Liar, Liar, Plants on Fire

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A little bonus content, a little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff right after the episode. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they respond psychologically in predictable ways. For instance, if you were conducting a polygraph test as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, was it you who fired the fatal shot? If the true answer were yes, the subject would fear getting caught in a lie, and the electrodes on his or her skin would pick up the psychological response to that fear.

That's Cleve Backster from an interview he gave to a writer and environmentalist named Dirk Jensen. Backster was one of the world's foremost experts in the polygraph, the lie detector test. Most of us know how that works, more from TV and movies than from any real life experience, like this scene from the movie Meet the Parents. Now, these aren't 100% accurate, right? They're, well, you'd be surprised how accurate they are. They can tell fairly easily if someone's lying or not. Now I'm going to ask you some questions, and all you have to do is answer yes or no.

Okay. All right, let's give it a whirl. Did you fly on an airplane today? Yes, I did. No peeking. Did we eat pot roast for dinner tonight? Yes. Was it undercooked? No, it was rare. It was a little rare for my taste, but I, but I wasn't kidding. I'm just... Relax, relax. The needles are jumping. Have you ever watched pornographic videos?

No. I mean, well, I don't know. Yes or no? People lie all the time, and that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes it's just the polite thing. Cleve Backster knew that. What he didn't know until one morning in February 1966 was that human beings weren't the only living thing his lie detector machine worked on. And they got a small beam of light again.

I thought that if I put the galvanic skin response detector of the polygraph at the leaf. Cleve Backster hooked up one of the plants in his office to the polygraph. I immediately understood something important was going on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. Backster, the founder of the polygraph unit at the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, was about to make an extraordinary claim that plants are more than just alive. Plants are aware.

I've given up trying to fight other scientists on this, but I know that if they perform my experiment, even if it fails, they will see things that will change their consciousness. They will never quite be the same. Cleve Backster's background is impeccable and indisputable. As far as accusing him of being one of those psychic weirdos.

Find a way to discover truth and you have a weapon more powerful than any bomb. Backster didn't invent the polygraph. That was the work of a man named Leonarde Keeler. Although, well, that's not exactly right either. Keeler gets the credit for the modern polygraph machine. While he was in high school, Keeler interned with the Berkeley Police Department in California, where a Canadian named John Larson happened to be employed as the first cop in America with a PhD. Larson was obsessed with developing a lie detector machine that could be used in criminal interrogations. Larson's work was based on an early prototype polygraph created by an American psychologist named William Moulton Marston. Marston created his prototype polygraph with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway. The two just happened to be in a throuple with another woman named Olive Byrne. Comic book nerds are vibrating in their seats right now because they already know this fun fact about the polygraph inventing Dr. Marston. He also created Wonder Woman, very much inspired and influenced by the two badass women in his own bed.

All the world is waiting for you. And the power you possess. In your satin tights, fighting for your rights. And the old red, white and blue. See, this is why history is so, so, so fun. It's not just dates and treaties and battles. It's also these kinds of geeked out geniuses like Marston, who managed to be both a dry as toast academic and a polyamorous comic book writer.

So, Leonarde Keeler develops the modern lie detector test. His first machine, which he called the EmotoGraph, was lost in a house fire. But he persevered and in February 1935, conducted the very first test of what he was now calling the Keeler polygraph. There is still a feeling that there is something unnatural or unfair about these devices.

However unfair the lie detector test might have felt to the defense, Keeler's machine had the endorsement of the most famous police officer in the whole country, August Vollmer, who just happened to have been Keeler's old boss at the Berkeley PD. Vollmer is pretty much the daddy of modern criminal science. His influence made policing more professional, more educated and more technologically advanced. It was Vollmer who encouraged Keeler's work with this peculiar machine that monitored a person's blood pressure and breathing to uncover deception. The theory is that the suspect cannot utter a falsehood without betraying himself to the intensely sensitive detector. Keeler insisted that it was wrong to call his apparatus a lie detector since it had no ability to really measure a falsehood. Only a person's respiration, pulse and blood pressure. He patiently explained how and over and over again. But the public was like, boring. It's a machine that can tell when you're lying. That's all we need to know. It didn't help Keeler, who was now Dr. Keeler, that his polygraph had become the last desperate hope of a woman whose husband was convicted of one of the most notorious crimes in American history. The insane publicity that resulted overwhelmed Keeler's efforts to explain this device. Mrs. Bruno Richard Hoffman believed with all her heart the Keeler's polygraph could save her husband's life because Bruno Hoffman, who the press dubbed the most hated man in America, was facing the death penalty for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was snatched from his crib on the second floor of the Lindbergh's New Jersey home. His tiny body was discovered two and a half months later on May 12, 1932, cold and lifeless, just four miles from the Lindbergh house.

Mrs. Hoffman, staring down the imminent execution of her husband by electric chair, said that surely he would be freed if only he were tested on Keeler's device. The evidence against Hoffman was heavily circumstantial. There were no witnesses, no fingerprints, but this was a different time in America and justice moved much more swiftly than we can even imagine now. Charles Lindbergh was a hero. His infant son was dead and Bruno Hoffman was a German immigrant, a carpenter with no power or money or influence of any kind.

The public was howling for blood for the death of this innocent child to be avenged. Hoffman looked guilty enough and that was good enough. Plus, Charles Lindbergh testified before a grand jury that he had heard Hoffman's voice in the cemetery where the meeting to exchange ransom money occurred. That was pretty much all it took to send Bruno Hoffman to the chair. Never mind that Keeler himself had sworn to the New Jersey State Police that his detector had a 90 percent accuracy rate or that William Marston, you know, Mr. Wonder Woman, also offered to polygraph Hoffman with his device. In the end, the doomed carpenter, whose own defense attorney apparently didn't believe him and was also apparently drunk a lot in court during the trial. Bruno was led to on April 3rd, 1936. Later, an FBI memo written by Bureau Chief J. Edgar Hoover was discovered.

Under no circumstances will we have anything to do with the polygraph test of Hoffman. One last thing about the Lindbergh case. Keeler approached Charles Lindbergh early in the investigation, offering to polygraph members of his household staff. Lindbergh refused on the grounds that no one working for him could even be remotely guilty. End of discussion. Which does make you wonder, given the entirely circumstantial evidence against Hoffman, if maybe justice wasn't all the way served in this case. If maybe there was a rush to judgment, not only to give a grieving family answers and closure, but to satisfy a public that was baying for blood. And there was Bruno Hoffman, an immigrant, an outsider, a man described as secretive and cold and peculiar. A man with a prior criminal history of burglary. There are those who believe that Hoffman was scapegoated and rushed to the electric chair. But that's a whole story all by itself for another time.

Bruno Hoffman was three years in the grave when Leonarde Keeler received the patent on his Keeler polygraph. Little did he know that another New Jersey man, Cleve Backster, would someday take his device all the way to the CIA, and then all the way to the outer limits. Backster was born in Lafayette Township, New Jersey in February 1924. His early life was as wholesome as a Norman Rockwell painting.

His father ran a country store in the sleepy little rural community. Even now it's home to 3,000 people. And fun fact for Hamilton fans, it's named after the Marquis de Lafayette, who fought on the side of the Continental Army in the fight for independence from British rule. Backster got a degree in psychology at Middlebury College in Vermont, and then served with the U.S. Navy during World War II. He followed that up with a stint as an instructor in interrogation for the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. There, Backster specialized in the use of hypno- and narco-interrogation. You know, hypnotism and truth serum-aided interrogation.

In the least surprising plot twist ever, the Central Intelligence Agency soon came knocking. Cleve Backster joined the CIA in 1948, and one year later founded the agency's polygraph program. One of his jobs was to brief State Department people headed overseas on how to avoid hazardous situations. For example, picking a reliable dentist, he said. Dentists use sodium pentothal as an anesthetic, but it can also be used as a truth serum to make people talk. That sounds a Cold War paranoia as a sort of mass psychosis. Then, yeah, you can see the logic. It would be embarrassing to spill state secrets mid-root canal just because your dentist was better at espionage than you. The CIA's enthusiasm for the polygraph was so sky-high that it wasn't until about 16 years later that the agency acknowledged that it was possible, that they hadn't done any real due diligence on the technology. While laboratory data showed accuracy rates in the 80 to 90 percent range, scientists admitted that this does not mean the machine works in actual practice.

Central Intelligence Agency officials, when confronted with the lack of relearn on this basic question, candidly admitted that they had missed this opportunity when their polygraph program was initiated. The feds did spend a giant truckload of money investigating the various phases of the polygraph machine and polygraph interrogation techniques. They just sort of forgot to investigate whether or not the thing actually worked in the real world, which does feel right on brand for the federales, does it not? Anyhow, it didn't seem to matter. Even after the Atomic Energy Commission weighed in saying that the polygraph was not infallible, that a machine for subversive purposes, and also that there are just people in this world who so routinely and casually lie about stuff that doesn't even matter, no machine could be built to detect that.

But the federal government was all, I can't hear you, and just kept right on administering lie detector tests. Thousands and thousands of them from the CIA's own archives. Yet there has been no attempt to determine the validity of the procedure, and no attempt to find out whether the polygraph operator really can detect falsehoods. No statistical proof has been compiled despite thousands of cases. No scientific proof has been produced despite thousands of opportunities.

You'd think this would be a real headache for Cleve Backster, founder of the polygraph program at the CIA. But by the time the CIA was backing away from Backster's baby, Backster himself was already long gone. He'd left the agency and headed to Chicago, where he worked for a brief time with none other than Leonarde Keeler, that legendary father of the American lie detector. He spent more than eight years serving as chairman of the Research and Instrument Committee of the Academy for Scientific Interrogation. He developed a protocol he named the Backster Zone Comparison Technique. It's now known as the ZCT. The four elements of the ZCT will be super familiar to anyone who's ever watched a cop show on TV. First, the control questions meant to establish a baseline, like this scene from the 2025 movie Black Bag. Is today Friday? Yes. Do you reside in the United Kingdom? Yes.

And then there are the relevant questions, the ones directly related to the investigation. Have you ever physically assaulted a significant other during an argument? Oh, you know I have. And some neutral questions tossed in too. Do you wear contact lenses? Yes. And finally, what Backster called the symptomatic questions, meant to assess the subject's fear and or understanding of the active deception. Have you read Physiological Stress Response and Polygraph Deception by Weymouth and Coombs? Cover to cover. Backster also developed a system for interpreting polygraph results. He assigned numerical values to physiological reactions, which helped make the whole process more objective, while also reducing the influence of examiner bias, which was and is a real factor. Even more so early on for polygraphy when examiners weren't required to have any kind of license to perform the procedure. No standardization of any kind.

It was a situation ripe for bias and error. It was right around this time that Cleve Backster became an entrepreneur. Backster started his own lie detection center and school in New York to polygraph examiners. He's graduated over 200 since 1958. Almost all police officers from every corner of the country. By 1964, that number had grown to 2,000 trained examiners using over 1,000 polygraph machines. They're not machines. They're instruments that register changes in breathing, heartbeat, and skin response to a slight electric shock. Such changes in careful questioning usually detect any deception. Russian agents have beaten everything but polygraph tests. Aw, does that make you nostalgic for the time when guys like this lived in fear of the Russians instead of happily tossing their salads the way our politicians do today? Yeah, same. Backster was well aware that his beloved instrument wasn't popular, wasn't fully accepted by science, and that the law would not compel anyone to submit to the test.

But Backster was a true believer. He shared the classic case of Sergeant John Dunlap, the National Security Agency courier. Dunlap submitted to a polygraph examination a year ago when he wanted to return to civilian status. By the time the smoke cleared, Dunlap appeared as a heavy player of the horses and owner of fancy cars and boats, which he acquired not on his slim government pay, but from a $100,000 Russian payoff. Sergeant John Dunlap committed suicide on July 23, 1963. Only liars are afraid of the polygraph. Backster's business expanded far beyond law enforcement. One of his more unusual gigs was for a television network. Backster polygraphed 200 people to test audience reaction to a new TV show. Backster also runs tests on applicants for jobs as school bus drivers. The companies that hire these men believe that this is a precaution which reduces the chances of hiring on-the-job drinkers, drug users, perverts, or other characters who shouldn't be around kids. Backster might have continued like this for the rest of his career.

He was successful, well-regarded, and had locked down his place in history. And then came the morning of February 2, 1966. Backster was in his office in Manhattan, and he found himself staring at a plant, a dracaena cane to be exact. Dark green, glossy leaves spilling out of the top of a long, slender trunk. It's a common, low-maintenance houseplant. You might even have one. I have one, although until this story, I could never have told you its name. I wasn't particularly interested in plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the building, and the secretary had bought a couple of plants for the office. A rubber plant and this dracaena cane. I'd done a saturation watering of these plants, putting them under the faucet until the water ran out of the bottom of the plants, and was curious to see how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracaena because the water had to climb up a long trunk and then out to the end of the long leaves. As Backster studied the plant, he had an idea. One that, as he later told Derek Jensen, might have been just simple curiosity. Unless maybe it wasn't. Maybe, as he told Jensen, it was his own subconscious pushing him to see the vast hidden truth of our world, to make the discovery of a lifetime. I thought that if I put the galvanic skin response detector of the polygraph at the end of the leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the moisture arrived between the electrodes. Cleve Backster hooked that plant up to a polygraph.

I noticed something on the chart that resembled a human response on a polygraph. Not at all what I would have expected from water entering a leaf. So think about it this way. At the most fundamental level, the polygraph is really measuring fear, or maybe the more accurate way to put it is, the polygraph is measuring the physiological response to threat. Imagine that you're hooked up to a lie detector because you're a suspect in a murder. Maybe you are the murderer.

The polygraph examiner asks if it was you who pulled the trigger that night, or let the match or poured the antifreeze into the power aid. If the truthful answer to the question is yes, it's very likely you'd lie and say, no, not me. But those electrodes attached to your skin, they picked up the minute reactions your body made to the fear of getting caught in that lie. And as Backster considered this, an idea for an experiment hit him. He threatened that discount Dracena came. Would it respond? Crazy, right? I began to think of ways to threaten the well-being of the plant. First, I tried dipping one of its leaves into a cup of warm coffee.

The plant, if anything, showed boredom. The line on the chart kept trending downward. Okay, so the plant had no issue with coffee. The thought entered my mind to burn the leaf. I didn't verbalize the idea. I didn't touch the plant. I didn't touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only thing it could have been reacting to was the mental change. And here's where things got really strange. I got some matches from my secretary's desk and lighting one made a few passes at the leaf. I realized, though, that I was already seeing such an extreme reaction that any increase wouldn't be noticeable. So I tried a different approach. I removed the threat by returning the matches to the secretary's desk. The plant calmed right back down. Girl, I know how this sounds. I'm here, too. It sounds made up. Sounds like bullshit. It sounds insane. And Cleve Backster, he was pretty bug-eyed about it, too. He'd hooked up a houseplant to a polygraph and the thing was reacting? Come on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There was no one else in the lab suite and I wasn't doing anything that might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that moment on, my consciousness hasn't been the same. My whole life has been devoted to looking into this phenomenon. After that first observation, I talked to scientists from different fields to get their explanations for what was happening, but it was totally foreign to them. The temptation to call whatever the heck was happening in Backster's lab a phenomenon of extrasensory perception or ESP fit the times, but not the facts. As Backster pointed out, a plant couldn't have extrasensory perception since it didn't have all of the five senses to begin with. Backster had a different working hypothesis involving the most basic or primary level of perception. Beyond that, he wondered if, wild as it sounded, plants might possibly be conscious or sentient in some as yet unknown way.

I mean in the primary sense that this perception applies to all cells we have tested. Amoeba, paramecium, fresh fruits and vegetables, mold cultures, yeast scrapings from the roof of the mouth of a human being, blood samples, even spermatozoa. For his next test, Backster wanted to see if or how plants might respond to the suffering of an animal. I arranged for brine shrimp to be dropped automatically at random intervals into simmering water while the reaction of the plants was recorded at the other end of the lab. Brine shrimp, or as little baby boomer kids knew them, sea monkeys. It's very hard to eliminate the connection between the experimenter and the plants being tested. Even a brief association with the plants, just a few hours, is enough for them to become attuned to you. Then, even though you automate and randomize the experiment and leave the laboratory, guaranteeing you are entirely unaware of when the experiment starts, the plants will remain attuned to you no matter where you go. At first, my partner and I would go to a bar a block away, but after a while we began to suspect that the plants were responding not to the death of the brine shrimp but to the rising and falling levels of excitement in our conversations. And then, we had someone else buy the plants and store them in another part of the building. On the day of the experiment, we went and got the plants, brought them in, hooked them up, and left. This meant the plants were alone in a strange environment with only the pressure of the electrodes and a little trickle of electricity going through their leaves.

Because there were no humans to attune to, they began looking around their environment. Only then did something so subtle as the deaths of the brine shrimp get picked up by the plants. By 1980, Backster had expanded his tests on plants to human tissue. Just now, earlier in the story, you heard him mention yeast scrapings off the roof of a person's mouth. The person in question was named Stephen White. Get ready. Backster took the sample from White's mouth and placed it in a test tube which had silver wire electrodes connecting it to the polygraph. White himself was seated 10 feet away from the device. Backster showed White a copy of Playboy magazine featuring photos of the actress Bo Derek. As White studied the images, the polygraph device registered significant fluctuations. In other words, cells from White's mouth didn't need to be inside White's mouth in order to feel all kinds of tingly ways just from the mere sight of Bo Derek, which to Backster was further proof of his theory of primary perception that living cells remain aware of and reactive to their surroundings even when they're isolated from the body itself.

From a handwritten note scrawled in the margins of a CIA file on Backster's experiments. If he has advanced this state-of-the-art in coupling electronic devices and living plants, we may do well to recognize such advances. The application of these techniques towards intelligence objectives may be accompanied by engaging individuals qualified in the disciplines of electronics and botany. Yeah, that sounds kooky, but we need to remember that the CIA once tried using cats as spies. They called that one Operation Acoustic Kitty, and it failed because cats are, you know, cats. They don't follow orders. They do as they please no matter how much secret agent training they get. But plants? Plants won't wander off for a nap. Plus, it was thought that plants, Backster has found, register fear. Should someone be murdered in the presence of a plant, electrodes can be placed on the plant, and if the murderer is brought back into the plant's presence, the plant will register great agitation. If defense attorneys hated the polygraph, how on earth would they react to testimony from a spider plant or a ficus? Backster's experiments might have remained completely obscure if not for the publication of a book in 1973 called The Secret Life of Plants. The authors Peter Tompkins and Christopher Byrd made the case for plants being sensitive to human care, argued that plants were awake and aware, sentient, and capable of communication. They suggested that plants are capable of emotional response, might come from the same world as other cosmic beings, like fairies and elves and gnomes, which did nothing to help their credibility in the scientific community.

Even as the public ate it up, the reviews were savage. The book is a hodgepodge of the absurd mixed with name-dropping references to respected scientific investigators. This kind of sensational tosh is dangerous. A mishmash of illogical nonsense, perverted evidence, and calculated misinformation like this is bound to be exposed and disappoint its dupes. The truth, whatever it may be, can only suffer at the hands of falsely mercenary and sensational exploitation by a pair of glib ignoramuses like Tompkins and Byrd. Today, the public would hear a review like that and immediately see Tompkins and Byrd as leadership material and elect them to Congress.

Back then, though, a nasty review just helped sell more copies. Because no matter how much human beings drone on about logic and reason, what we really crave is magic and mystery. Because ultimately, we're very small superstitious creatures who desperately fear our own smallness, like we fear the dark. We do our best to believe almost anything that hints at a wider, unseen world, at the hope that there's more to all of this than what we can perceive and understand.

Even as we insist and demand that reality obey a clear set of linear rules, we literally fall to our knees and pray for life to be a mystery beyond our comprehension. Now, the book didn't have huge sales numbers, but it made a huge impact on pop culture. One of the book's most bizarre claims was that plants could not only hear music, but also respond to it.

According to certain studies, plants placed in greenhouses playing Bach, Indian classical music, jazz, or even 12-tone serialism thrived and grew faster than those exposed to rock or pop. In 1979, director Walton Green began working on a documentary adaptation of Tompkins and Bird's book. He approached the artist Stevie Wonder to tackle the soundtrack.

Stevie Wonder's journey through the secret life of plants features cutting-edge technological experimentation and oozes infectious positivity and love for nature. However, critics at the time, anticipating a follow-up album akin to Songs of the Key of Life, were dumbfounded when Wonder broke free from the bold audiences expected from him. Bet you didn't expect to bump into Stevie Wonder in this story, did you? Or to find the reason why people today play music for their house plants. We have a tendency to see ourselves as the most highly evolved life form on the planet. It's true, we're very successful at intellectual endeavors, but that may not be the ultimate standard by which to judge. It could be that other life forms are more advanced spiritually. Modern environmentalism was born in the 1970s, at the very same time that people were being drawn to alternative religions and ideas of spirituality. It was the perfect moment for Cleve Backster to hook his Dracena Kane plan up to a polygraph. People were disillusioned by the war in Vietnam, by the Watergate scandal, by the long lines at gas stations thanks to the energy crisis. The first Earth Day was celebrated in April 1970.

The idea that plants had awareness, that all living things are connected, sharing both pain and joy in previously unseen and unknown ways. The 1970s were ripe for Backster's ideas. Backster himself acknowledged that he couldn't really explain the nature of the signal that his polygraph was measuring. He was well aware of every criticism leveled against him by the scientific community. I have given up trying to fight other scientists over this, but I know that if they perform my experiment, even if it fails, they will see things that will change their consciousness.

They will never quite be the same. Consciousness was what Backster spent the rest of his life thinking about. I think western science exaggerates the role of the brain in consciousness. Whole books have been written on the consciousness of the atom. Consciousness might exist on an entirely different level. Some very good research has been done on the survival of consciousness after bodily death.

All of it points towards the notion that consciousness need not be specifically linked with gray matter. That notion is another straitjacket we need to discard. The brain may have something to do with memory, but a strong case can be made that much of our memory is not stored there. Backster was also aware of how his work dovetailed with the Gaia hypothesis.

That's the idea that the world itself is one giant living interconnected organism. The planet is going to have the last word concerning the damage humans are inflicting upon it. It's only going to take so much abuse, and then it may well burp and snort a little and destroy a good bit of the population. I don't think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis one step further and attribute such a defense strategy to a kind of planetary intelligence. If that makes you uneasy, stay away from your news feed, because the news about the no matter how much we want to mud wrestle about the reasons. If what I am observing is accurate, many of the theories on which we built our lives need complete reworking. I've known biologists to say, if Backster is right, we're in trouble. It would mean a radical rethinking of our place in the world.

I think we're seeing it already. Cleve Backster died at age 89 in June 2013, just a few years after the TV show Mythbusters took a shot at busting his work on primary perception. The Mythbusters team did some experiments with a polygraph, achieving identical results as Backster. For other experiments, they used an EEG, an electroencephalogram, which is a device that brainwaves, a completely different technology from the polygraph. When the Mythbusters failed to duplicate Backster's results using their EEG, they called the whole thing busted, which I don't know, seems a little bit unfair, doesn't it? Can you really call the myth busted if you use completely different technology to test it? Our Western scientific community in general is in a difficult spot, because in order to maintain our current mode of scientific thought, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information. And more such information is being gathered all the time. Researchers are stumbling all over this bio-communication phenomenon.

It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for them to miss this fundamental attunement between living things. We'll end by answering the question that I know Max wants to ask the most. If plants are aware, how do they feel about being eaten? There was talk of vegetables feigning with terror at the prospect of being boiled, but Backster was convinced that plants liked being of use, that being turned into a salad or a stir was infinitely preferable to them than being left to rot in the ground. Besides, according to Backster, plants had a way of protecting themselves. Lettuce, for example, according to Backster, lettuce would go into shock when it was threatened. Yikes, that kind of makes you feel like all you can safely eat is a Twizzler, since that's just one molecule away from being vinyl.

No one's ever heard a Twizzler scream, or has they? Next time on True Weird Stuff, it's a ghost story, but a very specific kind of ghost story, because this ghost was a demon, or maybe a poltergeist, or maybe both. This is the most heavily documented, most heavily witnessed poltergeist story in the entire world, and we have it for you next on True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Erin Cox, and Don Morgan. Well, Sherry, that does beg the question, how plants do feel about being eaten, or put into a bowl and swirled around with olive oil and onion powder, salt and pepper, and then roasted at 400 degrees for 25 minutes in the oven?

I knew, as I was writing this, I'm like, Max is going to need to know how these plants feel about being eaten, so I went looking for that answer so that I would be able to give it to you. They like being of use, Backster said, which is kind of convenient, isn't it? It is. And they do go into shock. Thank God. How do pigs feel about it? Cows feel about it? And chickens feel about it, too?

You know what I love about this story? We all just kind of take for granted now, in this chapter, the year 2025, we all just kind of have grown up in this world where you know, everything is interconnected. People do say that plants respond to music. You've seen that, right? The way that certain kinds of music make dairy cows more productive. So we've just sort of kind of grown up into that, and we take it for granted. We don't really question it.

But once upon a time, not that long ago, this was radical and revolutionary and new. And the fact that the person kicking that door to our perception open was the CIA's lie detector guy. I know. It's kind of epic. It really is. And I'm glad you wove the CIA into another story. They will not leave. I think next week's story, the CIA does not make an appearance in, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, they're everywhere.

I have heard of this book, The Secret Life of Plants. This is something, and in fact, it seems to me that it led to the secret life of dogs and cats, the secret life of this and that. It was like the beginning of that. And I can remember people saying, I'm playing music for my plants, or I'm talking to my plants. There's a big thing if you talk to your plants that that them grow. So I think that the byproduct of the research that he had is something that floated across the transom. And I do remember hearing about these things, but I had no idea about the specifics of this or the fact that he's hooking these electrodes up to the plants or that the plants are reacting in that way.

And as you said, when the Mythbusters did it, they used a different technology. So I don't know that you can completely say that what they did busted the myth. That really was disappointing to me. I like Mythbusters as much as the next person with Basic Cable. When they did it, they did it two ways. They did it with the polygraph and they matched Backster's results. It was when they did it with the EEG that they didn't. But for whatever reason, they decided that the myth was busted when they didn't match the results with the EEG.

But it's two different technologies. And so I really disagree with that. I really disagree with the Mythbusters on that one. Look, do I have any notion what the hell was going on with those houseplants and Cleve Backster's lab? I do not. I don't. But he went, this one little goofy, huh, wonder what would happen, became the man's life work.

This wasn't a one-off. He did this. He has so much data from hooking his plants up to lie detectors. The thing that stops you, and I want to believe, I just want to believe everything, but here's what gives you pause. Some of the experiments that Backster did, he's basically saying, I thought about harming the plant and that was enough to cause the plant to react. So now the plant is not just reacting to direct interference or stimuli. The plant is reacting to your intentions. I don't know how to make sense of that. Do you? I don't know how to think about that. No, I don't know how to make any sense of that. It makes me wonder if there's anybody doing any research on this currently using the technology that he used on this, what, 40, 50 years ago, 50 some years ago. The takeaways for me from this story, first is, I didn't realize that the lie detector had the history that it did.

That, and I also didn't realize how much defense attorneys hate the damn thing. And I'll tell you what else I learned on this one. I knew about as much about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping as the average person who watches Basic Cable. It shows up on the History Channel or whatever. I mean, I don't know how much you knew about that case. I mean, I knew some things about it, and I knew that Bruno Hoffman was the man that ended up being executed for doing it.

And I know that there was always some concern about evidence. You know, back then, circumstantial, solid circumstantial evidence could get somebody executed. Today, there has to be physical evidence. People are so educated and conditioned by watching things like CSI and Law and Order and those kinds of shows. They figured that there has to be some sort of physical evidence in order to convict somebody or especially to execute somebody. And that's a good thing, by the way. We do need to hold the courts and law enforcement to these higher standards because today it's Bruno Hoffman, tomorrow it's your dad or whatever. We all need to have a stake in these systems and the methods and techniques and what we consider to be worthy evidence that you could get a conviction on.

So I read years ago, I read a book about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. And what I mostly remember, and I don't even like to revisit it in my own imagination, I remember what they describe when they found the baby. I mean, that's just really haunted me and stayed with me. And I think like a lot of people, I assumed, I guess I just took for granted that justice had been done.

But all of the reading and research I did for this episode had me walk away going, I'm not so sure now. I didn't realize that all of the evidence against Hoffman was circumstantial. And what really doomed the man? There were two things that doomed the man. One, Charles Lindbergh was a hero. He was a star. He was a famous figure at the time when this happened.

And there were a couple of things that reverberated from that. If hero aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby wasn't safe on the second floor, then no one's baby is safe, right? So there was that. And anytime a child is harmed, it dramatically changes the way that the crime and the case is perceived. We see that even now. And again, as it should be, children are the most vulnerable and they're our future. And if we don't give a damn about the kids, what are we even doing as a species? So there's that. And then there was the fact that Bruno Hauptmann was an unlikeable person. He didn't have a warm or engaging personality. He was described as cold and peculiar, right? When the victim in this case is America's hero, Charles Lindbergh, and you're cold and peculiar and speak with a funny accent, you weren't born here.

Do you see where this is going? Then, you know, Lindbergh was such a powerful and influential figure that him telling the grand jury that he heard Bruno Hauptmann's voice in the cemetery during the ransom exchange. That was it. That was all it was going to take to bring a death penalty conviction. But to your point, Max, we now know that eyewitness, earwitness testimony is very fraught. And was that enough to hang a murder conviction? Today, it might not be.

Well, the thought that I had when you were talking about this is if they believed at that time, falsely believed that the lie detector was, what, 90% accurate, 80 or 90% accurate, you would think the family would have said, no, we don't want him to take that. But they were that that would be something to exonerate him. So if they really if he and I don't know whether he's guilty or not, I don't know. But I mean, you would think that they would say, we don't want to do anything to make him look more guilty. Should we be able to get appeal some other way? So that led me to believe that perhaps maybe he wasn't guilty if they were to go and have this test that they believed was this accurate.

His wife was convinced that the lie detector test would exonerate her husband. John Keeler, the father of polygraphy in America, offered to travel to New Jersey and do all of this pro bono. William Marston, Wonder Woman writing throuple man offered to go to New Jersey and do all this pro the courts completely refused. And as you later learned, many years later, the FBI was like, no, this will not happen. Now, why? Why was that? Well, they saw they had solved their case. And they didn't want they didn't want anybody double checking what they've done. Because at that time, the FBI still was a fairly new organization. Right. And so they're looking for respectability from a national standpoint. So I figured they're going, No, we don't want anybody questioning what we're doing. If we did it, then that's what should have been done.

It was the one to punch of the child's father being Charles Lindbergh. And the things that we now know about Charles Lindbergh take a real shine off that hero. It does it really. But at the time, he was an absolute global hero sensation. So the one to punch of this being Charles Lindbergh, and the fact that people were terrified of kidnapping, it launched an entire kidnapping paranoia. It was the decision was kind of made like, look, this guy did it. Let's convict him. Let's get him into the electric chair. And then people can get on with their lives and not be so scared. Because we caught the bad guy. Whether or not we did catch the bad guy, whether or not the right person was convicted of that crime, I don't think we'll ever know. There's a lot of doubt to this. As we speak, there are people who are trying to get to the bottom of this, because they don't believe that the right person was convicted and executed. And now, you know, polygraph testimony for all of what we see in TV and movies and everything, it's not admissible in court. No, because because we know that you can beat the machine. You can be trained to beat the wall. And how many times have you heard cases of people that we find are absolutely telling the truth, but they say the test shows some deception? Well, it shows some deception, deception, because the person is being put in a stressful situation. So the whole idea of doing it to begin with, to be hooked up to this machine, to have somebody asking questions, you usually in a police station when you're doing it, or some government, you know, building, all of that is stressful all by itself. So the fact that there's deception, sometimes it could be a red herring, and not really be telling you what the truth is.

Well, and in the early days, in the early days before Cleve Backster founded his school and began training law enforcement, as polygraphy examiners, people were just like, I'll do that. So you, you didn't have there was no standard protocol, which Cleve Backster gave us the ZCT that's still in use today, right? There was no standardization and how a polygraph was administered. And there was no standardization in terms of who the examiner might be, their training, what they understood about the technology, what they understood about the art of interrogation.

And so Cleve Backster, he changed all of that. And what value the lie detector test has today is because of Cleve Backster. Like he took it was the polygraphy thing was the wild west. And then here came here comes Cleve Backster to try to put some boundaries on it and make it more functional and scientific. And he did that. And he's also rare in, in that he his time with the CIA was so brief. You see people disappear into the CIA and remain there for the remainder of their careers. It's isn't it unusual when we see like, Cleve Backster? Yeah, but he also, because of this, the specialty of what he was doing, and then he went and worked for Keillor, he might have made more money working for Keillor. And you know, you get more money.

Yeah, it's great to try to help the country. But if you're making more money in the private sector, you know, you can understand why a guy might do that. Well, and I think too, that Backster was more of a he was more he tended more towards science than he did towards spying or even law enforcement, right? Like his fascination with the polygraph, really wasn't about catching bad guys necessarily. It was about how does this instrument work? And how can we make it work better? How can we make it more valuable? And so I think he did accomplish that. Now, the fact that no one realizes the connection between who were all connected, and this guy, um, I just gives me the giggles. I love it. It's, it's crazy how many things in the world we just take for granted. Well, it's the way it is. That's just how things are. Everybody knows that. Then you find the person who's the reason why that's how things are. And everybody knows that. Well, you know, he's a scientist if he's hooking it up to plants, because there's, there's nothing to be gained by doing that. From trying to help from a criminal standpoint, right? So that's, that's what a curious that is what a scientist does. So yeah, I agree with you on that. And I did love, we can't play any of the music because it's copyrighted. And BMI as capital come for us. But I really did love that how Stevie Wonder came into this story. And Stevie was so when he was approached, they took this book, The Secret Life of Plants, which really is if you want to use an old fashioned expression, just codswallop. Like, it's just like, what did I just read? But they were going to make this into a documentary. Because again, this is the 70s. Right? When people were like, we're when people in America discovered yogurt and stuff like this is all just crunchy and new. And so they're going to make this crazy book into a documentary. And they go to Stevie Wonder. And they explain what they're doing. And Stevie Wonder became fascinated by this idea that, you know, plants had awareness and that every living thing was responsive to every other living thing. Which if you think about what pop culture was like in the 1970s, that's when Earth Day was invented. That's when people, you know, wore the t shirts with the picture of the earth on it that said love your mother. Remember? Oh, yes, I do. And and, and Earth Day kind of fell out of favor for a while. And now it's back in again.

It comes and goes. I mean, you know, we are deranged little meat suits. This is the only place we can live. We have nowhere else to go. And we alternate between Oh, I love the earth, let's protect it and the earth. Like we just go back and forth between this. I do. I do think it's interesting. I was I was I was at a play where I had to play a crazy conspiracy theory guy. But I know one of the lines I had to play was save the earth, the earth will be fine. It's us. We'll be gone. You know what I mean? The earth is gonna still be here.

Oh, it's true that when we talk about when people go, Oh, you're just a tree hugger, sir, I need you to hear me. If I'm hugging that tree, it's for dear life, because that's why we have oxygen. That's true. The earth, we may leave it a scoured smoking wreck, but it'll heal. We won't be here to see it. Because we're not nearly as resilient as the planet that we're stomping around on. But I did love I did love love love the way that all of these bizarre threads came together into this, you know, kumbaya love your mother earth kind of moment. Because we go all the way back to America's if you're if you're into police work, or you're a cop yourself.

August Vollmer is like, there he is a towering figure in American policing. He he's really responsible for making policing professional in a way that it wasn't prior to that. And john Keeler, Leonarde Keeler, Leonarde Keeler, the inventor of the polygraph, the modern polygraph. He was a high school student interning at the police department when he came up with this.

Like all these, all these different little threads of genius and inspiration and cultural change are all in this story, including one of the most notorious crimes in American history, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. I think that's what I'd like about. Well, that's what I'd like about doing this podcast. And the telling these stories is all the connections between things and that we don't know. Right? Because how can you you got to get through the day, you can't spend your whole day, you know, looking at the past and reading things.

But everything, although sure, yeah, I, I've spent 45 minutes down a wormhole of such things ago, where did the time go? Oh, I know. Oh, I'll lose a whole day. Yeah, I'll lose a whole day. I had to because the Lindbergh kidnapping connection to the polygraph was so interesting, that I had to like, punch myself. You can come back to this one, you can come back to this story later, we got to get back, we got to get to the laboratory. So cleave backstroke and hook up his houseplants. But I think it's important to know, especially because the lie detector is so baked into our pop culture, our movies and our TV shows and our novels. It's so important that we understand that it is not detecting lies at all, which is why you can beat it. Have you ever?

Have you ever been hooked up to one? No, I never have been. I there were there was a I don't know, it was years ago, somebody was traveling around the morning radio shows hooking up the host to lie detector machines. And it was like, oh, hilarious, high comedy. We didn't get that guy. We got the guy who said that he could hypnotize women into making their breasts grow. Remember that?

And as the only girl in the room is the only woman in the room. Well, there was only one candidate for this. So we go back into the sales department and we go into one of the unused offices and I flip the fluorescent lights off and he's like, all right, you lie down on the floor. And I've got this guy who I'm pretty sure has no actual training, skill or credibility. So I'm lying on the floor with my eyes closed and I got this guy and he's standing in the corner of the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can feel your breasts growing as you as you lie there, you can feel your flesh expanding as your breasts grow, becoming rounder and firmer. And I'm lying on the floor of the sales office in this radio station thinking, oh, my God, I have ruined my life. I should have I should have been an anthropologist. I don't want bigger boobs.

So there's that. But thank God this isn't going to work because I wouldn't want bigger ones. But I'm alone in a room with some probably failed prop comic. Can we be real, Max? A failed prop comic whose new shtick is going into clubs and hypnotizing women to get bigger boobs. I'm pretty sure that's what was happening. So, yeah, we didn't get the lie detector guy.

But it would have been it would have been a neat experiment to see. Well, they did that. I mean, in your script, it did say that there was a TV show. Did they not do that on Maury or one of these other shows like in the last 20, 30 years? It shows up a lot. Yeah, yeah, it shows up a lot. But understand that it is I don't know that they have any percentage on it now of effectiveness, but it's it's real sketchy stuff.

It's real sketchy. And we have to say before we leave Cleve and his Dracena Kane behind us, we have to say that even today, right now, with active ongoing criminal cases and investigations, you'll get a news report like so-and-so has declined to take a polygraph test. And your first thought is, well, if you were innocent, you would do it, right?

Yes, that's the thing. It's like, you know, but yeah, capital B, but or you'll hear so-and-so professes his innocence in the triple homicide, but polygraph tests were inconclusive. And you go, oh, it's guilty as hell. I mean, the lie detector caught him because we've all been sort of conditioned by mass media in Hollywood into believing that this is an infallible scientific device. And it isn't. And that's kind of a bummer.

That's kind of a bummer, because if you could, if you could be honest, be honest with me. Someone's been arrested. The crime is terrible. They fail a lie detector or they have inconclusive results. What are you thinking? Every single, you know, guilty, of course. But, you know, I have the ability to spot guilty people just like that. Anyhow, so I don't need the lie detector test. I've got I'm going to do I'm going to do an episode on you, the man who can see guilt.

Which is why I keep on being called to jury duty, but they never select me. They're really missing. I mean, think of all the time and money that could be saved by just seating you on the jury and let you get an eyeball. Perhaps, perhaps me telling them that I can spot guilty people just like that is the reason I didn't. I'm not sure, but it could be a contributing factor, let's just say. Yeah. Yeah. So keep that in mind. I'm going to try to keep it in mind, because, of course, you can imagine here at True Weird Headquarters, we follow we follow big, splashy true crime stories just like everybody else. And we are guilty of going, did you see what's his name? Failed his lie detector test. We're as guilty of that as anybody. So we're going to try going forward, probably to still rush to judgment, but to remember that it's not as simple as that. It's just not as clear cut as all that.

And I'm also going to try to blank this episode out of my mind, because there's a watermelon in my kitchen that I need to take a knife to and it can hear me talking about it right now. And if that thing were hooked up to a polygraph, it would probably be sobbing. And now I feel like a terrible person. So I'm going to need to forget this episode as quickly as I can, because if Backster's results were correct, we live in a we live inside a world that is pulsing with awareness and we're all connected to every living thing and to each other.

Sherry, when he said that the plants liked being of service, I don't know how they knew that, too. So I think that we tell ourselves that just to feel better about the fact that we're eating them. But Sherry, if I don't eat the animals and I don't eat the plants, there's very, very little else for me to eat. So, you know, well, that's right. I grabbed a baby, hooked it up to gravel so I can eat that for dinner. That's why I racked my brains. What is something that's technically edible but can't possibly be made out of anything food? And the closest I could get was like a Twizzler or Red Vine. That doesn't seem to be food. That seems to be Naga hide or one molecule away from it. So, I mean, you'll get scurvy and rickets and all your teeth will fall out, but at least you won't be eating anything that's aware and awake and alive.

We're going to be eating a lot of cottage cheese. So, next time on True Weird Stuff, there are a lot of, you know, very well documented cases of things that go bump in the night. And sometimes it's just left a mystery. And, you know, we're like, well, maybe the house was haunted. Maybe they lied. There have been a handful of pretty well documented poltergeist cases around the world. The one that we're going to tell you next week is the most heavily witnessed. I mean, so many witnesses inside the house, outside the house, family members, neighbors, complete strangers, so many witnesses who signed notarized statements, upstanding members of this community. This isn't kooky.

This happened long before, you know, Ghost Adventures on TV, long before the movie Poltergeist, long before anybody really knew what those words could mean. And it's the most well documented poltergeist haunting that we have. And it's an incredible story because on the one hand, it's paranormal. But on the other hand, it's also a story about what happens when an 18-year-old girl who has no experience of the world is so badly traumatized.

And that kind of trauma and that kind of energy and emotional intensity is what it is believed can lead to poltergeist activity. And this is the big one. And it's on the next True Weird Stuff. Thank you for listening. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com.

And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland.

True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.