Thought-Detector vans, 1973

Many will remember the TV detector vans that stalked suburban Britain in the 1970s.

Scarfolk was chosen to take part in a government scheme that tested the latest technology in thought detection, particularly because of the events surrounding “The Tim Seven” in 1972 (See here and here for more details).

The scheme not only successfully reduced the number of telepathic crimes in Scarfolk, but also exposed hundreds of “wrong thinkers.”

According to legislation, “a ‘wrong thought’ is a thought, which, when thought, contains themes thought to be not right, therefore wrong, and therefore prosecutable. An unthought thought may be potentially wrong, but the thought will not be prosecutable until such a time that the thought has been thought and its themes have been thoroughly thought through and deemed wrong by the authorities. Thinking about which specific thoughts may or may not be prosecutable may also be prosecutable.”

In 1975 the mayor’s brother, Winston, was one of the 90 people arrested for a “wrong thought” involving TV newsreader Angela Rippon, a jar of Robertson’s Marmalade, and garden Swingball.

via Scarfolk Council: Thought-Detector vans, 1973.

On the subject of strange visitors to Scarfolk, in October, 1974, there was a spate of cases involving parents being supplanted by eerie impostors. The frauds looked uncannily like their real counterparts and only children could spot the subtle differences.

For a time, affected children found a gritty substance in their school milk. At first poison was suspected but it turned out to be sand from a beach hundreds of miles away.

Despite police investigations none of the impostors were ever positively identified and there was a growing belief in the community that they might not even be human.

The impostors vanished as inexplicably as they had arrived and the children’s real bewildered parents were found wandering on the very same beach from which the sand had originated. They had no idea how they got there, how long they had been away, or what had happened during their absence.

This leaflet/flyer was distributed in comic books, at schools, and in toy shops.

via Scarfolk Council: “Is your mummy who she says she is?”.