Originally Posted by 4Health

Has CBP always had geiger counters at the customs checkpoint? When traveling back into the country with my father in late March, we were quickly pulled into a back room when we were approaching the desk to clear customs and asked if we had been in contact with any nuclear material recently. The CBP agents were all business and quite stern with us and basically tried the whole intimidation route. They told us that one of us tested positive for radioactive material and it then became apparent to me that it was my father who set it off because he had just had a cardiac perfusion test during which they inject radioactive isotopes that remain active in the body for a while. He had the test 7-8 days earlier. We explained this to the agents, and of course they asked for proof, of which we had none because this is not something we anticipated. We ended up giving them the name and phone number of his physician and after more questioning they released us and told us next time that if we had any type of medical procedure in the future that involved the use of radioactive isotopes to bring a letter from the physician if we were planning on traveling. This isn't that big of a deal except that we almost missed our connecting flight because of it. The gate agent had already given up our seat when we arrived at the gate, but after explaining what happened and a tiny bit of fussing (I know, I hate fussing, but it was the last flight of the day and my dad had an important business meeting in the morning), they removed the stand-by passengers from the plane who had taken our seats and gave us our original seats.

The weird thing about this is I never saw a geiger counter anywhere. While in the back room, they used a device to determine what type of ionizing radiation my father was emitting (I guess to make sure it wasn't gamma waves he was emitting), but that was the only time I ever saw a geiger type machine. How did they localize the radiation to us while waiting in the customs queue? It was really crowded and the few times I've played with a geiger, the only way to determine the location of the radiation is to move closer to it which causes the geiger to become louder. I think I would have noticed someone closing in on me with a geiger.

Has anyone else experienced anything else like this? Is this something new?