Aluminum Foil Hats Will Not Stop "Them"

Otter writes "A study at MIT has found that aluminum foil headwear ("Among a fringe community of paranoids..the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals") actually amplifies certain frequency bands allocated to the US government, as well as a mobile phone range, and is largely ineffective through the rest of the radio spectrum. But we can we trust the study, or are They controlling the researchers?"

Comments

Typo

[fiannaFailMan]

It's aluminium actually. Now drive on the right side of the road dammit!

What's that you say...Lies all Lies

[Widowwolf]

Whats next are you gonna tell it really wasn't His Noodly appendage that touched me?

Re:An interesting thing

[jd]

That one's relatively easy. Certain electrical and/or magnetic fields are known to cause hallucinations and minor brain storms. There are, in fact, devices you can buy to INDUCE these effects, though purportedly for the effect of listening to God. It seems likely that borderline cases where someone has an extremely low seizure threshold (and therefore extremely susceptible to such effects) AND in an area with an extremely HIGH level of EMR at the right frequency (or strong enough magnetic fields) would benefit from some form of Faraday Cage.

Since Government bleeding-edge scientific laboratories do often muck about with very powerful magnetic fields, and since lithium (an early mood stabilizer used by bipolar folk - who are disproportionately found in arts and bleeding-edge sciences) is well-known to reduce a person's seizure threshold, and since bipolar people are also well-known for being a source of conspiracy theories when in a manic state, it would not surprise me if the belief actually had historic events involving off-kilter scientists using metal sheielding and finding it helped them. (This doesn't mean this actually happened, I merely wouldn't be surprised if it had.)

Alternatively, in the 60s, the US Government actually had a psychic warfare division that did indeed indulge in the notion of mind control. Given that they also experimented a lot with LSD and other drugs well-known for causing delusions and paranoia, it would also not surprise me if - somewhere down the line - those who became deluded under the drugs experimentation were also involved (or learned of) the mind-control work and started their own research into how to stay safe.

If you combine these two potential sources together, you end up with the notion of the Government trying to control people's minds, people apparently being controlled, and apparently able to fend off that control with metal screening. Again, this is not a provable history, it is merely one of a (very large) number of possible ways you could create such a conspiracy theory.

I will offer one other basis for believing that this is the sequence of events - another poster mentioned "aliens" and "demons" - both of which are now believed to be seizure-related hallucinations in many cases. It would seem very UNlikely that a very similar myth is NOT seizure related. However, to get from the hallucinations caused by seizures to the specifics of the conspiracy theory and the proposed remedy, you would need some non-zero percent of the seizures to be triggered by the environment AND something that could be interpreted as the Government working in that field - however slight the similarity. What I've offered is one way to get both of these factors.