BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Thermal imaging was once strictly military, but is now used by Maryland police and fire departments to catch criminals and save lives.

Mary Bubala has the dramatic story of a high-tech rescue.

With the temperature dropping, the search to find 91-year-old Richard Holcombe–who suffers from dementia–was desperate. 

“He doesn’t always know where he lives,” said his daughter, Louise Morris.

Morris said her dad left the house at 5 p.m. to take a walk.  Their home is surrounded by thick woods.

“Usually you have three hours when it’s that cold if someone’s not well dressed,” said Morris.

Morris called police.  K9s and a dozen officers searched the woods, but the terrain was too difficult to maneuver on foot.  That’s when Anne Arundel County’s aviation unit launched and activated its thermal imaging.

“He apparently wandered from the back of his house to the ravine,” said Sgt. Shannon Mack.

With Sgt. Mack at the controls of the chopper and Corporal Bob Townsend directing a special camera mounted on their chopper, the two scanned the thick woods.  Forty-five minutes into the flight, they got a hit.

“I saw him stand up, sit down, stand up,” Townsend said.  “When I looked through the thermal imager, he raised one hand.”

Thermal imaging detects body heat showing the glowing image of living things clearly standing out against buildings or dense trees.

“Everything here you see on earth emits heat differently so we can see the human versus the cold background,” Mack said.

Developed more than 50 years ago by the military, firefighters use thermal imaging to see through smoke, allowing them to quickly find people trapped.  Police departments use it daily, saying it’s critical to their mission to save lives.

“We can search with a camera a much wider area than they can search on foot and we can do it with the latest and greatest technology,” Mack said.

Baltimore City recently used thermal imaging over Leakin Park hoping to find missing teen Phylicia Barnes in woods too dense to search, challenging terrain like where Holocombe was found.

“They said, `We have found a heat source coming out of the marsh’ and it was in a very, very steep ravine and my dad could not get out of it,” Morris said.  “He is alive; my dad’s alive.”

Morris is so thankful for the technology that made the rescue possible.

“A great new technology.  It doesn’t matter if it’s dark or if you were under a cover, they could tell and that was so reassuring because we had no idea where he was,” she said.  “I knew that he might have died had it not been for that technology.”

Morris says from now on, she plans on going with her dad when he heads out for a walk.