FFl@IAL ~8! er•t'i' Maverick Inventor Most of the easy combinations of components and materials have been investigated repeatedly since the time of Michael Faraday. However, it is still to this "low-hanging fruit" that the average maverick inventor is drawn for inspiration. For example, in the area of energy innovation, it is still attractive to many inventors to try various combinations of permanent magnets and wire to try to improve the efficiency of modern electrical machinery, or better yet, claim to extract possibly limitless energy from these magnets. The average energy inventor is not bothered by pesky Laws of Energy Conservation or that the devices he is spending endless time on have been investigated hundreds of times before. There is also the role of the media, most important the Internet, in continuing to stimulate the creativity of the maverick inventor. Movies continue to depict the lone genius saving the planet via some invention, be it a physical weapon or a piece of computer code. This no doubt propels succeeding generations to believe that they may one day single-handedly develop a new free-energy or antigravity device and save the planet. Unfortunately, the Internet has fostered the belief that new inventions, especially in the areas of energy generation and gravity control, are relatively straightforward - one simply needs the correct comb,ination of macroscopic components. One of the disadvantages of the access to apparent technological innovation that the Internet provides is to foster and maintain intellectual and experimental laziness. This manifests itself in many ways, principally in that the prospective inventor increasingly believes that simply spending a few minutes on the Internet can give him all the background information about who has done what in a particular field of invention. Indeed, the would-be inventor does not even need to leave his chair and physically investigate the situation himself. A corollary concern is the lack of information on prior attempts that is available to maverick inventors. Whereas the corporate inventor has immediate access to a broad range of technical resources, including patents and scientific and technical publications, the cost of these resources and their publicly accessible concentration in university libraries drive the average maverick inventor to rely solely on the Internet. Fortunately there are now positive signs that at least as far as "free energy" and antigravity are concerned, there are Internet sites trying to be repositories for failed inventions in these areas (Reference 1, 2). Another major problem is the decreasing reliance on a sound technical education, either in the sciences or in engineering. Why bother enduring 4 years of an extremely difficult undergraduate program when all the answers are right there on the computer screen. It is the age of instant, albeit self-proclaimed, geniuses. No need to bother with correct measurement procedures or proper control experiments when you can publish the results of your studies on YouTube without bothersome peer review. So how might one characterize the maverick inventor? Useful categories of maverick inventors (assumed to be in the context of the late 20th and early 21st centuries) might include the following types: • Individual with no formal training and little money. • Individual with no formal training and some money. UNCLASSIFIED/ IFOlil OFFIEiIAl WSE Ortllf 1
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 19 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.