I posted two fascinating episodes this week with Shannon Flynn. He describes first how Mark Hofmann defeated a lie detector test, and talks first about the mechanics of the test.
Shannon: The way that those polygraphs work is, they work on what is known as the zero-null system. In other words they put up a scale. Zero is the center, then it goes -1, -2, -3, -4, all the way to -15, whatever, and then +1, +2, +3, whatever. When a test is scored, they will give a number, but the number will be +1, or -3, or +10. Generally between -5 and +5 is a null reading. They can’t tell. They person has been messing with the test or the examination wasn’t done well. They can’t tell so it will be towards the center of that.
But then when you get to -10, -11, -12, very untruthful and easily seen; +10, +12, +15, very truthful. Mark scored a +14. I scored a +12. That really bothered those examiners when they found out he had beat that test, it just really bothered them. It turns out the main person up at the University of Utah, David Raskin was able to arrange an interview with Mark when he was in prison about two years, a year and a half, two years afterwards, because he wanted to find out how in the world he was able to do that. This is what Mark told him.
I don’t want to give too much away, I’m hoping this will pique your interest to listen! But suffice it to say, Mark’s passing the polygraph test has implications for the FBI and CIA, who routinely run polygraph tests on employees!
We also talked about how Mark changed Mormon history. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but Shannon said some very interesting things:
Shannon: Our understanding of church history hopefully is as bad now as they ever will be with the idea that they’re going to get better each day as time goes on. But that means 50 years ago they were significantly worse than what they are now. In 1960 did most people believe that Joseph didn’t do any of that money digging? They didn’t believe in that magic stuff, didn’t use a seer stone? Well you can see how much things have changed. Not only does the church acknowledge that, they have printed a picture of the stone! That says almost nothing about the artifacts. It tells us volumes about who we are, what we believe, how we think about things.
…
this idea of Joseph believing in magic and going on September 21st, the equinox. Mark in that Martin Harris letter was just giving a little snippet of some magic belief. Well now we know it’s a hundred times bigger than that.
So today those letters, that Josiah Stoal letter about the money digging, of course we know he did that, all the time. They would not be nearly as controversial, by a factor of a hundred that they are now.
Do you agree with Flynn’s assessment? Did Hofmann blow the lid off Mormon history?
Wheat & Tares 
No. For instance, the Tanners published *Mormonism Shadow or Reality* in the early 1970s, as I recall. They say therein that their work began in 1960. The sensationalism of Hofmann’s story, however, is acknowledged and may justify the analogy somewhat. I just know I and many others knew some history long before Mark’s 1985 bombs.
The lack of spiritual discernment (the ultimate lie detector) shown by our “Prophets, Seers and Revelators” during this time was a huge shelf item for me. If God couldn’t tell them that these documents were forgeries, and thus reject the purchase, and ultimately stopping the murders, then what good are these powers? What else have they missed? What are they missing today?
Bishop Bill,
That’s a great comment. I keep a picture (sorry, I couldn’t figure out how to post it here but you can easily find it with a quick Google search) of a very young Mark Hoffman with President Spencer Kimball, Counsellors N. Elden Tanner and Marion G. Romney, and a young Gordon Hinckley and Boyd Packer. All of them are looking at an “authentic” document found by Hoffman. Only one person in that picture actually knows what they are looking at.
Lie detector tests do not work on magic or measure some mysterious lying brain wave. They look at basic biological parameters like heart rate. They are extremely unreliable. Anyone who has practiced keeping their cool can pass them. Many actors, performers, attorneys who argue cases in court, and many others can beat them including sociopaths. They are a favorite in movies, mystery novels, and talk shows . The police would like such a magic test to get them out of a lot of hard work finding evidence. They mostly use the lie detector test to trick or compel criminals into confessions which are also not that reliable. Witness testimony is flimsy evidence in comparison with the hard evidence like bullets, blood stains, fibers, paint chips, fingerprints, DNA, chemical tests, etc.
I would be disappointed if Hoffman could NOT beat a lie detector test. And Bishop Bill, you know damned well, the spirit of discernment is even less reliable than the lie detector test. Just about every teenage boy and many teenage girls routinely lie to their bishops about a certain unmentionable subject and the bishops told the same lies themselves when they were young. The Mormon sheeple who think this gift of discernment is very reliable are lying to themselves because they conveniently forgot about when it didn’t catch them when they lied to their bishops.
As far as blowing the lid off , I would say Mark Hoffman generated extremely disturbing “evidence” for critical thinking Mormons but that wasn’t very many of us. I had a theory that Hoffman never wrote a forgery that he didn’t think should have existed if historical documentation had been much more extensive. He painted what he thought was a picture of Mormon history close to the truth. He lived by the premise: even if you make it up it still might be true. Fascinating but twisted guy, especially in light of all the problems created by the Internet.