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.