Who is behind Tinfoil Hat Dating?
Is Tinfoil Hat Dating a secret service honeypot, is someone here making fun of critics of the system or is there perhaps an ordinary “conspiracy theorist” behind this website? Find out everything you need to know about Tinfoil Hat Dating on this page.
The Tinfoil Hat Dating team
Actually, there is no “team” in this sense, because Tinfoil Hat Dating is essentially a genuine one-man project. The brains behind it are me – Mark Etting. I’m originally from Germany, but since 2016 I’ve been traveling the world as a digital nomad – laptop and thirst for adventure always in my luggage.
The idea for an alternative dating platform was born in spring 2022. Together with two friends, I was feverishly working on a concept for an alternative dating platform. After endless brainstorming sessions and countless phone calls, the name was finally decided: Tinfoil Hat Dating was born!
Mark Etting, founder of Tinfoil Hat Dating
In the almost three years since the initial idea, several developers and designers have been involved at times, but in the end it was just me. Today (as of September 2025), I manage all areas myself – from the further development of the platform to marketing and day-to-day support.
I still have a little bit of support: an experienced programmer supports me with technical optimizations and helps to integrate new functions into the platform.
Who is Mark Etting?
I was born in September 1983 in Kassel, a city with almost 200,000 inhabitants in the heart of northern Hesse.
Kassel is known…
- because of the Documenta art exhibition, which takes place every 5 years.
- because the last “NSU murder” took place here on April 6, 2006.
- because the book by whistleblower “Alexander Laurent” (the one with the 18-hour interview in the space suit) was set in Kassel.
- and because it feels like every German driver who has ever driven past Kassel on the highway has been flashed in the “Kassel mountains”.
From my earliest memories, I sensed a deep, undeniable truth: I didn’t fit into this system. Neither in kindergarten, where the first nonsensical rules curtailed my freedom, nor later at school, which wrapped itself around my mind like a corset. I developed such a strong rejection of school and teachers that, until I left school, I always gave just enough so that I was transferred and not downgraded from secondary school to the Hauptschule (which actually almost happened).
Bergpark and Hercules with trick fountains, the landmark of Kassel
The school system has failed me
Today, I am deeply convinced that if I had not developed this profound aversion to the rigid school system, my life would probably have followed the same predetermined path as so many others. Those paths that are shaped by ten to thirteen years of “brainwashing“. But this indoctrination didn’t work for me!
Maybe it was luck, maybe it was fate, but I was able to retain my independent thinking and a healthy dose of rebelliousness. Or maybe I even fought hard for it in retrospect – a priceless asset in a world that is constantly trying to bring us into line and keep us in line with the system.
School and vocational training
In my early 20s, I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t get very far in this society with my poor secondary school certificate alone. While my friends were already eagerly finishing their A-levels or completing their apprenticeships, I was agonizingly asking myself the question: “What should I actuallydo with my life?”
Finally, I made a decision: back to school. And lo and behold, I suddenly found learning surprisingly easy. Subjects that used to barely touch me suddenly took shape and sparked a real passion in me – especially anything to do with economics. In my early 20s, I was finally ready to consciously confront the education system – this time by my own choice, with the aim of gaining qualifications so that one day I could get a well-paid job (in the system).
My second educational path
Stations & degrees
2002 – Higher commercial school, Kassel
2003 – Apprenticeship as an office clerk, Kassel
2005 – University entrance qualification (Fachabi) Business & Administration, Kassel
2006 – Bachelor Business Administration, Erfurt
2010 – Master Dialog Marketing & Communication Management, Kassel
Search engine optimization
During my studies, I discovered a passion that would shape my future: Web development and search engine optimization (SEO). As there were no relevant subjects or courses at college or university, I taught myself everything – building websites and conducting experiments to find out how I could best manipulate Google search results(black-hat SEO). I also made this topic the basis of my Master’s thesis in 2013.
Looking back, I have to say that the seven years of study didn’t do me much good: Hardly any of what I had to learn for my exams ever had any real use in my professional life.
9-to-5 job not possible!
After my Master’s degree, I started working in SEO at an online marketing agency in Munich for five months. However, everyday agency life turned out to be stressful and poorly paid. So I dropped out of the trainee program and moved to Switzerland, where I worked as an in-house SEO traineeat a large e-commercecompany (Zug). But I didn’t last seven months there either: the thought of spending my life on the hamster wheel of a rigid working day was unbearable for me.
So I made my decisive decision: self-employment.
My biggest goal was clear and uncompromising: never again a 9-to-5 job. No more being woken up in the morning by the shrill sound of an alarm clock. Instead, a source of income that makes me independent of time and place. Freedom (or at least relative freedom) – that was my mantra from then on.
Good by Germoney
In 2016, I drew a line: I said goodbye to the country where supposedly the most intelligent and wealthiest people in the world live. My destination back then was Paraguay. Together with a friend who had already traveled to the country twice, I made my way to South America. There I applied for my permanent residence permit – a step that would secure Paraguay as my new home. No wonder the country is so popular among German emigrants: the immigration conditions are simple, uncomplicated and inexpensive. Perhaps this is why countless reports have been circulating in the German media for years explaining with a raised index finger why it is better not to emigrate there.
Always with the laptop, here in a bar in Thailand, 2018
Independent at last
Paraguay was the perfect starting point for me. In the very first few months, I set up my own business there: I offered my SEO services to several online marketing agencies in German-speaking countries and worked as a freelancer for clients from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The big advantage: Paraguay practices what is known as territorial taxation. This means that all income earned abroad remains tax-free in Paraguay. For me, this meant perfect conditions for my successful start as an independent entrepreneur.
Bangkok, Thailand
Despite this good start, I only stayed in Paraguay for just under a year. I moved on – my sights were set on Asia. After an eventful trip, I ended up in Thailand, where life took an unexpected turn: I met a woman, fell in love – and we decided to move in together. We lived together in Bangkok for the next four years.
This time was formative for me – not only because of the relationship, but also because I was able to get to know Thai and Asian culture. The Covid measures made many things more difficult, but I am grateful for the enriching insights into Asian culture that I gained during this time. And yet, neither Thailand nor my partner at the time managed to make me settle down. The wanderlust in me, the urge for freedom and change, was simply too strong.
My awakening moment
For as long as I can remember, I have asked myself many questions about my existence: Why am I actually here? What is the point of it all? I noticed the injustice in this system early on. I asked myself: Why do countries have to wage war against each other? Why are people able to kill other people even though they have never met before? Why are there people who live in abundance while others have nothing? Why does an election never really change anything – apart from making life even more expensive afterwards and increasing the tax burden on ordinary people?
In my early 20s, I wanted to understand the world in depth. I devoured documentaries on a wide variety of topics, which I downloaded from the Internet. I was particularly fascinated by everything to do with ancient civilizations – the Incas, the Mayas, the mysterious pyramids of Egypt. Their mysteries and secrets left me with the impression that official historiography was only telling half the truth.
One day, I came across something unusual on my favorite documentary website: a lecture by a former Greenpeace activist named Werner Altnickel, who I had never heard of before. In this program he was sitting together with a man called
About two weeks later, on a sunny summer’s day in 2006, I was mowing the lawn as I did every week. Suddenly I stood rooted to the spot: There were long contrails in the sky , some of which crossed over each other – and some even suggested that the plane that must have deployed them had flown a turn. I left the lawnmower in the garden, ran into the house, grabbed my digital camera and started photographingthe sky.
At that moment, only one thought crossed my mind: “That’s not possible!” “That’s exactly what the Greenpeace guy was talking about on that show!” The pictures I took back in the summer of 2006 still exist and are shown below.
Fascinated by my discovery, I just thought: “I absolutely have to share this with my fellow human beings!” So I sat down at my computer, registered in the forum of the Kassel newspaper HNA, which still existed at the time, and uploaded my pictures there. I wrote that airplanes were flying over Kassel carrying various materials such as barium and other substances – and that my photos would provide the proof. Frankly, I was convinced that my post would be deleted by the moderators within a very short time. So I didn’t look at the forum again that day.
Two days later, at breakfast, I almost fell off my chair as I leafed through the print edition of the HNA. There was an article with a photo of the sky full of contrails. It was accompanied by the headline: “Crazy discussion in the HNA online forum – mysterious streaks in the sky”.
I could hardly believe it. Not only had my post not been deleted – it had now triggered over 180 responses! To my disappointment, most of the responses ridiculed my claims. The article in the print edition itself contained 9 comments from the forum: eight of them mocking, one critical. What was particularly striking was that four of these mocking comments came from the same user. Even then, I realized how manipulative reportingis alwaysconstructed when it comes to controversial topics.
The next morning, the next chapter followed: HNA published a follow-up article in the daily newspaper and explained that they had contacted Greenpeace in Hamburg. A spokesperson there assured them: “There is no evidence of chemtrails.”
For me, that was a huge contradiction. On the one hand, there was Werner Altnickel, the former Greenpeace activist, who clearly explained that chemtrails existed and that he had lost his job there while trying to sensitize Greenpeace to this issue. Shortly afterwards, I saw the stripes in the sky with my own eyes. And then suddenly the official line was: “It’s all nonsense.” What was I to believe now?
HNA article from 2006 & Chemtrails photos from 2006
At that moment I knew: Now I need answers!
To cut a long story short: I came across Werner Altnickel’s telephone number on the Internet. I spoke to him on the phone for two hours and afterwards I had even more questions than before. Werner not only talked about chemtrails, but also about many other topics that I had never heard of or thought about before. After the phone call, I didn’t know how to categorize what I had just heard. Today I know that he was right about everything he told me back then.
Thanks to this experience, I am now able to familiarize myself relatively well with the standardsleepingsheep that, apart from the public broadcasters and the mainstream media the mainstream media, never other information has consumed in his life. How else could someone like that the things react to the things that a supposed “conspiracy theorist” in front of his head than with rejection? They don’t know what you’re talking about because they’ve never heard of it. They can’t assess whether the information presented to them is valid, and what’s more, they threaten his comfort zone. Most people are not receptive to new things anyway, especially not if they could have negative consequences for their own existence.
Dith Hollywood and constant media coverage the average person has learned that anyone who does not have the same opinion as thatthe system is a madman or a Nazi – and you can’t argue with people like that anyway. anyway with such people anyway. This fact shows me how perfectly this system is constructed. It is virtually indestructible! It would only be vulnerable from the moment the system lost media sovereignty, and that will never happen. With media sovereignty, the masses can be steered in any direction, as we were able to experience impressively in 2020 – 2023.
The CDs that Werner Altnickel promised to send me never arrived. And yet my path continued.
I was suddenly contacted via the HNA forum by someone I now call my best friend: He was studying abroad at the time and had already had his awakening moment a few years earlier. As he regularly followed the discussions in the HNA forum, he also came across my post and wrote to me: “I know someone who can explain everything to you”. I was given a telephone number. When I called it, a smoky, deep voice answered, which didn’t inspire much confidence, but nevertheless triggered something in me. The words were clear: “If you really want to know how the world works – and how we are all deceived – then come to me. I can show you everything.”
I remember exactly how I gave my girlfriend at the time the address I was supposed to drive to. I told her: “If you don’t hear from me within the next five hours, call the police andgive them this address.” My gut instinct warned me, but my curiosity was stronger.
When the door opened, there stood a man about 1.70 m tall, in his mid-fifties, gray hair, beer belly – enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke that floated directly towards me, in the direction of the stairwell. To my great relief, the man didn’t seem particularly threatening.
What followed was to change my life. I spent six hours with Wolfgang, in front of his computer, while he showed me a flood of pictures: company logoswith pyramids and the all-seeing eye, buildings with Masonic symbolism, explanations of the 33 degrees of Freemasonry, alternative theories about the 9/11 attacks, that there is a secret power in the background that directs all events in the world, and much more. What did all this have to do with chemtrails? From my point of view at the time, not much. Twenty years later: quite a lot.
When I went home after this meeting, my head was pounding with information. I felt a real dam break in my consciousness – and asked myself the question: “What if the man is right?”
If even a fraction of what he had just shown and told me was true, I would have to radically change my life. In the months that followed, I started reading books, began listening to Alexander Benesch’sInfokrieg radio program, regularly read Freemann’s ASR blog and, of course, ended up on Eichelburg’s hartgeld.com sometime around 2010. This was at a time when the Enlightenment movement was just spilling over from the English-speaking world (which at the time was mainly Alex Jones & David Icke ) to Germany and the first websites reporting on topics far removed from the mainstream were forming here.
I was confronted with this and similar information at my first meeting with my new mentor.
Obtaining information was not easy before 2010
In 2006, there was no YouTube and there was very little alternative, system-critical content on the Internet (especially in German-speaking countries). So there was not much choice but to read books.
Here is an excerpt of the books that significantly shaped my world view in the early years of my awakening
- Confessions of an Economic Hit Man – On the road in the service of the economic mafia, John Perkins, 2004
- Psychology of the masses, Gustav Le Bon, 2009
- The Media Monopoly: Mind Control and Manipulation of the Dark Forces, M A Verick, 2006
- Pan-Europe, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1982
- Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Antony C. Sutton, 1976
- Israel’s Secret Vatican 1 – 3, Wolfgang Eggert, 2001 – 2008
- 334 Promille Lüge, H. M. v. Stuhl, 2000
- SOS Abendland: The creeping Islamization of Europe, Udo Ulfkotte, 2008
- Forced prostitution: State-run brothels under National Socialism, Christa Paul, 1994
- Enslaved brains. Mind control and influencing behavior, Heiner Gehring, 2006
At the same time, I banned the television from my life and immersed myself in topics such as Freemasonry, the Illuminati and global power structures. I also read books by Eckhart Tolle and began to look into Dr. Hamer’s Germanic medicine, as well as many other interesting topics that usually remain hidden from the mainstream throughout my life. I had the feeling that there was an extreme amount of knowledge that I needed to catch up on as quickly as possible. Anyone who has been at a similar point in their life knows what I mean.
Without ever saying it directly, Wolfgang became a kind of mentor for me in the following years – a door opener who showed me how the world really works in all probability. Especially in the first years of my “awakening”, he gave me decisive impulses: he tirelessly researched on the Internet, printed texts, burned CDs, distributed information to others – with the firm belief that he could open the eyes of his fellow human beings. Unfortunately, most people were uninterested in his efforts. I was to have the same experience in the years that followed.
In 2016, when I was in Paraguay for the first time, Wolfgang left this world. Even today, I still feel deep gratitude for what he gave me. Tinfoil Hat Dating is also dedicated to him. I’m sure that if he could see that this platform exists – and that it would probably never have been created without him – he would be damn proud of himself and certainly of me too.
What drives me?
These are the countless voices of the last 20 years that have mockingly said to me: “You don’t really believe that you can change anything about this system, do you?”
Maybe they are right. Maybe I won’t change anything on my own. But maybe – and this is exactly my goal – this platform can help the right people find each other. And who knows what will grow from these connections. Werner Altnickel certainly didn’t think to himself on the phone back then: “In 20 years’ time, this guy will set up a dating platform for ‘conspiracy theorists’.”
The idea and vision of Tinfoil Hat Dating
After my personal moment of awakening in 2006 I quickly realized how difficult it is to find like-minded people in “offline life“. Conversations with friends you had known for many years seemed to become increasingly irrelevant. The same applied to conversations with family members. I quickly had to learn, as probably everyone who wakes up from this matrix at some point, that it is better to keep your mouth shut and not talk to certain people about existentially important topics that affect us all, as otherwise you will only experience exclusion anyway.
The majority of people you meet in life are mainstream-compatible sleeping sheep with whom you can’t talk about much more than superficialities and mainstream topics. It’s especially difficult if you’re a woke man in your 20s or 30s looking for a partner at eye level. I’ve met a lot of women in my life, and the best ones were the ones who were at least not dismissive of the topics I told them about. From today’s perspective, I’ve spent a lot of time with women who didn’t suit me at all because of their “standard world view”.
From these experiences, I have recognized the need for a platform like Tinfoil Hat Dating derived. I want to help the right people find each other as early as possible in life. This applies not only to romantic relationships, but also to friendships.
As someone who has spent a lot of time in other countries, I also know how difficult it often is to make friends in a new country. That’s why Tinfoil Hat Dating enables everyone who has already left their home country or will be leaving in the future to quickly find new friends and contacts in their new home.
I myself am always as happy as a little child on Christmas Eve when I meet a like-minded person and realize that we are dealing with the same topics and are on the same wavelength. Unfortunately, that happens far too rarely in real life.
That is why I would like to start building the Tinfoil Hat Dating platform to help like-minded people around the world connect with each other – regardless of country, ethnicity, skin color, language or gender. There are people all over the world who have realized that something is not going right here. Tinfoil Hat Dating is designed to help these people connect with each other.
Why the name Tinfoil Hat Dating?
My two friends and I had lots of name ideas when we were developing the concept for the platform in 2022 – but it quickly became clear: “Tinfoil Hat Dating” contains all the relevant trigger words. Catchy, provocative, easy to understand. It is dating for those who are labeled by the masses as “aluminum hat wearers” – in other words, for those who have the courage to think outside the box. The name is a deliberate, almost cynical use of this defamatory term. A kind of creatively playing back the mockery that the system throws at us.
Of course, I would never describe myself as an “aluminum hat wearer”, and I don’t know anyone who would seriously do that for themselves. But the term conveys exactly that The wink we wanted. Anyone who hears “Tinfoil Hat Dating” immediately knows what it’s about.
The first steps
The platform went online for the first time in 2023 – and the community grew to almost 800 members within six months. But then, with a heavy heart, I had to pull the plug. The reason was the collaboration with an Indian development team: they had done an excellent job on other projects for years, but with Tinfoil Hat Dating every update turned into a fiasco. New problems arose with every update and loading times tormented users – some pages took up to 50 seconds to load. In developer-speak, you could say that the website was programmed to break. Continued operation was impossible and a rebuild was the only option.
The complete rebuild of
So began the painstaking rebuild – from January 2024 to July 2025. As I was still heavily involved in other freelance projects in 2024, there was little time to work on Tinfoil Hat Dating. It wasn’t until November 2024 that I was able to focus almost exclusively on the project close to my heart. If I had known back then what an enormous amount of work it would take to set up a platform like this on my own, I might have put my energy into more profitable projects.
But today, after the website has been back online for almost 2 months, I am proud to have seen it through. Tinfoil Hat Dating is the most ambitious project of my career so far – and at the same time the one with the greatest significance.
I wish everyone who registers here inspiring encounters, valuable contacts, true friendships and conscious partnerships. And who knows – maybe I’ll even meet one or two of you in person one day.
Mark Etting, founder of Tinfoil Hat Dating (Aluhutdating) – on September 11, 2025