DOW-UAP-D139: Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy

Source file: DOW-UAP-D139_AAWSAP-DIRD-Traversable-Wormholes-Stargates-and-Negative-Energy-April-6-2010.pdf Originating agency: Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Defense Warning Office, AAWSAP program Document type: Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), "Acquisition Threat Support" series; control number DIA-08-1004-004 Date: 6 April 2010 (information cutoff date, ICOD: 1 December 2009) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY (the FOUO marking is struck through; released to the public in 2026) Page count: 42 VIRIN: 260918-D-D0360-1128 PURSUE Release: 6

Summary

"Traversable Wormholes, Stargates, and Negative Energy" is a DIA reference document dated 6 April 2010, control number DIA-08-1004-004, prepared by the Acquisition Support Division (DWO-3) of the Defense Warning Office. The author's name is redacted and replaced with the label "AAP Person 58". The same label appears as one of the two authors of DOW-UAP-D138 on warp drive, written four days earlier, and the two papers complement each other: D138 names the wormhole and the warp drive as the two "loopholes" in the light-speed limit and concentrates on the second, while D139 is devoted to the first.

This is one of the longer papers in the series: 34 numbered pages, 12 figures, two tables and 79 references. It has five chapters: a summary, a review of traversable wormholes and the "stargate" solution, the definition of exotic matter and the energy conditions (including six ways of generating negative energy in the lab), the chapter "Constructing a Traversable Wormhole is not Easy", and a conclusion titled "The Way Forward".

The author's position is clear and not neutral. The paper states that the claim that exotic matter violates the energy conditions, making faster-than-light travel implausible, is a false problem: "it has been shown that this is a spurious issue". It ends by saying a traversable wormhole might be demonstrated in the lab given focused, sustained research support. At the same time the author admits that nobody knows whether large amounts of negative energy can be produced, or how a wormhole would actually be built.

The paper does not mention UFOs or UAP. The closest it comes is a sentence on how a small wormhole appearing in our space would look: "an unusually bright spot in the sky."

Research Article

Place in the program

The Administrative Note on page 2 is the same as in neighbouring papers of the series: the product is "one in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009", and questions go to "AAP Person 1", AAWSA Program Manager, DIA, ATTN: CLAR/DWO-3, Bldg 6000, Washington, DC. As throughout the series, a warning forbids further dissemination of the photographs; the standout image here is Figure 8, "A Stargate in Times Square", a composite of an arched portal in Times Square through which a desert landscape is visible.

Of the 12 technical areas in the AAWSAP Statement of Objectives (DOW-UAP-D110), the paper serves mainly spatial/temporal translation, and to a lesser degree propulsion and power generation, through the question of how negative energy might be produced. It also touches on time: the author writes that "It is very easy to build a time machine, given a traversable wormhole", and immediately adds that time travel is beyond the paper's scope.

Why wormholes: mass, time and dinner at home

The summary explains the motivation. All conventional propulsion, from nuclear rockets to light sails, rests on Newtonian mechanics and is capped at light speed. For an interstellar trip at more than 5 percent of light speed within 100 years, the mass ratio (spacecraft mass at launch divided by mass at burnout) runs from 10^5 to 10^100, meaning a rocket made almost entirely of propellant. At relativistic speeds time dilation means travelers return to an Earth where decades to thousands of years have passed.

A wormhole sidesteps both problems. Explorers could place a "wormhole-stargate" near Earth, pass through at low speed ("30 mph!", as the paper puts it), spend a day at a remote site and "return home through the stargate in time to have dinner with their families." The author traces the field to the 1985 work of Caltech physicists Michael Morris and Kip Thorne, done, according to the paper, "as an academic exercise at the request of Carl Sagan", who was then drafting his novel "Contact".

Chapter II lists the design requirements for a traversable wormhole: a transit time of no more than a year, no time dilation, accelerations and tidal forces of no more than 1 g, speeds below light speed, a vacuum tube so travelers do not touch the exotic material, and no event horizon or singularity. This is what separates it from the Einstein-Rosen bridge of a black hole, where the singularity blocks the way. Using the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the author shows that each additional "handle" (throat) raises the negative energy required: with one throat the energy density U must be less than or equal to zero, with two less than or equal to minus one half, and with three less than or equal to minus one, in geometric units. Hence a single-throat wormhole is the desirable engineering solution.

The "stargate": a flat throat

The novelty the paper highlights is the "stargate", a wormhole whose throat is flat rather than spherical. It is built with the thin-shell formalism: take two copies of flat spacetime, remove identical regions from each and join them along the boundary. Equations 3a to 3c show that the shell is made of matter with negative surface energy density and negative surface tension: "This is exotic matter!" But when a face has infinite radii of curvature, that is, when it is flat, both quantities vanish (Equation 4), so a traveler "will feel no tidal gravitational forces and see no exotic matter threading the throat." Such a gate, the paper says, could be built from a thin layer of exotic matter "much like a thin film of soap stretched across a loop of wire."

The author also describes what a wormhole would look like: the spherical Morris-Thorne opening would appear as a sphere containing a shrunken, distorted mirror image of another universe, "just like a glass Christmas tree ornament", whereas a flat gate would not distort the view (Figures 6 to 8).

Negative energy: claims and sources

Chapter III is the theoretical core. "Exotic" matter is defined as matter whose energy density is less than its pressures or tensions, and in many cases negative. The author presents the energy conditions (WEC, NEC, DEC, SEC) as "mere hypotheses" formulated by Hawking and Ellis, notes that quantum field theory has allowed local negative energy density since 1965, and asserts, citing a single source, that these hypotheses were "experimentally shown to be false - 25 years before their formulation." The paper lists the known natural sources of negative energy: static radial electric and magnetic fields, the squeezed quantum vacuum, gravitationally squeezed zero-point fluctuations (ZPF), the Casimir effect and certain Dirac field states.

It then examines six ways of producing negative energy in the lab. Ultrahigh-intensity tabletop lasers reach electric fields of 10^14 to 10^18 V/m, but every observer sees a positive energy density in them, and "It is not known how to increase the tension in these fields." A squeezed vacuum produces a wave in which pulses of negative energy, about 10^-15 second long, alternate with positive pulses; the author proposes a rotating mirror system (Figure 9) or a sodium gas chamber (Figure 10) to separate them, and cites an experiment that demonstrated a squeezed vacuum source with a diode laser and a rubidium vapor cell.

Gravitational squeezing is examined in Table 1: near Earth it affects only wavelengths of 0.23 m and above, with a density of minus 2.23 x 10^-22 J/m3. The author openly notes that another researcher (Ford, in a 2007 private communication) disputes the formula and computes minus 1.82 x 10^-70 J/m3 near Earth, a gap of 48 orders of magnitude: "The resolution of this disagreement remains an open question."

The Casimir effect is called "by far the easiest and most well known way to generate negative energy in the lab", but the numbers show its limit: a throat of 1 km radius would need plates 1.28 x 10^-16 m apart, smaller than an atomic nucleus, and a throat of 1 astronomical unit would need 1.57 x 10^-12 m. "There is no technology known today that can engineer a cavity with such minuscule plate separations", and below about 10 nm the effect changes character anyway.

How much energy, and what limits it

Chapter IV opens with an admission: "One knows how to make small quantities of negative energy in the lab. But one does not know if it is possible to make large quantities of negative energy." Equation 9 and Table 2 give the negative equivalent mass needed for a short-throat wormhole: minus 0.71 Jupiter masses (minus 1.35 x 10^27 kg) for a 1-meter throat, minus 709.9 Jupiter masses for a kilometer, and minus 2.3 Earth masses for a centimeter. The author stresses that this is not the total mass seen by distant observers, and that Equation 9 is only a "gross upper limit": according to work by Visser and colleagues, wormholes can be supported by arbitrarily small quantities of negative energy, although the violation cannot be made to vanish entirely.

The main theoretical obstacle is the "Quantum Inequalities" (QI), under which a long pulse of negative energy must be weak and must be followed by a larger positive pulse. The paper itself notes that "Investigators have invoked the QI to rule out many of the macroscopic wormhole spacetimes", but the author argues that the Casimir effect and other sources violate all three conditions, that the QI have not been verified in the lab, and that they have mainly been proven for simple fields in flat two-dimensional spacetime. The author also describes an odd "mass conservation law": a ship passing through adds mass to the entrance mouth and removes it from the exit mouth, and if a runaway reaction threatened, "it would be prudent for wormhole engineers to simply "turn off" the wormhole for a brief moment."

On detection, the paper notes that negative energy in space should produce a distinctive gravitational-lensing signature, that simulations found wormhole lensing events "very closely resemble the main features of some GRBs" (gamma ray bursts), and cites a detector model in which negative energy causes cooling rather than excitation.

Significance

The paper closes with a historical analogy: more than 40 years passed between the Curies' discovery of radioactivity and the first nuclear reactor, so "it is possible that a traversable wormhole can be demonstrated in the laboratory as long as there is a focused, sustained level of long-term research support." It gives no numerical timeline for a wormhole. "The Way Forward" is a list of research programs: squeezed vacuum generators, other varieties of Casimir effect, moving mirrors, Dirac field states, negative energy detectors, trapping and storage, and finally the question of construction itself: "If one "zaps" a region of empty space with a beam of negative energy, will a traversable wormhole appear? One doesn't know."

The only concrete forecast concerns the dynamical Casimir effect (moving mirrors): "It may be expected that a laboratory demonstration of the dynamical Casimir effect will occur before 2012." For general context, an observation of this effect in a superconducting circuit was indeed reported in 2011, but it is a phenomenon of creating photons from the vacuum, very far from engineering spacetime.

For the critical reader: the paper frames the question within accepted relativistic physics, but takes the advocate's side on every contested point, especially against the quantum inequalities. The official 2026 blurb concludes that there is no known mechanism to generate, concentrate or stabilize the required amounts of exotic matter. The historical analogy also contains an error: the first reactor at the University of Chicago, credited in the paper to Fermi and Szilard, went critical in December 1942, not 1939. In the table of contents, the Chapter II heading is spelled "Transversable" instead of "Traversable".

Key People

Locations

Key Concepts

Notable Quotes

"In 1985 CalTech physicists M. Morris and K. Thorne discovered the principle of traversable wormholes based on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (published in 1915)." -- page 5

"Explorers could spend all day investigating the remote spacetime location and then return home through the stargate in time to have dinner with their families." -- page 7

"Therefore, one can construct a stargate by generating a thin shell or surface layer of exotic matter much like a thin film of soap stretched across a loop of wire." -- page 15

"If a small wormhole (three or more dimensional) were to begin to appear or even bump into our local space, one would perceive this process as the occurrence of an unusually bright spot in the sky." -- page 17

"There is no technology known today that can engineer a cavity with such minuscule plate separations." -- page 29

"One knows how to make small quantities of negative energy in the lab. But one does not know if it is possible to make large quantities of negative energy." -- page 29

"However, one still does not know how to construct a traversable wormhole because general relativity theory only provides a recipe for the essential geometric and material ingredients required to open and maintain one, but not the required assembly instructions." -- page 32

"On this basis, it is possible that a traversable wormhole can be demonstrated in the laboratory as long as there is a focused, sustained level of long-term research support." -- page 34