The bismuth coincidence.

Why bismuth matters

Element 115 (now officially named Moscovium) lives in Group 15 of the periodic table. So does bismuth. Both elements have five valence electrons, which means they should bond in similar ways and form similar crystal structures.

Bismuth’s physics is unusual for a stable metal. It is the most strongly diamagnetic stable element on earth, meaning it repels magnetic fields more powerfully than any other. Bismuth titanate is one of the finest known electret materials, meaning it can hold an electric field permanently the way a magnet holds magnetism. Bismuth ferrite is multiferroic, meaning electric and magnetic properties influence each other inside the same material.

In other words, bismuth’s chemistry produces exactly the kind of weird properties you would want from a hull material. Or a propulsion target. Or a sample that “shouldn’t work.”

Where bismuth keeps appearing

The bismuth thread runs through fifty years of independent UAP research.

1950s. Townsend Brown, an American inventor, demonstrated that high voltage applied to asymmetric capacitors produced thrust. His colleague Lewis Whitten told the American Institute of Physics: “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 (Group 15, 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 her academic post at the University of Alabama in Huntsville to do classified gravitomagnetic research at Redstone Arsenal. Her published work proposed that superconductors could align electron gravitomagnetic effects into a directional force. Several of her co-authored papers reference bismuth-related compounds.

2017. Hal Puthoff and TTSA acquired layered samples of magnesium and bismuth, allegedly recovered from a downed craft. Layers of bismuth about one third the width of a human hair, alternating with magnesium layers about ten times that. Puthoff said the bonding technique was “prohibitively expensive” to replicate and broke their equipment when they tried.

2020s. Stanford’s Garry Nolan, a senior pathologist, is currently analysing magnesium-bismuth samples of claimed UAP origin.

2024. NASA’s Dr. Charles Bueller, lead electrostatic scientist at Kennedy Space Center, is replicating Townsend Brown’s work. In hard vacuum (which rules out ion wind), at 400 volts, he is measuring up to 50 millinewtons of thrust. Of more than 2000 configurations tested, the ones that work share a feature: trapped charge in the material. Like an electret. Like bismuth titanate.

“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 counter-argument

In 2024, the U.S. government’s AARO office sent one well-known Mg-Bi sample to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for analysis. The verdict came back: terrestrial origin, no exotic isotopic signatures, did not function as a terahertz waveguide in the configuration tested.

That doesn’t close the question on bismuth. It closes the question on that specific sample. But it does set a bar. Any future material claim now has to clear a higher evidentiary threshold than it did before.

Either way, the chemistry connection stands. Element 115 sits where bismuth sits. Bismuth has the properties an electret hull would need. Lazar named the element decades before this thread became visible to outsiders.

In Jesse Michels’s words: it is either the most chemically literate lucky guess in history, or it isn’t a guess.

Sources for this page

• Hal Puthoff in The Age of Disclosure roundtable
• Bob Lazar in DEBRIEFED ep. 83
• Also referenced: AARO/ORNL Synopsis (2024), Bueller (NASA KSC, 2024 American Alchemy interview)

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