Reading the section on personal hovercrafts from Boy’s Life magazine, I noticed someone mentioning X-Ray glasses. I remember as a child seeing advertisements for them in SpiderMan and Fantastic Four comic books, but my thrifty parents always told me “You’re not getting those.”
What exactly did those glases do? Was there a skeleton painted on them? Or did they really enable you to see anyone’s skeleton? 
Jacques Kilchoer
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Those puppies had about a 1/2 inch diameter hole over each pupil, with some type of tissue paper that distorted your vision and put halos around everything you looked at.
If you used your imagination, the “internal” halo around a human arm or leg could line up so as to produce the illusion of a bone or something. Pretty damn hokey, imho, since my friend bought them so he could see panties.
Hey, at least they were a better deal than sea monkeys!
Does anybody remember ordering something out of the back of a comic book and NOT being disappointed?
I recall a news item within the past year or so, that certain night-vision goggles were made that accidentally(?) allowed the viewer to see through clothes when used in daylight. Hoax?
That was a video camera, not goggles. It was made by Sony. There are web pages out there that show the kind of images you could get. I don’t have any URLs handy, but you could probably find a few with your favorite search engine
Night vision goggles? I thought it was a night setting on some sort of video camera or something like that. A local radio station did a report on it and discovered it really didn’t work very well.
But!! There WAS a real thing called millimeter wave radar that was for use in airport security devices. It did basically give a view of a person’s body under their clothes, although as I understood it, it was just a black & white image.
There was some reports of the company that made it was going to reduce the resolution so operators could see a gun, but not the small details of someone’s anatomy. I don’t know what became of it but i’m sure a search thru news archives would turn it up - it was within the past 18 months or so.
peas on earth
It worked best with thin material like polyester, but not with heavier materials (e.g.: denim).
“Age is mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” -Leroy “Satchel” Paige
Some site which was kind enough to spam me the other day with something that’s actually proving relevent. The gist is that they’ve got some filter, that when used with the NightShot feature on some Sony Camcorders (mine has it… kind of cool in a post Cold-War sort of way) gets you an imagine of under the clothing. If you care that much, I’ll let the link descibe it fully.
“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
Thanks for the correction. I checked out the Kaya site, Jophiel, and found it interesting; their results were better than I had expected.
Thanks, Jophiel, but I can get a pretty good imagine of what’s under that clothing without a video camera. 
Sony Nightvision CCD camcorders can indeed see thru clothing. It’s scientifically proven. It’s done thru using Infrared capacity of those cameras. Any CCD camera can do this as they work on IR but the feature is turned off except for the Sony Nightshot. This camera does not use a light amplifier it just reads IR light instead.
Only some fabrics let IR thru. But yes, it does work. Try a Kodak wratten 087 filter on a regular CCD camcorder and it should work to some point.
Some perfectly ordinary cameras will let some things show through that aren’t visible to the eye. One should never, for example, wear white briefs under black tights, no matter how good it looks in the mirror.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Note of course that the Kaya site has no mailing address, no contact phone number, and apparently is an optics company only offering one single lens for sale. For all I know, you could order and get the glass bottom from an old Coke bottle.
“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
Does anybody remember ordering something out of the back of a comic book and NOT being disappointed?
I actually ordered a potato-E gun (For Dan Quayle!) and I was pleasantly surprised (as much as a 9-year-old can be). I had an endless supply of “bullets”! Don’t exactly remember how it worked but it shot potato pellets about half the size of a pencil eraser. Those were the days!
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”
E A Poe
Ack. I built a potato gun years ago using 3 inch diameter PVC for the barrel and 6 inch for the “firing chamber.” An igniter from a gas BBQ completed the ensemble. (Do NOT try this at home, kids!)
I could easily shoot a potato 3 or 4 hundred yards, a golf ball even farther. Alas, they changed the formula for AquaNet hairspray, and I can’t even get a whimper out of it anymore. 
Just find a really cheap hairspray Nickrz, the stuff that you know is just burning a hole in the air being in the can.
>>while contemplating the navel of the universe, I wondered, is it an innie or outie?<<
—The dragon observes
PapaBear sed :Does anybody remember ordering something out of the back of a comic book and NOT being disappointed?
Pretty much no. The one thing that technically worked but was hard to use was an odometer for pedestrians. It basically counted your steps by being clipped to your belt and sensing the up-down motion of your hips. Trouble was, you had to have a very exagerated step to make it work.
When I was about 8 years old, I saved up my birthday money and cashed in pop bottles (remember those days?) so I could send away for those cute little critters who wore bows in their hair and rode seahorses.
I didn’t think I could stand waiting the 2 months it took to deliver but it gave me time to build a special box out of left over lumber from our barn and decorated it with fabric I thugged out of my mom’s sewing room.
There are no words to describe just how brokenhearted I was when I discovered that sea monkeys are nothing but brine shrimp. The same brine shrimp we could walk a mile down the road and fish out of the Great Salt Lake with Kerr jars, although we never did because they just weren’t that interesting.
>^,^<
KITTEN
He who walk through airport door sideways going to Bangkok. - Confucius
By the way, thank you to Nick for his explanation of X-Ray glasses. Seems like the illustration in the comic book was somewhat misleading.
Jacques Kilchoer
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.