Tinfoil Hats: Not Just for the Crazies Anymore?

Hide me. My predicament started out as a mere curiosity, but then over time the phenomenon seemed to occur with greater and greater frequency. I tried to dismiss it as being a "coincidence" that was only noticeable because I was subconsciously monitoring and listening for it. After today, however, the time has clearly come to take action.

The disturbing events are instances where I am reading or writing a particular word or phase and at the exact same instant I hear that exact word or phrase spoken on the radio. Now, I have to admit that I spend practically my entire waking life either reading or writing, while simultaneously listening to a variety of talk and music radio in the background. Melanie will attest to the alarmingly large number of times I remark about how I had just written or read something and then heard it on the radio. A skeptic like myself, upon hearing someone else make such a claim, would either attribute the events to happenstance or ask a smart aleck question about whether the words were amongst the most common in language like "the," if," "or," etc. I promise you that is not the case. While I cannot list the many words and phrases I have seen and heard at the same time from utterly unrelated and uncoordinated sources, I can say they are often not frequently used words. Sometimes, like one time a couple days ago, I was reading the word "record" (as in a vinyl music disk) while concurrently hearing the word "record" (as in a written account of an event). That was not the tipping point that caused me to reconsider the potential benefits of a tinfoil hat.

What jolted me was that - and I swear on a stack of Bibles this is true - I had just typed the title "TV DX" from a story in a 1958 edition of Radio Electronics magazine, when Jean Shepherd, whose recorded radio show from April 1965 I was listening to, suddenly uttered the phrase "TV DX." My blood ran cold and I literally stopped what I was doing and looked over at Melanie with my jaw sitting on the table, mouth gaped wide open. The chances of that happening have to be near zero. She's used to my stupid, exaggerated expressions, but with this she knew something profound had happened. Minutes before the incident I had no idea that "TV DX" would appear at all in either medium, and honestly, I never recall hearing the term before. The magazine story specifically dealt with the topic (obviously, since it was the title), but Shep's story was just one of many he told about his experiences as a boy, as an enlisted man in the Army Signal Corps, and later as a radio and television announcer. The story recounted a memorable event in the Army during a field exercise when the guys in his communications outfit found themselves conversing via Morse code with someone from the far side of the world while outputting only about 20 watts with a simple antenna. It was after that when he talked about the time at a television station where he worked where a broadcast from a few hundred miles away was suddenly appearing on local TV sets in home and bars, instead of the signal they were transmitting locally.

Anyway, once I regained my composure, I walked to the kitchen, pulled out the roll of aluminum foil, and fashioned myself the tinfoil hat shown in the photo. Perhaps the "crazies" aren't so crazy after all, I thought. The only rational explanation that a person of science can contemplate for the TV DX "coincidence" is either aliens or government agents are using some sort of wave energy to directly influence my brain. Being no one's fool, I am now wearing the beanie while typing this account of the scenario. Using my vast knowledge of RF and microwave engineering principles, the prototype uses two layers of aluminum foil with a multi-faceted outer and inner texture in order to present a diffuse (as opposed to specular) surface to inward facing waves attempting to penetrate the shielding while also providing the same direction-scrambling advantage to my thoughts with an outward pointing vector. Figuring that the perpetrator's brain-influencing waves are stronger than my biological waves, the shiny surface faces outward. Surely mind-penetrating waves are very short in length based on the size of neurons and synapses, so the skin depth would certainly be no deeper than a single thickness of aluminum foil, two at the most. Time will tell whether the spiral tail is most effective with a clockwise or a counter-clockwise twist. I'll keep you posted... if I survive the ordeal.

<--- Very interesting story of unintentional radio DXing (starts ~ 1/2-way in)

       and TV DXing (starts ~ 3/4 way in)..

Jean Shepherd: Code School - April 13, 1965

RF Cafe Visitor Response:

"If your tin foil hat isn't properly grounded it acts as an antenna and instead of shielding it actually amplifies the alien's mind control signals. That's why you read so much about tin foil hats. It's part of the alien conspiracy to create more mind controlled zombies.   By the time you read this it will probably be too late. Your mind will be gone and you'll be one of "them."

- Steve Gilbert, RF Design Engineer "

Posted  May 9, 2014