Okay, we all joke about folks who claim that we’re all being mind-controlled by unseen telepathy rays (or whatever); these folks are gently called tinfoil-hatters.
But how many of us have actually met one in the flesh? I have.
Several years back, as I was entering my car to go to work a nicely dressed 40’s-ish woman approached me to strike up a conversation. This was in midtown Manhattan. She noticed from a car sticker that I worked for a TV station. The conversation went from pleasant and curious – to bizarre. Her bottom line was that we’re all being mind-controlled by hidden transmitters and I should do a TV show to expose the conspiracy. As I politely but firmly insisted I had to leave for work, she cried to the heavens, “Damn you John! You got to him too!”
Wow.
IMO, that encounter (plus being present during an honest-to-goodness rubber-mask-and-gun-toting-style bank robbery) sets me apart from the rest of the boring rabble.
I had someone write to the legislative office I worked for, claiming extensive documentation about being targeted with microwaves – lots of copies of correspondence in which he said the same thing to everyone who listened. That’s about as close as I got (OTOH I have directly met various other forms of crackpot)
Around 15 years ago, I was working at a leather shop (biker jackets, boots, etc) and late in the evening, a guy comes in looking to get a metal jock because his downstairs neighbor had a heat ray and was trying to burn this guy’s private parts through the floor.
He got more and more agitated the more I tried to convince him that we had no such item for purchase and seemed genuinely worried by the time he left the shop.
Saw one about 12 years ago in my first and only trip to the States. He was near Mann’s Chinese Theatre with the full tinfoil outfit, complete with hat. It freaked me that there are some cliches about the US that were true.
I worked with one for several months… he was the “usability expert” hired by our design team to help manage the usability issues and testing with some of our bigger projects.
He knew his job very well, and he was good at it, but get him talking about anything other than work, and the conspiracy theories began to flow. He had theories about everything from the Apollo moon landings to the Kennedy assassination to Bush’s Presidency, and they were among some of the most whacked theories I’ve ever heard.
Nice guy, but hard to talk to… he’s been laid off for some time now.
One of my students one time went off a new world order/UN is taking over the US, black helicopter rant one day.
I knew that if I did not work to reel this guy in quick that the afternoon would be wasted. So thinking quickly here is what I said
If I ever win the lottery do you know what I’m gonna do?
I’m gonna take flying lessons and learn how to fly a helicopter. Then I’m gonna buy a copter and paint it black. Then I am going to follow you whenever you leave your house. Just to watch you go crazy.
After the laughter died down we got back to work.
I worked at an appliance repair store some time ago and one day a man came in with a malfunctioning microwave. Our store did not repair most microwaves and the boss thought that this one couldn’t be fixed anyway. She kept telling the man that it was leaking radiation and he should just throw it away and get a new one; meanwhile he started babbling about a friend of his who had built a time machine out of used nuclear missile parts. Uh, yeah, okay. He finally left the store, though not via time machine.
I once knew a woman who always wore an orange watch cap that she had sewn the words “No Trespassing.” Never really talked to her though so don’t know her story.
I had a friend who believed witches from a cult called ‘The Family’ were watching him, and that he was being stalked by a ‘googly-eyed man’. He believed he could overhear The Family talking about him through a bug that they had hidden in his food and that he had ingested. He believed that harmful astral rays were coming down from the heavens, and that my parents (who lived on the floor above him) blocked them.
I knew a moon-landing conspiracy guy who had an interesting twist on the conspiracy. The reason why the landings had to be fake is that if it could have been done at all, then the British would have done it first!
I’m endlessly fascinated by conspiracy and crackpot theories - the more whacked out, the better. I’ve met more than my share of crackpots. I met a guy who claimed some relative of his invented the 100+ MPG carburetor and another, years later, who claimed his father invented an engine that ran on nothing but water, but that he eventually stopped working with it because it was “too dangerous.” Uh-huh. I tried to explain why it couldn’t possibly work, but of course he just got very defensive and wouldn’t listen to me. Oh well, I lost that battle in the war on ignorance, but I try…
My grandmother, the late Grammy Sweetie, had lots of crazy friends. In fact, she met them all the same summer when she waitressed in the Catskills. I believe she was either committed to some sort of rest home with them, or worked there, but what she claimed is they were all waitresses. Sure, Grammy.
Anyway, two of them were wearers of Reynolds brand headware. One of them,I don’t know too much about, but she claimed that there were rays of some sort coming out of her outlets and she didn’t have a fridge because of radiation. I am pretty sure that Grammy didn’t believe her.
BUT
There was also Fran. Fran spent 5 years in a mental hospital because, as Grammy said, there were communists in her union and they were trying to make Fran be a communist too. Grammy bought this whole story and believed that Fran was hospitalized because the communists in her union were making her nervous. To me, it was apparent that she was hospitalized for so long because she had paranoid delusions.
AND
Fran’s sister, another good friend of Grammy, had to live in the woods because,supposedly, her CIA employee husband was trying to kill her. Grammy believed that too.
