Why the mocking? You see something wrong with the NASA research?
NASA Eagleworks is certainly legit. Kinda like the skunkworks.
I believe this is the same Dr Harold White who claims to have achieved nanometer scale warping of space.
Maybe it pushes out fermions? Is that the principle at work?
Yes.
NASA has never submitted a report for peer review. Therefore, until one appears it's grandstanding at best, shameless fundraising at worst.
The experimental results are not sufficiently distinct from noise to establish that the result is real, and the experimentalists claiming this result have latched onto one phoney-baloney theory after another in an attempt to make their claims plausible. Last year, it was a relativistic effect produced by unbalanced Lorentz force at the different width ends of the resonant cavity. That claim got pretty well blown-up and now they're raving about virtual particles.
The reality is that if the experimental effect was large enough for them to get a peer-reviewed result into publication, theorists all over the world would be shoving each other out of the way to explain the effect, rather than the other way around: a handful of dubious "theories" without any serious experimental evidence for them to explain.