1603: The Grave Detector part 2

Speaker: David O'Sullivan, a 25 year old from Ireland, read a book titled Wild by Cheryl Stray. Wild is a story about a woman who lost everything and then found her way after taking a life changing hike across the Pacific Crest Trail. David couldn't put the book down. And David O'Sullivan was one of the people who read it and said, you know what, I want to do this after I get out of college. I'm talking with Kathy Tarr. Kathy is an avid long distance hiker who has hiked the Pacific Crest Trail countless times. The Pacific Crest Trail is roughly 2, 600 miles long. Last year in 2023, only 503 hikers completed the entire length of the trail. Which starts at the Mexican border and stretches all the way to Canada. You almost make it sound like this was a bucket list thing for him, but he wasn't an experienced hiker, right? Well, he did hike in Ireland, but in Ireland, it doesn't snow. And also the mountains are more like ridges. They're not very tall. David O'Sullivan started his hike in March of 2017 near Campo, California. It's been almost a hundred miles and 11 days since he started his trek. But David O'Sullivan will never make it to the Canadian border. When did people realize that he was missing? He was not reported missing for quite some time. Because the family didn't expect to hear from him again until he got the Big Bear, which would have taken many days to hike. By now, it's probably a month into it, at least, since he'd gone missing. And so, now they're really, really, really upset. David O'Sullivan's family in Ireland called the Pacific Crest Trail Association, the Irish Embassy, anyone who could help find David O'Sullivan. Eventually, they got a hold of the Riverside Sheriff's Department, but there were still no signs of David. They, you know, went on the trail and they didn't see anything off the side of the trails. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months. So by that time, he's not alive. Then San Bernardino County conducted a more extensive search with helicopters, dogs, ATVs, but they still couldn't find anything. And there was a flyer, a missing flyer for David down in Southern California. So I went to my daughters and I said, you know, I'm going to go up to Idyllwill and see if there's anything I can do up there to help. But unfortunately when I got up there, nobody was searching for him. There's no missing flyers or anything. And I found out his family was, had just flown in from Ireland. Around this time, Kathy Tarr learned about a cadaver dog handler to see if he can help search for David. The dog handler's name is Paul Dotsty. And I get a phone call from Paul Dotsty. He lives in Mammoth, California. And so he introduced himself. He told me that there was this person, R Pad Boss. He testified in the Casey Anthony case. And he created this thing. I don't know what to call Um, he created this contraption that he said could pick up on waves. Electromagnetic waves? Yeah. And that he could pick up on human remains if he had something from the family, which he said, you know, fingernails, fingernail clippings worked great. And I'm listening to him and I'm like, okay. And I'm thinking to myself, I've never heard of this before. You heard right, Dr. R. Pod Voss had a new invention he's testing out. It's a grave detection machine that he likes to call the quantum oscillator. Here's how Dr. Voss markets this machine. He claims that he can find your great great great grandfather's unmarked grave simply by adding your DNA, it could be fingernail clippings, hair, whatever, and you put it inside this machine, and with about 92 percent accuracy, his quantum oscillator will point at the direction of your great great grandfather's grave shaft. Dr. Voss says that the Quantum Oscillator has a range up to 30 miles, although sometimes he claims it goes as far as 60 miles under the right conditions. And get this, the United States Patent Office approved his patent for the Quantum Oscillator back in July of 2018. Now that his machine has a patent. Dr. Voss is offering up his service to anyone willing to hire him. He writes on his website, quote, Yes, Mr. Criminal, soon your life will be much worse because of the improvements of forensic technology, unquote. Today we're going to focus primarily on the quantum oscillator. Is this technology even scientifically sound? Can this machine actually do what it claims it does? I'm Javier Leyva and this is Pretend. Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. 16 year old Carly Guse disappeared on October 13th, 2018. Two months after her disappearance, Paul Dotsty, the cadaver dog handler and R Pod boss, offered to help find her. Carly's parents, in a fit of desperation, offered Carly's baby teeth and handed them over to Dr. Voss. Dr. Voss placed Carly's teeth in the machine, then fired up the quantum oscillator. They started at Carly's house, and the machine started pinging and led them right to the area where she was last seen. They kept walking. And half a mile later, Dr. Voss says that he found a blood trail, and that blood eventually led them to a pair of underwear. Then, nearby, they spotted coyote scat. According to Dr. Voss, they took the coyote poop to the lab, tested it, and they found the presence of specific human decomposition chemical compound. Bullseye, right? The quantum oscillator could have led them right to the very spot that Carly died. Or at least that's what Paul Dosti and Dr. Voss wants us to believe. But despite this discovery, it's been six years since the discovery of the underwear and the poop, and the authorities have not linked this evidence to the case. Let's get back to the case of the missing Irish hiker, David O'Sullivan. Kathy Tarr was leading the efforts to locate David O'Sullivan. At this point, the official police search was over. If they're going to find David's remains, it was all dependent on volunteers. But now Dr. Arpad Voss is offering up his new quantum oscillator to try to find David. So I reached out to Andrea and some other people and I'm like, man, I don't know anything about this. Andrew Lankford is the author of the book, Trail of the Lost. It's a fascinating read, by the way. Andrew started looking it up and she goes, Oh, man, this is, you know, this is fake science. And we didn't know what to think. But at that point you're, you're thinking, well, It's worth a shot, right? It's been a long time since David went missing. We're not getting a lot of support from law enforcement. I mean, why not? Right? Well, you know, I did think that, you know, I reached out to family because, you know, it's not for me to make decisions. I do what the family wants me to do, but I don't make decisions. I reached out to them and I, I told them about it. They were skeptic as well. And I said, honestly, I said, it's up to you. And that's the point of this. The point is, I don't know any family that wouldn't at least try it. Because they want their son back and even though they think this is fake science, they're like, well, let's try it. So we meet him at the airport and we pick him up. I drove him around some places and he get his thing out and it the first time I saw it, I'm like, oh, my goodness, because it's made with PVC pipe. And the family had sent me fingernail clippings, which I gave to him, and he put them into this device. Yeah, I'm picking something up. It's very, very, a very small, small reading, I guess. He looks at his thing. And he says, yeah, it's this many feet up the trail. So I'm like, really? Okay. Like, he's not on the trail. But he would say something like, you know, maybe he peed there, or something fell off, or, it's just whatever. And then we went into some other places, and he did pick up something, and he says, yeah, he goes in this direction, he goes, I'm picking something up. And I remember at one point I was like, In front of him. I'm like, Oh, I said, I'm in the way. He goes, Oh, don't worry about it. He goes, unless you are a family member, it wouldn't pick anything up with you if you were standing there. And I'm like, okay. And this place that he picked up was pretty far. We were up on this ridge. It was pretty far down. So then the next day we took him out again. And the next day I actually had other people come out. So then if he did come with this. a coordinate That we would go search that area or an animal can pull them around but things are going to be scattered There are things that would be there. So don't point to a piece of ground and tell us that's where he died Like the the bobcat is not going to eat a backpack Right or yeah And birds are not going to pull it apart and make enough stuff hey, so let me ask you a question, but this is just to paint a picture for people because You This is not just him with his little PVC device pointing at things, right? You guys chartered a helicopter for this, right? Oh yeah. We did that too at 3, 000 an hour. So he's up there on a helicopter pointing to the side of a mountain with this thing. And you're saying that, that he's getting like bounces or false positives and stuff like that. When the helicopter lands, he tells us he's got. He's got hits. He calls them hits. And he has these hits. And I said, okay, where are these hits? Not only did Dr. Voss say he found something, Andrea Lankford wrote in her book that he claimed that the quantum oscillator detected a Caucasian bone somewhere along the mountainside above a narrow canyon near a 400 foot waterfall. Of course, the place that Dr. Voss and his quantum oscillator were pointing to was halfway up a mountain with no direct path and no way for a helicopter to land. It would take an experienced mountaineer to climb, certainly not someone with David O'Sullivan's skill level. Again, how much trust should we put on a machine where all you have to do is put some DNA in a can and wires magically point to the right direction of a missing loved one from miles away? He just doesn't want the drama. Michael Hadsall runs a non profit called Peace River Canine Search and Rescue. You know, he'd rather be in his lab working on stuff and not have to deal with all, you know, all the other stuff. I went to lunch with my neighbor, you know, we do this every now and then we went to some Russian restaurant or something like that. He's from Russia. So we're having lunch and I said, Hey, I'm, I'm doing this story. I'm talking to, to this guy today. I'm doing the story about this guy named Dr. Voss. And I tell him about the dousing rods and I tell him about the, what is it? The oscillator, what is it called? The quantum oscillator, the quantum oscillator, the gizmo as we call it here, but I sounded. Like an idiot, like seriously, like trying to explain it to somebody like this guy, my neighbor's looking at me like, are you freaking kidding me? He had a hard time believing that the dowsing rides, but like to tell him that somebody could get the fingernail clips of their great, great grandfather and I can take care and use hair and find your great grandfather's grave. That just sounds so sci fi and unbelievable. Explain that to me, like, seriously, like, like, as a, like a serious conversation. The quantum oscillator is basically a crystal radio set. That's what it is. It has a center core, which has got copper wire on it. It has a top indicator, which is a reactive on the bottom. The bottom has a pointer. That points in the direction that we're working in. Let me try to describe this thing for you because it looks like a prop from a Ghostbusters movie. Imagine a cordless power drill where you have the handle, and then underneath it where the battery pack goes, it's actually a can. That's where you put the DNA. And then instead of a drill, it has two metal rods that are sticking out parallel to each other. A lot like the dowsing rods. So this is not an Apple product where it's nice and slick. This thing has wires wrapped all around it. Inside that, we were talking about taking hair or fingernails. Those have crystallists in them. Every person on this planet has H formed DNA, which is what we have. And that has crystallists. It has to have a crystal in it, because that's the only thing that holds the strength of the DNA together. So, all those crystallists generates a resonance frequency. And so, all we're doing is taking that energy, and making our little crystal diode, like we have our crystal radio set, putting it in there, getting the electrons running at a certain rate, and saying, this is the frequency that we're looking for. And then, we're just pointing it around, and it's hitting, when it hits that frequency, the top part starts. Going like a, like a Geiger counter. It's going click, click, click, click, click, click, click back and forth. And we, we suddenly know, okay, it's that way. And we start working and we start walking it out that way. And we know how to flood an area with electrical energy so that we can get the bone to, to ping up and use it like a sonar and the bone will ping up. ping. And then we can find it that way. That's what it does. That's exactly how the quantum oscillator works. We're learning. We've been, I've been working with him. I think it's almost five years now with that thing. And we field test it where I think we're about the only team in the United States. So we, we use it. I report back to him what happened. And then sometimes he's down here with us when we're doing it. And so you actually own one of them. I have two of them. There's only, I think, seven in existence and I own two of them. I mean, he is, if you get to talk to meet him, he is Brilliant. We call him Boy Genius around here. Or Jimmy Neutron, that's our usual thing that we call him when he's running around. When he's out in the field with the team, his code name is Jimmy Neutron. Ever since his testimony at the Casey Anthony trial, it's been downhill for Dr. Arpad Voss and his reputation within the scientific community. His fall from grace was immortalized when Mother Jones Magazine, in partnership with the Marshall Project, published Published an article about him. The article was written by reporter Renee Ebersole, who attended Dr. Voss one week training at the National Forensic Academy. I came into it from the perspective Because I don't, I try not to go in with a bias. I said, you know, I'm interested in your research. I was very honest that I was interested in the oscillator. I was interested in the dowsing rods. I was interested in their techniques for, you know, solving cases. The result of all that work and the, you know, taking into account what all the other experts say, was not what Dr. Vass would have liked to have seen. It wasn't probably the story that he would have liked me to tell, but it, it is the story. While she was there, Renee Ebersole got a chance to try out the dowsing rods. And it worked even for you, right? I mean, and you were coming in as a skeptic, right? So the first time I went before I attended this school, um, I had, when I had met him in person, he gave me a demo. He, he let me try it out myself. And, you know, I, I walked across, I think it was a cow bone that he put on the floor and I had the dowsing rods and I, I walked across the cow bone and sure enough, they crossed. And even though I was like, this doesn't work, this doesn't work, and they, they crossed. I was like, how does that happen? Yeah. I mean, it didn't right away. I started looking into like, what, how does this work? Like it didn't, I knew that it didn't cross. It didn't, it didn't work. I knew there must be some, some reason why these things were crossing. Um, because I know that it doesn't work any better than good luck. And she's right. In our last episode, we discussed the ideomotor phenomenon, where even the smallest muscle movements can cause the rods to swing in whichever direction you want. I bought a set of dowsing rods from Amazon and have been walking around the house all week. It's actually pretty fun. But for Dr. Voss, dowsing rods aren't a toy. He considers it one of the many tools investigators can use out in the field. According to Ebersole, his scientific peers are concerned about that. And mainly the people who told me about Dr. Bass originally were scientists, you know, I was hearing about him and his research from scientists, and most of those scientists were concerned about what he does. With law enforcement, with training law enforcement, and what he was also doing with giving him family's false hope. Let's just say that Dr. Arpad Voss wasn't a big fan of the Mother Jones article. In fact, he lashed out at Mother Jones and Renee Ebersole on his website. He said, quote, There is something out there called deceptive journalism where the basic premise may be true, quote, But the statements have been altered or omitted to such an extent that the meaning has been changed to deceive the audience. Unquote. He also said it was incomplete and terribly misleading. Does he talk about the quantum oscillator at the National Forensic Academy? Yeah, sure. But he says he also talks about a lot of other forensic anthropology techniques. He complains that the article didn't mention that he talks about other techniques such as ground penetrating radar, infrared technology, drones, helicopters, highly trained grave detection dogs, and magnetrometers. Here's retired homicide investigator Freddie Ponce once again. He attended the 10 week training course at the National Forensic Academy. The last week being Dr. Basa's course. Do you think that, did your bullshit sensor go off? You know, we questioned him on it. And listen, when I, and I asked him, listen, what is this? Is this, are you entering the loci of the DNA of the victim into this machine? And he goes, no, it's not the loci of the DNA profile. It's. We're looking to see if we can enter the frequency of DNA, that DNA, there's frequency in DNA. I find it personally interesting that police and homicide detectives, such as yourself, who have worked in this field for a long time, are, you guys are serious people. People that don't really fall for BS. You've seen everything, you know what I mean? And then you look at this guy and on the surface it almost looks like, you know. Like he's trying to sell people on a story. You know what I mean? Right. And it's, it's, it's different than like, I don't hire a high psychic to walk around a painting because it's bullshit, right? It's for me, that's all bullshit for me. That's all bullshit. Now, when you're applying something to science and DNA, and you know, to see if there's something there that it's in this infant stage and it's being tested. Okay, so, okay, so we'll wait and see what happens with the rest of the test. I asked Renee Ebersole her take on this. When you go to a magic show and you see an illusion and you're like, you're blown away, like, Oh my God, what this woman really saw it in half or how did he pull a rabbit out of a hat? You know what I mean? But these, these are cops, right? These are like hardened. They don't buy a bunch of BS. These are like tough people generally. How could they be duped if this technology really is junk science? That's what I find hard to believe. is presented as an expert in his field. He talks about a lot of scientific things that are sort of above the agent's heads. You know, when, when you're sitting there in the classroom, their eyes are glazing over and he makes a lot of references to it. I think by the time they get to the Diocean rods, it's like they're, they're kind of blown away by how brilliant this guy is, whether they understand what he's been saying or not. And then when he gives them something that he, they can, they can actively do and they can actively see working. I felt like that made it, that helped make it more convincing because he had presented himself as such a scientific expert. R Pod Voss's friend and colleague Michael Hadsall has this to say about the criticism. I'm going to give you a little history on PhDs, okay. Um, they treat each other badly. It's a very competitive business. And so the only way they seem to be able to market each other is by cutting everybody else down. And that's kind of how they do it. And it's a shame because you would think, well, these elites, there's all these real heavy intellectual people wouldn't act like But they do. It's terrible. I, I hear people talk bad about him and I will yell at them and say, that's not true. That is not true because I get tired of hearing this stuff. But why do you think they talk bad about him? I don't, you know, part of our pad, uh, is that he is one, probably one of the kindest gentlest souls you will ever meet in your life. He just doesn't have a mean bone in his body. Guy and he is easy to kick around because he won't fight back, you know, and I get out, I'm, I end up being the fighter 'cause he won't fight back. I, I think, you know, the only try, I always say they only try to tackle the one that's carrying the football for a long time he was the expert on it and he stepped out like many great inventors throughout history, our pod vase says that he is being persecuted for being ahead of his time. He compares himself to Galileo. Remember what the church did to him when he said that the earth was not the center of the universe? But here's where this analogy falls short. Galileo's theories have been confirmed time and time again. Renee Eversole says, Nobody's tested the oscillator who isn't Connected with our fed boss. You know, he's apparently he's given them out to a couple friends and they're telling us that they're working, but there's no published research and there's no because there's no published research. There's no opportunity for other scientists to test it and see if it really works. You know, we don't charge for our time. We never do. We volunteer. We do this for free. All of it. You do what for free? We go out and do these searches and do this stuff, uh, for law enforcement and all that. They never pay us for anything. The most, the most they ever do for us is pay for our hotel to keep us up overnight for how do you stay in business? Donations. We raise money. Uh, Peace River is a non profit 501c3 and we're constantly raising money and, uh, so that we can pay for these services to go out and help these people that do it. They're bringing him in as a consultant on a case or something, then he pays a consultant fee or something, but when he's out there searching with us, he doesn't get paid anything. I wouldn't feel comfortable charging for it because of the fact that it's still new science. It's still what I consider to be not proven yet. It's we're proving it. We're making it better every year, but I don't feel comfortable doing it. Now. If I get to where I'm 100 percent reliable with the, with the gizmo and I'm going to be like, okay, maybe we should start paying us for it, you know, because it'd be that way. But for the most part, Peace River is set up as a charity to help people get closure on their, their missing persons stuff. That's what we do. Michael Hadsall and his non profit may offer their services for free, but that's not always the case with Dr. Aarpod Voss. Remember David O'Sullivan, the missing Irish hiker we talked about at the top of the show? Well, Kathy Tarr, the woman leading up the search, says that Dr. Aarpod Voss got compensated when he brought the quantum oscillator to look for David. Here's Kathy Tarr again. But we were going to pay for his flight out from Tennessee. Mm hmm. Knoxville, and we would pay for his hotel room, food, and also pay him for his time. According to Andrea Lankford, David O'Sullivan's parents paid Dr. Voss 3, 000 in cash, in addition to his travel and lodging. Not to mention the cost of hiring a helicopter pilot so that Dr. Voss can point his quantum oscillator at a side of a mountain. And then there was a team of volunteers who took time out of their day searching for areas Dr. Voss had identified. But even those volunteers weren't equipped to traverse the spot where Dr. Voss was pointing to. We go up there and he is using his It's using the fingernails of the family and he's like, yes, i'm getting it over there. I'm getting hits over there Now this is an area That you'd have to be a mountaineer to get to this is not an area any hiker could just hike to Especially a beginner a fairly New novice hiker, right? Like David O'Sullivan. Exactly. But he is, he's, he says, that's where he's at. He's over there. He's up, he's up over there. And we're looking, you know, we're like, wow, how did David get over there? So we're like, okay, you know, and he gave us coordinates for these hits, uh, which was never just one hit. It was hits in an area. In fact, Andrea Lankford went searching for David alone along the dangerous terrain and got badly injured in the process. That's a lot of money, time, sweat, and tears for a technology that's scientifically questionable at best. Kathy Tarr told me that Dr. Voss only worked for 12 hours. All of a sudden he's like, well, we got to go because we got to, we have this other, this other search we have to do. So I was thinking, you know, I'm paying for his time and you're going to hurry off and leave now? And did you get the sense that, that these two were trying to genuinely help, or did you feel like they were pulling one over you and the family? So when I met our pet boss, he comes off very much like a very humble type person, and it always made me think like, he really thinks this is working or does he have the knowledge that it doesn't work and he's scamming these people, but honestly. When I met him, he came off very nice, very humble. He did not come off as someone who is scamming us. He did not, to me. Like he, he really genuinely believes that this device could possibly work. I mean, it's ridiculous. It cannot work. It does not work. Whether he believes it works, I can't tell you that. But I can tell you that, I'm just telling you how he came off to me. He came off very humbled. I mean, his background. His background is huge. And so because of his background, that's probably the main reason why we decided because he does have a good background. Let me ask you about the family though, because you know, that, that's the real tragedy here. And like, even today is 2024 now and their son, David has been missing since 2017. And how do they feel about the whole experience with Dr. Ross? Do you think that they felt like That it was worth it that why not let's give it a shot or or how do they feel today now that Now that nobody has turned up, you know, at the beginning they had hope. I believe it was false hope. And I believe that it was instigated by Paul Dotsie. They've never found anybody, no matter what they want to claim. And I believe at this point, you know, the family believes it was just a waste of their time. It was just a waste. It was an absolute waste of time and energy, but you had to try it. That's, that's the sorry thing about it, because any family will try it. And I, you know, I know now what they're doing, where I didn't know this before. Kathy Tarr said that she learned her lesson, and she's now dedicated her life to assisting families of missing hikers. Chris Fowler and David O'Sullivan, they're both PCP hikers who disappeared and not been able to be found. So I created a foundation called the Fowler O'Sullivan Foundation. We have found people, we have found missing hikers. We do not charge families. We pay expenses for our volunteers, but we don't ever charge a family anything. It's, it's amazing that even today, you know, so many years later, what is it? It's been almost like six years, right? And you're out there and you still are looking for David O'Sullivan. I mean, that's right. He's out there. Stay tuned for part three of The Grave Detector. In the next episode, we're going to talk to a real forensic scientist to see what he thinks oscillator. Plus, we're going to get a response from Dr. Voss where he breaks down his technology point by point. That's next time on Pretend. Today's episode was written and produced by me, Javier Leyva. It was edited by Poonath Shenoy with the podcast pundits. As always, if you want early ad free episodes, I would highly recommend joining Patreon or subscribing to Pretend Plus on Apple Podcasts. Not only are you supporting a little teeny tiny independent show, but you're also getting bonus content and episodes without those pesky ads. And remember, find me on social media at PretendPod. All right, that's it. I'll talk to you guys next week.