L.A. Times                   Thursday, September 24, 1998 

A Detector With Detractors 

Manufacturer of device, which has been used by an L.A.
police group, says it can help locate fugitives or victims buried in
rubble. But some scientists call it a fake. 

By THOMAS H. MAUGH II, Times Medical Writer
              
    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: http://www.dklabs.com
     
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