Tag: dowsing rods

The NY Times on the Iraqi dowsing rods

February 1, 2010 • 8:36 pm

by Greg Mayer

The totally bogus dowsing rods sold to Iraqi security forces by an unscrupulous (and now arrested) British manufacturer (noted at WEIT here, here, and recently here) were the subject of an editorial, “Shock, Awe and Abracadabra“, in today’s New York Times. Money quote:

The junk science should have been obvious: the slender wand is topped by what looks like a radio antenna on a swivel that the manufacturer guaranteed to point to weapons or bombs hidden up to a half-mile away, underwater or in planes three miles high. “We are working on a new model that has flashing lights,” the manufacturer told The Times of London last year, when first challenged about ADE 651.

Any satisfaction that United States forces avoided this particular sting should be tempered by the fact that American blood and treasure have underpinned the Iraq government across the war’s many expensive follies.

The reason I post occasionally here on these high-profile pseudoscience cases is that being alert to the tactics and activities of pseudoscientists of all stripes is useful, even if particular schools of pseudoscience are an area of focus. I teach a popular general education course at my university entitled “Science and Pseudoscience”, in which we discuss things such as Velikovskianism, UFOs, alien abductions, astrology, palm reading, and many, many other things; and of course, creationism. There is an old saying that a language is a dialect with an army. Creationism is pseudoscience with a powerful political lobby.

Update (Feb. 5): Here’s Randi’s take on the recent developments.

Pseudoscience– banned in Britain

January 22, 2010 • 3:24 pm

by Greg Mayer

A while back, I posted on the shocking use of high priced, English-made dowsing rods by Iraqi security services to detect explosives, dowsing rods being a notorious and well-debunked form of pseudoscience. Use of these devices not only wastes tens of millions of dollars, but costs lives (see the original NY Times article). Well, I’m happy to report that the BBC has reported that the UK government is banning the export of these devices.

Sidney Alford, a leading explosives expert who advises all branches of the military, told Newsnight the sale of the ADE-651 [what the company calls the dowsing rod] was “absolutely immoral”.

“It could result in people being killed in the dozens, if not hundreds,” he said. [Sadly, it already has.]

The BBC went on to report not only the the government action (spurred in part by recent successful bombings in Iraq), but also some analyses of the devices.

Claims of such almost magical technical abilities would almost be comic, if the potential consequences were not so serious.

Newsnight obtained a set of cards [the part alleged by the manufacturer to be sensitive to various substances] for the ADE-651 and took them to Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory where Dr Markus Kuhn dissected a card supposed to detect TNT.

It contained nothing but the type of anti-theft tag used to prevent stealing in high street stores.

Dr Kuhn said it was “impossible” that it could detect anything at all and that the card had “absolutely nothing to do with the detection of TNT”.

Do go to the BBC site to see the video of Dr. Kuhn analyzing the card.

More on dowsing

November 5, 2009 • 1:10 am

by Greg Mayer

Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait also has a post on the Iraqi bomb dowsing: When Antiscience Kills: Dowsing Edition. Here are some videos by James Randi showing how dowsing works. The first is about someone who wanted to claim Randi’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.

The second is a clip from Randi’s wonderful film, Secrets of the Psychics. In this clip, Randi attempts to test dowsing at a Russian alternative “medicine” clinic; the dowsing part runs from about 1:50 to 7:30. (The whole film is great and a hoot– see, as just one highlight, Johnny Carson’s total pwnage of Uri Geller on the Tonight Show, or Randi’s outing of the still active televangelical fraud, Peter Popoff. Apparently no longer available as VHS or DVD, Randi has posted the entire film on Youtube.)

Pseudoscience in the news

November 4, 2009 • 11:34 am

by Greg Mayer

Although they’re a little bit off the usual topics here, two items in today’s New York Times caught my attention. First, there’s an article by Rod Norland on the use of dowsing rods (!!!!) by Iraqi police and military to detect explosives. The Iraqis have spent tens of millions of dollars on these dowsing rods, called the ADE 651.

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, said the center had “tested several devices in this category, and none have ever performed better than random chance.”

The Justice Department has warned against buying a variety of products that claim to detect explosives at a distance with a portable device. Normal remote explosives detection machinery, often employed in airports, weighs tons and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The ADE 651’s clients are mostly in developing countries; no major country’s military or police force is a customer, according to the manufacturer.

Dowsing is a well known and well debunked form of pseudoscience, so it was going the extra mile for the Sandia Lab to test more such devices, yet, the Iraqis still swear by them. James “The Amazing” Randi offered a million dollars to the English manufacturer of the device if it passed a fair experimental test, but with the money they are making off the Iraqis, they have no monetary incentive to have the device tested. The Times reporter even ran a couple of small tests on the device (bringing licensed weapons past a checkpoint; trying the device himself), and of course it didn’t work, but this did not shake the Iraqi general’s faith. It’s often claimed that pseudoscientific beliefs are harmless, but here’s a case where, according to the Times, suicide bombers were able to get past a dowsing checkpoint and kill 155 people in an attack last month.

In another example of how pseudoscience hurts real people, a second article in the Times, by John Schwartz, records how a deputy sheriff in Texas is using “dog-scent lineups” to put people in jail. As is well known, eyewitness testimony is a very problematic source of evidence (see also the work of Elizabeth Loftus), and lineups have their own particular problems (as the Times has noticed before [summary– full article no longer online]). But “nosewitness testimony”, by a dog, presents further complications.

The police told Mr. Bickham they had tied him to a triple homicide through a dog-scent lineup, in which dogs choose a suspect’s smell out of a group. The dogs are exposed to the scent from items found at crime scene, and are then walked by a series of containers with samples swabbed from a suspect and from others not involved in the crime. If the dog finds a can with a matching scent, it signals — stiffening, barking or giving some other alert its handler recognizes….

Mr. Bickham spent eight months in jail after being identified in a scent lineup by Deputy Pikett’s dogs, until another man confessed to the killings.

The Times article records other such cases, including one in which the dog-scent lineup evidence was contradicted by DNA evidence. A British canine police unit expert who watched video of the dog-scent lineups, stated

“If it was not for the fact that this is a serious matter, I could have been watching a comedy.”

Both these stories remind me of previous pseudoscientific fads that have swept over small (or in the Iraqi case, large but not very knowledgeable) police departments in the past: “fuel stabilizers” and other alleged devices that “align the fuel molecules” to save gas, and satanic ritual abuse.