Iran Fooled by Fake Coronavirus Detector

Reports are emerging of a new device developed by the Iran Revolutionary Guard that can detect coronavirus “within a radius of about 100 meters”.

Major General Hossein Salami, Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, has demonstrated the handheld gun-like device with a long arial, and how it contained a ‘polarised virus’ that could ‘create a magnetic field [that] will point towards coronavirus anywhere within a radius of 100 meters in five seconds”.

To use scientific terms, this is utter hogwash and gobbledegook.

The device appears to be identical to another gadget that was ‘invented’ by the Egyptian military for detecting Hepatitis and HIV. I wrote about this six years ago and within hours the government was back-peddling.

This fake device, the ADE-651, was also at the centre of a fraud committed by a British businessman on the Iraqi government – this time it was sold as a bomb detector. Somerset-based James McCormick was jailed for ten years after making millions selling this device. The judge told him he had ‘blood on his hands’ as unsuspecting people would have been relying on the device to find concealed explosives. If this device is used to give an air of security in coronavirus detection, lives will also be lost at the hands of whoever has committed this fraud.

The originator of the device though appears to be a Texas-based used-car salesman, Wade L. Quattlebaum, who sold it as a novelty golf-ball finder, as well as a gun and explosives detector. He was prosecuted too and barred from making the device. Someone in the world is still at it though.

If Wade had stuck to marketing this gimmick as a comedy gift for golfers, little harm could be done. But instead, this useless gadget keeps popping up in places where it poses severe risk to life. Just who is behind this now?

Thanks to Meirion Jones for bringing this to my attention – yet again. Watch his QED2016 talk on the detectors here…