A former friend of mine thought England was in the control of a homosexual conspiracy - he became rabidly homophobic, and refused to go into certain pubs because the clientelle were “homosexuals in disguise”. Eventually he refused to go out at all because all the homosexuals were looking at his ass. He was sectioned soon after. 
A once close friend of mine thought had the whole Illuminate thing going for quite some time. He threw in a few others, conspiracy theories, UFO abduction, Ghosts haunting, etc. He was a close friend of mine because I was one of those types at that time. I have seen the light, but him… Well, he now thinks the CIA is after him.
I work in property management and the tenants we have had. The crack addict who kept accusing me of coming into her room and beating and peeing on her along with putting worms in her stomach. The guy whose matress was talking to him and protected himself with salt (when he move, we swept up over 1/2 a Hefty bag of salt) The woman who accusing fictious people of coming into her apartment and messing up things (the City Inspector damn near had a stroke when he saw the 7 locks she had installed on her front door, and the telephone company knows her cause she keeps accusing people of listening in to her phone calls). The prize was a nutjob who was so worried about voodoo that she would only go to the bathroom in jars (Howard Hughs syndrome), and so nuts about electricity that she kept cutting electric cords off of appliances.
That doesn’t run on water, it runs on electricity. And I can’t see how zapping water with a magnetron to turn it into steam could possibly be more efficient than a plain old electric motor.
It does look like a fun project, though. 
I used to work with one.
I worked at a small industrial controls/engineering company, and a man worked there for a few weeks with some very interesting beliefs. He seemed perfectly normal until one day when work was slow he started asking me for advice for a personal project he was working on: a free energy machine involving a motor driving a generator. This led to a long and strange conversation. Apparantly he worked with crackpot-technology developer Dennis Lee for a while, and lost quite a bit of money paying Lee to promote his inventions; he also had quite a few strange beliefs involving the Secrit Conspiracies which run the world (alarmingly, the company president seemed to believe in these as well), and about how the medical community was violently supressing the truth about how easy it was to cure cancer.
He used to talk about how doctors were butchers, and he’d never go into a hospital. Soon after he left on medical leave; apparantly he had developed some sort of severe medical condition involving a hernia and his stomach squeezing through the diaphram and pressing on his heart and lungs. I never found out if he survived or went to the hospital or what; I left the company soon afterwards.
I think I may have found the flaw in this plan…
:dubious: Uh huh…
Hah! Wow, I didn’t even read that far. Yep, that’s a flaw, all right. 
Many, many years ago, I got a random phone call from a woman who wanted to tell all her secrets to somebody in case she disappeared. Apparently her husband was missing; he flew a black helicopter and worked at a secret military base where they made cheese with the AIDS virus embedded in it to kill all the homeless people. Or something. It was really long and involved, and included her suspicion that among her co-workers were a couple of agents watching her. It took only a couple of minutes for me to realize what was going on, at which point I started taking notes; they wound up covering both sides of a sheet of paper, which I sadly can no longer locate. Anyway, at the end (I listened to her for at least an hour), she thanked me for my patience, and asked me to promise to keep my eye on the newspaper in case something happened to her. I said, How will I know it’s you, since you haven’t told me your name? Long silence, after which she said, Since I’ve told you this much, I guess I can trust you; and she gave me her name. I looked it up in the phone book later, but of course I have no idea if it was the same person. The most depressing thing is, maybe twenty minutes into the conversation, she put the phone down to yell at her kids to be quiet. Poor kids.
On a much more prosaic level, there’s a woman in my office who buys into the whole “aliens built the pyramids, face on Mars” crap. She finds it extremely compelling that “all these old buildings are the same pyramidal shape.” I asked her to think about it: If you don’t know anything about structural engineering and you want to build something really big, what’s the most stable shape? A pile that’s wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, obviously. She tried to argue with me, but she wasn’t making any sense, and eventually she got flustered and wandered off.
I’ve met two.
The first was a lady who lived in her van with a bunch of stray dogs. She took odd jobs in the neighborhood on occasion, but mostly kept to herself. She was always rearranging the stuff in her van, and was very intent and focused about it. She told me a convoluted story about how she wrote a bunch of country and western songs that were stolen by Mickey Gilley. She also said that someone (Mickey Gilley, an ex-husband?) was poisoning her food with blue powder regularly.
The second person I met ina VA hospital. I was assigned to him for a class. The nurses told me he was a paranoid schizophrenic with active delusions. Chatting with him, I asked “So, do you see or hear things that aren’t real?” (Do you see the flaw here?). Of course he said “No.” So I rephrased to “Do you see or hear things that others don’t?”, to which he answered “Yes.”
I asked him when was the last time that had happened, and he told me “Oh, Just now. I saw your brain fly out of your ear, go around your head, and back in again.”
Oddly, that’s exactly what happened while I was working on rephrasing my question.
I worked with a lady who was convinced the ceiling tiles in the restroom were recording everything at work. She had the shakes so bad that she had a constant scab on the end of her nose from attempting to light her cigarettes but always lit the end of her nose in the process. It was sad and it got so bad she was finally carried out forcibly and committed and I never saw her again.
I once saw a man walking around with a really elaborate foil antenna trying to pick up signals. He wasn’t wearing a foil hat though, which leads me to believe that he was either playing for the other team or that maybe sometimes “they” send good signals also.
“Why don’t the little voices in people’s heads that tell them to kill their entire family, their dog, and then themselves ever say, ‘Go take a shit on the salad bar at Wendys!” ~ George Carlin
When I was younger, I used to be a crackpot who believed all sorts of conspiracies: the french mafia did it, black choppers, the Superbowl is film at the same bunker as the moon landings, a lot of stuff from the Art Bell show.
Thank God for Cecil.
I’m proud to say I no longer exhibit those kinds of strange and abnormal thoughts. I have been cured. I would like to thank the good surgical doctors who operated on me, and I’d like to thank Blinky, the piece of my brain which they removed…
I don’t wish to hijack the thread, or suggest that the microwave/water engine is a good idea, but this is not a closed system. The water (supposedly) puts in more energy than is required to cause it to explode. Other than the fact that the water is going to have to be fairly saturated with air bubbles to boil readily, and some serious friction and lubrication issues, this just might work. Especially in a low-friction, ceramic engine running as a two-stroke. And it’s not supposed to be more efficient, it’s just supposed to run on water.
Now where’s my tinfoil hat gone too?
Why? Surely the amount of energy derived from boiling something (as opposed to combusting it) is going to be the same as put into the boiling process (hence steam engine inefficiency).
We had a “chemtrails” letter in our local paper only last week. The stuff makes bubbles in the puddles when it rains, you know.
Chemtrails? No problem! Just build a Cloudbuster and destroy them!
When I was in high school I had a job at a local grocery store. One guy who worked back in the deli was always kind of strange, but I didn’t realize how strange until one day when I was alone in the break room with him. He admitted to me that the name I knew him as wasn’t his real name, and that he maintained a variety of identities to prevent the evil U.S. government from keeping tabs on him. I "whatever"ed him, and he went for his proof.
He pulled out two wallets, one from each back pocket. One wallet had identities in the first half of the alphabet, and the latter half of the alphabet was covered in the second wallet. He showed me 8 complete sets of ID, each alias complete with a driver’s license, social security card, & one or more credit cards. They were fantastic forgeries – if I wasn’t looking at 8 different names for the same picture, I’d have been certain they were official IDs.
That night I mentioned this guy to my mother, and she immediately knew who I was talking about. She was a teller at the bank where this guy had an account, and his wild crackpot ways occassionally caused some trouble. Most interestingly, he claimed to have seceded from the United States and formed his own country. He wanted the bank to print checks that reflected this in the address, and they wouldn’t do it. He ended up printing his own checks (and she said those looked 100% official as well), with all the correct account information and everything, except the address:
Edward Smith
1 Edward Street
Edwardsburg of the Province of Edward
United Republic of Edtopia
I told the guy that I was concerned after speaking with him, and asked if he could create alternate identification for me and a few of my friends. He was willing (for a small fee) until I insisted that all the ID’s had to state that we were 21 years old.
Oh, my poor sick mind. 
Here I was thinking that I would laugh and say "Oh, we are not taking you to Sicily. It’s Sweden. "
Is that a common delusion? In Robert Anton Wilson’s Historical Illuminatus Trilogy, (not Illuminatus!,) the protaganist, Sigismundo Celine, has a cousin who is driven to suicide by his tendency to see “sodomites” in the shadows, which progresses to the point that he believes everyone he meets is a secret sodomite.
I just remembered another fella I worked with in the early nineties who was let go after repeatedly accusing co-workers of breaking into his apartment to change the settings on his alarm clock so that he’d be late for work. It wasn’t tardiness that did him in-- it was the physical threats he’d made against people if they didn’t stop messing with his clock. That sort of thing, combined with his enthusiasm for collecting guns, made for some nervous co-workers for a while.
I’d never heard of any other cases until you mentioned that book.
It is odd how many different deluded people choose the same delusion. The poor old CIA get a rough time of things, as do the Freemasons. Has anyone done any statistical research on this?
The cliché of the guy who thinks he’s Napoleon has kind of died down these days; I wonder who the most popular delusion-of-grandeur is at the moment? Osama? Saddam?