--- title: "The Examiner Mentioned The Secrecy Act. The Applicant Vanished." dek: "Application 4,112,889 described a device its author said produced thrust without reaction mass. The third action invited withdrawal. He withdrew, never refiled, and burned his notebooks in 1991. Nothing in the file says the device worked." kind: news (News) desk: Suppressed Science author: Dr. Ilse Vantongeren (fictional) published: 2026-08-01T14:00:00Z updated: 2026-06-11T15:40:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/free-energy-withdrawn-patent tags: free energy, patents, secrecy orders, Tesla, propulsion genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Examiner Mentioned The Secrecy Act. The Applicant Vanished. *Application 4,112,889 described a device its author said produced thrust without reaction mass. The third action invited withdrawal. He withdrew, never refiled, and burned his notebooks in 1991. Nothing in the file says the device worked.* The file cost forty-seven dollars and a second form. That is the most interesting thing about United States patent application 4,112,889, and this newspaper will come back to it. The application describes an "apparatus for asymmetric capacitive displacement": two plates, an asymmetric dielectric, and a claim that the assembly produces thrust in one direction without expelling anything. > **Figure:** Application 4,112,889 — see https://theyburied.com/article/free-energy-withdrawn-patent It was filed in 1977. It was withdrawn in 1979. The reason is on the page. ## The examiner's third action **Document: PX-1560 — examiner's note, third action** ``` Applicant is advised that the device as described would, if operable as claimed, require re-examination of the disclosure under 35 U.S.C. 181 (secrecy orders). Applicant is invited to withdraw and refile with amended claims. [MARGIN, DIFFERENT HAND] applicant withdrew 11/79. no refiling. no secrecy order issued. file closed. ``` Section 181 of the Patent Act permits the government to impose secrecy on an application whose publication it judges detrimental to national security. Several thousand such orders are in force at any time, and the number is published annually. Gilbert Trawin examined mechanical applications for twenty-six years in the relevant art unit and did not examine this one. He was clear about what the language ordinarily means and equally clear about what it does not. "An examiner writing that is not saying your machine works," he said. "He is saying: *if* this worked as you have drafted it, we are into a different statute, and I am not going to be the person who finds out. Withdraw, narrow your claims, refile. It's housekeeping. It happens." Asked how often he had written a third action like it, he said: "Twice. Both perpetual-motion adjacent. Neither refiled either." ## What the file does not contain It contains no test data. No measurement. No independent replication. No laboratory notebook. The applicant's estate, contacted through a nephew, told us the notebooks were destroyed by the applicant himself in 1991, and gave the family's account of why: he had come to believe the effect was an artefact, was embarrassed about the years he had spent on it, and did not want them found after his death. The family has no documentation of that account either. They are reporting what he told them. We are reporting what they told us, and labelling it as exactly that. > He is not saying your machine works. He is saying: if this worked, we are into a different statute. > > — Gilbert Trawin, retired primary examiner ## The conventional explanation, at the length it deserves Dr. Priyanka Ramaswamy-Ohlsson has published experimental work on asymmetric capacitors and asked for room to explain the standard account rather than a sentence of it. This newspaper gave her the room, because the standard account is the thing most stories of this kind leave out. Devices of this geometry do produce a measurable force in air. The force is well characterised, it scales with air pressure, and it disappears in vacuum. It is ion wind: the sharp electrode ionises air, the ions accelerate toward the blunt electrode, they collide with neutral molecules on the way, and the assembly experiences the reaction. It is a very inefficient fan. "Everybody who builds one measures a force, because there is a force," she said. "The question that separates a fan from a revolution is what happens in vacuum, and that experiment has been done many times by people who wanted the other answer." She added, unprompted, the sentence this newspaper found most useful in three months of reporting: "I would be delighted to be wrong. That is not a rhetorical position. I have a chamber." ## The correction we made An earlier version of this story said that "no secrecy order was issued, according to the file." The file records that no secrecy order was issued *in this matter*. It is a prosecution history for one application. It is not a register of secrecy orders and could not have shown one issued elsewhere, to someone else, about something adjacent. That distinction is the difference between a fact and an implication, and we printed the implication. It is fixed, and it is in the [corrections archive](/corrections) permanently. ## Sources (invented) - Dr. Wendeline Achterberg-Osei, Patent attorney, thirty-one years in mechanical prosecution — Interviewed in person; read the full prosecution history at our request (14 April 2026) - Gilbert Trawin, Retired primary examiner, USPTO Art Unit 3745 — Interviewed by telephone twice (20 and 27 April 2026) - Estate of the applicant, Through a nephew, named in our notes — Written correspondence (May 2026) - Dr. Priyanka Ramaswamy-Ohlsson, Experimental physicist, asymmetric capacitor literature — Interviewed by video call (6 May 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1560: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1560 ## What we could not confirm - Whether the device worked. There is no test data in the file and the applicant's notebooks were destroyed in 1991. - Why the applicant withdrew rather than amending, which the examiner also offered. - Whether any secrecy order was ever issued in connection with this line of work. The file shows none was issued in this matter; it is not a register and could not show one issued elsewhere. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.