[For a summary page about all my Danie Krugel posts, click here]
I suppose that, in all fairness, I have to consider the possibility that Danie Krugel is not a fraud, but a victim of what Nobel-prize winner Irving Langmuir called “pathological science” :
Pathological science is the process in science in which “people are tricked into false results … by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions”.
Let’s start at the very beginning, at least as far back as we can deduce from the available reports. According to the Passi magazine article:
He becomes involved with a group of developers researching mineral mining, using existing technology and developing it further to locate gold, diamonds, iron ore and even oil below ground. Danie is almost exclusively responsible for all the research, the group, the funding.
And from the Carte Blanche transcript:
Finding missing people was the last thing Danie had in mind when a group of businessmen approached him four years ago to develop equipment that could locate minerals.
Danie: ‘We started by getting stuff from overseas. A lot of people who said they could develop the stuff for us [was] just a hoax. Then we started with diamonds. The small diamonds, the sugar diamonds gave me a lot of heartache because you pick up on every small piece of diamond. Now what we do is work to get the bigger diamonds from a carat upwards.’
Danie and his partners are now reworking this old dig, but they only focus on dumps where the equipment shows they will find real big ones.
They have reason to smile. Their register shows they’ve found almost 300 carats in just three months.
If we assume that Danie slapped together a few pieces of internet-ordered mineral-detecting junk electronics, it is quite easy to imagine him being fooled by something that he does not understand. As an exercise in creative speculation, I can imagine some kind of device with a container for his ’samples’, and a receiver for, oh let’s say radio waves. Remember that we are bathed in this type of radiation from literally hundreds or sources, coming from all directions. He can then point the receiver in a direction, turn a dial and cause a light to blink or a needle to move to indicate signal strength at that frequency. Presto! Matter Orientation System. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he does not know that he is detecting radio waves. He is, after all, an ex-policeman with no known technical or scientific training. So he points it at a mine dump, and they start digging, but only find small diamonds. He then fiddles a bit with the dial and frequencies, and points it at a random other dump, where he gets a stronger reaction to existing radio signals. They dig, and find bigger than average diamonds, because that dump is from a time when the mine used less advanced technology to recover diamonds. No magic, no quantum physics, no GPS, just sheer luck and wishful thinking. It is a classic case of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy: Empty your gun into the side of a barn, then walk up to the wall and draw a target over the place with the most holes.
Then he hits on the idea of using the machine to locate missing people. By his own account, he loads some of his son’s hair into the device, points it at him and gets a positive reading. But just to be sure, he moves to some other point further away, and repeats the process. He must now turn the dial to some other frequency, but again, he can make a light blink with the device pointed at his son. In this way, he can tackle cases of missing persons: Use common sense and insider police knowledge to deduce the most likely location, point the device toward it, turn the dial until you hit any strong radio signal, and convince yourself that this means the machine works. His apparent unwavering conviction regarding the locations of the Van Rooyen victims and Madeleine McCann could be indicative of this type of delusion. In both cases his ‘device’ points at locations that seem very plausible, but can be arrived at with nothing more than ordinary logic and detective skills.
I can even see him fooling others, and in turn being fooled by their belief in him. At least one report indicates that a renowned cell phone tracking specialist called on Danie to help him find some robbery suspects. It’s not too hard to imagine him telling Danie that his cell phone tracking pointed to a certain location, and Danie then telling him that his machine points to the same place. If the suspects are found there (or even near there), both Danie and the detective can be fooled into believing the machine works. And as soon as his successes start appearing in the media, more and more people will become convinced of his abilities, and less likely to question the efficacy of the machine when he gets involved with their cases. I also doubt that the media will ever report (or even be made aware of) failures by Danie. I strongly suspect that he has been involved in many cases that were never solved, and therefore never reached the media. I also suspect that if we could add up all the failures and successes, the results would point to nothing more than an average hit rate for investigators working on their own.
OK, so I will grant that this might have been the way things started, but I am pretty sure that it cannot stay like that for long. As Dr Park so eloquently explains in his book, what starts off as foolishness often leads to fraud, especially when the media gets involved. Inventors eventually realize that they have been fooling themselves, but many lack the courage and integrity to admit it to the thousands who will read about it in the papers. At this point, you get two types of voodoo scientists: Those who just fade into the background, never to be heard of again, and those who start inventing elaborate schemes of intentional fraud to maintain the media attention that they have fallen in love with, or to convince all the potential buyers who contacted them since the invention appeared in the media.
To wrap up, there is one case that convince me that Danie is now on the path of intentional fraud, whether he started off on it or not: The missing cameraman. Danie was able to tell journalists that the cameraman was hiding in some shrubs in the Jewish section of the local cemetery, which is just too specific for self-deluded guesswork. Going out from the absolute conviction that the machine cannot possibly work, the only explanation is collaboration between Danie and the cameraman, or a third party that followed or traced the man to his hiding place and informed Danie.
So yes, it might have started off as foolishness, but the evidence suggests (at least to me) very strongly that it is now fraud.
UPDATE 10 OCTOBER 2008: Support the initiative to stop Danie Krugel.
Well put. I tend to err on the assumption that these people are simple deluded, but you have quite eloquently pointed out that Krugel can’t simply be fooling himself any longer.