The vast majority of jurisdictions around the world reject polygraph results as inadmissible in courts of law. John Larson demonstrates a ‘lie detector’ polygraph machine at Northwestern ...

American inventor John Larson, right, demonstrates the operation of a polygraph at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the 1930s. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images ...

American inventor John Larson, right, demonstrates the operation of a polygraph at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the 1930s.

The man credited with fully developing the polygraph, a Berkeley police officer named John Larson, who also had a PhD in psychology, would later turn on his invention as unreliable, according to ...

American inventor John Larson, right, demonstrates the operation of a polygraph at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the 1930s. - Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images A version ...

When President Ronald Reagan’s White House threatened thousands of government officials with polygraph exams, supposedly to protect classified data (but probably also to control press leaks), his ...

When President Ronald Reagan’s White House threatened thousands of government officials with polygraph exams, supposedly to protect classified data (but probably also to control press leaks ...

WASHINGTON—In a small interrogation room in Virginia with a one-way mirror, employees from across the Department of Homeland Security are being summoned and hooked up to a polygraph machine.