According to researchers at MIT, the government could actually benefit from the use of tinfoil hats by conspiracy theorists. The research shows that tinfoil amplifies government frequencies, rather than blocking them. So this raises the question, did the government covertly start the tinfoil hat myth in order to trick anti-government types into helping the government track them?

“It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government’s invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.”