Open letter
Dear Mr Krügel,
Over the last two years you have received a substantial amount of publicity in various South African and international media, including prominent SA newspapers such as The Sunday Times and the primetime investigative television programmes Carte Blanche and 3rd Degree. In most cases, such media exposure was centred on your claims about having developed a technology that allows you to locate a person by means of a hair cutting (variously, a DNA sample) of that person.
The media articles and you yourself have described in broad strokes this technology’s operation as novel, even revolutionary science. However, these descriptions, if taken at face value, do not adequately support the plausibility of such a person-locating method being at all feasible. In short, there is much reasonable doubt about whether the ability you claim is actually possible.
Moreover, some of the past cases in which you had become involved – notable among them that of the young British girl, Madeleine McCann – raise more questions than have been answered. Several of these cases also illustrate how the anguish of people who are trying to find a missing loved one can be compounded, and usually is so, by thwarted hopes, and the frustration and disillusionment attending them.
It seems very clear that your involvement in missing-persons cases has been driven largely by a desire to help those in need in their quest to find a loved one who has gone astray. In such an emotionally charged setting, though, it seems equally clear that whatever help or support is offered must also be authentic if it is to be reassuring and viewed with confidence.
As interested members of the public, we feel that all of the aforesaid concerns would be alleviated at a stroke if your technology bore the imprimatur of a relevant, trusted and independent authority. That is to say, the ability you claim to have developed needs to be subjected to a rigorous, carefully designed testing protocol in order that its proper functioning can be confirmed. Doing so will at once boost widespread confidence in the dependability of your technology, and also attract the kind of attention that is needed for advancing it.
The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has a standing offer of one million US dollars for anyone who can convincingly demonstrate such an ability as yours. In fact, the JREF’s founder has stated that you are certainly eligible for testing should you wish to do so, and that testing can easily be done in South Africa, taking less than a day to complete. The JREF does not conduct testing itself and delegates this task to an independent authority. All that is needed by the JREF is a mutually agreed-to test procedure, which can easily be negotiated via e-mail.
It is perhaps understandable that you will be reluctant to submit to testing that would require you to divulge the inner workings of your method. We can reassure you with complete certainty that revealing your secrets will neither be asked for, nor in any way necessary. The testing we envision would entail exclusively a clear and carefully controlled demonstration that your method actually works reliably, subject to the constraint of locating missing persons by means of a hair or DNA sample alone.
If nothing else, please at least consider carefully the merits of what has been set out above. We would strongly encourage you to validate your claims in the suggested manner because doing so will afford all of the stated advantages, both to yourself and to other people you may choose to help in the future.
For a list of signatories who share these opinions and support the objectives proposed in this letter, see the Support Us page.
