Hiding In Plain Sight- Part 1

This subject originally got me going after reading a post in Dick Stout's "Stouts Standards" (https://stoutstandards.wordpress.com/) on the subject of basically how you "Dress To Detect," i.e. DON'T WEAR CAMMO while you are out metal detecting! "Why, why not, for crying out loud?" you might ask, angrily buttoning your cammo shirt and cammo jacket while removing your custom cammo-finished metal detector from your camouflaged jeep or truck. Heres why:

cam·ou·flage:the disguising of MILITARY personnel, equipment, and installations by painting or covering them to make them blend in with their surroundings.

Now if you are mine sweeping (no, not the GAME!) , or basically de-mining  an area for safe passage during military operations, then cammo is by all means appropriate. If you are a hobbyist, in-country, looking for coins and artifacts in a city or county park, forest, trail, or boat ramp the one thing that will garner more attention than anything else is CAMMO. I'm sure I'll get some disagreement on that, mostly from the people wearing CAMMO at boat ramps, but be that as it may, camouflaged clothing and gear attracts attention BECAUSE of it's association with military operations. Unfortunately, due the uneasy state of the world, and the countries in it, cammo means military, and military garners immediate scrutiny from both the public and law enforcement when you are engaged in public activity using an unfamiliar device of some kind...like your metal detector.

Okay, say you researched a real sweet spot along an old two-lane road, which used to be a dirt wagon road in 1830, with a massive amount of traffic on the hoof and off of it! You and your pals excitedly swinging your custom cammo metal detectors, dressed like cammo troopers, are almost guaranteed to be looked on by passing motorists and law enforcement with suspicion, and you may get a quick visit from the county sheriff.  Now I know and you know you are doing nothing wrong, but appearances are everything in this society and the only other folks who wear cammo regularly are hunters carrying shotguns. Your sweet spot may become off limits real quick!

Our society, here in the United States, spends 22-hours a day being trained to stare into little glowing plastic screens, for all social media needs, official government propaganda (code word: Newsertainment) and "flash-causes" to quickly believe in and fight for, regardless of the reality of the "cause" itself. People are programmed for years to pay attention to some things and ignore others completely, and even in plain sight, certain things do not register on an average 21st Century citizen's Psyche.  Perception is everything, and since most citizen's average attention span in 2015 was 8.25 seconds (in 2000, human attention spans were in the 12 second range) while a goldfish's attention span is 9 seconds in perpetuity.

From http://grassrootsinternetstrategy.com.au/website-on-a-mobile-phone/

This is where hiding In Plain Sight while metal detecting originated. It happened while I was searching an old park that was being renovated; bulldozers, pipes and all kinds of things everywhere. I was detecting deep in a recently carved out depression, when an old guy called down to me "Find any coins or treasure? Haha!" I pulled my headphones off and he quickly said "Oh, I'm just kidding...I know you are just working and looking for pipes and stuff!" I asked him why he thought that and he said "Well, you are wearing a high-visibility orange shirt like most people working in public, and it has a company name on it...that's how I knew!" I was wearing an old faded orange T-shirt that had "Duck Commander" printed on the back I'd received from Kellyco Metal Detector Superstore as a thank-you for help in training a few newbies with their new machines. It was not a company shirt, but the Duck Commander logo looked pretty impressive against the orange background!

Then I remembered a line in one of my favorite movies, where the core of the Earth had stopped and the young scientist said that there was no way to get it started again, where the senior scientist looked at him and said "But what if there was?" I hit the stores and looked specifically for bright orange or florescent green shirts with slogans or trademarks, cause' nobody's gonna have time zipping by to read it, they are just going to get the "Perception" that was a work shirt! I was ready to experiment and see what the public reaction was to my new getup!