George, even if you insist on discounting my experience (and, sadly, I must remain anonymous for legitimate reasons I'm sure you would appreciate), the NAS never said that the false positive was even a likely result. If you take all of the correct decisions made in correctly administered polygraph exams, and then throw in the inconclusives, the false positives and false negatives would indeed be a tiny minority. And you don't see the false negatives on this forum complaining do you?  

So that leaves us with a tiny minority of claimed false positives, of which you are one. And how many of those false positives know anything about the polygraph except what they read and choose to credit or discredit? And how many of them have any experience in the real world as polygraph examiners?

Ok, perhaps one in a million is a slight exaggeration. Let's look at in another way, though.  How many people who have posted on this website are false positives? In this age of the internet, I think that there are a lot of people out there taking polygraphs who come to this site out of curiosity, and I'm sure you would like to think you have that kind of audience.  Well, since you began keeping count, there have been just over 20,000 posts on this website.  Over 3,500 of those have been yours, George.  That leaves less than 17,000 posts.  How many total posters wrote those 17,000 posts? Surely less than 10,000 posters, judging by the enormous number of posts by many of the Especially Senior Users and Senior Users.  But let's say that every single one of those posters has been a false positive failure in a polygraph exam. I'm sure that would be a ridiculous exaggeration, but let's give it a ridiculous benefit of the doubt. How many polygraphs have been conducted in the U.S. alone since you began this anti-polygraph crusade?  Any idea?  No?  Me neither.  But if you took all of those posters we're pretending are false positive failures, I think it would still be a tiny minority compared with those who passed the polygraph or simply came up inconclusive.

I had fun with this post, as I'm sure you can tell. But it is fun food for thought.   

Apparently I hit the million-to-one lottery three times in a row on three different polygraph exams.  All of them for different issues.

It would seem logical that if I showed deception in my answers about selling cocaine on my first polygraph exam that I would show some reaction to the same question on subsequent exams, but that never happened.

I wonder what the odds are of hitting a one-in-a-million shot three times in a row?  I believe the odds of that happening are one time in ten to the eighteenth power.  I think that's approaching what even statisticians call "impossible."

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That's right, Bill. I believe it is possible, with very much practice and feedback, to produce polygraph charts that appear legitimate while using countermeasures. I can't even do it myself in lab conditions with another polygrapher trained in counter-countermeasures, though. If I can't do it, I believe the average reader on this website can't do it, either, and I've caught some of them trying. When that happens, their job opportunity ends right there.

The truth is all that polygraph examiners and the agencies or organizations that employ them desire. Polygraph examiners aren't like Saruman, the evil wizard in Lord of the Rings, looking in their crystal ball and trying to work the arts of black magic. When examinees pass the exam, it's nice for everyone involved. When they fail, I maintain that it is almost always because they deserve to fail.

What part of "almost always" do you not understand, Bill?