Call for Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie References

lma writes "Lyle Zapato, best-selling author (well, maybe just author) of Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie: Practical Mind Control Protection for Paranoids , and developer of MindGuard, personal anti-psychotronic software for Amiga and Linux, is trying to find as many references to AFDBs or similar devices prior to 1991 as possible. Please help this important part of our cultural heritage from being lost, and email him with any references you can find." Well, there was my Uncle Milt..I mean...well, nevermind.

Re:From their website

[Angry White Guy]

type man xsublim from the console one day and see what you come up with. It's been happening all along. Software to control you, software to set you free.

The real deal

[Duchamp]

I had a few calls from this one [raven1.net] when I worked as a sysadmin at her ISP.

You can also see her with a sign standing outside the mall in downtown Hamilton, or at the side of the road by the highway.

My Dad remembers the original case

[Degrees]

My dad was a Sheriff's officer before I was born, and the original story made the rounds. One of his friends was a detective in the San Francisco Police Department, was called upon to visit a citizen there (must have been in the early 1960's, I think). Anyway, the person had lined every wall of the apartment with aluminum foil, 'to keep them from reading her brainwaves with the radio'. Obviously, the person was mentally ill. When the person expressed distress at not being able to leave the apartment, the tin foil hat was proposed. (The detective figured that the person was harlmess enough, so why not 'help'?)

So that is the story as I heard it. My dad knows the name of the detective in S.F.

Re:My Dad remembers the original case

[Schnapple]

Yeah but his point was that this was a mention of a tin foil hat in this very reasoning (to protect your brain from influences) way prior to 1991. Urban legend or no, if it was told in the 1960's then this was quite a while back and therefore qualifies.

Mind control at Menards

[Anonymous Coward]

Our regional home products store had this sale where you could buy a plastic tub for 3 bucks and then get 20 percent off on any product you could put in the tub (like paint, batteries, light bulbs).

My wife and I went there to look at floor tile and the whole store was full of customers pushing around shopping carts with a tub in it and filling it with stuff, like mindless drones.

I really badly wanted to buy stuff on the sale, but I did not want to be manipulated like this. My wife pointed out that every form of sales promotion could be taken to be manipulation, including shopping carts, which encourage customers to fill it full of stuff to buy. But my wife thinks I buy too much stuff at Menards anyway, and I felt like I had to pass on the tub like an alcoholic needs to stay away from drinks.

Be wary of links online...

[MarvinMouse]

Some of the psycho links aren't actually as insane as you may think...

I used to play the game Majestic online [ea.com], and I know for a fact they set up a lot of "pseudo-pages" of companies, home pages, etc. to go along with the storyline, and some of these links that have been given are directly from that game, and a few may be from further down the road (then I was in the game), because they seem to read almost exactly the pages I saw when I was playing.

Sure there are psychos online, but there's also a lot of pages set up for other less insiduous or insane reasons.

Just something to think about.

EM radiation and your brain.

[Chris Canfield]

If you visit this old wired story [wired.com], there is a bit of evidence that the increasingly pervasive and increasingly intricate electrical fields we are exposed to every day may not be having a neutral effect on our mental states. The author wonders, not without reason, whether the hallucinatory effect he experienced might be related to the surprising, so far unexplained explosion of mental illness in developed nations. I remember an abnormal developmental psychologist professor from the University who said that many of the hallucinatory schizophrenics in her care had objectively fewer episodes while wearing some form of EM radiation shielding around their brains, and a good friend working in a home for mentally troubled youths seconded the assertion.

In other words, there may be a very good health reason for the ubiquity of self-medicinal aluminium headware. Perhaps we should be attempting to investigate the link between tin hats and improvement in certain forms of mental illness, rather than simply mocking the subject (and QED anyone attempting to study it)?