Within that first year of the mobbing, one of the mobbers who appeared to be working from next door inveigled, “Why don’t you let us give you a nice tin hat. Then we’ll get you right out of there.”

It was a comment whose significance I did not understand, at least, not until I read the narrative of an investigative interview with the owner of the south mobbing house. When the second of two investigators was finally able to interview the south mobbing house owner, the owner and his tattooed Crossfit friend regaled the young investigator with a slew of colorful statements. Among other things, the owner of the south mobbing house claimed that:

• I had accused him of sending me “evil spirits” that “spoke” to me through my microwave.
• I had covered all the windows in my house with tinfoil, and then taken it all down the next day.

Neither statement was true. Both might have been funny in other circumstances. And I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, this was the home owner who, with his attorney chum, had presented a poorly written brief at an earlier court date, arguing the theory that I was “delusional” and “paranoid schizophrenic.” This was, went the illogic, the only possible reason why I would claim they were harassing me inside my home. Not to mention the fact that his then-girlfriend claimed in the same proceedings that they wouldn’t be able to have children if I, a middle-aged woman who had no criminal record, lived next door. And perhaps it was because the couple had no children that the south mobbing house owner also volunteered that he was afraid for his dog.

With the statements about tinfoil and microwaves, the mobber’s earlier offer of a tinfoil hat fell into place. So too did a curious exchange a few years back between one of the neighborhood watch co-captains and the mother of the south mobbing house owner who had suddenly emerged from the south house as the co-captain’s husband shook his fist and admonished me that renters shouldn’t park on the streets. The mother of the south mobbing house home owner rushed down the stairs and cried out to the co-captain, “Don’t you think she’s crazy?” It was obvious that I was the “she” she spoke of, this woman I’d talked to only once before, soon after the south mobbing house owner moved in next door. She’d said to me, “Some [renters] aren’t very good people.” I had been taken aback at her open disapproval of those who rent their homes. Later on, I came to see these sly insults, of which there were many, as a bid to make me feel uncomfortable in my home, and in this neighborhood. This was another time I was stunned, as the co-captain quickly picked up on the cue, “Yes!” she loudly affirmed. “She’s crazy!” In hindsight, I should have seen the exchange as a warning of what was to come.

♠

The victim of mobbing may be made to wear the tinfoil hat, but this hoax is not for the victim. The tin hat is ready-made for the scams of mobbers, harassers and other criminals who evade prosecution for their bad deeds by pointing the finger at their victims. When the victim-blaming is successful, any charges that are filed are likely to be made against the victim and the mobbing enters the courtroom with the victim of what is essentially a hate crime being painted not only as a criminal but someone who has mental problems. It turns out that the Village Idiot is a lunatic.

With this perception, it doesn’t take long to get to a finding of legal incompetence, with the court-appointed psychologist reviewing documents for statements made to the police and for any criminal charges that ensued. Criminal charges include a “treatment component” that is shaped in part by the statements of the supposed crime victim. If the “victim” is a mobber trying to deflect suspicion onto the mobbing victim, the charges themselves—including any “treatment component”—are shaped by defamation. I can’t think of a better way for a criminal to shut down a reporting victim.

Assuming that court records represent the truth of the matter and paint an accurate picture of the mobbing victim, the psychologist then opens the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), finds the rubric that best matches the the unflattering descriptions of the mobbing victim and produces the requested psychiatric diagnosis. There is no reprieve for the mobbing victim. Numerous psychiatric diagnoses include the characteristic that the subject “lacks insight” into his condition. This means that if you protest a psychiatric error that results in your being diagnosed as delusional, your objections are easily ignored because, of course, you are delusional.

The view of the court-appointed psychologist is biased against her subject based on the content of a court proceeding that does not represent the truth. No matter how her subject presents or how he explains the situation in a clinical interview, the perceptions of the court-appointed psychologist are likely to be biased in favor of the court record or the statements of any attorneys who have challenged the competency of the subject. The court-appointed psychologist who has made up her mind that you are delusional may even challenge your recounting of documented statements if she has not seen them on the record. Given such obstacles, court-appointed psychologists should not be supposed to be neutral in their assessments. These professionals are servants of the court who may  have a diagnostic code in mind well before a psychiatric interview. Attorneys appear to have greater influence over how the court-appointed psychologist perceives her subjects than do her subjects. A bit of research reveals the fact that attorneys routinely influence the outcomes of court-requested psychiatric evaluations (“Competently Lawyering Competence: The Role and Duties of a Lawyer in Addressing Competence to Stand Trial Where the Questions Are Focused on Client Communication and Capacity to Assist,” Criminal Justice, Fall 2017, https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/criminal_justice_magazine/v32/cj_fall17_Philipsborn.pdf).

Additionally, courtroom rules and process reduce the chances for the court, including opposing counsel, the prosecution and the judge, to gain an accurate perception of any defendant. Defendants are advised to remain silent and to allow their attorneys to speak for them. The court may only see and hear what the defense attorney believes is in the defendant’s best interests. In a case in which the defense attorney does not believe the wild stories of the mobbing victim about how she is being harassed in her home and is disinterested in representing her at trial, the defense attorney may accept or find convenient the defamation that the defendant is delusional and represent only his own goal, to withdraw from her representation. In such a case, a defendant who is unable to separate her interests from her attorney’s and address the court on her own behalf, may be doomed to live with his bad decisions.

♠

A tinfoil hat is not tin at all, but is typically made from sheets of aluminum foil, which may also be used as a makeshift “liner” for a hat or headgear (“Tin foil hat,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat). According to Wikipedia, the self-proclaimed “seer” John Palfrey proposed in his 1909 Atomic Consciousness an “insulative electrical contrivance encircling the head during thought.” Since thought does not cease, this begs the question of when the “contrivance” would not be worn. Palfrey sought protection from a “telepathic impactive impingement” on his “retention of thoughts and ideas.” In 1926, Julian Huxley’s protagonist in the science fiction short “The Tissue-Culture King” discovered that “caps (hats) of metal foil” block the effects of telepathy. These plot points begin to form the narrative of a small movement of conspiracy theorists who fear the invisible waves of radio and believe they are under attack by their own government.

Panic theories such as these may evolve with technology. For example, Atomic Consciousness was written in 1909. In 1900, the Brazilian priest Roberto Landell de Moura accomplished the first wireless transmission of the human voice over a distance of approximately five miles. In 1901, Landell de Moura received his first patent from the Brazilian government; in 1904 he received three more in the United States—for “The Wave Transmitter,” “The Wireless Telephone,” and the “Wireless Telegraph.” The first radio program, on what is now known as AM radio, was broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1906, by Reginald Fessenden in Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock Massachusetts. (“History of Radio,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio). The 1930s would be the golden age of radio; by the start of the decade radios could be found in 12 million American households (“Radio In The 1930s,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/radio-in-the-1930s/).

Matt Soniak explains the scientific reasoning for the “foil helmet” in The Atlantic (“Tin Foil Hats Actually Make it Easier for the Government to Track  Your Thoughts,” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/tin-foil-hats-actually-make-it-easier-for-the-government-to-track-your-thoughts/262998/). The theory was that, like a Faraday cage, an aluminum cap  would constitute an enclosure of conductive material that would protect the brain within, by distributing and dissipating electrostatic charges and electromagnetic radiation. In practice, however, the tin-foil hat does not fully enclose, and therefore cannot shield, your brain. And in an amusing twist, researchers determined that foil helmets actually amplified frequencies in the 2.6 Ghz and 1.2 Ghz ranges.

♠

Like radio waves, microwaves are a type of electromagnetic radiation. Microwaves are smaller than radio waves, however, falling between radio and infrared light in the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. The EM spectrum is commonly divided into seven regions of decreasing wavelength and increasing energy and frequency: Radio waves, microwaves, infrared (IR), visible light, ultraviolet (UV), x-rays, and gamma-rays. Radar, which takes its name from an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging (RADAR), evolved from the observed effects of bouncing short-wavelength radio waves off of distant vessels during World War II. A radar system installed only weeks before detected the first wave of aircraft in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but the new technology was not trusted and the warning was ignored (“What Are Microwaves,” Live Science, https://www.livescience.com/50259-microwaves.html). Microwaves also power the Doppler radar system used to forecast weather.

The spread of microwave technology into the American kitchen came with the microwave oven. The heating capabilities of the short radio wave were discovered by accident when Percy L. Spencer paused before a laboratory magnetron—an instrument that emits microwave radiation—and became aware that the candy bar in his pocket was melting. Within days, one of Spencer’s coworkers literally had egg on his face after a microwave-induced explosion and the team was chowing down on the first microwave popcorn. The next step was to harness and contain the heating capabilities of the microwave in what was essentially an enclosed metal box with shielding like a Faraday cage.

The heat of the microwave was quickly recognized as its greatest danger. This concern is revealed by the ongoing debate over how to cook the egg yolk that is encased within the viscous white by a membrane and then again in a shell. An article on DailyMail.com documents the concerns of English opthalmologists treating the victims of microwave-induced explosions for facial, eyelid and corneal burns. The doctors cautioned that exploding eggs possess injurious capabilities in and out of the shell, and regardless of whether the yolks are prophylactically pierced (“Warning over exploding eggs,” DailyMail.com, April 30, 2004, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-261297/Warning-exploding-eggs.html). A November 2008 research paper by Andrew J. Tatham of The  University of Edinburgh concludes that explosions of microwave-heated eggs can even result in ocular penetration. Dr. Tatham also discusses an ocular injury that was caused by the explosion of an egg that was poached, sans shell, in a microwave (“Ocular injuries from exploding microwave-cooked eggs,”Injury Extra 39(11):366-367 · November 2008 with 372 Reads; DOI: 10.1016/j.injury.2008.07.002.

Discomfort with microwave technology is easily traced back to the Cold War. In 1965, the American government sent medical workers to draw blood from embassy workers at the American embassy in the Soviet Union, telling them they were testing for exposure to a new virus. This was a lie. In fact, the American government had learned that the Soviets were bombarding the Moscow embassy with low-level microwaves, an effect that was dubbed the “Moscow Signal.”

Although the signal was weak, it exceeded the maximum exposure standard of the Soviets by a hundredfold. The White House directed the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon to investigate. The mandate of Project Pandora was to understand the effect of radiation on human beings. Sharon Weinberger, author of The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency that Changed the World, writes about these invisible radio-powered weapons in an article adapted for Foreign Policy (“The Secret History of Diplomats and Invisible Weapons,” August 25, 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/25/the-secret-history-of-diplomats-and-invisible-weapons-russia-cuba/). According to Weinberger:

“With the passage of time, the government’s concerns about microwave-induced mind control might sound like something born of the worst sort of Cold War paranoia—the sort of thing easily parodied as a tin-foil-hat conspiracy—but set in the landscape of the 1960s, it seemed a plausible concern.”

The clandestine nature of the Project Pandora resulted in government distrust and, according to Weinberger, “public paranoia” over what the State Department was up to. The 1970s disclosures to embassy personnel of the exposure to microwaves were met with anger and lawsuits. In the end, the matter of the Moscow Signal was resolved with the construction of an aluminum screen, to shield the American embassy from microwave energy.

♠

Decades later, the American military continues to study the effects of the microwave. In an article published ten years before The Imagineers of War, Sharon Weinberg investigates the claims of a select group of Americans who believe they are “targeted individuals,” persons holding the conviction that they have been targeted by the United States government for mind control (“Mind Control,” Washington Post Magazine, January 14, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011001399_5.html?noredirect=on). According to Weinberger:

“The idea of a group of people convinced they are targeted by weapons that an invade their minds has become a cultural joke, shorthanded by the image of solitary lunatics wearing tinfoil hats to deflect invisible mind beams. ‘Tinfoil hat,’ says Wikipedia, has become ‘a popular stereotype of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.”

Weinberger’s lengthy article explores the stories of those who believe themselves to be TIs, from the voices they claim to hear, to the “gang-stalking” and “V2K” (voice-to-skull) harassment they claim to be plagued by, to the “directed-energy weapons” they claim to be assaulted by. She attempts to substantiate the research that TIs say supports their claims of a government conspiracy by filing a Freedom of Information Act request. The unclassified documents that Weinberger received showed that back in 1994, Air Force scientists used microwaves to “transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility.” She also notes that the potential for microwave attacks on the human brain was listed as a “future strategic issue” in a 2001 presentation to the National Defense Industrial Association.

While Weinberger interviews psychiatrists who note, of course, that those who suffer from delusions “lack insight” into their mental illness, she draws no conclusions about whether the plight of the TIs is the result of mental illness or government mind control. At the end of her lengthy article, the origin of the TIs’ troubles remains as ambiguous as their fate. It is perhaps this ambiguity that makes “giving” a victim a “tin hat” such an attractive scam in a predatory crime.

♠

The victim of mobbing may decline to wear the hat, but the tinfoil hat fits the crime of mobbing pretty well. For example, real estate mobbing here in northeast Seattle, is neighborhood racketeering. In my neighborhood, it involves a corrupt neighborhood watch, some of whom have ties to the Seattle neighborhood councils that Mayor Murray discontinued funding a few years back. The corrupt neighborhood watch has also appeared to be working with at least one builder and several real estate agents who apparently are quite willing to threaten tenants and their landlords with lawsuits, ‘gag’ orders, what have you. Just the same, this is one-house-at-a-time racketeering and the effort appears to have a neighborhood origin and focus. Racketeering is an organized crime that is effected through a conspiracy, and that does appear to be the case here in northeast Seattle. Tin-hatters are conspiracy theorists; putting a tinfoil hat on the victim of racketeering—especially racketeering driven by a corrupt neighborhood watch—makes the victim of a crime look like a conspiracy theorist too. In fact, Wiktionary, provides one “derogatory” meaning for conspiracy theorist, which is “One who believes in, follows, or advances a conspiracy theory.” And “tinfoil hat” is a listed as a synonym for “conspiracy theorist” (“Conspiracy theorist,” Wiktionary, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/conspiracy_theorist).

Tin-hatters wear tin-foil hats to protect themselves from radio waves. A major component of mobbing harassment is effected by radio, whether shortwave radio from a neighboring home, video diversion over WiFi transmitted from a car parked nearby, the illegal use of emergency frequencies on police radios, calls intercepted by scanners, and so on. This is, no doubt, why the owner of the south mobbing house told the investigator the tall tale that I had put tinfoil over all of my windows one day, and then taken it down the next.

The tinfoil hat fits the crime of mobbing in other ways as well. For example, cell phone mobbing (bullying) and real estate mobbing incorporate the use of harassing speech. Both types of mobbing are effected over unusual communications interfaces. Cell phone mobbing may use interfaces intended for system sounds, for example. In real estate mobbing performed from locations of close proximity to the target property, you may see sound diversion using a Yagi WiFi antenna, neighbor-hacking, or verbal abuse emitted from the vents and venting systems of the neighboring residences. Both types of mobbing are effected using unusual interfaces, whether on phones, televisions or computers, or on window panes and over building structures. Mobbing isolates the victim for harassing speech without a clear source. Tin-hatters can point to no source for the voices they hear and claim that the government is “injecting” thoughts into their minds.

The south mobbing house owner claimed that I had accused him of transmitting “evil spirits” that spoke to me from my microwave. This over-the-top claim would probably be quite enough to convince anyone who actually believed it that the person who believes “evil spirits” are in her microwave is mentally ill. The claim, in and of itself, serves as a reference to the unclassified Air Force documents that indicates that that they had decades ago been able to use microwaves to transmit speech inside a person’s head.

But while some tinfoil hatters may hold to such documents as evidence of governmental research into mind control, the effect may be comparable to more recent technologies like parametric speakers. The ultrasonic sound of parametric speakers creates beams of sound that easily isolate an individual for a personalized, and private, message. The makers of some parametric speakers claim in their advertising literature that aiming a parametric speaker in a certain way can given the listener the impression that the origin of the sound is within his own head. But even if someone were able to consistently direct the beam of a parametric speaker so that every utterance appeared to come from inside the listener’s head, however, this would not be equivalent to a delusional state or with a condition of mind control.

Mobbing uses “victim-blaming,” including defamation that the victim is delusional, to deflect suspicion from a real estate scam. Tin-hatters are derided and assumed to be delusional. Whether you are a tin-hatter or a mobbing victim who is presumed to be delusional, your objections to being called delusional are easily dismissed because, according to the DSM, those who are delusional “lack insight” into their condition and therefore may not believe they are ill.

Tin-hatters may not be able to explain the origin of the harassment they endure. Mobbing victims may not allowed to explain the origins of the harassment they endure. For example, in cases where victim-blaming is used to deflect suspicion onto the victim and the victim is charged with a crime, exculpatory evidence of the true nature of the matter as a bullying situation may not be admitted. Moreover, the mobbers may be able to convince the courts that their mobbing victim is a tinfoil nut. When this occurs, the end result may be that the victim is deemed legally incompetent. Someone who is legally incompetent cannot testify in a court of law and is therefore legally refused due process. This is an effective way to silence a reporting victim.

When a mobbing enters the courtroom, there’s a good chance that the perpetrators of the “clearing-by-smearing” crime that mobbing is will have defamed you as delusional to the police and the prosecutor. If the mobbers made good on their threat and responded to you trying to report the in-home harassment and stalking by telling the police you are harassing the lot of them, the defamation that you are mentally ill may even be embedded in the charges you face as the “treatment component.” When the defamation is this effective, your due process right to face your accuser and testify is at risk. So when someone offers to fit you with a nice tinfoil hat, be sure to tell them, “It’s not my style.”