It has proceeded almost unnoticed, but this fits in to a larger pattern of the suppression of anything beyond the mundane and materialistic. There's a counterpart to the "Overton Window" for all human development and it's been steadily shrunken.

An example similar to the glasses is Kirlian photography. It became quite a popular subject in the 1970s. That was perhaps a unique time in living memory, when the population was both interested in pushing back the boundaries but was also aware of what a charlatan was.

As a residue of that popularity, you can see a Kirlian photograph of a left hand in the montage of images in the opening of the 1990's series "The X-Files".