The following is the post that I submitted:
I recently saw on the show Mythbusters on their "anti-gravity episode" that they used a technology called a "lifter" which was able to float in the air by means of an ionic wind(NOT Antigravity). Also I recently heard about a solid state fan that uses the same ion wind technology, and which can also outperform regular fans in weight and power. So theoretically if you were able to somehow get enough lifting energy from ion wind then you could make either a toy car that floated around on ion wind, or you could make a full sized hover board. But in fact if enough power was possible someday you may even have a rocket pack version, to get from place to place in the future. The draw backs of this technology are:(1)It may not have enough power to lift a person in a compact device.(2)It uses very high voltages(20,000V's). (3)It has a bi-product of Ozone gas from the corona discharge used to make the ion wind. Also you'd need to have DC to DC step up voltage circuit that some technical people might know, which is also in a portable unit along with the battery. But also stabilizing the platform has to be worked out, in some kind of self stabilizing arrangement of electro-aerodynamic pumping.
artZ, Sep 12 2008
Other useful info is to search solid state fan, and electro-aerodynamic pumping. I also theorize that with high enough energy you could make a full sized vehicle float a few inches above the ground.
But if you wanted the vehicle to fly it would be a different technique. If the top of the vehicle was the sharp emitter electrode and the body of the craft was the blunt collector electrode the ion wind would be forced to travel downward around the craft, or from top to bottom, creating upward lift, using the "coanda effect". Here's a link that explains the coanda effect and the theory of flight better through actual simple experimentation. But in short when air is pulled downward to travel along the surface of the craft, by the flow of ions, the equal and opposite reaction of pulling air down also pulls the body of the craft up. The actual shape of the craft is only important for horizontal aerodymanic flight and has nothing to do with lift force. So the only lift force is from the coanda effect created by the ion wind which was itself created by a very powerful DC electrical generator, inside of the craft.
The following is from wikipedia under corona discharge:
Corona discharge usually involves two asymmetric electrodes; one highly curved (such as the tip of a needle, or a small diameter wire) and one of low curvature (such as a plate, or the ground). The high curvature ensures a high potential gradient around one electrode, for the generation of a plasma.
Moving the craft side to side is a different matter though. Which I don't have a solid theory for yet. But it may use the same ion wind technology, with highly charged movable capacitors located inside the craft. Used to offset the charge on one side of the craft making the air flow alter, or reconfigure around that spot, on that side, which would make that side move forward from a change in ion wind flow around it creating a pressure differential. But no solid math that works for that theory yet.
Also the source of power needs to be large which we currently don't have the energy technology for yet other than nuclear. It may be possible to have high voltage Alternating Current also, but because of the alternation it would only have pulses of ion flow. This may be useful if it is true that at high enough frequencies(20,000hertz or above) current then cannot flow through the human body, because of the human body acting as a resistor at that high of a frequency.
But also on the problem of high energies being dangerous to humans, as long as you're suspended in the air and your body doesn't touch the ground then your body won't conduct the energy to the ground and therefor no electric shock. The power line maintenance crews know this trick, and use it all the time(See: "High voltage" under "power lines", on wiki). So always jump onto highly charged objects to not be touching the ground at the same time as you're touching the charged vehicle or object.
Also in making the craft one solid seemless peice of metal for no moving parts or chance of breaking and also for aerodynamics, you would still need some way of entry into the craft. Superfluidity to go straight through the walls of the craft would work, but has never been substantiated as a real technology yet. But suposedly high enough electrical charge mimics the same properties of a plasma(high amount of electrons) and maybe even superfluidity as well. It's just an unsubstantiated hypothesis at this point though.
I do know that at high enough voltages though you get an effect that mimics superconductivity, with very low electrical loss. Because at high voltages the electrons have high potential energy and are static charges and therefore since they are non-moving electrons they have less wire to run into and get resistance from. But then of course it may be releasing that stored energy in the form of photons from the ambient glow that high voltages naturally create. By the way that's how you light the inside of the craft, in order to never have to replace lightbulbs. I call this effect "spontaneous emission".
I used to think that high (+/-)static charges were the same as gravity and anti-gravity, because they both share so many similar characteristics, but now that I have the above verifiable theory, I no longer think that anti-gravity is involved with UFO's, and instead think that it is ion wind. But for space travel they have to use something different, which I no longer have a good theory for. Even though static electricity still shares most of the same physical properties as gravity. There's just no solid evidence or theory for anti-gravity yet. So for now it anti-gravity is still an unsubstantiated hypothesis for space flight.
The only substantiated UFO picture that I've ever heard of is the one that was on the cover of time magazine in the 50's and still cannot be disproved or disputed. It was called the mcminnville photos, so that is the design of craft that I got this theory from. Also on wiki.
