A Perfectly Average Anomaly

A man walks into an airport body scanner, and with eerie consistency, the machine flags the exact same part of his body. What could be going on? Search Engine investigates a Bermuda Triangle. Incognito Mode⁠ https://searchengine.supercast.com/, our ad-free, no-rerun, bonus episode feed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  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 can 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.

• 1:11PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Can you introduce yourself?

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Um, actually, I'm sorry. Would it be possible for me to maybe go by a pseudonym or not have a name?

• 2:00PJ Vogt?

  Nothing would delight me more than to offer you a pseudonym. Do you have one in mind?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Um, how about Travis?

• 2:07PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  So I fly pretty frequently because I live in both Honolulu, Hawaii and New York City.

• 2:25PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  So I fly back and forth, you know, kind of a lot. So you can imagine that I'm going through security pretty frequently.

• 2:32PJ Vogt?

  Wait, and you, New York and Honolulu?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:36PJ Vogt?

  Two very far apart places.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Almost as far apart as you can get.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  In the US, it's a very inconvenient.

• 2:45PJ Vogt?

  Okay, and so the question you have is about something that happens when you fly. Tell me what happens.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Um, okay, so do you know the full body TSA scanner?

• 2:55PJ Vogt?

  The one where you, it's, 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.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:23PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And then there's like a little screen. And generally after like a one second delay, it just turns green and says something like, go. And then you just walk on and get your baggage.

• 3:33PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  So if it's like, if you're wearing like a big watch or something, it might be like over your wrist. But for me, most times there is a box on the front and a box on the back. And the box on the front is directly over my dick.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  And then to make matters worse, on the back avatar view, there's like another little box that's like directly on my anus. So it's like.

• 4:16PJ Vogt?

  And when you say your anus, like you don't mean the general area of your buttocks. You mean like where your anus sits?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I use the term advisedly, like it is not just like, oh, it's the whole backside. Or like, oh, it could be his lower back. No, it's like the tiniest little box and it happens so frequently.

• 4:35PJ Vogt?

  Oh, my God.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  I sort of thought like, oh, this is a thing that happens to everybody. But then I would be telling the story or just like alluding to my experience in security. And it was just, I would be met with blank stares because this is, I guess, not a universal or even a common experience.

• 4:50PJ Vogt?

  Do you remember the first time it happened?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  So I looked through my old text messages and the first account that I gave to someone of this happening was in 2017.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:19PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:55PJ Vogt?

  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, they're checking to make sure that there's not like a piece of metal or something there.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  That's my assumption. I think it's like the machine thinks that I could be smuggling something there. Or like have contrabands in my underwear. And so just the back of the hand rub kind of ascertains that there's nothing to see here.

• 6:23PJ Vogt?

  And my curiosity and my discomfort are like battling each other right now.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  My desire to share my story is in tension with my discomfort.

• 6:37PJ Vogt?

  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 any, 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

• 7:19PJ Vogt?

  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 asked 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, well, thanks a lot.

• 7:49PJ Vogt?

  Nobody would be like, oh, my God, let's pat that guy down. It would just be like, nothing to see here. Everything normal.

• 7:57PJ Vogt?

  Travis did not have theories about what was going on here. He said we need to ask 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 pat down.

• 8:16PJ Vogt?

  When I hung up with Travis, I was uncertain about what to do next. I knew the TSA wasn't going to answer my questions about this. They're tight lipped, honestly, for good reason. They were not going to troubleshoot this one user's extremely particular anomaly. The problem just seemed, I don't want to say too small, but certainly too niche. It seemed too niche. Except a week later, July 12th, a new email arrived on my phone. And this email stopped me in my tracks. Can you just read me the email that you sent?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. So the email that I sent says, "What did the TSA agent see when I go through the body scanner? For some reason, I always get pulled aside because of the abnormality around my crotch. I then have to get a pat down. Is this common? Why does a stranger have to molest me in order for me to go on a plane?"

• 9:10PJ Vogt?

  This is a man named Silas, and the anomaly has been happening to him since at least 2019. He says, same as Travis, it happens pretty much every time. Silas, of course, didn't know about Travis. But I explained that there was another person just like him, a North American male whose genitals also somehow scrambled the TSA machine, like a kind of Bermuda Triangle in his nether regions. Silas was not alone.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  That's crazy. I just, I mean, like, I'm almost happy to hear that it's happening to somebody else and it's not just me. I'm not some kind of freak of nature where I trip up the machine.

• 9:49PJ Vogt?

  No, so this guy Travis, he really went out of his way to say that he was like, "I have a totally normal body." He's like, "I have average-sized genitals."

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:59PJ Vogt?

  "I've never had like a surgery." Same thing.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, like, I'm gay. And so I've seen plenty of other people's genitals and, you know, perfectly average, nothing out of the ordinary, normal size. You know, I don't have a piercing or anything. I have absolutely nothing special about my genitals.

• 10:18PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, yeah, he's gay and he talked about how his partner was like, "You have a normal..."

• 10:26Speaker 02

  I have no clue. Yeah. I'm just thinking about, you know, how strange of a coincidence it is that like, two gay guys are getting pulled aside for crotch abnormality. It's just like, it seems like a lot of, you know, it seems like the probability of it are pretty low that the two people for whom it's happening somehow can confirm that they have normal-sized genitals because they have seen other people's genitals. And it's definitely a very normal size. I do not have a giant dong. I have a very average dong.

• 10:57PJ Vogt?

  What if it's just like an average dong detector?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Perfectly average.

• 11:09PJ Vogt?

  Had the US 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 say. And then, a few weeks after my conversation with Silas, on August 31st, I received a third email.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  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's 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?

• 12:18PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 12:31PJ Vogt?

  I am serious, and you're also not the second listener to write in with this question.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Stop.

• 12:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, you're the third.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Are you serious?

• 12:40PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  I'm the third person to write about a light-up groin in the airport?

• 12:45PJ Vogt?

  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."

• 12:58Speaker 03

  You're fucking kidding me.

• 13:00PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:10PJ Vogt?

  Everyone has said the same thing to me, which is, "Normal. Normal, average."

• 13:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've got a normal penis.

• 13:18PJ Vogt?

  And is there anything unusual about your body?

• 13:22Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say so, no.

• 13:25PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  I would say I have a pretty normal human body.

• 13:33PJ Vogt?

  What a strange question to ask and have to answer.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:36PJ Vogt?

  But it's not like, oh, there was that surgery where they put like a titanium rod in me or like a bunch of tiny guns or anything like that.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  No, no tiny guns in my body.

• 13:45PJ Vogt?

  And then the other thing that the other two men had in common is that they were both gay.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Okay, interesting.

• 13:53PJ Vogt?

  May I ask you about your sexuality?

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm, I'm straight. That is so curious, though.

• 14:01PJ Vogt?

  But you're saying, I don't know which way the Kinsey scale goes, but like, you're like, straight, straight.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I have a very healthy view of what a beautiful man looks like. But yeah, I'm straight.

• 14:14PJ Vogt?

  You mean, you can, I, you're not so straight that like, you can't tell the difference between, I'm trying to think of the most beautiful man I can think of.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Like George Clooney and like.

• 14:23PJ Vogt?

  You can tell the difference between George Clooney and Danny DeVito, but you would go on a date with neither of them.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:33PJ Vogt?

  So here's what we know. We know George Clooney is more conventionally handsome than Danny DeVito. We know that these three average donged men are repeatedly triggering false alarms on one of the most important detectors in modern society. And we know that whatever's going on here, it probably has nothing to do with their sexuality.

• 14:54PJ Vogt?

  But what was going on here? I promised the three I would get them answers. And after the break, we do.

• 15:36PJ Vogt?

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• 16:20PJ Vogt?

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• 16:39PJ Vogt?

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• 17:25PJ Vogt?

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• 17:52PJ Vogt?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 17:55PJ Vogt?

  The puzzle. Three men having the same peculiar experience while going through the TSA scanner, leaving them with this question. What was the machine seeing in their anatomy that it found so anomalous? My first step was, as always, the internet. A simple Google search. TSA scanner penis? Immediately dumped me into a lane of inquiry. A theory that each of our listeners had dismissed, but which I would ultimately be glad I pursued as there were clues to be found in it. Theory number one: large dongs. There is an extensive body of internet literature, not hard science, but what was at least until

• 18:35PJ Vogt?

  recently called "lived experience," online of men with supposedly large packages offering testimony about the inconveniences they've regularly suffered under the cold, unyielding gaze of the TSA's body scanner. You can find an article about this phenomenon on the website bigdickguide.com, an online magazine for well-endowed men that contains sections like "How to Measure" and "Underwear Buying Guide." There are also several news stories from 2012, when an American internet micro-celebrity made the rounds to talk about his bad experience with the TSA. Here he is on British Morning News.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  Jonah Falcon is the owner of what is thought to be the world's largest penis. And when the bolt in his trousers caused a security alert at an international airport recently, he inevitably made headlines around the world.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  Jonah joins us now. And so let's go, welcome, by the way. Thank you for coming in today.

• 19:29PJ Vogt?

  You see these two wide-eyed British newscasters on their couch. Jonah, a surprisingly round-cheeked, baby-faced man on the opposite couch, there to speak his truth.

• 19:39Speaker 06

  So this was one of the airports that had the body scanner, you know, the one that actually shows an outline. So that's what caught their eye. First things first, they said, "Are you sure you took everything out of your pocket?" I said, "Yes." So I went through the metal detector, and I went through the body scanner. And then they were, you have some sort of growth. And I think this was very close to when that, one of the terrorists attempted to wrap a bomb around his penis.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 20:05Speaker 06

  Oh, gosh. And maybe they were, they were saying, well, this is something we're looking out for, you know, so it could have been a conflux of, you know, a perfect storm there, you know.

• 20:14Speaker 05

  So when they discovered what it is, and when you said to them, actually, it's me.

• 20:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  Uh, what was the reaction?

• 20:20Speaker 06

  They wanted to hustle me through there immediately.

• 20:24PJ Vogt?

  It's funny, this constituted a news story, a weird news story, but a news story in 2012. These days, you see something like this pretty much every two weeks if you visit the subreddit r slash Big Dick Problems. On this subreddit, the TSA body scanner issue comes up constantly. One post goes, "Body scanners. Know it's been asked a lot, but need tucking techniques." Another, "Every fucking time with the TSA." A third, "TSA agent said he would find what's in my pocket after my second trip to the body scan."

• 20:59PJ Vogt?

  I feel like I need to point out that on Big Dick Problems, there's much more discussion of the joys of having a large package than of the sorrows, but the TSA problem is an exception. The men here do find it embarrassing. They're often offering each other tips about how one might get around it, theories as to why it might be happening. Over on r slash TSA, the TSA's subreddit, an anonymous Redditor explains confidently what's going on here, why America's Transportation Security Administration is targeting these men. Quote, "So the body scanner scans you, compared to what's expected, then reports any anomaly. So if you have a larger than average body part, it'll come back as deviation from expected, which is essentially the average of population, so you'll get further examined.

• 21:43PJ Vogt?

  And yes, a large flaccid penis will come back as deviation. Other body parts will do too, but like other body parts have wider range of expected spectrum. Penises do not." End quote.

• 21:58PJ Vogt?

  As a longtime appreciator of language on the internet, I find this comment to be a pitch-perfect distillation of internet expert voice. The person has no evidence, cites no sources, and yet, they are confident, and they speak in the approximate language of expertise. For all the bullshitting AIs do, I think they learned it from us.

• 22:20PJ Vogt?

  I found other theories on these forums. Someone wrote, "My armpits always set off the TSA machine. It's gotta be the aluminum deodorant." The problem with this theory being that most people put deodorant on their armpits, not on their crotches, so it was no help to us. Similarly, a third theory held that this is all being caused by scar tissue. Somehow, scar tissue supposedly tripped up the scanner. Maybe, but if that was true, it wasn't explanatory here. None of our three listeners had had vasectomies, inguinal hernia repairs, or any other kind of groin-based surgery.

• 22:57PJ Vogt?

  Online, the predominant theory remained the big dong theory. As much material as there was, as endlessly fun as it was to talk about and frankly, read about, I also knew it had to be wrong. Or at best, incomplete. I had three real-life men swearing on the averageness of their dongs, and I believed them. All the internet was really telling me was that this problem was widespread. I thought maybe I'd have better luck if I just turned my attention to the body scanner itself, a device called the millimeter wave scanner. I reached out to the TSA for an interview. They did not respond, so I turned to the next best option.

• 23:36Speaker 07

  Hey, PJ.

• 23:37PJ Vogt?

  Hi, Doug. How are you doing?

• 23:38Speaker 07

  I'm doing great, yeah. I told my, one of my nieces and nephews that I was gonna have a podcast with you, and they were, they're big fans of you, so.

• 23:47PJ Vogt?

  That's so nice to hear.

• 23:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, uh, yeah.

• 23:53PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 24:11Speaker 07

  That's a good story. 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.

• 24:29PJ Vogt?

  Are you allowed to say what national security applications?

• 24:32Speaker 07

  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."

• 24:46PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 25:09Speaker 08

  After the passengers place their carry-on bags into our X-ray device here for screening, while the passenger himself walks through this metal detection device that's immediately adjacent to it. And that in effect-

• 25:20PJ Vogt?

  The 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.

• 25:58Speaker 09

  Last 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.

• 26:12PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 26:21PJ Vogt?

  Fully plastic guns never became a real threat. But what terrorists really did increasingly develop were bombs that use less and less detectable metal.

• 26:29Speaker 10

  December 1994, Islamic radicals detonate a gel-type explosive aboard a Philippine Airlines flight over the Pacific.

• 26:37PJ Vogt?

  In 1994, Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, hides liquid nitroglycerin in a bottle of contact lens solution.

• 26:46Speaker 10

  It blew a hole in the aircraft, but failed to bring the plane down. 292 passengers survived. Only one was killed.

• 26:55PJ Vogt?

  The bomb blows up, killing one person aboard a flight. And the methods that terrorists use to smuggle these explosives onto flights keep advancing.

• 27:04Speaker 11

  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.

• 27:13PJ Vogt?

  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. These 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.

• 27:33Speaker 12

  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.

• 27:47PJ Vogt?

  In 2006, terrorists in England try 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.

• 28:07Speaker 10

  The so-called underwear bomber Abdul Matalib boarded a US airliner last Christmas, no questions asked, and nearly blew it up.

• 28:15PJ Vogt?

  The underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdul-Mataleb. When Abdul-Mataleb 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-Mataleb got on board with this bomb, but now he had to light it, which is where things went wrong for him. Somehow, instead of detonating his crotch, he ended up setting his legs on fire. A fellow passenger noticed Abdul-Mataleb was restrained. Tragedy was averted. But now, this new hole in the fence had to be patched.

• 28:58PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 29:19PJ Vogt?

  Can you explain to me what millimeter wave is, as if I'm a reasonably bright high school student?

• 29:26Speaker 07

  Sure, it's basically radial 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?

• 29:36PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 07

  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.

• 29:58PJ Vogt?

  Doug 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 their 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.

• 30:21Speaker 07

  There were some limitations to it, but it would show the person, the full body of the person. There was any threats on the person, you would see that. You would see the shape of the person. It 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.

• 30:41PJ Vogt?

  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 worked as a prototype, but Doug and his team had to refine the technology. So they started testing their prototype on real-life human subjects.

• 31:14Speaker 07

  The modeling agency sent me all these 18-year-old, beautiful young ladies, and I said, "No, no, we want somebody that's over 18." And I just wanted, like, all kinds of people that were 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." And so it was pretty wild.

• 31:37PJ Vogt?

  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. Metal detectors were instantaneous, and you didn't want some new scanner to slow down the airport's security line.

• 31:55Speaker 07

  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.

• 32:10PJ Vogt?

  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. Because the wands sweep around you, 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.

• 32:51Speaker 13

  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 workers to see if...

• 33:03PJ Vogt?

  This is a clip from "The Today Show" back in 2008. Matt 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 and 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.

• 33:30Speaker 13

  Talk to me about the technology. Real quickly, how does it work?

• 33:32Speaker 14

  A passenger steps into the machine, and it bounces radio waves off your body.

• 33:37Speaker 13

  Harmless waves?

• 33:38Speaker 14

  Harmless radio waves, less than even a cellphone call. So 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.

• 33:52Speaker 13

  How graphic an image is that person viewing of the person beneath the clothing?

• 33:56Speaker 14

  It looks like a fuzzy photo negative.

• 33:58Speaker 13

  Okay.

• 33:59PJ Vogt?

  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. They even have out there, in the broad summer daylight, two citizens who are going to walk through the machine for the first time.

• 34:24Speaker 13

  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?

• 34:35PJ Vogt?

  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. In 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 work. 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.

• 35:20PJ Vogt?

  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. We'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

• 36:02PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 36:25Speaker 07

  Right.

• 36:26PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 36:33Speaker 07

  Right.

• 36:35PJ Vogt?

  Doug had a few theories.

• 36:36Speaker 07

  Could be a number of issues. There 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.

• 36:51PJ Vogt?

  What's a corner trap?

• 36:53Speaker 07

  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, then it bounces off the side of your body and then back to the sensor.

• 37:06PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 37:25PJ Vogt?

  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. It'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.

• 38:10PJ Vogt?

  Was I supposed to believe that his butthole contained a second corner trap? We moved on. Next up, the clothing theory.

• 38:18Speaker 07

  Like, you know, you get a sock line, a bra line. If you really look at how the underwear works, it pinches against the skin and it deforms the body somewhat.

• 38:27PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 38:44Speaker 07

  I don't know if there's moisture or anything like that there.

• 38:48PJ Vogt?

  What do you mean, moisture?

• 38:49Speaker 07

  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 bigger deal or not. So I don't have any data that shows it's a super big problem.

• 39:04PJ Vogt?

  But it could be like if there's sweaty guys, like the sweat could be the problem.

• 39:09Speaker 07

  Possibly. Could be.

• 39:12PJ Vogt?

  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 BICE, 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.

• 39:52PJ Vogt?

  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 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?

• 40:38PJ Vogt?

  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, there you go.

• 40:56PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 40:58PJ Vogt?

  It was the very first time I made Doug chuckle, although unfortunately, I was not joking. After the break, bro, what is this?

• 41:47PJ Vogt?

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• 42:32PJ Vogt?

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• 43:05PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 43:49PJ Vogt?

  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. 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. The higher traffic alone explains the higher incidence of accidents. Once you adjust for just that fact, the Bermuda

• 44:33PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 45:13PJ Vogt?

  Okay. Who are you and where are we right now?

• 45:17Speaker 15

  I mean, I think you're supposed to answer that question and you're supposed to say what your plan is.

• 45:21PJ Vogt?

  This is my editor, Shruti Pinnmaneni. 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 may be going on with people who try to go through the detector and get flagged is that...

• 45:58PJ Vogt?

  Their groins might be sweaty.

• 46:01PJ Vogt?

  And 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 gonna do. Bathroom, too.

• 46:29PJ Vogt?

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

• 46:44PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 46:51PJ Vogt?

  That's water, just so you know. I'm using my hands to dump airport sink water all over my underwear and my accent, my thighs. This is so gross. I feel like I'm gonna be arrested.

• 47:04PJ Vogt?

  Okay. Definitely mission accomplished. I wandered back out onto the concourse, dignity gone, and headed towards Truthy, 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.

• 47:31Speaker 16

  It's very empty at JFK today, maybe because it's a shutdown.

• 47:36PJ Vogt?

  It's great. I know.

• 47:37Speaker 16

  And Trump, who's FAA, is...

• 47:40PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, until they flag.

• 47:40Speaker 16

  ...doing away with flying.

• 47:43PJ Vogt?

  I'm like worried my crotch is gonna dry, but I put a lot of water in. Suddenly, there I was. Over here.

• 47:53PJ Vogt?

  Belt off, laptop out, shoes on, new rule change.

• 47:57Speaker 11

  Okay, go.

• 47:58PJ Vogt?

  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 of seconds. I stepped through, I looked at the agent, who motioned for me to stop.

• 48:23PJ Vogt?

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

• 48:48PJ Vogt?

  Moments later, on the other side of security in a very tense conversation, I caught up with Ruthie.

• 48:53Speaker 16

  I saw you getting wet and patted down.

• 48:56PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, yeah, it totally worked. I think we actually just have an answer now.

• 48:59Speaker 16

  Did you ask the guy?

• 49:00PJ Vogt?

  No, because here's what happened. I went through the thing, there was just a yellow and a red square on my crotch. It was like super like high, whatever. And then, as I said, I made myself very wet, but also like in the bathroom, using the sink. Also, like, I accidentally left my fly unzipped. So the guy just looks at me and he goes, "Bro, what is this?"

• 49:26PJ Vogt?

  Like, and I was like, "Oh, sorry, I got water on me in the bathroom." And he just like went like, "Ugh." And then he was like, "I gotta pat you down." And then he did like the back of the hands, like crotch pad 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 had I said, had I been like, "Do other people set off the thing with their crotches?", I literally think I would have been arrested. But I feel pretty confident that all these men have sweaty crotches.

• 49:59Speaker 16

  Wow.

• 50:04PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 50:19Speaker 17

  Okay, just gonna go through security now. Stand by.

• 50:26PJ Vogt?

  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. These were his results.

• 50:44Speaker 17

  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, but sweat level, hot summer day level underwear. And I got flagged.

• 51:17PJ Vogt?

  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. Which 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.

• 52:01Speaker 17

  So it worked. It totally worked. Didn't have to get a pat down. It went totally smooth. Yeah, it's great.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Oh my God. Okay, so that was very nerve wracking. I stepped into the scanner, I put 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.

• 52:39PJ Vogt?

  That last voice, of course, was Travis, our first listener. He too had passed. So this was our answer. The Bermuda Triangle, at least for these two listeners, was resolved. Sweat.

• 52:55PJ Vogt?

  In 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 in to temptation, and in stories like that, just budge 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. I 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.

• 53:40PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:08PJ Vogt?

  Oh no.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  And I feel that if I get through two distinct checkpoints, two trips through the scanner using this method, I will be convinced.

• 54:22PJ Vogt?

  Oh Travis, please don't do this.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  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 pad downs, the whole thing.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:11PJ Vogt?

  Leave 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 publish, 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.

• 55:56PJ Vogt?

  If 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.

• 56:52PJ Vogt?

  Oh, 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 Multer, 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. So 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.

• 57:35PJ Vogt?

  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 6. You can email [email protected] for more information. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnamaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bezarian. This episode was fact-checked by Natsumi Hajisaka. Special thanks this week to Shauna Malvini-Redden. Our executive producer is Leo Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor-Moore, Corinne Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Shuff.

• 58:20PJ Vogt?

  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 are 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. Thanks for listening.