Explosives Detection - Bogus Devices

Bogus Devices

The US Department of Justice warned in a National Institute of Justice publication, "Guide for the Selection of Commercial Explosives Detection Systems for Law Enforcement Applications (NIJ Guide 100-99)," about the ongoing trend of "Bogus" explosives detection equipment being sold to unsuspecting consumers. The report mentions by name the Quadro Tracker, an apparent dowsing rod with a freely pivoting radio antenna rod with no functioning internal components.

"...There is a rather large community of people around the world that believes in dowsing: the ancient practice of using forked sticks, swinging rods, and pendulums to look for underground water and other materials. These people believe that many types of materials can be located using a variety of dowsing methods. Dowsers claim that the dowsing device will respond to any buried anomalies, and years of practice are needed to use the device with discrimination (the ability to cause the device to respond to only those materials being sought). Modern dowsers have been developing various new methods to add discrimination to their devices. These new methods include molecular frequency discrimination (MFD) and harmonic induction discrimination (HID). MFD has taken the form of everything from placing a xerox copy of a Poloroid photograph of the desired material into the handle of the device, to using dowsing rods in conjunction with frequency generation electronics (function generators). None of these attempts to create devices that can detect specific materials such as explosives (or any materials for that matter) have been proven successful in controlled double-blind scientific tests. In fact, all testing of these inventions has shown these devices to perform no better than random chance...."

A number of dowsing rod-style detection devices have been widely used in Iraq and Thailand, notably the ADE 651 and GT200, where they have been reported to have failed to detect bombs that have killed hundreds of people and injured thousands more.