'They' also claim the contrails from airliners aren't spreading mind control agents...

I have proof and past experience with dishonest government employees. Please take your arguments for chemtrails elsewhere.

Sure, but what you're talking about is widespread conspiracy to allow ERDs to be 'triggered' manually.

I think that theory warrants about as much consideration as chemtrails.

He never said they manually triggered an alarm. He said they could very well be lying that a detector was ever used let alone registered explosives.

That would be extremely gutsy on the part of the TSA employee... I go through the pat-down dance at least once a month, and that test is always done while I'm standing there, and the pass/fail reports are quite obvious (big green/red boxes with text).

Is that dependent on the airport? I've flown as recently as two months ago, and I went through four pat-downs over the course of the trip. I never saw any green/red indicator when they tested the pat-down gloves.

Regardles, I wouldn't exactly put it past the TSA to make up a positive hit. It's not like we haven't ever had a police officer claim someone committed a traffic violation on someone based on appearance and ultimately find drugs or some other criminal behavior.

Perhaps.

In the past two months, I've had pat-downs in DCA, BWI, and PHI (my home airport, SYR, doesn't have scanners, so there's nothing to opt out of).

They all use machines similar to this one:

http://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/files/images/edt_closeup.jp...

I've never seen a failure myself (the green bar you see pops up after a few seconds), but according to a friend who has, a red bar pops up instead.