You brought up a very good question onlyinmydreams, why would someone go to all that trouble to perpetuate a hoax?
Yet, if one were to claim that he had "The Perpetual Motion Machine", (we know this not possible, yet). Submitted a drawing with labels, and a
summary of what it is, and paid the patent fee for a U.S. patent, he would in fact initially have the patent pending and after a negative database
search for the same patent would be issued the United States patent for the perpetual motion machine. In theory, he would never have to produce a
working model or prototype or for that matter a non-functioning one.
Mental state notwithstanding, he met the requirements. Now, If this person was sincere and not crazy or a hoaxter it wouldn't matter. I read the
mission of the U.S. Patent Office and they never require an actual working model.
Now case in point, the Air Force back in 1972 or '73 had engineers working for them at Los Alamos Nat. Lab and applied for the patent for a
thing they called the 'Subterrene' I think. Here is a link to a story about it:
www.geocities.com...
There is also a picture if you look in the archives, a search would probably turn it up. I will try to find the patent or patent number for you guys.
They didn't have a working model at first if I remember. Now that I think about it, when was NORAD finished? It is the most famous underground
facility we have and that was probably hat it was used for. Anyway I found this in another patent, "For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,357,505, issued to
Armstrong et al., 1967, discloses an electrically heated earth drill, while U.S. Pat. No. 3,693,731, issued to Armstrong et al., 1972, describes a
nuclear reactor heated earth boring machine."Well Yes it would be hard to hoax the moon landing but other aspects of the government would not be so
hard to hoax. IMHO. -Troy