Colander

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A typical household colander

A colander (sometimes spelled collander) is a type of sieve used in cooking for separating liquids and solids. It is usually made of a light metal, such as aluminium or thinly rolled stainless steel, although it is not uncommon for it to be made of plastic. A colander is pierced with a pattern of small holes for the liquid to drain through, but allowing the solids to remain inside the sieve itself. It is usually shaped as an inverted dome or cone.

[edit] Urban legend of use in police interrogation

Over the last couple of decades, an urban legend has spread in which a colander is passed off as part of a lie detector by police officers to get a suspect to confess to a crime.

The colander, it is said, was placed on the suspect's head by officers who believed the suspect was lying when he denied the offense. Wires were then run from it to a nearby copy machine. A piece of paper was placed on the document window with the words "He Is Lying!" or something to that effect on it. With every question asked that the interrogators did not believe, they pressed the button on the copier, producing the "lie detector"'s apparent judgement on the answer. Eventually, the suspect confesses, and is rewarded with another apparent result saying he is telling the truth. However, the confession is then thrown out by the judge as coerced.

It is often recounted as having occurred somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, usually the Philadelphia suburbs.

University of Utah folklore professor Jan Harold Brunvand attempted to track down the story's origins for his fifth and final book of urban legends, The Baby Train. He contacted the police chief of Radnor, where the story had often been alleged to have taken place. The chief denied it, and no other source he contacted could either pin it down or confirm that it had happened. He eventually tracked the story down to supposedly having occurred in 1977, years earlier, and found a citation from a book of humorous legal anecdotes compiled by UCLA law professor Gerald Uelmen.

Ultimately, however, he doubted the story's veracity, calling it a police joke that had been accepted as reality by a reporter at some point. However, after the book was published, he received a letter from a Bucks County judge confirming that the case had actually come before him.