Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, quick note before we start the show, we're having a sale. Because we've gone crazy over here at Search Engine HQ, we've decided just this once for the holidays to offer a discount on Incognito Mode. That is the version of the show that has no ads, where we occasionally run bonus episodes, weird experiments. We have our live board meeting for Incognito Mode members.
It is 20% off for six months. You can give it as a gift for the holiday season. you give it as a gift to yourself. 20% off for your first six months. Incognito mode, on sale. We've lost our minds. Check it out at searchengine.show. That's where you can sign up. Okay, our final episode of the year, after some ads. Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt.
No question too big, no question too small, no question too average. This year, Search Engine received 4,589 questions. I read them all on my phone, often when I shouldn't have been. My favorite one arrived almost exactly mid-year, July 6th at 2.30 in the morning. As much as I loved it, I also knew as I read it, there was probably no world in which we'd actually end up on the air.
It was too niche. It was also, frankly, inappropriate. Definitely a question to entertain my friends at the bar with, but which bringing to an office felt a little close to an HR violation. Can you introduce yourself? Um, actually, I'm sorry, would it be possible for me to maybe go by a pseudonym or not have a name? Nothing would delight me more than to offer you a pseudonym.
Do you have one in mind? Um, how about Travis? Travis. Okay. We can go with Travis. Travis had a question about something pretty personal that was happening to him at the airport. Something he'd mainly discussed with his partner. So I fly pretty frequently because I live in both Honolulu, Hawaii, and New York City. Oh, wow. So I fly back and forth, you know, kind of a lot.
So you can imagine that I'm going through security pretty frequently. Wait, and you, New York and Honolulu? That's right. Two very far apart places. Almost as far apart as you can get in the U.S. It's very inconvenient. Okay, and so the question you have is about something that happens when you fly. Tell me what happens. Okay, so do you know the full-body TSA scanner?
The one where you, it replaced the pure metal detector and you walk in and you kind of put your hands like the cartoon over your head and it scans you more thoroughly is my understanding. Yeah, exactly. So if you have a TSA pre-check, you generally just go through the x-ray like old school.
But for everybody else, you go into this kind of like cylindrical space, and then you plant your feet shoulder width apart, hold your hands in the air above your head, and then it kind of like whooshes around you. And then there's like a little screen. And generally after like a one second delay, it just turns green into something like go, and then you just walk on and get your baggage.
That's what happens if everything goes right. If something goes wrong, meaning the machine detects some kind of anomaly, you get stopped. You see on the little screen a sort of gingerbread outline version of you with a box over the part of your body that the machine is flagging. So if you're wearing a big watch or something, it might be over your wrist.
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Chapter 2: What unusual experience does the guest have with TSA body scanners?
It sort of like crept up on me for a while. It would just sort of happen. I wouldn't think about it. I might text someone like, oh yeah, I got hung up in security. Or like my mom was asking like, why were you late to meet me at the gate? And I was like, oh, I got a special pat down. And then only in the past couple of years did it dawn on me that like this happens to me all the time.
It happens often enough that by now, Travis knows what to expect. On his otherwise breezy commute from Honolulu to Manhattan, he'll set off the scanner. He'll get stopped. And then it'll be time for the pat-down. The agent, they'll offer a private screening. Travis will decline. Instead, they're in front of everybody, every time. He'll go through the brief, somewhat embarrassing ritual.
So, they say, like, I'm going to rub the backs of my hands across your crotch. And then they say, like, I'm going to rub it across your buttocks. That's what they do with the backs of the hands. And then they're like, okay, good to go. Got it. So, it's like they're trying to establish, it sounds like, I'm guessing that they're not groping you.
So, it's the back of their hand, not the front of their hand. And they're checking to make sure that there's not, like, a piece of metal or something there. That's my assumption. I think it's like the machine thinks that I could be smuggling something there or like have contraband in my underwear. And so just the back of the hand rub kind of ascertains that there's nothing to see here. And...
My curiosity and my discomfort are like battling each other right now. Same. My desire to share my story is in tension with my discomfort with sharing my story. The whole time we'd been talking, I'd been trying and not quite succeeding in drafting this sentence in my head.
Like, the optimally polite, optimally HR-friendly version of the question I had about why Travis's private parts might register as out of the ordinary to the machine intelligence that powered the airport scanner. Finally, I stammered it out. Is there anything unusual about your body? I anticipated this question. The answer is, I really think no.
I have asked my partner, you know, you know my just feels very intimately. Is there anything to see here? And he says the answer is no. I also believe the answer is no. So I really don't think that it's like a... body issue. Okay.
Like, I don't even know, by the way, when I ask that question, whether I'm asking a question about size, material, shape, but just like, as far as you can tell, like, you just look like, if we were walking together through a naked spa or sauna, no one would look twice at you. You're just a guy. Well, thanks a lot. Nobody would be like, oh my God, let's pat that guy down.
It would just be like, nothing to see here. Everything normal. Travis did not have theories about what was going on here. He said when he'd asked the TSA agents, they didn't have much to offer him. Some arbitrary suggestions, he could make sure to not hitch up his pants, he could try looser or tighter clothing, none of which worked. All roads led to Patdown.
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Chapter 3: How does the TSA body scanner work and what happens when it flags an anomaly?
Perfectly average. Had the U.S. government in the second Trump administration developed a working form of gaydar that targeted average-donged men? It seemed unlikely. No stereotype that I knew held that average-donged gay men specifically posed a national security threat. The ever-expanding list of domestic enemies our country accumulated did not yet seem to include them specifically.
These two men, I was convinced they were connected, but I believed they were connected in some way I couldn't yet see. And then, a few weeks after my conversation with Silas, on August 31st, I received a third email.
Hi, PJ and team. Huge fan of the pod. Been here since day one. For the past three or four years, every time I go into the airport security body scan machine, where you stand on the yellow feet and put your arms up, no matter what I'm wearing, my groin area always lights up red on the TSA screen, and an agent has to pat me down.
I haven't had any procedures like an implant, pacemaker, etc. I have everything out of my pockets. Nothing is abnormal, but I always get flagged. What's going on? Is this normal?
Our third listener in just two months. His name was Keller. So I will tell you something strange, which is that you're not the first listener to write in with this question. Are you serious? I am serious. And you're also not the second listener to write in with this question. Stop. Yeah. You're the third. Are you serious? Yeah. I'm the third person to write about a light-up groin in the airport.
You're the third North American man I've talked to who has said, I don't know what's going on. When I go through that specific machine at the airport, most times it lights up. It lights up specifically on my groin.
You're fucking kidding me.
I'm not. And the other two men I've spoken to, I've had the unenviable journalistic responsibility of asking them about the size of their genitals.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What theories exist about why some men trigger false alarms at airport security?
Fortunately, Doug had one more idea. The sweat theory. I don't know if there's moisture or anything like that there. What do you mean moisture? Well, you know, radars reflect off of moisture as well. So there may be issues with moisture. I can't tell about their situation, but I don't know if that's a big deal or not. So I don't have any data that says it's a super big problem.
But it could be like if there's sweaty guys, like the sweat could be the problem. Possibly. Could be. Sweat. There were other good reasons to suspect it. There'd been the Redditors who'd complained about getting stopped over their armpits. Maybe it wasn't the antiperspirant tripping the machine, but instead the moisture the antiperspirant was supposed to address.
And this summer, the same summer that I'd gotten those emails from our listeners, what I'd missed was a slew of articles, one in the New York Post, another in Vice, about a woman who was afflicted with what both outlets referred to as swamp crotch. A sweaty crotch which was causing her, she thought, to get flagged by the TSA's body scanner.
So now we had what felt like a narrow, answerable question. Does millimeter wave technology, the body scanner used at almost all American airports, just not work on people with very sweaty private parts? I thought that was a narrow, answerable question, except it wasn't. There just isn't good public data about TSA stops.
You can read anecdotes and Reddit posts, but there's nowhere where the government publicly discloses information about false alarms. This is considered sensitive information by the TSA. To some degree, all this secrecy makes sense, but this specific not knowing really frustrated me. These sophisticated machines could handle sweat, or they couldn't.
Wasn't this something ultimately you could just test? And I guess if the theory is that this might be sweat, is there, I guess I could just like, the next time I know someone who's flying, I could ask them to like do laps around the airport right before they go through the millimeter wave machine. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It was the very first time I made Doug chuckle.
Although, unfortunately, I was not joking. After the break, bro, what is this? The Bermuda Triangle, the actual one, not the metaphor for our listeners' crotches, in real life is a patch of ocean in between the coasts of Florida, Puerto Rico, and Bermuda. It's an unofficial place with no defined boundaries. People draw and redraw its lines all the time. The Bermuda Triangle is not quite real.
It's true-ish, story true, the way a lot of things are these days. The facts tell us that planes and ships really do disappear in that area. Famously, the USS Cyclops and its 306 crew and passengers vanished without a trace there in March 1918. And people tell the story of Flight 19, a group of five Navy bombers who disappeared off the coast of Florida in 1945.
The idea that there's something deeply mysterious causing disappearances like these comes from a 1960s magazine article from a writer named Vincent Gaddis. Gaddis, a lousy reporter and a great storyteller, exaggerated almost everything about this place he named the Bermuda Triangle. He left out anything inconvenient to the legend.
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