Tin-foil hat
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A tin-foil hat (abbreviated TFH), also tinfoil hat, is a general term for a piece of headgear made from one or more sheets of tin foil, aluminium foil, or other similar material. Some people wear the hats in the belief that they act to shield the brain from such influences as electromagnetic fields, or against mind control and/or mind reading. Such hats are very uncommon in mainstream society, as the injuries they might guard against are highly speculative, and their effectiveness in preventing such harm would be dubious even if the danger were plausible. Instead, the concept has become a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.
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[edit] Tin-foil hats and paranoia
There have been some people who believe in the efficacy of tin-foil hats and similar devices. Reasons for use include preventing perceived harassment from paranormal beings or stopping the experience of hearing voices in one's head. These draw on the stereotypical images of mind control operating by ESP or technological means, like microwave radiation. Belief in the effectiveness of tin-foil hats is popularly linked to mental illnesses such as paranoid schizophrenia.[1]
The delusion of "mind control rays" or other invasive mental activity may seem very real to those afflicted with severe paranoid delusions, and such persons have been known to make and wear improvised defences against the imagined invasion. While aluminium foil and tin-foil are traditional, less fragile materials such as metal window-screen mesh are now more commonly used.[citation needed] Electrical conductivity is seen as a key quality, due to the Faraday cage effect.
[edit] Thought screen helmets
Individuals who believe they have been abducted by aliens have been known to use variants of the tin-foil hat. Since 1998, American UFO researcher Michael Menkin has widely promoted his homemade "thought screen helmets" as a means of blocking mental communication between humans and extraterrestrials. The helmets are made of 3M Velostat (a kind of metallised plastic), and Menkin provides assembly instructions and user testimonials at his website, stopabductions.com.[2]
Because of his unusual invention, Menkin has become the subject of tongue-in-cheek newspaper and magazine articles throughout the world.[3][4] Thane Burnett of the Toronto Sun joked, "His thought screen helmet isn't the only thing which confounds aliens. They apparently haven't learned to use a phone directory, which is how I tracked Menkin. But when they do come for him, they won't get Michael Menkin's mind".[5] Among his supporters, however, is the paranormal-themed radio talk show Coast to Coast AM, who featured Menkin as a serious guest on June 25, 2005.[6]
[edit] Scientific basis
There is a small amount of truth or reason to be found in the rationale for a tin-foil hat. A well constructed tin-foil enclosure would approximate a Faraday cage, reducing the amount of (notionally harmless) radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation inside. A common high school physics demonstration involves placing an AM radio on tinfoil, and then covering the radio with a metal bucket. This leads to a noticeable reduction in signal strength. The efficiency of such an enclosure in blocking such radiation depends on the thickness of the tin-foil, as dictated by the skin depth, the distance the radiation can propagate in a particular non-ideal conductor. For half-millimeter-thick tin-foil, radiation above about 20 kHz (i.e., including both AM and FM bands) would be partially blocked.[7]
The effectiveness of the tin-foil hat as an electromagnetic shield for stopping radio waves is greatly reduced by the fact that it is not a complete enclosure. Placing an AM radio under a metal bucket without a conductive layer underneath demonstrates the relative ineffectiveness of such a setup. Indeed, because the effect of an ungrounded Faraday cage is to partially reflect the incident radiation, a radio wave that is incident on the inner surface of the hat (i.e., coming from underneath the hat-wearer) would be reflected and partially 'focused' towards the user's brain. While tin-foil hats may have originated in some understanding of the Faraday cage effect, the use of such a hat to attenuate radio waves belongs properly to the realm of pseudoscience.
A (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) study by graduate students at MIT determined that a tin-foil hat could either amplify or attenuate incoming radiation depending on frequency;[8] the effect was observed to be roughly independent of the relative placement of the wearer and radiation source. Note that at GHz wavelengths, the skin depth is less than the thickness of even the thinnest foil.
Tin foil hats are seen by some as a protective measure against the effects of EMR, or electro magnetic radiation. At this time, no link has been verifiably proven between EMR exposure and subsequent ill health, however EMR exposure has many alleged effects.[9]
[edit] Tin-foil hats in pop culture
- The protagonist Jerry Fletcher in the 1997 film Conspiracy Theory covers his apartment walls with foil to protect himself from them.
- The paranoid centaur Foaly, in Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl series of books, wears a tin-foil hat to protect from mind-readers.
- In the Simpsons episode "Brother's Little Helper", Bart wears a trash can lid on his head and covers his body in tin-foil, as well as lining the ceiling with wire coat hangers to protect himself from the influence of Major League Baseball's mind control satellite after he begins taking an anti-ADD drug "Focusyn".
- In the TV series King of the Hill episode "Dale Be Not Proud", paranoid conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble awakens on a hospital bed, and, upon finding out that he is donating his kidney, instantly goes into a craze and asks why "isn't there a tin foil hat on my head?!"
- In the film Lovesick, Dudley Moore plays a psychiatrist who gives a homeless patient some aluminium foil to "protect" the patient from the "mind control rays" his patient claims are bombarding him.
- In the film Knight Moves (1993), there is a Grand Master chess player who wears a tin-foil hat to prevent his opponents from reading his mind. It's a short way to show the stereotype about the eccentricity of some chess players.
- In Signs, the children and younger brother of the lead character wear tin-foil hats to prevent their minds from being read. This is parodied in Scary Movie 3, in which the tin-foil hats are actually giant Hershey's Kisses.
- In the X-Men movies, Magneto's metal helmet serves much the same purpose of a tin-foil hat by preventing Stryker's son (in X2) and Professor X (in X-Men and X2) from using telepathy against him. Former Marvel Comics supervillain Juggernaut wore a helmet made of a mystical alloy for similar reasons.
- In the Sci Fi Channel (United States) original movie Control Factor, nonconsensual test subjects use hats lined with copper wool to protect themselves from a government experiment to incite violence in an inner city neighborhood using microwave-based mind control signals.
- Tin-foil hats are often referenced on Internet forums such as Slashdot, Fark.com and Footballguys.com.[10]
- In his autobiography, Frank Zappa refers to Echo Park residents "Crazy Jerry," an electricity addict and speed user who had been institutionalized a number of times, and his roommate known only as "Wild Bill the Mannequin Fucker," a chemist and methamphetamine cook who modified department store mannequins for sexual uses. Both are reputed to have employed metallic hats (vegetable steamers, aluminium pots, tin-foil etc.,) to "keep people from reading their minds." Zappa once recorded Crazy Jerry's life story, excerpts of which can be heard on some of his early recordings.
- The character Joe Wicks who was featured in British soap EastEnders suffered mental illness and constructed a tin-foil hat for "protection".
- The novel Idiots in the Machine by Edward Savio portrays a character who believes that tin foil keeps harmful gamma rays away and becomes a media sensation, marketing a successful line of foil hats to Chicago.
- In the third episode of the first Friends season , Lizzie is a homeless woman who offers Phoebe her tin-foil hat.
- A group of Toronto artists and musicians at Funkless.com hold an annual Tinfoil Hat making contest
- In the video game Age Of Mythology, typing the message "TINFOILHAT" randomly reassigns ownership for all of the units on the map.
- While testing myths and urban legends about microwaves on the television show MythBusters, Adam is shown in several shots wearing tin-foil hats. In one scene, it is molded over his head, and in another, it is wrapped around like a chef's hat.
- In the video game Psychonauts, the character Dogen wears a tin-foil hat to prevent psychic "accidents" in which he makes people's heads explode.
- In the video game Destroy all Humans there are several "paranoid" people wearing tinfoil hats and talking about the men in black
- The broiler plate hat that Nicol Williamson adorned as Merlin in John Boorman's Excalibur was the inspiration behind the Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie, a.k.a. "An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control."
- A San Francisco based acoustic chamber-music group call themselves Tin Hat Trio.
- In an episode of Stroker and Hoop, the main character wears a tin-foil hat to protect from Ron Howards' mind control rays.
- Former MTV vee-jay turned podcaster, Adam Curry, has a segment on his daily podcast Daily Source Code entitled "Tin-foil Hat Moment." This segment usually involves a story told by Adam or by one of the listeners who have called in where the subject is geeky in nature.
- In the television program, The Venture Bros, Hank and Dean wear tin-foil hats to protect them from the virtual reality system, the "joy can."
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.bostonist.com/archives/2005/11/15/hey_crazyget_a_new_hat.php
- ^ http://www.stopabductions.com/. Retrieved 19 September 2006
- ^ Galland, Xavier. "Protect your mind from alien attack!". The Nation (Thailand). 3 Feburary 2003.
- ^ "Mind Your Head – aliens about". Sunday Herald Sun. 6 August 2000. p. 61.
- ^ Burnett, Thane. "Take Me to Your Readers Now". Toronto Sun. 27 June 2004. p. 18.
- ^ http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2005/06/20.html. Retrieved 19 September 2006.
- ^ Jackson, John David (1998). Classical Electrodynamics. Wiley Press.
- ^ http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
- ^ http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article362557.ece
- ^ http://forums.footballguys.com/forum/index.php?act=SF&s=&f=2/
[edit] See also
- List of hats and headgear
- Microwave auditory effect
- Tinfoil Hat Linux
- Homokaasu
- James Tilly Matthews
- Francis E. Dec
- William Tager
- TEMPEST
[edit] External links
- Yahoo group about wearing tinfoil hats to benefit life
- Do tinfoil helmets provide adequate protection against mind control rays? – from The Straight Dope
- Stop Alien Abductions – instructions for making a "thought screen helmet" from 3M Velostat
- Aluminium Foil Deflector Beanie – parody
- On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An empirical study. Ali Rahimi, Ben Recht, Jason Taylor, Noah Vawter. MIT, 17 February 2005.
- "EMF Safety Garments" including "Shielded Cap"
- Tinfoil Hat Mind Control Musical Animation – parody
- Tinfoil hats attract mind-control signals, boffins learn
