Who are the experts you are citing?
The Vieira story I linked to above was reported in the BBC and The Times, and the “gas in the air con” element of the story came straight from a spokesman for French police investigators. Whether it’s possible or not, it’s clearly not just a concept drummed up by the tabloids.
It’s not intuitive, but a lot of burglary and other forms of house robbery happen when the householder is present. Someone may walk in your back door, or climb in the window while while you watch TV.
A lot of break-ins happen while people are asleep. A surprising number of people leave car keys visible just inside the front door. Break the glass quietly (molasses and paper still works), open the door, grab the keys. You can be half a mile away in their car while they are waking up and saying, “Did you hear something downstairs?”
Cops are on average, of average intelligence. You get average people believing this foolishness, so it stands to reason you will get cops who believe it, too, even though it’s impossible. No surprise that you get cops speculating that that’s how a burglary was done.
You forgot to mention ‘The young, millionaire, on-vacation victims’ before ‘fall asleep Saturday night and have headaches on Sunday morning when they wake up.’
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if chemicals are involved (C2H6O, at least), but not pumped in through the air conditioning.
You have to admit it’s great tabloid journalism - Russian mafia, society wimmin in low-cut dresses, wealthy folk who are “understood” to have been chloroformed in their beds by intruders.
I also like the bit about the family supposedly gassed “through the letter box” in their four-bedroom house.
That must have taken a hellacious amount of chloroform, or ether, or whatever the fiends were using, to fill up a house enough to knock out the inhabitants. Wouldn’t they have been a trifle conspicuous hauling huge tanks of anesthetic gas to the front door? Not to mention the risks of leakage involved in piping in gas in that fashion. I can easily envision a bunch of drugged thugs piled up outside the letter box.
Anyway, Cary Grant would never have committed a jewel robbery that way. And I can’t imagine Grace Kelly falling for a sleazy Russian Mafia type wearing a gas mask.
I just reread a bit of that old Gassed in the Hotel Room thread. Man, that reeked of paranoia.
Patrick Vieira is teetotal. Doesn’t drink.
No, it’s an old urban legend, which has been around for decades. Originally the robbers were supposed to be pumping the gas into sleeping compartments on overnight trains. Then they supposedly moved on to truck drivers sleeping in the cabs of their trucks, and travellers sleeping in camping trailers and RVs at roadside rest stops. Now they rumors claim they have moved on to hotel rooms, vacation rental apartments, luxury homes, and yachts. And in all this time, no one has discovered one publicized case of the burglars getting caught at it. Nor has anyone identified this miracle gas that mixes so easily with air, never kills anyone (not even the pet canary), does not penetrate gas masks, and dissipates by morning. (Nitrous oxide, the chemical blamed in the Daily Mail story, is a terrible candidate.)
A far easier explanation is that the victims simply slept through the burglary. The victims were sound asleep, and the burglars were good at their jobs.
The fact that some police appear to believe this is happening doesn’t do much to convince me. Many police officers believed for years that PCP (“angel dust”) gave users superhuman strength, a claim that has been thoroughly disproven. Police are humans and like any other humans can believe things that aren’t true.
Maybe. But if you tally up the evidence given so far in this thread, we have police investigators arguing the “it’s possible” side, and no evidence whatsoever for the “it’s just a myth” side.
OK. Now I’m backing the anaesthetists. 
There is plenty of evidence that it’s just a myth.
The main piece of evidence is that if burglars were gassing people, we’d have lots of reports of people either waking up in the middle of the robbery, because the dose they received wasn’t enough to knock them out, and reports of people dying, because the dose they received was enough to kill them.
How many burglars have been caught carrying around tanks of anesthetic gas and gasmasks?
What kind of gas is this anyway? It apparently doesn’t leave a residue, has no side effects other than a headache the next day, and is cheap enough that you can flood a whole room (or house!) with it, and expect to make more money from the burglary than it cost to get the gas. How many tanks of gas do you need to fill a hotel room? Apparently this gas is a substance unknown to medical science, and known only to European burglars. There are substances that you could pump into someone’s house that would be cheap and fairly easy to administer, carbon monoxide is the obvious choice. Except then lots of victims wouldn’t wake up the next morning with a headache, they’d wake up dead.
The police investigators might believe it could happen, but that doesn’t mean it really could happen. This is something that sounds plausible at first thought, but the more you think about it the more impossible it becomes.
Well, the only evidence for it is a police investigator saying ‘maybe’; wheras you have convincing arguments, grounded in chemisty, physics and medicine, about why it’s not possible, as well as convincing arguments about why there should be more evidence if it was really happening (absence of evidence is not of course definitive evidence of absence, but it can be an argument for the likelihood of absence, an argument to be weighed with all the other evidence).
A gas mask wouldn’t protect the burglers either, they’d need a supplied air system (like scuba gear).
Statement from the Royal College of Anaesthetists on alleged gassings -
That’s an interesting statement, especially the part about “cheap”! Xenon is an effective and relatively safe anaesthetic that might conceivably do the job, but it’s not cheap at all: The WorldWide Anaesthetist - Drugs, volatiles and anaesthesia
Now, if you wanted to steal something really valuable…
The cheapest, relatively easily obtained anaesthetic is diethyl ether, which can be synthesised from alcohol and battery acid and is sold in some countries as an aerosol spray for cold-starting diesels. Whether such an aerosol could be used to anaesthesize a room is debatable, and it would be a hell of a fire hazard. You’d also expect some of the victims to have vomited, although the overall danger from ether overdose is relatively low. Ether and anaesthesia
Chloroform is similarly blighted by low potency and would be more dangerous to the victim than ether, although it doesn’t pose the same fire hazard. Chloroform should be detectable in the victim’s bloodstream.
The surgical anaesthetic halothane is another candidate and could concievably be used in this way. It is neither cheap, safe or easily obtainable. You’d expect some victims to suffer tragic side effects. Halothane has been suggested as a constituent of the gas used by Russia to end the Chechen hostage crisis, along with an aerosolised opiate such as fentonil or carfentonil. Whatever the Russians used, it resulted in 16% fatalities among victims subjected to an hour of uncontrolled exposure, with nobody tending to the unconcious victims to keep their airways clear. That’s actually doing quite well but it illustrates how gassing people into unconciousness just isn’t a safe thing to do.
This sounds like bull to me. Read this part:
Why would the doors be left open if there were running air conditioning units? Presumably they were running, because what would be the point of releasing gas into them if they weren’t? The story isn’t even internally consistent.
This sounds a lot like the Mad Gasser of Mattoon which was likely a case of mass hysteria. I think mass hysteria is a likely explanation for this also (unless it’s simply trashy tabloid fiction).
Afyter reading the thread, I have to agree. The report I read of a “real case” in a reputable paper might indeed have been based on mistaken police statements.
I have updated my post.
This UL definitely predates the internet. To my everlasting shame, I once believed it and repeated it.
You have pickpockets in Europe (the US too, but I have the sense that this is more of a Euro thing) that rob people while wide awake. It is not suprising that it can be done while they are in an entirely natural slumber.
Also worth noting, just because a respectable news sources says something is possible (unless they cite a reputable and relevant source), that doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. The vast majority of journalists studied journalism or related things in school. Not a lot of them studied anesthetics, firearms, aviation, or many other fields that they write about. That doesn’t make them bad journalists, that just makes them lousy anesthesiologists.
They have to get most, if not all, of their information on such topics second-hand, and if they don’t get it from a good source, or if they just misunderstand the information given, then they very well might put out complete nonsense. I recall an article talking about Dick Cheney shooting a guy in the face with a 20mm gun (as opposed to a 20 gauge shotgun or whichever he was using, loaded with birdshot). For clarification, 20mm is the same diameter as the cannon rounds that fighter jets shoot at each other. And we’ve all seen the screenshot from CNN talking about the Space Shuttle Columbia traveling 17 times the speed of light.
Edited to add: Also, on the gas mask note: The reason that gas masks wouldn’t protect you from sleeping gas is because gas masks don’t do much to stop the flow of gasses (or else you’d suffocate from not being able to suck in such gasses as nitrogen and oxygen). The stuff they’re designed to protect against, such as tear gas and nerve toxins, are actually liquids or ionized solids. They work pretty much in the same way that a Brita water filter works, interestingly enough.