Go On, Blast Your Junk With a Radar Gun

Why do some of the craziest panics come from cops?

Satanic cults stealing children in the night. Touch fentanyl, and you will most certainly die. Step on a crack, and you break your mother’s back. It’s all the same isn’t it? Myths, legends and bullshittery. 

But should we be afraid of shooting our junk with a radar gun? 

And why do the craziest conspiracies and panics seems to come from cops?

I like to ask the big important questions around here.

No surprise, this all comes from an old-timey news story bursting from the belly of the late 1970s Iowa. This Iowan oldie is alleging that police officers’ balls (and offspring) are at risk from the radar guns they are operating on the job.

The concern has been linked to a recent documentary on microwaves.

You know. The kitchen appliance.

While reading the article, I did have an instinctive latchkey-kid-shudder, not gonna lie.

I remembered the age-old warnings barked at us 80s kids like, "Don't stand too close to the microwave!" and "Don't put that in your ass!" Truly, in the 1980s, the microwave was something you kind of feared.

It was mystical, dangerous, and radioactive.

Microwaves are an interesting thing, it turns out.

It starts with a couple of bros in England named John Randall and Harry Boot. Oh and war—it's always war shit when it comes to invisible death beams.

During WWII, the core of microwave technology was called the cavity magnetron (what a badass name!). Pretty sure there's also a butt toy named the "cavity magnetron," too, but I'll let you Google that.

Indeed, the Brits used it to track ships and aircraft during World War II. Now, that sounds a lot like radar to me, so I guess we can't file Radar Balls™️ in the same bullshit cabinet as Fentanyl Death Touch™️ just yet.

Back to the science…

It turns out even better than tracking ships is cooking shit. British scientist James Spencer was operating the cavity magnetron and found a melted chocolate bar in this pocket. Homie cooked a chocolate bar in his pants just by standing beside this device and went, "Whoah, cool, I should patent this."

Pretty good idea, actually. He also patented the process of microwaving coffee, if you were curious.

Leaving this aside, it seems like junk danger has been dialled to eleven, but Spencer got to work and, indeed, filed a patent with Raytheon.

Yep—that Raytheon.

Thus was born *jazz hands* the RadaRange.

"Radarange NS Svannah" by Cduthy is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The RadaRange was the first commercially available microwave, and it was built like my Grandma Walburg¹. The beast (the microwave) stood six feet tall, weighed a near-metric fuck-ton, and, much like Grandma Wally—was really bad for your health if you interrupted its normal operation.

Of course, they were too cantankerous for the average American kitchen, so it took a few decades for them to start making their way out more broadly to consumers.

The craziest thing is that a wireless heating method, albeit with radio waves, had been demonstrated by Westinghouse as early as 1933 - at the World’s Fair in Chicago.

Cooking with radio waves - Chicago Worlds Fair 1933 (Wikimedia Commons).

But I am not sure I’d stick my face up to that unit and turn it on, to be honest.

By the 1970s, a few decades after the RadaRange was developed and my old-timey story was published, microwaves had come down in cost and size. Their presence atop bright orange laminate counters was becoming more commonplace — but so were the concerns around their safety.

Don’t ask me how or where, but folks started getting really weird about microwaves. Whispers that just standing too close to them could fuck up your DNA, give you cancer and make you sterile. I couldn’t find the referenced documentary from the Iowan news article, but there are ample other samples on YouTube and various archives.

Now, in Canada, where we have a somewhat functioning government, researchers examined 106 microwave units for harmful or excessive radiation leakage in a study published in the year 2000.

Only one microwave exhibited any unsafe behaviour at the time; that unit was 23 years old! That means it was sold around the time my old-timey Iowan news article was written.

A 23-year-old microwave should have won a Nobel prize, not be subjected to scientific testing, for God’s sake. 

Let's get back to the balls—more radar—less microwave.

Radar technology was also developed during World War II to track ships and aircraft, then later became used by police for catching speeders - but how it did this was different than the type of waves used to heat your supper. 

Radar technology uses the Doppler effect: it shoots out a radar beam, like the U.S.S. Enterprise, and then measures the returning signal after it bounces off of whatever you're shooting at. This is definitely not how your microwave works, clearly, and there's no mention of heat. Like, at all. 

No chocolate bar melted in the tighty-whities of Deputy Worrywart from blasting passing muscle cars, it would seem. And if the good deputy does have a brown pile in his pants, sadly, it's not from the radar gun—and it's likely not chocolate.

It's not just the lack of heat that sets radar guns, microwaves and harmful radiation apart, but the commingling of these three types of waves is related to the overall myth.

Let me explain, with absolutely no science training at all.

The type of radiation that is emitted in your microwave is not the same as the radiation that is emitted from an X-ray machine at your dentist's office. This is where scientists are likely a little disappointed in all of us for conflating the two.

You see, it turns out the two types of radiation that are important for us to distinguish are ionizing and non-ionizing. We are surrounded by non-ionizing radiation all day, every day.

Electromagnetic Spectrum Visual from the CDC.

Ionizing radiation will most certainly fuck your shit up if you are exposed to too much of it, and it is the same kind as your dentist's X-ray machine uses. According to the CDC, "ionizing activity can alter molecules within the cells of our body. That action may cause eventual harm (such as cancer). Intense exposures to ionizing radiation may produce visible skin or tissue damage.”²

The CDC then contrasts this with our microwave, "Unlike x-rays and other forms of ionizing radiation, non-ionizing radiation does not have enough energy to remove electrons. Non-ionizing radiation can heat substances. For example, the microwave radiation inside a microwave oven heats water and food rapidly."³

Alright, so we’re getting closer.

Back to the junk-roasting radar guns of the '70s.

Turns out there has been quite a bit of research on the topic of radar and its potential hazards to humans—a large study in 2002 on over forty thousand Korean War veterans who were exposed or potentially exposed to high-intensity radar during their service. The study found, "there was no evidence of increased brain cancer in the entire cohort…testicular cancer deaths also occurred less frequently than expected in the entire cohort and high-exposure occupations. " (Groves, 2002).

Ok, so that's the high-power radar in the military, but what happens if I pointed a police radar gun at my junk and "pulled the trigger"?

Did anyone ever think of that?

Indeed. They did.

In 1995, the Law Enforcement Technology journal had this to say: "Although periodic legal cases implicate police radar as a factor in cancer, cataracts, melanoma, and other medical ailments, scientific and government evidence does not justify police officer safety concerns" (Peterson, 1995).

They didn’t stop there: “Even if a person using traffic radar placed the antenna against his or her body, most of the energy would tend to go right back into the generator (radar antenna) instead of penetrating the person's body. It is concluded that traffic radar poses no health risks to police officers and that the myth of radar cancer should be dispelled.” (Peterson, 1995).

Now, they don't say "junk,"—but it seems like this myth might be busted. Even the police scientists have said this is junk bunk.

So, the moral of this story?

Until my next panic-peddling piece from cops who don't know better, go forth and speed-trap your junk to your heart's content⁴.

1. Actual name.

2. CDC. (2024, February 19). About Ionizing Radiation. Radiation and Your Health. https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/about/ionizing-radiation.html

3. CDC. (2024, February 22). About Non-Ionizing Radiation. Radiation and Your Health. https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/about/non-ionizing-radiation.html

4. Not a doctor. I mean, I personally, don’t think pointing anything at your junk that has a trigger on it is a good idea.