Most people are familiar with Holograms, 3 dimensional Images created by lasers, which can capture an object in three dimensions instead of being like a two-dimensional photo.
Full colour lasers can project a moving image onto a hidden piece of glass on a stage to recreate performances from actors and pop stars who are no longer with us.
But there is one type of laser generated imagery which can create not only three-dimensional images but 3 dimensional objects in space and can have a very physical effect on the real world.
From creating virtual flash bang grenades for crowd control, to guiding lightning or a high power electrical current to a target up to 100 or so metres away to creating fake radar images and heat signatures from jet aircraft to trick radar systems and guided missiles that the plane or missile is actually one of many, to talking plasma balls and possibly the source of recent UFOs sighting that can apparently travel at incredible speeds and perform manoeuvres and stops that unheard of by man made aircraft, this is the world of laser induced plasma.
Lasers were invented just over 60 years ago and since then have gone on to change the world in quite dramatic ways. Modern communications, moving huge amounts of data over fibre optic cables around the world would not be possible without lasers. High power lasers cannot only cut through metals and perform welding, ultra high power lasers are being developed to initiate fusion by concentrating petawatt levels of energy Into tiny deuterium and tritium fuel pellets, creating conditions equivalent to that of the centre of the sun where fusion can take place and a whole new energy source can be created here on earth.
And all this is with just light, the same sort of light that you see everywhere around you but there is a difference. Normal light is diffuse, the photons travels in every direction and can be made up of any colour or wavelength of light.
Laser light is monochromatic, meaning that it is just one wavelength, and all the waves are in phase, meaning that the troughs and peaks of electromagnetic waves all line up together.
This means that a beam of laser light has very little divergence. A military grade satellite killer laser has a wider opening, which conversely creates a less divergent beam. If you were to shoot it at the moon, by the time it got to the surface, it would be about 2.4km across. If you were to point it at Mars when it’s at the closest point to earth, at about 54 million kilometres, the beam would be about 321 kilometres across.
But if you use a lens, you can focus the energy down to a spot and greatly increase it’s power, just like a magnifying glass in sunlight. Also the most powerful lasers don’t run continuously; they only run for a very short period of time, usually from nanoseconds or billionth of a second to femto seconds or shorter, that’s 10⁻¹⁵ seconds, or one quadrillionth of a second. Doing this you can pack a huge amount of energy into a very short space of time and when you combine with a focused beam and you can create such high electric field that you can strip the electrons from atoms to create Plasma, the fourth state of matter, a gaseous mixture of subatomic particles consisting of ions and electrons which is also an electrical conductor.
By focusing the laser in air, a tiny pocket plasma, or a plasma voxel can be created. This to us would appear as a bright point of light that although it Only lasts a billionth of a second it would seem longer due to the persistence of vision in our eyes and if you fire thousands of these flashes per second and move the laser at the same time you can create an image of a moving object in 3d space.
The laser beam itself can be moved around with a galvanometer, basically, two mirrors, one which controls the X direction and one which controls the Y direction. The technological breakthrough to control the whereabouts in the length of the beam where the focusing should take place, was to use a linear motor to move a focusing lens. This would then determine how far away focus point would be. With this setup you can then position where the plasma will occur anywhere where along the beam that can be pointed and focused.
In fact with some very high power systems in the giga and terrawatt range, once a plasma burst has occurred, the extreme heating of the air, can alter the speed of light in air and create a lens effect which can the self-focus the beam.
As the ionised air heats up it expands rapidly at supersonic speeds to produce a crack or bang, just like lightning makes the thunder crack. The more powerful the laser, the louder the bang.
One of the first applications which was thought up for this plasma technology was crowd control. Aim a laser beam near someone or a crowd and then initiating a series of plasma bursts to sound like a stream of flash bang grenades going off.
Depending upon the type of laser, they can be pulsed thousands of times a second and by modulating the laser its possible to create sound. This has sometimes been referred to as the voice of god, because it could target at an individual and a bright light in the air would be talking to them. The type of lasers used are infrared so you would not see the beam, only the talking plasma ball.
In this example the plasma recreates the sound of a verbal warning, but this is a very low power lab test. This was announced over 5 years ago but so far nothing has been seen of this in public.
But over 10 years ago, Japanese company Burton inc, created a method that I mentioned earlier of steering and focusing a 1khz pulsed infrared laser to create plasma voxels for aerial displays. This could then create a rather crude moving image made-up of these voxels, A bit like the huge orchestrated drone displays which we are now familiar with but on a smaller scale.
But when scaled, it up would certainly be something that could be seen over much larger distances than just a few 10s of metres. This was because it was meant to be a portable visual warning system for tsunami’s that could be broadcast into the sky when maybe other forms of communication we’re no longer available.
Now try as I might I couldn’t find any videos that included the original sound of the voxels as they are created but from what I have read is that it is pretty loud and unpleasant with upto a thousand being created per second to build up the image, that would be a 1khz noise bath, which is probably why they didn’t include it on the marketing videos.
Since then the Japanese university of Tsukuba has created Fairy lights using a femtosecond laser instead of a nanosecond laser of Burton. This is a scaled down colour version creates smaller, quieter and safer plasma voxels that can be touched and interacted without causing more serious burns from a larger longer duration laser system, creating between 4000 to 200,000 dots per second in frames, with frame rates from 30 to 100 frames per second.
Now while this tech seems to have not taken off in the commercial space the military seem to have taken an run with it but are keeping it very much a secret.
What we do know is that the US Navy has patented a not dissimilar system that could be mounted on aircraft to create fake infrared signatures as decoys. Using multiple systems could create something that looks like possibly multiple aircraft in infrared light, and can be seen on thermal imaging equipment to fool heat-seeking missiles.
In theory, plasma is not dense enough to reflect radar waves but depending on the energy put into creating the plasma voxel, the supersonic shockwave that creates the bang will create a change in air pressure that radar can detect. This is because it alters the density and refractive index of the air, affecting how radio waves, which radar uses, to propagate through it and detect it.
Now, with the observations of the Tic Tac and other unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs over the assigned military testing areas and observed by US Navy aircraft in visual light, infrared and radar and performing such high-speed manoeuvres that defy everything we know about flight in air, might these actually be a highly advanced version of we have seen by Burton to create instant incredibly realistic aerial decoys that look like real craft, of whatever origin.
And when you thought that you couldn’t do much more with plasma, in 2021, scientists in Switzerland used a high-repetition-rate terawatt laser on the Säntis mountain to create plasma filaments to guide lightning strikes. This is similar to using rockets which trail wire fired into thunderclouds to initiate a lightning strike. Using a laser there is no rocket debris or wire to fall back to earth and it can be fired as many times as you have power for the laser.
This Electrolaser experiment was demonstrated on a smaller scale by the US Army in the mid 2000s to create plasma filaments close to a near by target and then send a high power electrical discharge down the filaments to connect with it, be that an object or person. However, it now seems that an experiment in this field which was known as the Phoenix project, where the U.S. Navy tested an electro-laser against aircraft and missiles in 1985 and this was part of President Regans SDI or Strategic Defense Initiative.
In 2017, Dr Alexandru Hening, the lead researcher in the later 2021 US Navy patent, said in a piece for the Navy’s own IT publication, that high power short pulse lasers could generate plasma filaments hundreds of meters in length and that next gen lasers could create ones that are over couple of kilometres long, and that it should be possible to create phantoms or fake sensor imagery at considerable distances. Dr. Hening has been working on laser-induced plasma at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific since 2012.
So it seems as though we might be either on the cusp of a whole new generation of laser-generated phenomena or maybe it might already here, and UAPs could be the ideal way to muddy the waters and keep everyone guessing while possibly testing it in plain sight, what do you think, let me know in the comments.
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