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An e-meter is a machine that measures the small amount of electricity that runs through human skin. While e-meters are used for certain clinical trials, they’re most widely known for their association with the church of Scientology, which uses them to test for thetans (secret alien souls that control all our thoughts and emotions) during the auditing process of its members. The church has been court-ordered to admit that “by itself, this meter does nothing. It is for religious use by students and Ministers of the church in Confessionals and pastoral counseling only.”

The whole setup “looked like something out of science fiction,” Sawatsky quotes an unnamed participant as saying. “It didn’t look as if it had been built on earth. I’m not trying to be sensational about that. It was a whole bunch of girders that were small flanges to bolt equipment together, and a screen in a box containing naughty pictures.”

“The plan was to monitor as many physiological variables as possible in the hope of finding a reliable method for identifying homosexuals without arousing the fear and anxiety involved with polygraph testing,” Sawatsky wrote.

The plan was to monitor as many physiological variables as possible in the hope of finding a reliable method for identifying homosexuals without arousing the fear and anxiety involved with polygraph testing

Enter Frank Robert Wake, a Carleton psychology professor the government recruited and sent to the United States for a year to study the homosexual detection measures that were being developed there. They paid him about $5,000, or about $40,000 in today’s dollars.

There, he came across a study an American university professor had recently done for a marketing firm in which he strapped a camera to subjects’ heads and measured their pupil dilation as they roamed a grocery store to see which product packaging interested them the most. Wake decided that this would be the perfect basis for his project. A camera measured their subjects’ pupils as naughty images flashed — if their pupils dilated when they saw someone of the same sex, they were a homosexual and therefore a threat to national security.