Something I heard about on NPR this morning: from the recently declassified files of the CIA – the so-called “Family Jewels” – comes an internal memo describing “oddball letters and phone calls” sent in to the CIA in the early 1960s. There’s the usual Cold War paranoia, including the guy who tried to alert the government to Communist electronic thought-control by “a coherent light process of inducing a state of controlled hypnosis by radiation of radio frequency energy on a wavelength of approximately 4 x 10-5 centimeters.” My favourite: “the man who came in to volunteer as a spy in the Czechoslovakian uranium mines”, who feared exposure to radiation, but had come up with a novel solution: wrapping the tinfoil from Chesterfields cigarettes around his private parts. And you thought tinfoil hats was just a silly Internet meme.
The memo itself: Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs (yes, that’s really the title!).
