The Real Story of the Tinfoil Hat (It’s Not Funny)

We will be getting into the origin of the tinfoil hat.

In pop culture, the tinfoil hat is the ultimate punchline.

It is the universal shorthand for for internet paranoia, mental illness, and irrational conspiracy theories.

If you want to dismiss someone without addressing their evidence, you call them a tinfoil hat, or you tell them to go put on their tinfoil hat.

You tell them to maybe loosen up their tinfoil hat.

You tell them, don't forget your tinfoil hat or any other number of slides.

But where exactly does this trope come from? Because as I mentioned before, tropes don't just emerge out of thin air.

They are manufactured, filed away, and fed to the public until the symbol replaces the actual history of where it came from itself.

In 1971, on a locked psychiatric ward inside the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital, an attendant walked into a room and found a 38-year-old patient sitting quietly on his bed with a heavy metal wastebasket upside down over his head.

When the attendant asked him what he was doing, the man explained with very precise technical precision that he was trying to shield his brain from incoming microwave transmissions.

A staff doctor, seeing the patient with a trash can on his head, wrote him off as a delusional idiot.

a delusional psychotic.

But instead of ordering more tranquilizers, the doctor actually did something quite unusual.

He instructed the nursing staff to bring the patient a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil.

We will be getting into the origin of the tinfoil hat.

In pop culture, the tinfoil hat is the ultimate punchline.

It is the universal shorthand for for internet paranoia, mental illness, and irrational conspiracy theories.

If you want to dismiss someone without addressing their evidence, you call them a tinfoil hat, or you tell them to go put on their tinfoil hat.

You tell them to maybe loosen up their tinfoil hat.

You tell them, don't forget your tinfoil hat or any other number of slides.

But where exactly does this trope come from? Because as I mentioned before, tropes don't just emerge out of thin air.

They are manufactured, filed away, and fed to the public until the symbol replaces the actual history of where it came from itself.

In 1971, on a locked psychiatric ward inside the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital, an attendant walked into a room and found a 38-year-old patient sitting quietly on his bed with a heavy metal wastebasket upside down over his head.

When the attendant asked him what he was doing, the man explained with very precise technical precision that he was trying to shield his brain from incoming microwave transmissions.

A staff doctor, seeing the patient with a trash can on his head, wrote him off as a delusional idiot.

a delusional psychotic.

But instead of ordering more tranquilizers, the doctor actually did something quite unusual.

He instructed the nursing staff to bring the patient a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil.