The story is even more bizarre than the quote suggests. I wrote up a post over on Chicagoboyz detailing the weird intersection of government incompetence and media bias.

Anyone who knows a bit about information theory and physics/biochem knows that teleportation is going to be a very very energy- and information-intensive thing to do and will probably never be possible, but I really can't see a problem with the US military doing a quick reality check just to be sure.

It's not as if they wasted tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a team of scientists and engineers as so many other government projects do. X-33, anyone? This was a one man project and he produced a 79 page paper after three years. That's comparable in both time and size to a PhD thesis, both of which seem entirely reasonable. I'd expect to read that the total cost of paying his salary and project overhead was $100k or so a year for a total project cost of $300k. And, being the government, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a good bit higher than that. A million, say. Which would be a drop in the bucket for the US military and they might well regard it as money well spent.

The actual cost? $25,000.

That's very very reasonable.

In fact I don't know what the guy was doing for three years, but he sure wasn't living off the proceeds! Probably he spent no more than 3 - 6 months on it, and the report will read more like a novel than a scientific paper.

It's really hard to see what the fuss is about.

Bruce-

Entirely agree.