New York Press writer Alexander Cockburn comments on polygraphy in his column, “Wild Justice” (Vol. 14, No. 29). Excerpt:
I’m no fan of the man from Modesto. But it was troubling to see Gary Condit being hounded by the cable news shows into taking a polygraph test and then trashed for using his own polygrapher, a retired FBIman. Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that the polygraph wasn’t any good for detecting deception. He dropped the test.
The polygraph was invented in 1915 by a Harvard man called William Moulton Marston, who claimed that his clunky little gizmo could detect lies by measuring blood pressure. Marston’s main claim to fame derives not from his machine, but from a doodle he came up with: the cartoon character Wonder Woman.
In the past 85 years, the polygraph hasn’t changed much from the Marston prototype. “The secret of the polygraph is that their machine is no more capable of telling the truth than were the priests of ancient Rome standing knee-deep in chicken parts,” says Alan Zelicoff, a physician and senior scientist at the Center for National Security and Arms Control at the Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, NM. Zelicoff gave us this view in an article featured in the July-August edition of The Skeptical Inquirer.