Flashlight Weapon Makes Targets Throw Up
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}It looks like a big flashlight — but it's really a nonlethal weapon designed to make you sick.
Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., of Torrance, Calif., has been granted a contract by the Department of Homeland Security to develop what it calls the "LED Incapacitator," according to a DHS online newsletter.
The handheld device using light-emitting diodes to emit super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths, causing disorientation, nausea and even vomiting in whomever it's pointed at.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}• Click here to read the newsletter writeup.
"There's one wavelength that gets everybody," says IOS President Bob Lieberman. "Vlad [IOS top scientist Vladimir Rubtsov] calls it 'the evil color.'"
Phase 1 of the contract — creating a working prototype — has already been completed, and Phase 2 will begin this fall as researchers at Penn State's Institute of Nonlethal Defense Technology put the puke-saber through its paces.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"Phase 3 will be our shrink phase," Lieberman said, admitting that the prototype, 15 inches long with a 4-inch lens, is too large and heavy to be comfortably carried on a belt.
DHS hopes to equip police, Border Patrol agents and National Guardsmen with the barf-beamers by 2010.
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