Podcast Episode 9: That Time I Wanted Blood From The Human Lie Detector

For months, Jen had been paying a highly credentialed "human lie detector" for validation, only to be met with professional deflection and silence.

This episode is about the moment that changed. From the shocking history of a 1970s kidnapping on sovereign land to a deeply vulnerable revelation in a therapist's office, Jen pieces together a story that is stranger ... and more validating than anything she could have imagined. And somewhere in the middle of it all, an actual medical professional confirms what she has known all along.

Some people really do see what others miss. This is the episode where the truth finally takes shape.

Talk Nerdy To Me® - Episode 9 Transcript

EP. 9 - That Time I wanted Blood From The Human Lie Detector

Before I get into the horrifying next part of the story, let me just say this about the human lie detector. He came into my life at an incredibly confusing yet deeply self-reflective time. I already knew everything I was seeing, and I had the surveillance footage to prove exactly how quickly I saw it, which was very important.

What he provided was a very expensive weekly space to present my findings and connect the dots on everything I knew to be true. I just didn't know how yet. That validation gave me the confidence to open up to people around me, which didn't just make me feel less alone in being stalked, it also saved me a ton on Uber rides and turned friends I already loved into chosen family.

Honestly, a parrot would've been just as effective, but they live far too long.

I can't read this next part.

Welcome to Talk Nerdy to Me. This is the unbelievably true story. Once you hear it, you may never experience your own life in the same way.

Back in the late '80s, a high-ranking federal official decided to personally intervene in a custody dispute involving a girl living on a reservation. This girl had been adopted as an infant by a non-Native couple, but the courts had ordered her return to her biological mother and her tribal community.

The legal case was settled. It was done.

But this federal official disagreed with the outcome, and so he assembled a team, including US Marshals, a television crew, and a consultant—a psychologist, someone brought along ostensibly for their expertise. They drove onto sovereign tribal land, pulled the girl off her school bus, and began questioning her while cameras rolled.

Now, here's where it gets worse.

According to the federal official himself in his own written account, it was the consultant, AKA the human lie detector, who crossed the line. It was the consultant who suggested to the girl that she could simply leave. All she had to do was get in the car.

And she did.

Five adults convinced her to do this.

The whole party was eventually stopped by state police at gunpoint, arrested, and jailed. The federal official later faced a reckoning from his own colleagues. He was forced to apologize. He blamed the consultant for escalating things.

The consultant, AKA the human lie detector, seemed to face no public accountability whatsoever.

Look at the entitlement and desperate need to control. He brought his own camera crew to the kidnapping. He had his own camera guy. The news camera crew wasn't enough.

He had to have his own.

Oh my God, I'm completely speechless.

Jen thanked her maid of honor for her insistent instincts. She didn't need any more information other than what was in front of her to know she was going to fire him immediately.

Her maid of honor was really happy to hear that and followed it up with, "I'm sure this is going to take a while for you to process."

Technically not needing that much time, my mind locked onto exactly what happened.

A high-ranking federal official brought in the human lie detector to consult on a case that was already settled, closed, decided, done.

His entire authority rested on a single claim: that he could read human behavior and serve truth.

Yet the most consequential act attributed to him in the story was not detection. It was manipulation.

Suggesting to a child surrounded by federal marshals and cameras on sovereign land that she could simply get in the car is not a neutral observation.

It is influence engineering.

A trained psychologist would know that children in high-stress, authority-saturated environments do not experience such a suggestion as an invitation.

They experience it as a command.

The consultant's expertise was not incidental to the harm. It was instrumental to it.

What makes this case study so damning to me is the accountability gap.

The federal official faced a formal reckoning and deflected blame onto the consultant. The consultant faced nothing.

This is a well-documented dynamic.

The credentialed expert brought in to provide intellectual legitimacy for an operation is typically the most shielded figure once it is over.

In the moment, their involvement makes the operation appear credible and authoritative.

In the aftermath, it gives those responsible a ready defense.

The expert signed off on it.

And the label "human lie detector"—not a clinical designation, but a performance identity, a title designed to make people feel seen before they have said a word.

That kind of authority does not need to raise its voice.

It suppresses resistance simply by being in the room.

For a child already surrounded by federal marshals and rolling cameras, there was no resistance left to suppress.

Any professional who accepts the human lie detector title, steps into that room, and uses it to dissolve a child's resistance to being taken has not merely made a poor judgment call.

They have weaponized their credentials against the most vulnerable person present.

Oh, and did I mention he brought her a teddy bear?

The silence that followed and lack of public accountability is not a footnote.

It is the story.

Another rather large portion of his story was that his technique is patented using a groundbreaking form of technology.

Being a techie myself, witnessing the near total absence of real technology in all of my sessions bothered me more than I expected.

Before publishing this podcast, I needed to know what the patent actually said beneath the language.

So I did what felt most appropriate.

I used the technology we do have and fed it into ChatGPT.

This is a genuinely unusual case, and in the context of everything else you have been discussing, it is worth reading carefully.

This was filed in the nineteen seventies for a therapeutic process that is, on its face, remarkable.

It uses infrared heat imaging technology, the same cameras used to screen for breast cancer, to scan a patient's body for temperature aberrations or anomaly on the theory that unresolved trauma is not just psychological, but physically stored.

A tense muscle, restricted blood flow, a cold spot—the body has been holding since a frightening moment years or decades earlier.

Once the anomaly is located, the patient is hypnotized, their attention directed toward that exact spot, and regressed until they re-experience the original traumatic event.

The claim is that when the regression finds the right memory, the temperature anomaly visibly destabilizes on the screen in real time, the body releasing what the conscious mind could not reach.

The entire process, the patent states, takes about forty-five minutes and produces permanent relief.

What it is really claiming underneath all of that is that the body broadcasts hidden truth and that a trained expert can read it.

Aha.

But this goes back to him being the one person who could analyze—slash read—it.

Unless, of course, he teaches his revolutionary practice to a student.

Talk about job security.

I don't know what I'm more confused about: the fact that this was patented, or the fact that after 45 minutes it produced permanent relief.

As someone who clearly has gone through a lot in terms of my mental health, I couldn't wrap my own brain around how ridiculous this actually sounded.

The patent expired in the early '90s, so I followed up my ChatGPT-ing with, "If this was so beneficial, why would anyone let this lapse?"

It may have served its purpose simply by existing.

A filing done in the 1970s, even one never commercialized, establishes a paper trail. It says this person was doing serious, documented, formally recognized work. It lends the kind of institutional credibility that a title like human lie detector cannot provide on its own.

Once that credibility is established and attached to a professional identity, the filing itself becomes unnecessary.

The aura it created outlasts the document.

That last part will be funny in just a moment.

The patent lapse took place just a few years after the kidnapping incident occurred.

While I don't like to make assumptions, and clearly this is just my personal opinion of the human lie detector based on my personal experiences and facts that I found, it seems like it made sense that that's why he went overseas and explains the accounts I read of people's experiences of him in the mid to late '90s.

Remember, the internet at that time was in its infancy, so the whole idea of literally packing up and going somewhere else was a very real thing you could do.

The human lie detector's core idea of the 1970s patent did not disappear.

It metastasized.

A recently granted U.S. patent, US12023160B1, describes a non-invasive remote system that estimates the probability of deceit from physiological variations. No contact required.

Meta filed a patent as recently as July 2026 for a wearable that builds a detailed emotional profile from biometric data.

Feel Goods Therapeutics holds patents on technology that passively monitors psychological signals to identify emotional states and trigger mental health interventions.

The underlying assumptions have never changed.

The body reveals what the mind conceals, and technology can extract it.

The 1970s patent required a willing patient, a clinical setting, and a hypnotist.

The modern versions require none of that.

The human lie detector of the 1970s needed to be in the room.

The 2020s version runs from a wristband or a camera feed.

The ethical stakes have not shrunk.

They have scaled.

Jen was still determined to receive formal training in studying non-verbal leaks. She was not going to let one person stop her from something she clearly had a talent for.

Before firing off an email to the human lie detector, she went back to the one person in that space she actually trusted: Joe Navarro, the author of the number one-selling body language book, and the book she had so frequently gifted to friends, making sure the people around her were kept up to speed on certain findings she found game-changing.

She signed up for his course's free trial.

The onboarding process was considerably easier.

No months of rejection.

No moral and ethics review.

It did not carry the same ring as being the only person in the United States to receive this training.

But Jen had never cared about that in the first place.

The science is the science.

She knew what she had to offer and did not need anyone to validate or verify that for her.

What she did need verified was her overall state.

So she went back to her actual therapist, the one that Jen would allegedly need on call while going through his program.

Technically speaking, he was not wrong.

She did need to call her.

Her therapist understood the urgency in Jen's message and squeezed her in right away.

"So that program I emailed you about?"

"What program?" she asked, confused.

"Did you not get my email?"

"No. I had to switch emails. I was having too much trouble with spam."

Jen laughed as she gave her the Cliff Notes.

I told her about the autism discovery, about being naturally gifted at reading body language, and how much it was changing my life because I literally see things other people cannot.

What began as frustration in trying to communicate what I knew I was seeing changed with the surveillance footage I then pulled up to show her.

Then she asked the question that shifted everything in my life.

"What do you see exactly?"

She knew about the gang stalking, but she didn't know about my newfound way of describing it.

"I see shapes around people."

"It's super simple. It's just an outline."

Jen then drew for her exactly what she saw: two stick figures, one with a very simple line drawn outside of it, taking the shape of the stick figure. The other drawn as a square, noticeably larger and further away from the stick figure, almost like a box.

"It's like a cookie cutter you use in baking that acts like a fingerprint."

"I don't need to see any other details about a person to know who it is, which I obviously know now thanks to COVID and people having to wear masks."

"Normal people have a shape around them very close to their body. Since everyone has its own shape, it's unique—hence the recognition part."

"But the gang stalkers, their shape was further away from their body, and the shape was identical."

"I've never seen identical shapes around people before, let alone however many people over the years this has been."

"That's what made it so impossible to ignore and made me realize something was happening and I was in danger."

"These people were connected, and I knew it."

"So when I saw that man's phone on the cruise—all those photos, all those videos—it wasn't a surprise."

"It was everything I had already suspected."

"It was not just a discovery."

"It was a confirmation."

"And sometimes I recognize shapes so fast, my brain doesn't even process the words before my mouth is blurting out, 'Oh, hey, so-and-so.'"

"The shapes are automatic, and they occur naturally."

"I'm not sitting there creating a shape to put around someone."

"It just already exists."

"I can just see it."

Her therapist paused.

She had always known Jen was perceptive, but watching how quickly and precisely Jen had identified someone she believed to be a gang stalker left her momentarily speechless.

It was one thing to know it intellectually.

It was another to see it in action.

And in that pause, she was quietly reckoning with what this ability meant and, for Jen, how life-changing her next few words may be for her.

"The shapes that you see are actually auras."

"It's part of the electrical fields our bodies emit."

"It's remarkable that you can see them."

"What you're describing is a condition called synesthesia."

"It's more common in people with autism, and it's genetic."

"Wait."

"The shapes aren't because I'm autistic and gifted at reading body language?"

"When I think of auras, I think of colors."

"I don't see the colors."

"I just see the shape."

She then asked if Jen was left-handed.

She told her yes, but that she was forced to write with her right hand by her first-grade teacher, who thought left-handed people were the devil.

She explained that she still holds a pen like it's a crayon, and her body pantomimes as a lefty.

"Women, specifically left-handed women, are more likely to have synesthesia."

"In the simplest terms, your wires are crossed."

"When your brain should only be experiencing one sense, it's actually experiencing another."

"It's considered a gift, not mental illness, and a lot of very successful people say that it's synesthesia that has made them have that unique edge or X factor."

"Is that why when I write, I hear notes?"

"When you write, you hear notes?"

"Yes."

I was in shock.

I felt incredibly vulnerable admitting this.

Outside of saying my wedding vows, this was without a doubt the most vulnerable moment of my life.

It's my writing process.

To me, it's almost sacred.

I'm like a composer, but of words.

I know where to put the beats and where the breaks are.

I use GIFs based on the notes that I hear, not from the sound of the word, but from the post entirely.

That's why I start off every post with "Maestro" and a song.

I listen to the song on repeat while I write.

My engagement time for a single post is over 10 minutes.

Even people who live through what I experience admit to wanting to read it because what I wrote was different than what they noticed.

"Other people can clearly experience what you experience too, which means this is not just something you carry alone."

"You can use it to connect, to communicate, to be understood."

"That is not a small thing."

"How does that make you feel?"

Jen could not answer.

She did not know how she felt.

She could only try to absorb what her therapist was saying, word for word.

In a single one-hour session, her actual therapist had identified a condition that Jen had described verbatim to the human lie detector repeatedly over months, and he had done nothing with it.

He had treated her descriptions like she simply had a way with words.

She was not just speechless.

With every second that passed, the anger built.

She had a great deal to say to the human lie detector, and she intended to do what she has always done best:

Write every word of it out.

With her left hand if she had to.

And in blood.