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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Call Zone Media.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week, we are telling the story of a fake bomb detector that wound up getting a shitload of people killed thanks to the ideomotor effect and how that's weirdly relevant to our current moment in American culture, AI, all this good stuff. To talk with me about that, Ed Zitron.
Ed, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Now, Ed, you're the host of the Better Offline podcast. And how are you feeling about the ideomotor effect and people being able to know what's real? I'm amazed by Clever Hans. I think Clever Hans is a hero who was unfairly eaten. By German soldiers after he was murdered in World War I. They were very unfair to clever Hans.
Chapter 2: What is the story behind the fake bomb detector?
I do. He's a smart, smartest horse. It was just desperation and not a punishment, but it does in the articles read a little bit like because they found out he wasn't really smart, they sent him off to die. You were a fraud, Hans. Oh, man.
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I actually drop better when I'm high. It heightens my senses, calms me down. If anything, I'm more careful. Honestly, it just helps me focus.
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Chapter 3: How did the ideomotor effect contribute to the scam?
But you do see how some of the marketing bullshit is the same. And yeah, I do find it very funny. Like the idea that you're basing probable cause for searches on a device where the designers are like, we can't tell you how it works because then someone might know how it works. Then they'll start changing the molecules. Yeah, they'll change the molecules on us. I'll switch it up.
The molecules will be different. The drug dealers making the drugs will change the molecules to give off a different wavelength. I hate it when drug dealers do that. Always moving the molecules around. What are we going to do? Then they'll do molecule science on us.
Then we're fucked.
Then everyone will have drugs. Once they figure out the molecules, we're screwed. So three schools in Johnson County, Missouri, are said to have bought trackers for $955 each. So they're selling these things originally for like $8 to $12. Now you're getting $9.55 for the ones you're selling to fucking Missouri. Other sources show that trackers were sometimes sold for as much as $8.
thousand dollars, especially to law enforcement agencies. B.J. Hodges, director of safety and security at Shawnee Mission School District, was quoted as saying, if it does what they say to do, then it's going to be a tremendous asset, not only to school districts, but to law enforcement. And yeah, if it did what it said it did, it would have been, but it doesn't. It's the Theranos thing, right?
This is very much a Theranos thing where they're like, well, if you could really do all those tests. Yeah, off of a drop of blood, you know. Did they bother to do any fake detections or did they just? Oh, yes. They've got fake detections. Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Because they know where the drugs are or whatever. You know, it's very easy to trick people with this shit.
As we've talked about, we just went through all the different ways people were tricked in the past by this. It's the same ones in the future, you know, or the 90s. Quadro's marketing pitch included claims that their tracker could find narcotics behind brick walls and at distances of up to half a block away. It could even... What the... This is my favorite... What? Yeah, yeah.
It could even, this is my favorite part. If you want to think back to just what we were talking about a little earlier, they even were like, it can identify places where pot was smoked in the past. Right? Which gives you, it's the same thing with the dogs, where they're like, if it alerts and then there's no drugs, they're like, oh, he had pot before.
But that doesn't make any sense, because if it's where the drugs were, and it was the fumes coming off the drugs, that means the drug molecules are not giving off the wavelengths. Right, right, right. It doesn't make sense based on your bullshit science. Yeah. I mean, I was with you until the drug molecule wavelength. That was fine, but now I'm questioning it. That's what proved this is nonsense.
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Chapter 4: What role did Malcolm Rowe and Wade Quattlebaum play in the grift?
The skeptics were never brought up, so it just seems like, oh, maybe everyone thought this was real, and that's not the truth. When the Quadro tracker starts being sold in like 1995, famed skeptic and magician James Randi finds out about it, and he issues a challenge to Quadro, offering $507,000 to anyone who can pass a double-blind test of the device. And first off, we love you, James.
And second, after that comes a paragraph I did not expect to read. And this is about James Randi. He conducted a test with Missouri Seminole County School District Director of Security Wolfgang Halbig, who was considering buying one of the units. With a known sample of marijuana, Randi asked Halbig to find the card for marijuana from a number of unidentified cards.
In a series of tests, Halbig did not get one correct. Now, that just sounds like a debunking, right? Nothing sketchy about that. And there isn't about the debunking. Do you know who Wolfgang Halbig is today, Ed? No. This has nothing to do with James Randi. It's just crazy that he shows up in this. Wolfgang Halbig was indeed the district director of security for Seminole County back then.
In more modern days, because of his experience as a school director of security, he became a Sandy Hook shooting denier and a regular guest on InfoWars back when Alex Jones still ran it. He was a major part of the Sandy Hook denier. That's Wolfgang Halbig. That has nothing to do with his story. He's actually...
On a good side here, because he is, like with James Randi, he is busting the fact that this thing is nonsense. Bizarre. It's just funny that it's Wolfgang Halbig.
Yeah. It's very funny.
It's also funny that he would have fallen for the tracker. He definitely would have thought this was real if James Randi hadn't saved his ass. I do love that, too. It's so cool seeing how history is just full of dullards waiting to be conned. It really is. I love it. So police departments in Illinois and Georgia made purchases of the tracker despite this public debunking.
Between 1993 and 1996, Quadro sold roughly a thousand units around the United States. This paragraph from the article I've been quoting from should provide some explanation as to why. It comes right after they describe Randy and Halbig testing the tracker. Tests and demonstrations in three other school systems, however, convinced administrators to buy the units.
They are still drawing up guidelines about how to deal with searches of students' lockers, cars, and belongings that the tracker hits. And we know now because of the lawsuits, these weren't real tests and demos in these other school systems. They were cons.
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Chapter 5: How did the Quadro Tracker deceive police departments?
At first, they're all friends. But because the mole was meant for sale in the UK and Europe, Bolton decides like, well, if I want to really get this thing moving, I need to get a legitimate group of people who are attached to the defense industry to say it's real. And the best people is like the royal engineers have this like team of guys who like test stuff. To see if it works, right?
So if you can get the Royal Engineers to say this thing works, then you can sell it pretty much anywhere because the Royal Engineers are very much professionals, right?
Right.
So in 1999, he submits one of the moles to the Royal Engineers support team and he asks them to repair a report on it. Per the BBC, they found it was accurate only about 30% of the time and could not be relied on. Now, that should have been the end of it, right? Well, the Royal Engineers found it doesn't work.
But despite that, that same article notes that several years later, like four or five years later, when his house gets raided, Bolton's home gets raided because of the crimes he's about to commit. police find two letters of support from the Royal Engineers in Mr. Bolton's offices.
And he'd use these letters to pitch governments and law enforcement agencies around the world on the mole by saying, look, the Royal Engineers said it works, even though they didn't. And he definitely had the papers from them saying that it worked, even though they're supposed to have said that it didn't. One article I found on Corruption Tracker claims that Bolton doctored the letters.
But that's not necessarily true because Bolton remains involved with the Royal Engineers directly for some period of time after they test the mole and find it's bullshit. And in fact, after that test, they will help him actively sell the mole. So I don't know that he did doctor those certificates. The first big hurrah for the mole ā yeah, it's interesting.
We'll cover that more in a little bit. The first big hurrah for the mole and for Global Technical was a home demo that Bolton carried out. This impressed a businessman named Jim McCormick enough that McCormick offers to help them sell the thing in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Now, at this point, Bolton has started to get greedy, and so has everyone else, because especially I think this guy McCormick comes in and says, we could sell tens of millions of dollars of these. So all of the guys who've been working together start planning on how to go to business on their own, right? They don't want to share the profits with the others.
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