Palmer Luckey on UFOs, Anduril, Invisibility Tech, & Moon Wars

Luckey details the FQ-44 Fury autonomous fighter jet, developed in 556 days from contract to first flight. Anduril beat Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin by operating as a defense product company rather than contractor, investing their own capital to move faster and building AI-powered fighters that fly alongside manned aircraft.

• •FQ-44 developed in 556 days - fastest new fighter program since Korean War
• •Beat legacy defense contractors (Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed) on Air Force contract
• •Product-first approach: invest own money, sell finished products vs. contracted development
• •Autonomous fighters extend weapons and sensors forward, enable risk-taking without human casualties
• •Better incentives: make more money moving faster and succeeding first time vs. delays and retries

Luckey addresses Wall Street Journal and Reuters articles criticizing Anduril for test failures and fires during weapons testing. He explains that failures are essential to product development, contrasting Anduril's rapid iteration funded by their own capital against traditional defense contractors' cost-plus models that incentivize delays.

• •Test failures (drone releases, small fires) are normal and valuable in weapons development
• •Air Force and Navy confirmed tests were successful and met all criteria - media ignored this
• •Anduril has intentionally started hundreds of fires during testing over 8 years
• •Key difference: Anduril spends own money to move fast, not taxpayer funds
• •Media creates false narratives because successful fast development isn't a 'story'
• •Won't change testing approach despite criticism - already doing the right thing

Luckey reveals Anduril developed working optical camouflage for their Ghost helicopter drone in 2019-2020, making aircraft invisible to human eyes. However, this technology is largely irrelevant against modern adversaries equipped with infrared, radar, and lidar systems, which is why it's not deployed on production units.

• •Visible-spectrum invisibility is 'way easier' than hiding from synthetic sensors (radar/lidar/IR)
• •Projection system calculates luminance and color to match background from target's perspective
• •Successfully demonstrated on Ghost drone against sky and ground backgrounds in 2019-2020
• •Not deployed because US adversaries (Russia, China, Iran) use advanced sensor technology
• •Optical camouflage can actually make vehicles easier to detect with proper technology
• •Human eye has poor resolution - easier to fool than modern military sensors

Luckey presents his working theory that UAPs/UFOs likely originate from Earth's distant past rather than the future or distant space. He argues that traveling forward through time via gravity distortion is physically possible, while time travel to the past is not, and that the vehicles are probably not recently manufactured.

• •Current theory: UAPs come from Earth's distant past, not future (physics don't work for backward time travel)
• •Probabilistically more likely from billions of years of past than this specific moment
• •Gravity distortion allows subjective time to pass slowly while external time races forward
• •Possible ancient Earth civilizations from a billion years ago with no remaining evidence
• •References undersea bases and decades of consistent sightings in Santa Catalina Channel
• •Believes UAPs are not recently manufactured - either very old or stored for long periods
• •UAP technology and current human development exist on 'completely parallel tracks'

Luckey explains why warfare on the moon or in space would be decisive and catastrophic for all parties involved. The fragility of life support systems and impossibility of armoring spacecraft due to weight constraints means any conflict would be swift and devastating until space technology advances significantly.

• •Life off-Earth is extremely fragile - any system failure (life support, vacuum containment, food) is fatal
• •Moon warfare would be 'decisive, swift, and catastrophic' for everyone involved
• •Cannot armor spacecraft with current technology due to mass and volume constraints
• •Space combat will focus on never being detected, targeted, or fired upon - one hit likely destroys vessel
• •Moon useful for electronic warfare, phased arrays, radar tracking in Earth-focused conflicts
• •Only protection: deep underground bunkers, lava tubes, or asteroids - not traditional surface warfare

Luckey introduces Seabed Sentry, Anduril's underwater surveillance system using fiber optic microphone arrays. The system detects and classifies everything under and on ocean surfaces - submarines, ships, divers, whales - then filters to only relevant threats, extending their successful land-based Sentry Tower concept to maritime domains.

• •Extends Anduril Sentry Tower (covers 35% of US Southern Border) to underwater domain
• •Fiber optic microphone array detects acoustic signatures at extreme distances
• •AI processing more sophisticated than human sonar operators for classification
• •Detects submarines, ships without radar signatures, unauthorized divers in harbors
• •Hard problem is filtering - knowing where everything is but only alerting on threats
• •Goal: make the world transparent to military, eliminate ability to hide

Luckey's most exciting current focus is designing weapon systems manufacturable by existing US automotive, tractor, and agricultural factories. Unlike WWII where factories converted to weapons production, modern systems require specialized facilities. Anduril intentionally designs slightly heavier components that any machine shop can produce for rapid wartime scaling.

• •WWII lesson: designed weapons manufacturable by existing automotive/tractor factories
• •Modern defense lost this - requires highly specialized workforces and factories
• •Fury landing gear is 'a few percent heavier' but manufacturable by any US machine shop vs. only 2 facilities
• •In wartime, need whole-of-country effort - Anduril won't build everything directly
• •Design philosophy: use metal thickness, heat treatments, fastening methods matching existing industrial capacity
• •Goal: scale to hundreds of thousands or millions of units without building new industrial base
• •Model applicable to allied nations with existing industrial capacity