A Perfectly Average Anomaly

25:02Hey, PJ. Hi, Doug. How are you doing? I'm doing great, yeah. I told one of my nieces and nephews that I was going to have a podcast with you, and they're big fans of you. So that's so nice to hear. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. This is Doug McMakin, storied engineer, first time podcast guest, possibly a little unsure of what he'd gotten himself into here. Doug's mostly retired now, but in his busier years, he was a research engineer who led the team that developed millimeter wave technology. And so how do you get pulled into this? that's a good story um so i got hired at the pacific northwest national lab in the late 1980s to work in a group that was developing radar imaging techniques and we were looking at using it for national security applications are you allowed to say what national security applications i can't really talk about some of the things we were doing at that time but what happened is our national security personnel they brought the faa to us saying hey you need to look at this technology because we believe it could be used for what you're looking for.

26:12Hmm. Doug was joining a multi-decade cat and mouse game, a fight between the engineers who try to keep airplanes safe versus the criminal engineers who work on the side of mayhem. The battle really takes off in the early 1960s when hijackers begin to target airplanes for the first time. They're mostly using guns, and so in the early 1970s, airports finally start adding metal detectors. After the passengers place our carry-on bags into our x-ray device here for screening, why the passenger himself walks through this metal detection device that's immediately adjacent to it. And that in effect...

26:45The engineers of the 60s and 70s were trying to stop hijackers. The typical hijacker threatened violence, but usually just wanted money or a flight to political asylum. Give me what I want and I'll release the hostages. In the 1980s, terrorists started to target airplanes. Terrorists wanted to kill people. Many were okay dying themselves, which made them a harder opponent to stop. And technology seemed to be changing in a way that benefited terrorism. The rising threat of plastic weapons, both new guns like the Glock that contain more plastic and less detectable metal than its predecessors, but also plastic explosives.

27:24Last week's bombing of TWA Flight 840 has focused attention on a hole in the protective security net at a great many airports. The bomb used on that flight is believed to have been made of plastic explosives. Plastic or plastique as explosives people know it. And so the government funded research into body scanners. Machines that could see under your clothes. In case a metal detector one day wasn't good enough. Fully plastic guns never became a real threat. But what terrorists really did increasingly develop were bombs that used less and less detectable metal. December 1994, Islamic radicals detonate a gel-type explosive aboard a Philippine Airlines flight over the Pacific.

28:03In 1994, Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, hides liquid nitroglycerin in a bottle of contact lens solution. It blew a hole in the aircraft, but failed to bring the plane down. 292 passengers survived. Only one was killed. The bomb blows up, killing one person aboard a flight. And the methods that terrorists use to smuggle these explosives onto flights keep advancing. Now to the story of that mysterious man accused of attempting to blow up an American Airlines jumbo jet with high-powered explosives planted in his shoes. In 2001, the shoe bomber, Richard Reed, smuggles 10 ounces of non-metal explosive material in his shoes, which nearly works, except he is stopped while struggling to light his shoes.

28:50these putzes. After that, for decades, we have to take our shoes off so they can be x-ray scanned for hidden plastic or hidden liquids. By planning to use liquid explosives which would pass undetected through the x-ray machine and raise no alarms, the plotters seem to have found a way to circumvent the kind of airline security we've all become used to since 9-11. In 2006, terrorists in England tries smuggling lots of explosive liquid in multiple plastic bottles. They're caught, but that gets us our no-liquids-over-three-ounces rule. Finally, in 2009, we see the terrorist who, in my opinion, has most successfully contributed to making our airport experiences more annoying.

29:32The so-called underwear bomber Abdul Muttalib boarded a U.S. airliner last Christmas, no questions asked, and nearly blew it up. The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdul Muttalib. When Abdul Mitalib boarded his Christmas Day flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the bomb he was carrying was a packet of powder sewn into the crotch of his underwear. Undetectable by metal detectors and unlikely to be detected by a TSA agent, since searching passengers' crotches by hand was not a part of security. Abdul Mitalib got on board with his bomb, but now he had to light it, which is where things went wrong for him.

30:10Somehow, instead of detonating his crotch, he ended up setting his legs on fire. A fellow passenger noticed. Abdul Mitalib was restrained. Tragedy was averted. But now, this new hole in the fence had to be patched. The TSA needed a way to look into people's underwear in as unobtrusive a manner as possible, a very hard engineering problem to solve. Which brings us back to Doug McMakin and the machine he helped develop. Millimeter wave technology, essentially a real-life version of the x-ray specs that used to exist only in science fiction. Can you explain to me what millimeter wave is as if I'm a reasonably bright high school student?

30:51Sure, it's basically radio frequencies, but at real high frequencies. So if you think of like dropping a rock into a water, you get ripples on the water, right? Yeah. Each one of those peaks is a wavelength, right? And so you get that in electromagnetics as well. So it's a wave in space. You can't see it, obviously. But at lower frequencies, the wavelengths are longer. And as you go up in frequency, the wavelengths get a lot shorter.

31:23Doug explained that these kinds of short wavelength waves pass through fabric but bounce off skin. Which means you can actually use millimeter waves to see through clothing. The same way a bat maps a cave by bouncing sound waves off its walls, Doug and his team in the early 90s were designing this machine that would bounce millimeter waves off a human body, which would then create a kind of crude image of that person. There were some limitations to it, but it would show the person, the full body of the person. If there was any threats on the person, you would see that. You would see the shape of the person.

31:58It wasn't high resolution. You didn't see hair. you didn't see the color of the skin or anything like that, or the color of the eyes. In this bald, black-and-white nude image Doug's scanner generated, one thing you could see was objects. Millimeter waves don't just bounce off skin. The waves also bounce off other material, metal, water. So if someone's hiding a gun or a liquid explosive under their clothes, the image created by the millimeter waves will reveal an anomaly, a place where the waves can't easily pass through. The body scanner works as a prototype, but Doug and his team had to refine the technology.

32:34So they started testing their prototype on real-life human subjects. The modeling agency sent me all these 18-year-old beautiful young ladies, and I said, no, no. Wait, wait, somebody that's over 18. And I just wanted, like, all kinds of people with different body types. So we would bring them in and strap on threats, and we would hand them a gun and say, okay, go in the bathroom here and put this gun in a certain area, come out. So it was pretty wild. Doug said the machine was testing well, was able to find those hidden guns, but the FAA needed a version that would work at an actual airport, meaning it had to be more reliable and it had to be quick.

33:14Metal detectors were instantaneous, and you didn't want some new scanner to slow down the airport security line. It was a process, and we finally, we kind of settled on this cylindrical, approach in the late 90s because it gave us more coverage on the person. You can scan a person at different angles to get angular diversity. The cylindrical approach led to the machine most airports have today. You step into the cylinder, two wands sweep around you. Each of those wands holds a panel containing hundreds of tiny antennae. Each of the antennae is rapidly firing extremely high-frequency radio waves at your body.

33:54Because the wands sweep around the image of your body is a 3D holograph, not a flat 2D picture. Doug's team had this technology up and running by the late 90s. The technology worked that early. It worked, but we, American society, didn't yet want it or need it. It was a little too invasive. All that would change, though, after the underwear bomber. All right, Meredith, thanks very much. If you're traveling by air this holiday weekend, you just may run into this new high-tech device at the security checkpoint of a local airport. It's called the Millimeter Wave, and it allows security... This is a clip from the Today Show back in 2008.

34:32Matt Lauer, still the host. The Millimeter Wave body scanner has been plopped, confusingly, on the streets of Manhattan, just outside of NBC's studios. The surveillance machine is having its primetime moment. As cameras roll, an adoring crowd cheers wildly because they're on TV, not because they're excited about millimeter waves, but it is confusing for a second. Matt Lauer is interviewing a TSA spokesperson. Talk to me about the technology. Real quickly, how does it work? A passenger steps into the machine and it bounces radio waves off your body. Harmless waves? Harmless radio waves, less than even a cell phone call.

35:07So those radio waves are then transmitted to a remote location where another security officer will view a 3D image of the person and be able to see if they have anything hidden under their clothes. How graphic an image is that person viewing of the person beneath the clothing? It looks like a fuzzy photo negative. Okay. There's actually a lot going on here. The TSA is trying to calmly sell Americans on some invasive new technology. Matt Lauer is acting both as a stand-in, asking the public's obvious skeptical questions, but also trying to help the government with this project of making it all seem not so scary.

35:43They even have out there in the broad summer daylight two citizens who are going to walk through the machine for the first time. All right, we've got Eric and Kathy here who have volunteered to go through this device for us. So Eric and Kathy, one at a time and again, this is screened by someone in another location. Why don't you head in, okay? It's like they're volunteering for a magic trick. It's funny watching this 17 years later, because on the one hand, we now walk through these machines all the time. On the other, the version of the machines we walk through has been modified in a crucial way.

36:15In 2008, a human TSA agent would have reviewed the black and white nude images generated by the body scanner. That's what the TSA was asking us to be comfortable with. But Americans never got comfortable. Instead, public outcry drove Congress to intervene. And in 2012, Congress passed a law demanding the TSA change how these devices worked. In 2013, the TSA complies. They don't delete the machine, but they do delete the human being in a room looking at images of passengers. That person is replaced by an algorithm, which is how we get to where we are today. Today, the millimeter wave machine collects an image of your body, but the only thing a TSA agent ever sees is that gingerbread man cartoon outline where anomalous areas have been flagged with boxes.

37:06We've gotten back some of our privacy. In exchange, occasionally, we get mysterious computer errors. Boxes around body parts with no good explanation as to why they are there. I told Doug McMakin exactly what it was that had led me to his door today. I got an email from a listener who was saying that routinely when he went through the scanner, he was getting flagged and he was getting a false positive on his groin. and then we got two more listeners in a very short period of time having the exact same thing happen to them it wasn't like they were leaving things in their pockets because now for privacy there will be like as you know like a sort of stick figure avatar of a person right and there will be a box where it looks like something is going on but the box is always over their crotch and they don't understand what's going on right doug had a few theories could be a number issues that could be the software not taking into consideration the geometry or what we call corner traps on the body that create anomalies or artifacts that are not being compensated for.

38:17What's a corner trap? Corner trap in radar terminology means that under your armpit would be kind of a corner trap where it hits like your arm and then it bounces off your arm and then it bounces off the side of your body and then back to the sensor. The corner trap theory. This is the whole reason that when you walk into one of those body scanners, you raise your hands over your head. It's to minimize corner traps, to stop the millimeter waves from ricocheting wildly between your arm and armpit. You spread your feet apart for the same reason. You don't want to create a corner trap by pushing your thighs together, which could actually be an explanation for all those well-endowed men on Reddit complaining about the body scanner.

39:01It's possible that their dongs themselves are creating corner traps. Doug said this was a possibility, or alternatively, Doug thought those men could be being flagged by the machine's algorithm, which was used to more average bodies and perhaps confused by theirs. But for our listeners, all of whom reported average dongs, I didn't know what to make of this. they didn't seem like they should be any more likely than anyone else to have a corner trap. And besides, the machine in Travis's case was also lighting up his anus. Was I supposed to believe that his butthole contained a second corner trap?

39:40We moved on. Next up, the clothing theory. Like, you know, you get a sock line, a bra line. You know, if you really look at how the underwear works, it pinches against the skin and it deforms the body somewhat. it. The thing about the clothing theory, though, was I'd spoken to our listeners about this. They'd all tried different clothing, loose sweats, tight running gear. Nothing seemed to make a difference. They kept getting flagged. Fortunately, Doug had one more idea, the sweat theory. I don't know if there's moisture or anything like that. What do you mean moisture? Well, you know, radars reflect off of moisture as well.

40:18So 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 shows 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 are 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.

41:07A 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.

41:47To some degree, all this secrecy makes sense, but the 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, 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'd made Doug chuckle. Although, unfortunately, I was not joking. After the break, bro, what is this?

42:52Thank you.

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46:36The 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.

47:20The 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. For example, while, yes, the disappearances there are mostly real, they make more sense once you include their obvious explanation, which Gaddis left out. The area he calls the Bermuda Triangle is a very busy corridor, a high-traffic shipping lane, with lots of islands and shallow water.

47:57The higher traffic alone explains the higher incidence of accidents. Once you adjust for just that fact, the Bermuda Triangle, as a statistical phenomenon, disappears. Except as a story, the Bermuda Triangle never goes away. It's in our imagination as a useful metaphor for something else. The idea that there are parts of life that are beyond our understanding, and that things that are incomprehensible can be dangerous, even fatal. That's a true idea embedded in a fake one. Radar really does glitch. Machines do malfunction. Some men's dongs reliably cause false positives, with no clear explanation as to why.

48:45Okay, who are you and where are we right now? I mean, I think you're supposed to answer that question. You're supposed to say what your plan is. This is my editor, Shruti Pinnameneh. We decided we were just going to test this swamp crotch theory. We'd had to take a flight last month anyway, and we decided to commit an act of journalism. So here we were, standing on a crowded concourse, where I was, as instructed by Shruti, identifying myself for tape. Well, I'm EJ Vogt, and you and I are at the airport. And one of the theories that actually I find pretty credible for what might be going on with people who try to go through the detector and get flagged is that their groins might be sweaty.

49:34and I don't want to like exercise in the airport, but what I'm going to do is go to the bathroom and trench myself in disgusting airport sink water in my private parts and then see if that triggers a situation at the TSA. As I say it out loud, it sounds like a terrible idea, but that's what I'm going to do. Bathroom's here.

50:00I let myself into the family bathroom, the one, crucially, with a lock on its door. Someone has been using the sink for something similar, because there's lots of hairs on it. That's gross. Okay.

50:22That's water, just so you know. I'm using my hands to dump airport sink water all over my underwear, my accent, my thighs. This is so gross. I feel like I'm going to be overrusted.

50:35Okay. Definitely mission accomplished. I wandered back out onto the concourse, dignity gone, and headed towards Shruti, who is standing by security. I'm in JFK Airport with a very wet crotch. Going through security, I look like a pervert. Oh, I hope they have the right—yeah, they have the right machine. There's the machine. The security line was surprisingly short. We were quickly moving towards the conveyor belt for carry-on luggage. It's very empty at JFK today. Maybe because it's a shutdown. It's great. And Trump, his FAA, is tuning away with flying. I'm worried my trouch is going to dry, but I put a lot of water on it.

51:18Suddenly, there I was. Over here. Over here. Belt off, laptop out, shoes on, a new world change. Okay, go. I shoved my tray towards the agent overseeing the conveyor belt and stepped into the body scanner. Hands over my head, I heard the swoosh as the antenna rotated around me. Imagined all the invisible millimeter waves bouncing and returning back to a machine that searched me now for anomalies. All of this in just a couple seconds. I stepped through. I looked at the agent. Who? Motioned for me to stop. I whipped my head around to the screen and saw it there, my gingerbread figure, with not one, but two boxes, a cautious yellow one, an angrier red one, both of them exactly around my crotch.

52:09I felt the joy of discovery until I saw the agent's face, which looked somewhat mad. I was not immediately sure why.

52:19Moments later, on the other side of security and a very tense conversation, I caught up with Shruti. I saw you getting blood and patted down. Yeah, yeah, it totally works. I think we actually just have an answer now. Did you ask the guy? No, because here's what happened. I went through the thing. There was with a yellow and a red square on my crotch. It was like super high, whatever. And then, as I said, I made myself very wet, but also in the bathroom using the sink. Also, I accidentally left my fly unzipped. So the guy just looks at me and he goes, bro what is this like and i was like oh sorry i i got water on me in the bathroom and he just like went like oh and then he's like i gotta pat you down and then he did like the back of the hands like crotch pat down but definitely wetness sets it off so like but he was so angry and disgusted with me that i was not asking him fun follow-up questions about whether like i think Like, had I said, had I been like, do other people set off the thing with their crutches, I literally think I would have been arrested.

53:25But I feel pretty confident that all these men have sweaty crutches. Wow. Poor man. I, too, felt bad for the TSA agent, a government worker only here to protect our skies. But I guess not bad enough. Because a week later, when another search engine colleague offered to rerun the experiment to confirm our results, I said yes with little compunction. Okay, just going to go through security now. Stand by. This is Search Engine senior producer Garrett Graham, a very precise and methodical thinker. Garrett did not entirely trust me to have distributed a reasonable amount of water on my own crotch, so he wanted to try a more scientific level of moisture, closer to actual sweat.

54:13These were his results. Well, I got a pat down. I got flagged, so I stepped through, and I got a cursory pat down, more cursory than the one described by our three listeners, but I think that we found our goal for here. I think it's swamp crotch. I mean, I had moist underwear. Not soaking wet like PJ, sweat-level, hot summer day-level underwear. And I got flagged. Now that we had data from our soggy experiments, we emailed Doug McMakin, the engineer. He wrote back to explain what we may have found. He explained that millimeter waves bounce off of water-soaked clothing, that at a high enough moisture level, water creates a barrier.

55:02Which meant Garrett and I really had created two synthetic Bermuda triangles, places on our bodies where millimeter waves could no longer pass through. So we emailed our listeners. we told them it was time for the final round of testing. Lucky for us, two of our listeners, Travis and Silas, were set to fly this week, and they were game to be deputized into our experiment. The instructions get their bodies as dry as possible as they pass through the scanner. Not swamp crotch, desert crotch. Here are the results. So it worked. It totally worked. Didn't have to get a pad down. It went totally smooth.

55:39Yeah, that's, yeah, it's great. Oh my God. Okay. So that was very nerve wracking. I stepped into the scanner. I planted my feet shoulder width apart. I put my hands over my head. It whooshed and the screen turned green. I made it through. I did not get a box over my dick. I didn't get a box over my ass. I just walked out like a normal person. And all it took was a stop at the bathroom to dry off my genitals and then change into shorts and a short sleeve shirt and fresh underwear. I'm a free man. That last voice, of course, was Travis, our first listener. He too had passed. So this was our answer.

56:17The Bermuda Triangle, at least for these two listeners, was resolved. Sweat.

56:26In a world full of so many unsolved mysteries, the drones haunting the skies of New Jersey, the silver monoliths in the desert of Nevada, our little anomaly had finally actually been resolved, which felt like a huge relief. Because to be honest with you, I'd not been entirely confident we'd get to the bottom of this one. And I've known many otherwise great journalists who have given into temptation and in stories like that just budged their facts a little bit. Not for a political agenda, just to make a neater story. On Wednesday, when we'd been waiting for our listeners' results, I had felt the call of that siren, just faintly.

57:03I was just so worried about ending this week having to tell you that the real Bermuda Triangle was the friends we made along the way or something like that. But instead, we had real proof. I turned my thoughts to vacation planning. Mexico City? And then, we got another message. Travis again. He was still at the airport. What could he possibly want? To thank us? Okay, so just to make sure that we don't have a crisis of replication on our hands here, I have exited the gate area, and now I'm going through a second security checkpoint. Oh, no. And I feel that if I get through two distinct checkpoints, two trips through the scanner using this method, I will be convinced.

57:54Oh, Travis, please don't do this. Well, on my second trip through security, I got flagged in the usual spots, a box right on my dick and right on my ass and the usual pat downs, the whole thing. So now I'm kind of tempted to exit again and go through security a third time just to see. Because then, you know, two out of three, maybe that's maybe that would be the evidence that we need. Well, on my third and final trip through security, I got the usual, a box right on my dick and right on my ass. And I think what I've really learned is I should just leave well enough alone and stop while I'm ahead.

58:42Leave well enough alone. Stop while you're ahead. That's what storytellers do. Unfortunately, we're pretty much journalists. And life had once again resisted tidy narrative closure. Just before published, we got a message from our third listener, Keller. He, too, had attempted the desert crotch method. He, too, had been flagged. So as of December 2025, the TSA average dong anomaly remains unsolved. For now, the real Bermuda Triangle will have to be the friends we made along the way.

59:27If you are an average-donged man listening to this who has the same predicament and wants to try to help us solve this, please write in. If you work for the TSA, particularly on the automatic threat recognition algorithm and are willing to anonymously help us, please, please write in. As I speak these words, average-donged North American men are still suffering.

1:00:03Thank you.

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1:01:27Oh, before we go this week, one last thing. People write me pretty often who are trying to figure out how to do work like what we do at Search Engine, just asking for career advice, looking for a door into this industry. I just want to say publicly, Search Engine's brilliant producers, Garrett Graham and Emily Maltaire, neither of them had any real audio or journalism experience before going to graduate school at NYU. NYU's journalism school is a great place to learn. A shockingly high number of the people who we work with all came to this work through that specific door. I think the professors there are doing something right.

1:02:01So if you want to learn how to make shows like Search Engine do the kind of work we do, you could consider applying to the NYU Podcasting and Audio Reportage Program. I think it's pronounced reportage, but I've been told not to say that because it sounds really pretentious. Applications for the cohort starting in the fall of 2026 are due in just a couple of weeks. January 6th. You can email audiojournalism at NYU.edu for more information. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamineni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Malterra is our associate producer.

1:02:36Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. This episode was fact-checked by Natsumi Ajisaka. Special thanks this week to Shana Malvini-Redden. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Mirandy, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode at searchengine.show. This is our very last episode of the year. Next week, we're going to share a story from one of our favorite storytellers, and then we will see you in January, a brand new year with brand new episodes.

1:03:16Thanks for listening.

1:03:31But now we'll continue doing so sentence programming and señal, Thank you.