The novel Idiots in the Machine by Edward Savio portrays a character who believes tin foil keeps harmful gamma rays away, becoming a media sensation after marketing a successful line of foil hats to Chicago.
The book series Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer features a paranoid centaur character named Foaly, who wears a tin-foil hat to protect from mind-readers. Tin foil hats have appeared in such films as Signs (2002), Noroi: The Curse (2005), and Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (2009). In a 2016 article, the musician and researcher Daniel Wilson writing in paranormal magazine Fortean Times noted an early allusion to an "insulative electrical contrivance encircling the head during thought" in the unusual 1909 non-fiction publication Atomic Consciousness by self-proclaimed "seer" John Palfrey (aka "James Bathurst") who believed such headgear was not effective for his "retention of thoughts and ideas" against a supposed "telepathic impactive impingement". The song references conspiracy theories such as the Illuminati and the New World Order, and Weird Al wears a tinfoil hat in the video. In 2014, "Weird Al" Yankovic parodied the song "Royals" by Lorde on his album Mandatory Fun, reworking it to "Foil".
In 2005 a tongue-in-cheek experimental study by a group of MIT students found that tin foil hats do shield their wearers from radio waves over most of the tested spectrum, but amplified certain frequencies, around 2.6 GHz and 1.2 GHz.
Frey discovered that the microwave auditory effect (i.e., the reception of the induced sounds by radio-frequency electromagnetic signals heard as clicks and buzzes) can be blocked by a patch of wire mesh (rather than foil) placed above the temporal lobe. There are some allegations that EMR exposure has negative health consequences. Ī belief also exists that aluminum foil is a protective measure against the effects of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) for many unspecified EMR frequencies. For half-millimetre-thick aluminum foil, radiation above about 20 kHz (i.e., including both AM and FM bands) would be partially blocked, although aluminum foil is not sold in this thickness, so numerous layers of foil would be required to achieve this effect.
The efficiency of a metal enclosure in blocking electromagnetic radiation depends on the thickness of the foil, as dictated by the " skin depth" of the conductor for a particular wave frequency range of the radiation. Effects of strong electromagnetic radiation on health have been documented for quite some time.