I knew back in 1996 that the story of the Quadro Tracker had to be remembered, retold, and shared with a forgetful public. So here it is after 19 years of dormancy. On January 15, 1996 Region readers of the NWI Times were treated to front page ink (above the fold) on the wondrous Quadro Tracker, a “molecular tracking device” marketed to school districts and police departments. Cited as “actual case studies” were reports of the detection of a criminal suspect from a distance of 15 miles based on a single hair recovered from a coat and the location of a bomb within a building from a position outside the building.
Before I finished reading the article I was ready to bet my last dollar that the Quadro Tracker was bogus. But how could it be? There were endorsements and testimonials. There had even been a demonstration (to local police and educators) hosted in December, 1995 by the Munster Police Department. Apart from the host Munster PD, the Merrillville PD, and the Merrillville Community School Corp. were reported to have expressed interest in purchasing their very own Quadro Tracker. Notably, there was no discernible skepticism in the newspaper article.
Just four days later on January 19, 1996 the news broke of a claim of fraud by the FBI’s Houston Division. Then on January 24, 1996 the news was that a scheduled product demonstration to be hosted by the Lake County Drug Task Force had been blocked by a restraining order. (There was, of course, no hint of contrition in the Times acknowledging its gullibility.) A Task Force “intelligence analyst” (named in the article but not here) was quoted as having been convinced by the earlier product demonstration hosted by the Munster PD. That same Lake County Drug Task Force was investigated three years later for the shakedown of a drug dealer and the curious disappearance of 22 pounds of cocaine from an evidence vault.
Without being a physicist, I have learned a few things about familiar detection devices. Radar will pass through atmosphere. Sonar will pass through water. Each such signal will reflect from an object of suitable size, shape, and density back to a receiver near the source of the signal beam. Without that reflection to a receiver, a radar screen will be blank. Consider the exterior of military “stealth” aircraft designed for avoidance of radar detection.
To detect a bomb within a building from an outside position, one would need a sensor signal that could penetrate glass, brick, plaster, and the like without reflection and then magically find the bomb, reflect back through the same barriers, and then deliver decipherable data to a receiver near the source. This doesn’t happen in the real world!
What about locating a criminal suspect from a distance of 15 miles based on a hair sample? We know that beams may diffuse like a (parabolic) flashlight beam, diverge like a floodlight, or remain coherent like a laser. Still, a broadcast beam (whether light or a radio wave) will travel in a predictable direction until encountering some form of matter that it cannot pass through and then either terminate or continue in a modified direction. For instance, an AM radio signal bounces off the ionosphere while an FM signal does not. FM radio transmissions and broadcast tv signals require a tall antenna to reach receivers in their outer service area. If you still have a tv antenna, it’s more likely to be above your roof than in your basement. A ground level Quadro Tracker beam will not travel 15 miles across terrain and will not reflect back from such a distance with useful detection information.
A more expensive version of the Quadro Tracker came with the claimed capability of locating a person across long distances (more than 15 miles) through a photograph inserted into the device. How utterly witless can police and school officials be? It seems that the FBI tech guys opened a Quadro Tracker and found no functioning components inside. According to Wikipedia, criminal prosecutions ensued and resulted (remarkably) in acquittals. That’s the miracle, I suppose, of good lawyering.
There are at least three lessons here. The first is that scoundrels and junk science persist. The second is that our police and educators may not always be the critical thinkers that we would like them to be, despite their education, training, and generally competent and honorable public service. The third lesson is that the authority to spend public money (as opposed to their own) may make men reckless. I say “men” because all those reported as wanting to acquire a Quadro Tracker were male. While the duped Times reporter was a woman, she was not proposing to spend public money.
I liken the Quadro Tracker debacle to the performance of a clever stage magician. Watching the performance, you should know that you are being fooled even if you can’t say how it’s being done. By contrast, the would-be buyers of the Quadro Tracker saw the magic show and thought it was real.
In mitigation, I have no knowledge of any local public entity actually writing a check for the Quadro Tracker. Sources for this article include: nwi.com archives of 1/15/1996, 1/19/1996, 1/24/1996, and 3/7/1999; 9th grade public school science; and Wikipedia.
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