This is an interesting Government document, from the
National Criminal Justice Reference Service Website, at
http://www.ncjrs.gov/, which is mostly about explosives detection equipment, but also mentions
LRL Fraud, in the
excerpt below, as indicated by the green font color, and specifically
treasure hunting LRLs, in red font color---
From time to time, there are new devices that enter the market. Most companies make reasonable claims, and their products are based on solid scientific principles.
"Claims for some other devices may seem unreasonable or may not appear to be based on solid scientific principles. An old truism that continues to offer good advise is “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is not true.” If there are any questions as to the validity of a device, caution should be used and thorough research must be performed before a purchase is made. Money can be wasted and even
lives may be risked. Although there may be other types of nonoperational devices around,
dowsing devices for explosives detection have emerged during the past couple of years. There is a rather large community of people around the world that believes in dowsing: the ancient practice of using forked sticks, swinging rods, and pendulums to look for underground water and other materials. These people believe that many types of materials can be located using a variety of dowsing methods. Dowsers claim that the dowsing device will respond to any buried anomalies, and years of practice are needed to use the device with discrimination (the ability to cause the device to respond to only those materials being sought). Modern dowsers have been developing various new methods to add discrimination to their devices. These new methods include molecular frequency discrimination (MFD) and harmonic induction discrimination (HID). MFD has taken the form of everything from placing a xerox copy of a Polaroid photograph of the desired material into the handle of the device, to using dowsing rods in conjunction with frequency generation electronics (function generators). None of these attempts to create devices that can detect specific materials such as explosives (or any materials for that matter) have been proven successful in controlled double-blind scientific tests. In fact, all testing of these inventions has shown these devices to perform no better than random chance.
"Mostly these devices are used to locate water and now are used extensively by treasure hunters looking for gold and silver. In recent years some makers of
these dowsing devices have attempted to cross over from
treasure hunting to the areas of contraband detection, search and rescue, and law enforcement.
ref:
http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/178913-2.pdf
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No, Art, he posted it in the correct forum.
