It was sunny but chilly afternoon on January 4th, 1963 when two unmarked vans drove down the quiet three-line streets of the DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

Flanked by police officers on motorcycles, the envoy pulled up at 1810-12-19th Street

northwest in front of a modest three-story beige brick building with an

alley running beside it.

There, while officers located both ends of the street behind them, a crew of plainclothes food

and drug administration agents and U.S. Marshals flooded out onto the sidewalk and rushed up the stoop.

When the agents emerged from inside shortly thereafter, they were escorting nobody in handcuffs.

Instead, they carried boxes of papers, stacks of books, and a bunch of electrical devices.

So many that they needed to call in two more trucks just to haul all three tons of it away.

Reportedly, these were their main target, toaster-sized devices called E-meters.

On the inside an e-meter is a jumbled mess of wires and chips.

On the outside, it looks like a prop you'd use in a cheap Star Trek knockoff

with all kinds of knobs and dials, a digital clock,

a Geiger counter style reader,

and long wires attached to two metal cylinders, one for each hand.

According to the FDA, these emitters came with false and misleading labeling, which was not a difficult fact to believe.

Their users believed they could detect harmful energies and Thetans, which in their belief system, were ethereal immortal entities like spirits that make up a person's soul.

What these devices actually did was measure electrical resistance in the skin, like an arm meter.

If you squint, though, you can imagine how religious cultists could have made that logical jump.

Skin conductivity can be affected by factors like grip strength and sweat, which might shift

if someone experiences, say, nervousness or anxiety. To a cultist, such a state might indicate the presence of evil spirits.

The FDA claimed victory, following its raid on the budding church of Scientology, having seized so many of its bogus arm meters.

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