This thread does not rest on any one person. It rests on a recurrence, drawn from independent people who mostly were not in contact with each other. This page sets out the chemistry, where bismuth recurs, and the documented dispute over the most-tested sample.
The chemistry, which is just textbook
Element 115, now officially Moscovium, lives in Group 15 of the periodic table. So does bismuth. Both have five valence electrons, so they should bond in similar ways and form similar crystal structures. And bismuth’s own physics is genuinely unusual for a stable metal: it is the most strongly diamagnetic stable element on Earth, repelling magnetic fields more powerfully than anything else; bismuth titanate is one of the finest known electret materials, able to hold an electric field permanently the way a magnet holds magnetism; bismuth ferrite is multiferroic, its electric and magnetic properties influencing each other inside the same material. In short, bismuth’s chemistry produces the kind of unusual properties associated with a hull material, a propulsion target, or a sample that “shouldn’t work.”
None of that paragraph is fringe. It is established materials science, and this thread starts from that ground rather than from a claim.
Where bismuth keeps appearing
The thread runs through fifty years of independent research:
- 1950s. The inventor Townsend Brown showed that high voltage on asymmetric capacitors produced thrust. A physicist at Martin’s RIAS laboratory, Louis Witten, recalled in a 2011 American Institute of Physics oral history: “There’s a guy named Townsend who claimed to have an isotope of bismuth that repelled instead of attracted.”
- 1989. Bob Lazar named Element 115, same column as bismuth, as the S4 reactor fuel, twenty-eight years before bismuth was central to anyone else’s UAP material analysis.
- 2000s. Dr. Ning Li left the University of Alabama in Huntsville for classified gravitomagnetic research at Redstone Arsenal; several of her co-authored papers reference bismuth-related compounds.
- 2017. Hal Puthoff and TTSA acquired layered magnesium-and-bismuth samples, allegedly from a downed craft, with bonding Puthoff said was “prohibitively expensive” to replicate and that broke their equipment.
- 2020s. Stanford pathologist Garry Nolan is analysing magnesium-bismuth samples of claimed UAP origin.
- 2024. NASA’s Dr. Charles Buhler, replicating Townsend Brown in hard vacuum (ruling out ion wind), measures up to 50 millinewtons of thrust at 400 volts, and of 2000-plus configurations the ones that work share one feature: trapped charge, like an electret, like bismuth titanate.
These are different kinds of source: a 1950s second-hand anecdote, a classified-era researcher, a current Stanford lab, an active NASA experiment. The recurrence is across all of them, and the Buhler work is ongoing.
“It was a multilayered bismuth and magnesium sample. Bismuth layers less than a human hair. Magnesium samples about 10 times the size of a human hair. Supposedly picked up in the crash retrieval of an advanced aerospace vehicle.” Hal Puthoff, The Age of Disclosure
The sample and the analysis
The layered Mg-Bi sample carries two accounts that sit side by side.
Puthoff’s account, above, describes a multilayered bismuth-and-magnesium structure said to come from a crash retrieval, with bonding he described as “prohibitively expensive” to replicate. The Witten oral history records the older claim of “an isotope of bismuth that repelled instead of attracted.”
Against that, in 2024 the U.S. government’s AARO office sent one well-known Mg-Bi sample to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. AARO’s reported finding was terrestrial origin, no exotic isotopic signatures, and that it did not function as a terahertz waveguide in the configuration tested. By AARO’s account this applies to that sample as tested; it is not a finding about bismuth in general, and the isotopic claim and the null result are both on the record.
What is on the record
The chemistry is established: 115 sits in the same group as bismuth, bismuth has the diamagnetic and electret properties described above, and Lazar named the element in 1989. The recurrence across the six entries above is documented. The layered-sample claim is disputed: Puthoff describes anomalous bonding and the older Witten account describes an anomalous isotope, while the AARO/ORNL analysis of the tested sample reported a terrestrial, null result. What remains open in the file is whether a bismuth-based sample clears the AARO/ORNL analysis, and whether Buhler’s trapped-charge thrust holds up under independent replication. Jesse Michels has said of the wider pattern that it is “either the most chemically literate lucky guess in history, or it isn’t a guess.”
Sources for this page
- The Age of Disclosure roundtable (Hal Puthoff)
- Bob Lazar Tells Me Everything (DEBRIEFED ep. 83)
- AARO/ORNL synopsis (2024); Buhler (NASA Kennedy Space Center, 2024 American Alchemy interview)