tinfoil hat (UNCLASSIFIED)

[victor steinbok]

Not identical--in fact, undetermined--usage, but from 1979. Looks like
just a generic hat made out of foil:

http://goo.gl/KOMMt
River Rats, inc
Jean Craighead George
Dutton, 1979 - Travel - 136 pages
Traveling illegally at night on the Colorado River with a mysterious
cargo, two boys are shipwrecked and must depend for survival on their
own ingenuity and a wild boy they find living along the river.
> Crowbar made them each an aluminum foil hat. Joe suggested they wear their life jackets as
> long as it was practical for whatever use they might make of them, then stretched out in the cool grass.

This seems to be just a covering made from aluminum foil, with no
"allusion". Still, it seems this project is not finished...

VS-)

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
>
> The March updates for the OED include "tinfoil hat" ("With allusion to
> the belief that such a hat protects the wearer from mind control or
> surveillance"), with 19 July 1986 for first citation.
>
>
> _Miami Herald_ 2/19/1983 p 8C. [from Newsbank archives, no page image or
> column # available]
>
> "There is more involved in this romance than a striking violation of
> professional ethics, though the film does concede that; along the way, a
> marriage is smashed, a suicidal patient is abandoned, and a derelict is
> turned out into the street, wearing a tin- foil hat to keep the
> Trade-Center beams off his brain. The film nods at these scenes, and
> then forgets them altogether. "
>
> Cleveland OH _Plain Dealer_ 5/16/1982 p 25 col 5
> "A Cleveland woman telephoned last year to complain that her neighbor
> was shooting an invisible death ray at her.  She wanted the police to
> stop it.
>
> The dispatcher suggested she wear a tin foil hat and put tin on her
> windows to deflect the rays."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org