No need for mythbusters. Apparently, the invisibility herbs don’t work, imagine that.
Try: ‘Drunk/High.’
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They work as long as you don’t look at the person.
Oh, it’s been done. Not in a robbery scenario, to be sure. And the results weren’t all that stellar.
Theft using “knockout gas” on European (Italian) night trains has been a regular (or at least persistent) story over the years.
I can’t quickly dig up any specific cases, although the US State Department seems to think it merits a warning. Criminals may also spray sleeping gas in train compartments. Where possible, lock your compartment. If it cannot be locked securely, take turns sleeping in shifts with your traveling companions.
As to the credibility of these stories, as a previous poster mentioned, depending on the degree of “knockout” required, you would expect to see a number of deaths and seriously injured victims if this were really happening. The Moscow hostage crisis in 2002 is one datapoint
Following the same line of reasoning I believe most of the cases of nightclub druggings with subsequent loss of memory are also fictitious - so do I get flamed too ?
ETA I was going to post about Moscow first but I mysteriously fell asleep !
Wasn’t this in a book by Donald E Westlake, something like a Las Vegas casino robbery. I read it a long time ago?
If it is true then it would represent a major advancement in chemical weapons, by ordinary thieves.
Well, to be fair, most of those folks really were drugged, just with a legal drug they were expecting to get dosed with. At most, they might have ended up with a rather stronger dose than they thought.
To be fair to our criminal friends, you don’t need a knockout gas when the people are asleep. What you’d need is a sedative to keep them from waking up. There are many that come in liquid form and I could see a criminal spraying some in a sleeping person’s direction for them to inhale. I have no idea if that’s ever happened or if it would be effective, but we have 100 replies about how there’s no gas that can knock people out, yet this legend doesn’t require that. The people were never awake to begin with in any of the cases.
Or they can be very very quiet.