The Wizards Project was a research project at the University of California, San Francisco led by Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan that studied the ability of people to detect lies. The experts identified in their study were called "Truth Wizards". O'Sullivan spent more than 20 years studying the science of lying and deceit. The project was originally named the Diogenes Project, after Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek philosopher who would look into people's faces using a lamp, claiming to be looking for an honest man. Synopsis The project defined a "Truth Wizard" as a person identified who can identify deception with accuracy of at least 80%, whereas the average person rates around 50%. No Truth Wizard was 100% accurate. "Wizard" is used to mean "a person of amazing skill or accomplishment." O'Sullivan and Ekman identified only 50 people as Truth Wizards after testing 20,000 (~0.25%) from all walks of life, including the Secret Service, FBI, sheriffs, police, attorneys, arbitrators, psychologists, students, and many others. Surprisingly, while psychiatrists and law enforcement personnel showed no more aptitude than college freshmen, Secret Service agents were the most skilled. O'Sullivan remarked, "Our wizards are extraordinarily attuned to detecting the nuances of facial expressions, body language and ways of talking and thinking. Some of them can observe a videotape for a few seconds and amazingly they can describe eight details about the person on the tape." Scientists are currently studying Truth Wizards to identify new ways to spot a liar. Truth Wizards use a variety of clues to spot deception and do not depend on any one "clue" to identify a liar. Truth wizards have a natural knack for spotting microexpressions. They also home in on inconsistencies in emotion, body language, and the spoken word with amazing skill. Ekman said on NPR: "We're still trying to find out how in the world did they learn this skill? Are they the sort of Mozarts of lie detection; they just had it?" Ekman points out that the success rate of Truth Wizards is "without any specialized training," and claims that anyone can be trained to detect microexpressions, one element used by Truth Wizards to spot deception in some case, and has released a training CD to do that. Controversies Psychologists Charles F. Bond and Ahmet Uysal of Texas Christian University criticized the methodology used by Ekman and O'Sullivan and suspected the performance of the reported Truth Wizards