A Detector With Detractors
What do techno-novelist Tom Clancy and some segments of the Los Angeles police community have in common?
Both have praised the merits of a “human-detecting” device that critics charge is an outright fake. Clancy used it in his newest novel, and a Los Angeles narcotics task force says it has been 100% successful in using the device.
LifeGuard, manufactured by DielectroKinetic Laboratories, LLC, of Washington, is marketed as a device to detect the faint electrical signal of a human heartbeat--at distances of up to 500 feet, and through metal, concrete and water.
The company says the device, which comes in three models costing $6,000 to $14,000, can pinpoint victims in the rubble of a demolished building or locate criminals eluding police.
“People can be localized through concrete and steel walls, earthen barriers, inside stationary or moving vehicles and underwater,” the company’s literature says. “There are no known electronic or other countermeasures.”
A federal laboratory that tested the device to determine if the government should purchase it, however, found that its success rate in locating hidden individuals was little better than would be predicted by chance. The company says its own tests are much more successful and that the government tests were flawed.
Independent Examinations
Independent scientists who have examined DKL’s claims say the device is little more than a modern version of the familiar Y-shaped stick of wood that purportedly can locate water underground.
“The LifeGuard is a dowsing rod dressed up in high-tech clothes with lights and buttons,” said physicist Robert Park of the University of Maryland. The company’s explanation of how it works is “meaningless techno-babble,” said Park, who is also a spokesman for the American Physical Society.
“This is vintage pseudoscience,” said Michael Shermer, president of the Skeptics Society, editor of Skeptic magazine and author of “Why People Believe Weird Things.” “They attempt to look and sound scientific, with all the buzzwords but without any real scientific content.”
“It’s a total fake,” said professional skeptic James Randi of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a respected organization devoted to exposing pseudoscience. “I’ve offered my $1-million prize to them if they can prove that it works, but they haven’t taken me up on it.”
Company officials, however, say that Randi is “a washed-up magician,” that Park is receiving money from Randi (“I wish,” Park responded) and that LifeGuard is the victim of a concerted attempt to discredit the company.
“We know the technology works; we’ve seen it work,” said Anthony Daniels, a retired assistant director of the FBI. “This device can save lives.”
Devices to detect humans, drugs, guns and other materials have a long and inglorious history, and LifeGuard is simply the most recent example, skeptics say. One of the most egregious examples is the Quadro QRS 250G detector, manufactured by Quadro Corp. of Harleyville, S.C.
Police forces and schools around the country paid $1,000 to $8,000 for this little plastic box with an antenna sticking out of it, which purportedly could find drugs and a host of other objects. Testimonials from police and educators were the company’s principal marketing tactic.
But when scientists from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio got their hands on one and opened it up, there was nothing in it--except a ball of epoxy with a few dead ants.
After the FBI found that the company was making fraudulent claims, a federal judge put Quadro out of business in January 1996.
Still on the market is the Super-Sensor Dousing Rod, which can be ordered from Psi-Tronics Visions for $79.95. A brochure says: “You can dowse the past, present and future. . . . Locate underground water, pipes, minerals, oil, etc. Locate fish and game animals, or missing persons.”
LifeGuard does have electronic circuitry inside. It looks rather like a science fiction ray gun, with a barrel mounted on a handgrip and a 6-inch-long antenna projecting from the barrel.
The device rotates on the handgrip to point in the direction of the human heart it is seeking. More expensive models incorporate a small laser to better show where the device is pointing and, supposedly, to make it more sensitive to the heart’s electric field. The company says it does not respond to the hearts of cats, dogs or other animals--a proposition that physiologists scoff at because of the strong electrical similarities between such organs.
DKL says the device monitors electrical signals of 1.2 to 2.0 hertz (cycles per second) emitted by the heart. But the wavelength of a 2-hertz signal is 93,150 miles, according to physicist Dale W. Murray of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Antennas used to detect electrical signals generally have a length of one-quarter the wavelength they are detecting. To detect a 2-herz signal would thus require an antenna about 23,287 miles long, he said, clearly much longer than the 15-inch antenna of LifeGuard.
Questions of Science
DKL’s literature says that ultra-low frequency (1-2 hertz) signals can travel much farther than signals at higher frequencies, making them easier to detect at a distance.
Park, however, says that just the opposite is true. “We easily detect signals from the edge of the universe at frequencies from around 1 billion hertz to about 1 trillion hertz. [But] we cannot detect ultra-low frequencies [because they are lost in noise]. The lower the frequency, the higher the noise level.”
There are lots of other problems, he said, but “there is no point in going further. This is fraudulent on the face of it.”
Company officials say the device is based on new science that researchers like Murray and Park are not familiar with.
Clancy, who has a reputation for great technical accuracy in his works, uses a souped-up version of LifeGuard in his newest novel, “Rainbow Six.” In the denouement, a special anti-terrorist team uses the device to pinpoint the location of bad guys in dense forest.
In a telephone interview, Clancy said he was told about the device by a retired assistant director of the FBI, who claimed it was very effective. “It’s possible I have been conned, but if so, it was done expertly,” Clancy said.
The retired FBI man is Daniels of Daniels-Burke & Associates, a security consulting firm in McLean, Va. “We have 27 years of law enforcement experience,” he told The Times. “We’re smart enough not to be dealing with something that is a fraud.”
Double-Blind Test Conducted
He argues that several police forces, including a unit in Los Angeles, as well as the military’s Delta Force anti-terrorism unit, have reported successes in using it. Scientific tests of whether it works are irrelevant, he said. “The reality is how it operates in a real-life police situation.”
That kind of reliance on anecdotal reports is precisely how the Quadro tracker’s makers promoted it. It took scientific testing in that case to show that the device was a fake, and critics say a scientific test conducted by Sandia’s Murray at the request of the U.S. Department of Energy has also damned LifeGuard.
The Sandia team carried out a double-blind study--in which neither the testers nor the LifeGuard operator knew where the human subject was--on March 20. The device was operated by a vice president of DKL, a trained operator.
The team used five plastic packing crates, each large enough to hold a human. In 10 preliminary tests in which everyone knew which crate was occupied, the operator, standing 50 feet from the crates, was correct in locating the subject 100% of the time.
But in 25 subsequent tests when the location of the subject was unknown, the operator found him only six times--little better than if he had been just guessing. Murray and his colleagues concluded that the device does not work.
In a telephone conversation, Murray was reluctant to talk about the tests, noting that Sandia’s lawyer advised him “not to get into a public debate” with the company. He noted, however, that tests at an Army research laboratory in Arlington, Va., confirmed his own results, and that “we have not established any physical basis by which this could work.”
Company officials, however, charge that Sandia was biased because it is developing competing technology, didn’t give the device a fair chance and brought in Randi to help devise the test.
George Howard Johnson, DKL’s chief scientist, said Sandia set up an unfair test. The range of the tested device is 500 meters in open air, he argued, but is less if there is a barrier, such as the plastic crate, present. DKL’s product literature, however, says the signal is unimpeded by any barriers.
Johnson also argued that trials should have been counted a success when the device pointed to a crate next to the one containing the human. By those criteria, the device was successful 72% of the time.
“We have a number of tests from independent sources which show the product works just as we say, and which show the flaws in Sandia’s test,” said Howard Sidman, chief executive manager of DKL. The company will talk about them only with people willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, however, because they fear such disclosures will affect their pending patents.
Johnson also said that LifeGuard must work because the company had received a patent on the device. Patent experts, however, noted that the U.S. Patent Office does not test new devices to determine whether or not they work.
Police Group Backs Claims
One person who agrees with the company about the value of LifeGuard is Lt. John Montanio of the Los Angeles Interagency Metropolitan Police Apprehension Crime Task Force, or LA IMPACT, a low-profile police group focusing on major narcotics traffickers.
Montanio says the group has four of the devices and is the only police agency in the country to use them tactically. “It’s been 100% effective for us,” he said, although its use has been appropriate only in a small number of cases.
In one case, a month ago, LifeGuard helped find a suspect in a large warehouse, he said. In a second, involving a hostage situation in Industry, LifeGuard showed where hostages were being held inside a house, but also indicated a human presence at another corner of the building. “I thought it was a mistake, but we later found out there was a baby there,” he said.
Montanio is aware of the criticisms, but says the device has proved itself. “One positive hit I can understand as a coincidence, but we are seeing too many ‘coincidences’ ” for it to be a fake, he said.
The National Institute of Justice may organize further tests of the device. But until such tests are conducted, Shermer said, potential purchasers should heed the advice of skeptics: “If something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.”
Product information about LifeGuard can be found at the company’s Web site: https://www.dklabs.com
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Does It Work?
LifeGuard’s makers say it can be used to locate humans in collapsedbuildings or to detect fugitives who have evaded police pursuit. TomClancy featured it in his new book, 1/2Rainbow Six.
Serves as visual guide for operator.
Frictionless bearing: mount allows device to point at subject.
Dielectric field: company scientists say it can detect a faint dielectric field producedby a human heart, even through concrete, steel or water. Some scientists question this claim.
LifeGuard Model 2
Eye-safelaser pointer
Telescoping antenna sections
Data port
LightPower switch for amplification circuitry
Frictionless bearing mount
BatterySource: Dielectro
Kinetic Laboratories
