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.