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how does one find things in sand. Is it acoustic, radio or what? Do they look for nonrandom features?
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There's a number of different ways, each one good for different things. The best is acustic resonance, what that is is simply you lay out a set-strength net of previously graphed explosives and blow them up, then they "listen" at different points. Every layer of sand/limestone/iron ore/etc. resonates differently, and with the timing you can have a very good "picture" of whats under there. This is very limited and very time consuming, thus are only used when they can limit the search area to a few hundred yards. This is mostly used by oil companies after they narrowed down a spot that may look like it contains oil (limestone dome), and they "shock" the ground to see if there's really oil down there, saving millions in drilling fees.
Fractal geometry I'm not 100% on, there's 2 main ways to do this over large areas. One is using a "Boom" on the back of a large aircraft (looks like a really long antennae out the rear), the aircraft flies very low while the boom guages magnetic fields, this works to about 100yds to each side of the aircraft. Designed in the 60s this is one of the best ways for aircraft to search for subs in the sea, over land it's more hit-or-miss, if it's over desert sands you can tell if there would be a truck buried there, but if they buried it somewhere in a craggy desert where there are more rocks chances of telling the difference between an iron ore or a truck would be very little. Added to this the Aircraft has to fly so low it would be extreamly dangerous to do this over mountains.
The other way you guage the "look" of the desert sands, just like in the dust bowl sand tends to form on the leeway side of buried or exposed objects. This is very hit-or-miss simply because the desert sands are extreamly fluid and change not only daily but hourly. A point of this is the Sphinx, it was almost completely buried by desert sands just 200 years ago, now the sands have moved on.
For a third is radar, but the technology of being able to look through sand is extreamly classified. We simply dont know how well this works, even if we dont have a program on it the government never denied experiments with it. I guess sometimes pretending you have the technology is almost as effective as actually having it as long as it makes "them" think twice.