On a recent trip to my hometown to attend my high school reunion, I had the pleasure of going through the TSA line at Boston’s Logan airport. I hadn’t flown in a few years, but the TSA experience was much the same. Gruff TSA employees yelled at the traveling public about all the procedures and processes that seemed to vary with each flight. After I took all my electronic items out of my bag and removed my shoes, they kindly divided my trays into two separate lines to help me lose track of them.
I entered the large scanner, where you are required to put your hands up over your head, and was promptly pulled aside for further screening. The TSA guy pointed to a large monitor behind me and explained why I had been stopped. Overlayed on a human silhouette was a large orange box right smack dab in the middle of my private parts. “The machine has detected an anomaly in the area marked with orange. We will need to pat you down in the area indicated,” he said. “Would you like to have this done in a private room?” The idea of being in a private room with a groin-patting TSA agent wasn’t too appealing, so I agreed to allow the pat-down right where we were standing. I scanned the room to see if any travelers had stopped to gawk, but they were all too preoccupied looking for their bags to emerge from the X-ray machine. The search, of course, found nothing “anomalous,” and I was allowed to proceed to my gate.
I didn’t think too much of it until I was boarding my return flight two days later and was again pulled aside after an anomaly was detected in my groin area. After I was cleared for the flight, I spoke to a TSA supervisor about being pulled aside for a pat-down on both legs of my flight. She told me that this type of search, conducted due to a false positive reading, was common. It wasn’t until I got back home and did some Internet research that I found out just how common it was to be searched in the groin area by the TSA. There were thousands of people discussing their experiences with the search, and many theories as to what triggered the machine.
Some people who sweated a lot in that area thought that the machine detected heat. Many women reported they thought the false positive was due to them wearing sanitary napkins. While some men who’d had titanium clips installed when they had a vasectomy thought that was the cause of their false positive (The TSA website says that titanium implants will not register on the machine).
I don’t know why these machines are generating so many false positives, but apparently, they’re as routine as lost luggage and that wailing baby in the seat behind you. Just resist the urge to crack any jokes about the pat-down. You know, the TSA has heard them all by now.
