Originally Posted by soccerstudpc20

We were talking about this in my sociology class and this is from my lecture and I thought it was really interesting. Anybody know anything about it???

Also, do you think there are still scandals like this going on right now?

(Directly from lecture)
"In the early 1960s, television had only been around commercially for less than a decade. However, within that decade, it had come to be one of the most popular devises in the modern household. Nearly every household in the nation had access to a television set. Thus, it is not surprising that someone would try to implement a sinister plan, using such a simple device, to dupe the passive viewers into an insidious ploy which the conspirators hoped would make them very wealthy.
A few clever scientists discovered that magnetic ions emitted into the atmosphere in a certain manner could affect the brain’s hypothalamus in such a way that it could influence behavior. Hence, the idea was to build a television set which could emit such ions at predesignated times, times such as during commercial breaks when people were viewing sales pitches regarding specific consumer goods.
The Brunswick company secretly designed and built several of these television sets and sold them in a Northeastern city in order to test the effects of such potentially powerful devices. The results of the tests were astounding! Since no one had ever tried any pretest upon humans in this sort of environment, none of the experimenters could have fathomed the resulting behaviors elicited by the affected viewers.
Some viewers were purchasing cases of the products which had been advertised through the baited television sets during the experiment. People without pets were purchasing cases of dog and cat food. Other were buying cases upon cases of soda pop. Others were buying clothes they had no need for. Men were even purchasing pantyhose. These unexpected results would end up causing the demise of the whole sinister plan to bilk money from the unsuspecting viewers.
Those victims who purchased such items as illustrated above didn’t go unnoticed. If the people themselves didn’t get curious about the weird happenings, others around them did and reported the deviant behavior to the authorities. Soon, a city-wide undercover investigation was conducted by the police.
The police kept records of the victims and sought any clues which would allow them to determine who was behind such a clever scheme. By constructing a mapboard with all the locations of the “crimes”, the police were able to develop a schematic pattern revealing a funnel-shaped cluster with the focal point aiming at the location of a community broadcasting station. The police deduced that something must be being broadcasted out into the community via that station and affecting the unsuspecting citizens.
Sure enough, with a little patience and clever detectives at work on the case, they came up with another link to the case. It turned out that the victims in each case all owned a Brunswick model television set. The investigators examined the suspected television sets and found the device which emitted the ions. The police allowed the incidents to continue a while longer until they could gather enough evidence to file felony fraud charges against the evil conspirators."