In this article we show why Scientology’s Floating needled is flawed as it was created by a 1960’s signal generator meant to measure electronics and not the human body.

A reader comment posted to this site on March 21, 2026, provides the first known firsthand technical account of how the floating needle standard used to train Scientology auditors under David Miscavige’s Golden Age of Tech was actually created. The account is brief. Its implications are not. 

The commenter identifies as someone directly involved in the development of the Hubbard E-Meter Drills Simulator — the training device used to certify auditors on correct needle reads under GAT 1. What they describe is not a technical footnote. It is a direct account of the origin of the institutional standard against which an entire generation of Scientology auditors was trained, retrained, and in many cases required to purchase new meters and re-audit their preclears at their own expense.

That account is now corroborated in full by United States Patent 6,038,470 — the Drills Simulator’s own patent, filed by its inventors at Golden Era Productions, Gilman Hot Springs, California, and assigned to the Church of Scientology International.

The Comment

The comment posted March 21, 2026.

The comment reads in full: 

“Very good Mr. Augustine! As someone involved with the development of the Drills Simulator, I know how the mechanical-looking robotic ‘floating needle’ on that machine was created.

It was just recorded off of an older Wavetek 110 signal generator. No humans involved! We had to edit it a bit to remove the little hitch at the peaks endemic to those old signal generators that used a diode array to smooth a triangle wave to get the faked sine wave.

We really wanted to create a real-looking floating needle but sadly it was a bit beyond the capabilities of the old 68HC705 microcontroller in that sad old beast.

Condemning a generation of ‘auditors’ to a mechanical definition of the floating needle. Sad, but really there was no hope for it once Miscavige took over.”

What Is a Wavetek 110?

A Wavetek Model 110 signal generator — the 1960’s era bench instrument whose output became Scientology’s floating needle standard.

Scientology’s Classic Product Misapplications and False Claims

The Wavetek 110 is a benchtop analog function generator manufactured from the late 1960s through the 1970s in San Diego, California. It produces sine waves, triangle waves, and square waves across a frequency range from below 1 Hz to 100 kHz. It was standard electronics laboratory equipment — the kind of instrument found on workbenches in university labs, repair shops, and engineering departments.

The Wavetek 110 was designed to produce controlled, artificial, non-biological waveforms for bench testing electronic circuits. Its sine wave output is specifically engineered to be unlike biological signals — perfectly regular, free of the noise and variability inherent in human physiological response. That regularity is its engineering virtue. For circuit testing you want a clean, predictable signal. For modeling human galvanic skin response you want the opposite.

Scientology took that maximally artificial, maximally non-biological waveform, edited out its one remaining imperfection, and presented it to auditors as the standard of authentic human spiritual release. They then used that standard to invalidate the prior training of thousands of auditors — whose reads, developed against actual human beings, were declared incorrect by comparison to a signal generator.

The product misapplication here operates at two levels simultaneously:

Level one is the e-meter itself — a resistance-measuring instrument misapplied as a spiritual detector.

Level two — and this is what makes the Wavetek discovery so significant — is that the training standard for using the misapplied instrument was itself derived from a second misapplied instrument. The artifice goes all the way down. The meter measures galvanic skin resistance and calls it spiritual mass. The training device that teaches auditors what spiritual release looks like on that meter was built from a signal generator that produces no biological signal at all.

The commenter’s description of its technical limitation is precise. The Wavetek 110 generates a sine wave by using a diode array to ’round off’ a triangle wave — a common analog approximation technique of that era. The method is effective but imperfect: it produces a characteristic small inflection, or ‘hitch,’ at the peaks of the waveform where the diode array transitions. This artifact is visible on an oscilloscope and audible on audio equipment. It is the kind of detail that only someone who has worked with the instrument would know to mention.

To create the Drills Simulator’s floating needle pattern, the development team recorded the output of a Wavetek 110 and then edited that recording to remove the diode-array artifact at the peaks. What remained — the edited output of a decades-old bench instrument — became the waveform that the simulator played back as the reference floating needle.

The Patent Confirms the Architecture

United States Patent 6,038,470, titled ‘Training System for Simulating Changes in the Resistance of a Living Body,‘ was issued March 14, 2000 and assigned to the Church of Scientology International. Its inventors are Bruce Ploetz and Victor A. Wagner, Jr., both listed at Golden Era Productions, Gilman Hot Springs, California — the Int Base. The priority date is May 9, 1996, placing the device’s core development in the same months that David Miscavige was constructing Golden Age of Tech in the aftermath of Lisa McPherson’s death in December 1995.

The “Training System for Simulating Changes in the Resistance of a Living Body” is commonly known as the Hubbard E-Meter Drills Simulator and is used to by the Church train Scientology auditors.However, the patent evidence shows deep technical flaws in the device and therefore flawed auditing as we next describe:

The patent for the Hubbard E-Meter Drills Simulator confirms precisely what the commenter described.

Scroll down all the way to see the patent for the Hubbard E-Meter Drills Simulator.

The CPU is specified as a Motorola MC68HC705PC8ACP — the exact 8-bit microcontroller the commenter named. The patterns are stored in an EPROM and described as ‘digitally recorded data representative of patterns of changing resistance’ — recorded waveforms, played back, not waveforms generated in real time from any model of human physiology.

The patent further specifies that the patterns ‘comprise data measured at a rate of 300 samples per second and stored in the ROM compressed using a conventional compression method.’ The CPU ‘reconstructs the original pattern wave from the compressed data.’ This is a playback device. The institutional claim that the patterns were ‘discovered by L. Ron Hubbard’ is the only place Hubbard enters the technical picture — and the patent’s own co-inventor has told us what was actually recorded into that EPROM.

Buried deep in the language of US Patent  6,038,470 we read of a performance problem in the circuitry: 

Above: Patent US 6,038,470 — the Drills Simulator’s own patent. The transistor circuit described here was rejected by the inventors as unsuitable precisely because of non-linearity problems — the same class of analog imperfection that had to be edited out of the Wavetek recording. 

The patent’s Non-Patent Literature section lists the internal technical documents filed with the USPTO as incorporated references, all authored by Ploetz and Wagner at Golden Era Productions in 1996: the Hubbard E-Meter Drills Simulator Student User Manual (32 pages), the Generator Circuit Source Code (71 pages), the LED Driver Source Code (22 pages), the READ Generator PC Jack Interface (1 page), and the Drills Simulator PC Interface Materials List (2 pages).

The Generator Circuit Source Code — 71 pages of MC68HC705 assembly language, filed with the USPTO in 1998 — is the document that would show exactly what waveform data was stored in the EPROM. It exists as a public record in the file wrapper for patent application 09/018,832. It has not yet been retrieved from USPTO Patent Center. When it is, it will show whether the floating needle waveform stored in that ROM is a regular oscillator output — as the commenter states — or something derived from actual human galvanic skin response measurements. Based on the commenter’s account, and on the hardware constraints documented in the patent itself, there is no reason to expect the latter.

The Generator Circuit Source Code is a public record. It is sitting in the USPTO file wrapper for application 09/018,832. Seventy-one pages of assembly language that will show, in numerical sample values, exactly what Scientology’s auditors were actually being trained to recognize. We are ordering these documents for a future article and technical analysis of the waveforms.

The Institutional Claim and What It Conceals

The patent states: ‘While any pattern may be stored in the EPROM 32, the preferred patterns for training were discovered by L. Ron Hubbard and are published in the books Book of E-Meter Drills, Understanding The E-Meter, E-Meter Essentials and the motion picture M-9: E-Meter Reads. Each of these works have been adapted from the works of L. Ron Hubbard, all of which are incorporated herein by reference.’

This sentence is the patent’s institutional framing of the device’s source material. It invokes Hubbard as the discoverer of the patterns and cites his published works as the authority behind what was stored in ROM.

The commenter’s account places a different object in that ROM: the output of a Wavetek 110, recorded and edited. The gap between the patent’s institutional claim and the co-inventor’s technical account is the gap between what Scientology told auditors they were being trained on, and what they were actually being trained on.

The patent says the patterns were ‘discovered by L. Ron Hubbard.’ The co-inventor of the patent says the floating needle was recorded off a Wavetek 110 signal generator. Both cannot be true.

What Was Trained Against This Waveform

The floating needle is the central read in Scientology auditing. It is the meter indicator that an auditor calls to signify that a charged item has been resolved — that the preclear has experienced what Hubbard described as a moment of release. The entire structure of an auditing session is organized around producing and correctly identifying this read. It is not a peripheral technical detail. It is the primary positive indicator in the practice.

Under Hubbard’s original definition, a floating needle was characterized by a loose, rhythmic, unpredictable back-and-forth movement — a needle that moved freely across the dial without being pulled by resistance. Experienced auditors developed judgment about it through practice with actual preclears. The definition was observational, not mechanical.

Miscavige’s Golden Age of Tech Phase 1, introduced in the late 1990s in the wake of the wholly preventable death of Lisa McPherson, replaced that observational standard with a mechanical one. The new definition required a specific ‘three-swing’ pattern with defined width and rhythm. Auditors who could not demonstrate recognition of this precise pattern on the Drills Simulator were not certified. Those already certified were told their training was incorrect and required to retrain.

We now know what that mechanical standard actually was. Auditors were not being trained against a more precise or more accurate version of a human floating needle. They were being trained to recognize a waveform recorded off a Wavetek 110 signal generator — a bench instrument that had no preclear behind it, no charged item being resolved, no moment of release of any kind. The ‘floating needle’ they were being certified to call was, at its source, an oscillator output.

Auditors were not being corrected against a more accurate human standard. They were being trained to recognize an artifice — the edited output of a decades-old bench instrument — as the definition of spiritual release. The correction ran in the wrong direction.

The 68HC705 and the Limits of the Machine

The commenter’s reference to the Motorola 68HC705 microcontroller is a technical timestamp that the patent itself confirms. The patent specifies this exact chip — model MC68HC705PC8ACP — as the CPU. It is an 8-bit microcontroller from Motorola’s 6800 family, introduced in the 1980s and widely used through the 1990s. It was inexpensive, reliable, and severely limited by any modern standard: constrained RAM, limited processing speed, no floating-point hardware.

The commenter states that the team ‘really wanted to create a real-looking floating needle’ — meaning a waveform that approximated actual human physiological response patterns — but that the 68HC705 lacked the computational resources to generate one convincingly in real time. The solution was to record a pre-existing waveform from the Wavetek 110 and play it back. The mechanical floating needle on the Drills Simulator is not a simulation of a human response. It is a recording of an oscillator, chosen in part because the hardware could not do better.

The gap between the Drills Simulator’s 68HC705 and the Mark VIII E-Meter’s Mitsubishi M30624 CPU — documented in United States Patent 8,121,676 B2, as analyzed in our prior article — represents roughly a decade of processor development. The training standard was locked in on older, cheaper hardware. The production meter then introduced far more sophisticated digital processing, including auto-calibration, non-linear gain correction, and interpolation. But the needle behavior the Mark VIII was producing was being evaluated against a certification standard that originated in a Wavetek recording on a machine that was already obsolete when GAT 1 was introduced.

There is a further irony documented in the patent itself. The inventors tested an alternative output interface circuit using field effect transistors and rejected it — specifically because those transistors generated ‘unwanted non-linearity when the voltage level exceeds one volt.’ The same class of analog imperfection that had to be edited out of the Wavetek recording was precisely what made one circuit design unsuitable for the simulator. The device was engineered to eliminate analog artifacts. The floating needle waveform stored in its ROM was itself an edited analog artifact.

The Institutional Consequence

The full weight of what the commenter describes becomes clear only when placed against what GAT 1 actually did to the Scientology membership.

Thousands of trained and certified auditors were told, under GAT 1, that their floating needle recognition was incorrect. Their prior certifications were invalidated. They were required to retrain on the Drills Simulator at their own expense. In many cases they were required to return to the e-meter training course from the beginning. In many cases they were told that auditing they had delivered was suspect and that their preclears needed to be re-audited. The financial and personal cost to the membership was enormous.

The standard those auditors were being corrected against was a Wavetek 110 recording.

The auditors who paid to retrain, who submitted their preclears to re-auditing, who accepted that Miscavige’s mechanical standard superseded Hubbard’s observational one — were being corrected against an artifice. Not against a better human read. Against a function generator output, edited to remove an analog artifact, played back on a machine whose processor was too limited to produce anything more sophisticated.

The commenter’s closing observation — ‘Condemning a generation of auditors to a mechanical definition of the floating needle. Sad, but really there was no hope for it once Miscavige took over’ — is the judgment of someone who was in the room. It deserves to be part of the record.

What This Establishes

Prior to this comment, the critique of the GAT 1 floating needle standard rested on institutional and theological grounds: that Miscavige had changed Hubbard’s definition, that the three-swing standard was more restrictive than Hubbard intended, that the mandatory retraining was a revenue event dressed as a technical correction. These critiques were well-founded but they were arguments about interpretation.

The commenter’s account, corroborated by the patent’s own technical specifications, moves the question to a different level. It is no longer only an argument about whether Miscavige correctly interpreted Hubbard. It is a technical account of what the Drills Simulator’s floating needle actually was at the level of its production: a recorded and edited waveform from a signal generator, chosen because the hardware could not generate a convincing approximation of a human response.

The patent confirms the playback architecture, confirms the microcontroller, confirms that the patterns are digitally recorded data. The 71-page Generator Circuit Source Code filed with the USPTO in 1998 remains to be retrieved — but based on everything the patent and the commenter together establish, it will show what was in that EPROM.

The floating needle that Scientology auditors were trained and certified to recognize — the standard that invalidated prior certifications, required retraining and re-auditing, and underpinned two decades of Golden Age of Tech auditing — was, at its technical origin, the output of a Wavetek 110 function generator, manufactured in San Diego, California, sometime in the 1970s.

No preclear was behind it. No charged item was resolved. No spiritual state was being measured or represented. It was oscillator output — and it became scripture.

The Bottom Line: Scientology’s e-meter is a classic case of “garbage in, garbage out.” A signal generated by 1960’s signal generator which was meant to simulate electronics and not the human body, was used to model the floating needle. And even this signal was flawed as it was a triangle wave poorly modified to become a sine wave.

Sources

Comment by ‘aqnx,’ posted March 21, 2026, The Scientology Money Project.

United States Patent 6,038,470, ‘Training System for Simulating Changes in the Resistance of a Living Body,’ issued March 14, 2000. Inventors: Bruce Ploetz and Victor A. Wagner, Jr. Assignee: Church of Scientology International.

United States Patent 8,121,676 B2, ‘System for Measuring and Indicating Changes in the Resistance of a Living Body,’ issued February 21, 2012. Assignee: Church of Spiritual Technology.

Non-Patent Literature incorporated by reference in US 6,038,470: Generator Circuit Source Code (71 pp.), LED Driver Source Code (22 pp.), Hubbard E-Meter Drills Simulator Student User Manual (32 pp.), READ Generator PC Jack Interface (1 p.), Drills Simulator PC Interface Materials List (2 pp.) — all authored by Bruce Ploetz and Victor Wagner, Golden Era Productions, Gilman Hot Springs, California, 1996. Available in USPTO file wrapper, application 09/018,832.

Bruce Ploetz, ‘What About the E-Meter?’, mikerindersblog.org.

Bruce Ploetz, comments in ‘Such a Deal!’, mikerindersblog.org — including firsthand account of Drills Simulator development and the role of Gary Lew (‘Luigi’) in recording reads.

Copyright 2026 Jeffrey Augustine

The US Patent for the Hubbard E-Meter Drills Simulator: