History of the Polygraph Timeline

Marston appeared in advertising for the Gillette company, claiming that polygraph testing showed Gillette razors were better than competing products.

CIA employee Edward Lee Howard was dismissed in 1983 after a polygraph screening in which he truthfully admitted to minor crimes, including petty theft and drug abuse.

Image source: Edward Lee Howard

Gary Ridgway passed a polygraph in 1984. He confessed almost two decades later after being confronted with DNA evidence.

Image source: Gary Ridgway

Larry Wu-Tai Chin and Aldrich Ames were notable spies associated with false-negative polygraph results. Ames underwent CIA examinations in 1986 and 1991 while spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.

Image source: Aldrich Ames

After Vicki Wegerle was murdered in Wichita, Kansas, in 1986, her husband Bill Wegerle failed two polygraph tests. He was neither arrested nor convicted, and later DNA evidence connected the killing to BTK and exonerated him.

Image source: Dennis Rader

Ana Belén Montes, later identified as a Cuban spy, passed a counterintelligence-scope polygraph administered by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1994.

Image source: Ana Montes

Television producer Mark Phillips revived Lie Detector on the FOX Network in 1998. Ed Gelb and host Marcia Clark questioned Mark Fuhrman about the allegation that he had planted the bloody glove.

During the 2002 disappearance of seven-year-old Danielle van Dam in San Diego, police suspected neighbor David Westerfield, who became the prime suspect after allegedly failing a polygraph test.

Image source: Murder of Danielle van Dam

The history of the polygraph became the subject of The Lie Detector, a documentary film that first aired on American Experience on January 3, 2023.

From 1945 onward, at least six Americans committed espionage after successfully passing polygraph tests, illustrating the limits of the technology in counterintelligence.

Polygraph evidence became inadmissible in New South Wales courts under the Lie Detectors Act 1983.

In 1987, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected the use of polygraph results as courtroom evidence in R v Béland, finding them inadmissible.

Image source: R v Béland

The Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988 generally prevented employers from using lie-detector tests for pre-employment screening or during employment, subject to certain exemptions.

Image source: Employee Polygraph Protection Act

Lithuania has used polygraphs since 1992, with law enforcement employing the Event Knowledge Test, described as a modification of the Concealed Information Test, in criminal investigations.

After the Frye standard was lifted in 1993, forensic evidence including polygraph evidence had to meet the Daubert standard, requiring scientifically valid reasoning or methodology that could properly be applied to the facts.

In United States v. Scheffer, the US Supreme Court left individual jurisdictions to decide whether polygraph results could be admitted in court. The majority said there was no scientific consensus on reliability and compared performance to little better than a coin toss.

Image source: United States v. Scheffer

Ontario's Employment Standards Act, 2000 prohibited employers from asking or requiring employees to undergo polygraph testing.

By 2007, polygraph testimony was admitted by stipulation in 19 states and was subject to the discretion of the trial judge in federal court.

The Offender Management Act 2007 created an option to use polygraph tests to monitor serious sex offenders on parole in England and Wales.

Image source: Offender Management Act 2007

In 2008, an Indian court adopted Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature Profiling as evidence to convict a woman accused of murdering her fiancé.

Image source: Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature Profiling

Despite documented polygraph failures, the Defense Intelligence Agency announced in August 2008 that each of its 5,700 prospective and current employees would undergo polygraph testing at least once annually.

Image source: Defense Intelligence Agency

In 2010, the National Security Agency produced a video explaining its polygraph process.

Image source: National Security Agency

On May 5, 2010, the Supreme Court of India declared the use of narcoanalysis, brain mapping, and polygraph tests on suspects illegal and unconstitutional when conducted without consent or under coercion.

On January 29, 2015, the Supreme Court of Poland declared that using a polygraph during interrogation of suspects was forbidden by the Polish Code of Criminal Procedure.

A 2017 account by David Canter and Rita Žukauskienė identified Belgium as the European country with the most prevalent police use of polygraph testing, with about 300 tests conducted annually during investigations.

As of 2017, the justice ministry and Supreme Court of both the Netherlands and Germany had rejected the use of polygraphs.

Wired reported in 2018 that an estimated 2.5 million polygraph tests were administered annually in the United States, most to paramedics, police officers, firefighters, and state troopers.

A 2002 National Research Council review found that, among people untrained in countermeasures, specific-incident polygraph tests could distinguish lying from truth telling at rates well above chance but well below perfection.

The National Academy of Sciences issued The Polygraph and Lie Detection in 2003, providing a comprehensive review of existing research.

The 2003 NAS review concluded that there was little basis for expecting a polygraph test to achieve extremely high accuracy. The American Psychological Association similarly stated that most psychologists saw little evidence that polygraphs accurately detect lies.

A 2010 study indicated that functional magnetic resonance imaging might help explain the psychological correlations associated with polygraph examinations.

Image source: Functional magnetic resonance imaging