gorgikla22 wrote on Apr 8^th, 2007 at 9:56am:

...the first polygrapher that i went to accused me of using countermeasures..... To be honest I had no clue what the word counter measure meant until my background investigator informed of the accusation... which ultimatley made me go and research to see what i had done from that lead me to this point.

I, too, was falsely accused of using countermeasures by a polygraph operator (Ervin Youngblood, LAPD). Like you, at the time, I didn't even know what polygraph countermeasures are. You can read more about my polygraph experience here.


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I have one other question.... If your baseline for the control questions and the relevant questions are about the same, then shouldn't they pass you since there's no difference... i would have thought that if your lying you would show a bigger more obvious reaction to a question?

Well, that's not the way it works. If the reactions are about the same, it's deemed "inconclusive."


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Also if it wouldn't be of any trouble i would like to know why i would be declared 97% deceiving once and then inconclusive two other times.

Note that while there are computerized scoring algorithms that purport to represent with mathematical precision the likelihood that an examinee is truthful or deceptive, such claims are unfounded, and were recognized as such by the National Academy of Sciences in its comprensive research review, The Polygraph and Lie Detection (see Appendix F).

As for how you could fail once and come up inconclusive twice, ask yourself: would you be surprised if you shook a Magic 8-Ball and the answers returned were not all the same? Or if you flipped a coin three times and the outcome was not each time the same? One should not be surprised when an invalid test yields inaccurate results.