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A popular story that has been in circulation online since at least 2010 is one that involves long-haired Native Americans serving as scouts in the Vietnam War. The earliest mention of the tale we found was an 8 December 2010 post from the self-described Indiana Jones of the superfoods and longevity universe, David ‘Avocado’ Wolfe. As the story goes, a woman married to a Veterans Affairs medical hospital psychologist caught wind (via her husband) of top secret information about how the military recruited scouts on Native American reservations for the Vietnam War. But once the scouts' hair was cut to regulation military length, they lost their preternatural tracking skills. Later tests showed that long, flowing hair was an essential component of those skills: The author of the tale attempted to explain a possible scientific rationale for such an occurrence: This story presented two separate areas in need of fact-checking: the historical claim that the United States military recruited Native Americans as scouts during the Vietnam era and later commissioned a study to find out why they were not performing as expected, and the scientific claim that hair functioned as an aid in military scouting activities. The historical account given here is dubious at best, and the claim that it stemmed from a secret project challenges us to prove a negative. Logical fallacies notwithstanding, the confirmable facts are that numerous Native American soldiers served in Vietnam, a large majority of whom volunteered for their service before being drafted and were integrated into regular units, and no historical accounts exist of specialized scouting units composed of long-haired Native American soldiers. We reached out to the military regarding the possibility that such a program may have occurred, and F. Lee Reynolds with the United States Army Center of Military History provided us with the following statement: An actual United States military project to recruit scouts from a specific ethnic group did exist, but the targeted group was Viet Cong defectors recruited to serve as intelligence scouts. This setup makes a good deal more sense relative to the Native American claim, given the Viet Cong’s actual knowledge of the land and its inhabitants. The scientific claims are no less dubious. While it is borderline accurate to say that hair plays a role in the nervous system, that does not mean it serves as some sort of antenna into the ineffable aspects of our own consciousness. The reality is a bit less grandiose, according to the New England Journal of Medicine: In other words, the two primary functions hair has on a sensory level are to signal physical movement of the hair and to detect pathogens. In both cases, however, it is not the hair itself that is talking to the nervous or immune systems, but the cells of the follicle to which the hair is attached. It is unclear how the subtle movement of one’s hair or the ability to detect pathogens via the scalp would have any bearing on scouting in the Vietnam War. The original article on this subject went on to claim that hair both emits and receives electromagnetic signals to and from the brain: The notion that hair emits electromagnetic energy is demonstrably false. Hair is a terrible conductor of electricity and is actually comparable in electrical resistivity to rubber, which commonly used to protect against the flow of an electric current. Other less well-defined terms such intuition are harder to refute, but it should be noted that not a single version of this story provided any sort of mechanism outside of the implausible and vague notion of electromagnetic signals. Kirlian photography, the only piece of evidence provided for the nebulous claim of hair as an intuition antenna, is a common topic on new age, alternative health, and metaphysical websites. In broad terms, it is a collection of techniques used to photograph an electric field, which new age and alternative health practitioners sometimes describe as an aura that is medically or spiritually informative. Science finds no support for such a claim, however. Any differences in a before/after photographs of hair would almost certainly represent nothing more than the moisture content of the hair or lack thereof, as later studies into the topic revealed. As Native American writer and creator of the blog Native Skeptic Noah Nez wrote on a post for the Center for Inquiry, hair plays an important role in many tribes' religious beliefs, but those views have often been co-opted by various New Age movements: This fanciful tale relies on the unsourced and unverifiable claim from a website that frequently peddles highly shareable stories having little to no scientific legitimacy, and it appears that the tale of long-haired Native American scouts in Vietnam belongs to that genre. Not a single piece of historical evidence supports the claims of Native American scout recruitment by the U.S. military, and no scientific evidence that holds up to any level of scrutiny supports the idea of heightened intuition resulting from longer hair.
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