I’m not talking about something that makes your eyes burn and water like pepper spray, or zaps your brain signals like nerve agents. I’m talking about something that just smells incredibly terrible. Is there anything that smells terrible enough to incapacitate or immobilize a person?
My father’s bowel movements.
Sorry, had to.
Ever smell a pregnant woman’s fart. I’m serious.
Made me look really close at the kid when he came out.
An olfactory basilisk, eh?
I don’t believe there is anything that would be guaranteed to work; there might be smells that are just very, very bad and that would make most people turn tail, but I don’t think there could ever be any guarantees, because the tolerance to bad smells is quite variable from one individual to another, and I don’t think there’s any specific ‘lockdown’ mechanism that would immobilise a person on such a stimulus.
For further reading though, look up David Langford - he is an SF writer that coined the idea of apparently benign sensory inputs that would crash the human brain.
Researchers at the Pentagon’s Non-Lethal Weapons Program have been trying to develop this for years, with one promising candidate:
Thanks for info!
Band name!