Every so often – like maybe when a tech blog writer has a slow news day – the topic of invisibility cloaks or stealth attire rears its ugly and not-yet-invisible head. “It’s just around the corner”, an article will imply. A little less than a year ago, the US Military said it wants invisibility cloaks for its soldiers within 18 months. We don’t know how that’s shaping up for them, but things aren’t looking too rosy. Just a few days ago, Phys.org published the piece Invisibility cloaks can never hide objects from all observers, explaining with confidence why the best one can hope for is the sort of distorted-background invisibility featured in the Predator movies. But are the folks at Phys.org just the contemporary equivalent of all the experts who told the Wright Brothers they’d never fly? Hard to say. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ll have another credible source (if NatGeo is still credible after its recent sale) parading a headline like First Invisibility Cloak Tested Successfully, Scientists Say,  while “burying the lede” by mentioning in the article itself that the device works only in two dimensions, and only on microwaves.

HyperStealth’s Quantum Stealth To The Rescue!

Yes, the image above appears to be a wonky Photoshop job, but as the vintage HTML page about the technology explains repeatedly, “the photos are to show the Media the concept, for security issues we can not show the actual technology”. The page also explains for dummies like you who doubt its credibility that:

Two separate command groups within the U.S. Military and two separate Canadian Military groups as well as Federal Emergency Response Team (Counter Terrorism) have seen the actual material so they could verify that I was not just manipulating video or photo results; These groups now know that it works and does so without cameras, batteries, lights or mirrors…It is lightweight and quite inexpensive. Both the U.S. and Canadian military have confirmed that it also works against military IR scopes and Thermal Optics.

Sounds legit, right? Well, it was legit enough for CNN. We’ll let you be the judge, but if there’s a real-world implementation of “stealth attire” out there, it’s working a little too well so far.