A Perfectly Average Anomaly

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 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. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI, the global film company that champions great cinema. From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, there's always something new to discover. With MUBI, each and every film is hand-selected so you can explore the best of cinema. If you're looking for something extraordinary, don't miss My Father's Shadow, coming to U.S. theaters on February 13th. Directed by Akinola Davies Jr., it's the first Nigerian film ever in official competition at Cannes. This poetic and tender story follows a father and his two young sons navigating their relationship against the vibrant, politically-charged city of Lagos in 1993. Written by real-life brothers Akinola Davies Jr. and Wale Davies, and starring Shope Derishu, It's a film that quietly uncovers the unspoken bonds of family. Whether you're already a lover of great cinema or just discovering it, Mubi brings the world's best films straight to your screen. To stream the best of cinema, you can try Mubi free for 30 days at mubi.com slash search engine. That's mubi.com slash search engine for a whole month of great cinema for free. 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. Can you introduce yourself? Actually, I'm sorry. Would it be possible for me to maybe go by a pseudonym or not have a name? Nothing would delight me more than to offer you a pseudonym. Do you have one in mind? How about Travis? 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. So I fly pretty frequently because I live in both Honolulu, Hawaii, and New York City. Oh, wow. So I fly back and forth, you know, kind of a lot. So you can imagine that I'm going through security pretty frequently. Wait, and you New York and Honolulu? That's right. Two very far apart places. Almost as far apart as you can get in the U.S. It's very inconvenient. Okay, and so the question you have is about something that happens when you fly. Tell me what happens. Okay, so do you know the full-body TSA scanner? The one where 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. 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. Yeah. And then there's like a little scream. And generally after like a one-second delay, it just turns green into something like go and then you just walk on and get your baggage. 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. 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. 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 and when you say your anus like you don't mean the general area of your buttocks you mean like where your anus is 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 It's like the tiniest little box, and it happens so frequently. Oh, my God. I sort of thought like, oh, this is the 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. Do you remember the first time it happened? So I looked through my old text messages, and the first account that I gave to someone of this happening was in 2017. 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. 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. 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. 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're checking to make sure that there's not like a piece of metal or something there. That's my assumption. I think it's like the machine thinks that I could be smuggling something there or like have contraband in my underwear. And so just the back of the hand rub kind of ascertains that there's nothing to see here. And my curiosity and my discomfort are like battling each other right now. My desire to share my story is in tension with my discomfort with sharing my story. The whole time we've been talking, I've 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 anything unusual about your body? I anticipated this question. The answer is, I really think no. I have asked my partner, you know, my just feels very intimately, is there anything to see here? And he says 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 ask 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, thanks a lot. Nobody would be like, oh, my God, let's pat that guy down. It would just be like, nothing to see here. Everything normal. Travis did not have theories about what was going on here. He said when he'd asked 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. 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? Sure, sure. So the email that I sent says, What do the TSA Asians 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? 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. That's crazy. 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. 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. I've never had a surgery. Same thing. 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. It's funny, yeah, he's gay and he talked about how his partner was like, you have a normal. I have no clue. Yeah. I'm just thinking about how strange of a coincidence it is that two gay guys are getting pulled aside for crotch abnormality. It seems like the probability of it are pretty low. 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. It's definitely a very normal size. I do not have a dying dong. I have a very average dong. What if it's just like an average dong detector? Perfectly average. Had the U.S. 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 see. And then, a few weeks after my conversation with Silas, on August 31st, I received a third email. 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 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? 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. Are you serious? I am serious. And you're also not the second listener to write in with this question. Stop. Yeah. You're the third. Are you serious? Yeah. I'm the third person to write about a light-up groin in the airport? 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. You're fucking kidding me. I'm not. And the other two men I've spoken to, I had the unenviable journalistic responsibility of asking them about the size of their genitals Yeah Everyone has said the same thing to me which is normal Normal average Yeah, I've got a normal penis. And is there anything unusual about your body? I wouldn't say so, no. Okay. I would say I have a pretty normal human body. what a strange question to ask and have to answer yeah 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 no no tiny guns in my body and then the other thing that the other two men had in common is that they were both gay. Okay. Interesting. May I ask you about your sexuality? Yeah, I'm, I'm straight. Um, that is so curious though. But you're saying, I don't know which way the Kinsey scale goes, but like, you're like straight, straight. Um, yeah, I think I have a very healthy view of what a beautiful man looks like, but yeah, I'm straight. You mean you can, I, You're not so straight that you can't tell the difference between, I'm trying to think of the most beautiful man I can think of. Like George Clooney and like... You can tell the difference between George Clooney and Danny DeVito, but you would go on a date with neither of them. Yeah. 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. But what was going on here? I promised the three I would get them answers. And after the break, we do. To be continued... Welcome back to the show. 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, question mark? 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 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. Jonah Falcon is the owner of what is thought to be the world's largest penis. And when the bulge in his trousers caused a security alert at an international airport recently, he inevitably made headlines around the world. Jonah joins us now. And so let's go. Welcome, by the way. Thank you for coming in today. 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. 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? They 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. Sure. And maybe they were saying, well, this is something we're looking out for. So it could have been a conflux of a perfect storm there. So when they discovered what it is, and when you said to them, actually, it's me, what was the reaction? They wanted to hustle me through there immediately. 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. No, 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. 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 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. 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. 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. I found other theories on these forums. Someone wrote, my armpits always set off the TSA machine. It's got to 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. 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. Hey, PJ. Hi, Doug. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Yeah. I told my one of my nieces and nephews that I was going to have a podcast with you and they were they're big fans of you. So that's so nice to hear. Yeah, so, 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. 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. Hmm. 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... 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 contained more plastic and less detectable metal than its predecessors, but also plastic explosives. 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. 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. In 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. 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. 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 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. The 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 Muttalib 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. Somehow, 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 a reasonably bright high school student Sure it 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. 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 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. 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. 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. So 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'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 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 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. 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. 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... 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, 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. 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. 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. They 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. 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 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. 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 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, as you know, a 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 of issues. There could be the software not taken into consideration. The geometry are what we call corner traps on the body that create anomalies or artifacts that are not being compensated for. What'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. 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. Was I supposed to believe that his butthole contained a second corner trap? We moved on. Next up, the clothing theory. 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. 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. So 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 says 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. 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. 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 this 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 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 yeah there you go yeah it was the very first time I made Doug chuckle although unfortunately I was not joking after the break Bro, what is this? The Bermuda Triangle The actual one, not the metaphor for our listeners' crotches, In real life, it's 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. 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 Triangle, as a statistical phenomenon, disappears. Except as a story, the Bermuda Triangle never goes away. It 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 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. Okay. 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. And I don't want to exercise in the airport, but what I'm going to do is go to the bathroom and drench 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. I let myself into the family bathroom, the one, crucially, with a lock on its door. Uh, someone has been using the sink for something similar, because there's lots of hairs on it. That's gross. Okay. That's water, just so you know. I'm using my hands to dump airport sink water all over my underwear, and by accident, my thighs. This is so gross. I feel like I'm going to be arrested. Okay. Definitely mission accomplished. I wandered back out onto the concourse, dignity gone, and headed towards Shruti, who was standing by security. I'm in JFK Airport with a very wet crotch. Going through security, I look like a pervert. Oh, I hooked in the right, yeah, they got 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... Yeah, until they flagged me. ...doing away with flying. I'm, like, worried my crouch is gonna dry, but I bet a lot of lot of money. Suddenly, 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. I felt the joy of discovery until I saw the agent's face, which looked somewhat mad. I was not immediately sure why. Moments later, on the other side of security and a very tense conversation, I caught up with Shruthi. I saw you getting bored. I just had it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It totally worked. I think we actually just haven't answered that. Did you ask the guy? No, because here's what happened. I went through the thing. It was with 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? Like, and I was like, oh, sorry. I got water on me in the bathroom. And he just like went like, oh. And then he's like, I got to 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 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 grudges. Wow. That 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. These were his results. Well, I got a pat down. I got flagged so I stepped through and I got a cursory pad 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. 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. So it worked. It totally worked. Didn't have to get a pad down. It went totally smooth. Yeah, it's great. Oh my God. Okay, so that was very nerve-wracking. I stepped into the scanner. I went to 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. The Bermuda Triangle, at least for these two listeners, was resolved. Sweat. 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've not been entirely confident we 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. 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. 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. Oh, 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. This episode was fact-checked by Natsumi Ajisaka. Special thanks this week to Shauna Malvini-Redden. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor-Moore, Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schaaf. 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. Thanks for listening. you