> Since then, at least 1,500 cases have been reported by US personnel stationed in 96 countries, officials said last year.
How many of those reports were after they passed the HAVANA Act, which grants significant compensation (up to one years salary) to any personnel who were affected by this vaguely defined condition with no known cause and no definitive physical indicators?
From what I’ve read I’m almost sure that some people were in fact affected. Some kind of directed energy weapon from an enemy state. There was a good article I read about it once that showed micro damage all over the brain of some victims.
However 1500 people is truly a large number. But they do say reported cases, not confirmed.
There was an early report that claimed abnormalities, but by the standards they were using just about everybody would have shown abnormalities - and they consequently did not even have a control group. Contemporary studies from 2024+ onward, using control groups, have found no physical effects or differences whatsoever. [1]
I also think it's noteworthy that claimed incidents have been reported just about everywhere, including Western nations. After the scare started, every "enemy" state individual, embassy, and other such facility would have been even more intense than usual surveillance. And absolutely no evidence of any attack of any sort whatsoever has been found.
By contrast mass psychogenic illnesses [2] have a lengthy history and their typical effects correlate identically with the typical reported effects of 'Havana Syndrome.' Actually I just noticed Havana Syndrome is now already listed as one of the examples of mass psychogenic illness. Somewhat surprising from Wiki, but accurate nonetheless.
The intelligence agencies public vs private statements validate the claims of few isolated directed energy incidents then exacerbated through asocial psychosomatic social incentives until it matured into a mass psychogenic illness.
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
> Some kind of directed energy weapon from an enemy state.
Suppose you are a nation-state, hostile to the USA, that has developed a directed energy weapon. Do you test it:
A) on your own citizens (whether willing, deceived, or coerced),
B) on citizens of some remote, poor, and/or war-torn country that is unlikely to retaliate against you,
or C) on diplomatic personnel from the country with the greatest military and intelligence resources by far, and with a proven history of bombing or invading other countries on both true and false premises?
I had never heard of Havana syndrome before, and I have nothing to comment either way on whether the physical symptoms are real and/or have a common cause. But the idea that an enemy state is using a secret weapon prototype to... randomly give headaches to American diplomats? Is bizarre, to say the least.
Suppose you’re a nation-state and have gathered wind that an enemy state has developed an eavesdropping technology that uses directed energy. Do you:
A) allow the enemy state to use it, letting them think you don’t know it exists
B) publicly accuse the enemy of having the technology, thus jeopardizing the intelligence assets who revealed its existence to you as the enemy goes on the hunt for the spies who leaked the info
C) make up a story about how a bunch diplomatic personnel got sick in a way that’s consistent with some kind of directed high energy source, causing your enemy to stop using the device and recheck everything because they thought it would not be detected, but apparently it was. They don’t suspect an internal “leak”, which keeps your spies safer.
What in the world would be the strategic advantages of C? This would be like loudly shitting your pants so you have an excuse to leave a party early without making the host feel bad. With over 1000 people involved, this whole Havana syndrome thing has disrupted the United States diplomatic efforts on an international scale, the constant rotation of embassy diplomats over this has had real world impact, even if non-obvious. While elaborate conspiracies are nothing new to the intelligence community, I think this would go beyond elaborate and into the realm of insane.
> What in the world would be the strategic advantages of [making your adversary think their undetectable device was, in fact, detectable?]
It can cause your adversary to react in ways that causes them to reveal more information to you. For example, they might move known specialists to locations that you’ve never associated with the kind of work those specialists do, possibly revealing secret sites.
You might cause your enemy to pause their program while they review, buying time for you to learn how to defend yourself better.
or, like the enigma code breaker, you hide the fact that you know of it, and exploit it buy feeding false or disadvantagous information which you can take advantage of.
You might think it strange the US warned the houthis they were going to bomb the weapons storages. However this does two things, causes the houthis to try to move things out of the way and causes the civilians to evacuate areas they know contain weapons. Both of which the US watch for to expand their list of targets.
None of the above, it's not really like the Chinese or Russians are any smarter than Americans. No one is going to invent some magical eavesdrop machine that operates on some principle that hasn't at least been thought about by the other side. If the Americans did learn about some new machine the other side invented from an insider, it would be trivial to drop the knowledge on the desk of the most relevant researcher, tell them to publish a public paper on it, and then use that as justification as to why new countermeasures need to be added to the embassy SCIFs. You protect your insider by making it look like the tech is now common knowledge and protect embassy operations.
All of the secret conversations and messages that occur in an embassy happen in a SCIF. If the other side can eavesdrop into those, you've got nowhere else to discuss these things so the only option is to build countermeasures. There are no juicy bits of intel floating around outside the SCIF that the other side couldn't gather themselves. If they can't eavesdrop into the SCIFs, then there's no immediate need to react. The other side isn't stupid, any false or misleading info you intentionally leak will eventually be figured out and then they'll know that you know they are listening (not good for your insider). The best course of action is to appear that you are acting independently of what the other side is actually doing, play dumb but don't be dumb.
Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) is a lucrative business and it's not hard or that expensive to setup equipment that can monitor the spectrum 24/7.
Invented by THE theremin. Yes, the instrument, theremin, the wacky one where handwaves and suck around some metal stick make funky horror movie noises, there was a Dr. theremin who invented that, and also this. Anyway, it was a "passive radio device" (given as a "gift") whereby if radio waves are projected onto the device it shall convolute said waves with sound waves of the room and then back-project a signal of radio waves with voice data overlayed, which can be read. Fancy at that sounds it is trivially low tech and simple. Very analog.
Rational thought goes out the window when people hear a good story.
When someone a long time ago (Victorian era? somebody correct me) started circulating a story people from ancient times up until the 19th century drank a lot of wine and beer because they didn't know how to find clean water, an amazing number of people repeated it as if it were a fact. Despite the fact that there was no evidence to support it (other than the people repeating the story), there was evidence against it (many ancient writers describe the use of clean water and how/where to find it), and it made no sense (if they couldn't find clean water, why didn't they all just die when they didn't have wine and beer? what about the billions of uneducated rural people today that get along fine without treated water and don't drink wine or beer?). When we hear a good story, we want to believe it, so we don't think too hard about it.
It is very much a well documented thing. You’re incorrectly reasoning that since it wasn’t the only strategy ubiquitous everywhere and all the time that it just not have been real
could you point to the specific part of those Wikipedia entries that says that very large quantities of these drinks were taken because of the difficulty of finding clean water? Or were you making another point here?
> The term [Aqua Vitae (“water of life”)] was used by the 14th-century alchemist John of Rupescissa, who believed the then newly discovered substance of ethanol to be an imperishable and life-giving "fifth essence" or quintessence, and who extensively studied its medical properties.[3]
You’re not going to find a well defined germ theory breakdown of the potability of water because it did not exist. It’s not like they could identify clean water vs dirty water. It’s not like drinking dirty water meant you were going to die either. Generally speaking, people understood that drinking more alcoholic drinks was likely to have health benefits among other things, hence the term “water of life”. Drinking alcohol was seen as a move that would improve your health, including as literal medicine. It was frequently drank because it was good for you. Not strictly because they knew they couldn’t drink the water. They did drink a lot of dirty water too.
Do you think distilled alcohol can be used as an alternative hydration source instead of water? Might I ask have you ever tried it?
> Drinking alcohol was seen as a move that would improve your health, including as literal medicine
Even if that’s true it’s not at all related with alcohol being a replacement for water. It’s like if someone if in 400+ years decided that most people in the 2000s only ate supplements instead of actual food due to similar reasons.
If you’re referring to the fact that alcohol is a diuretic, then just say that. that’s basically a myth in the popular understanding. A drink has to be fairly strong to dehydrate you. A beer will probably hydrate you. But it might vary by person for stronger beers.
The drinks we are discussing here are extremely weak and definitely going to hydrate you.
> Even if that’s true it’s not at all related with alcohol being a replacement for water. It’s like if someone if in 400+ years decided that most people in the 2000s only ate supplements instead of actual food due to similar reasons.
Then maybe read my whole post where I explicitly said they drank a lot of dirty water
Alcohol is a duretic, that is no myth. Vasopressin/ADH inhibition is well documented and studied. You are talking out of your ass about hydration by alcohol. Even miniscule amounts of alcohol increase duresis via supression of ADH.
I too have heard about the theory about how alcohol was safer to drink than water, however, a lot of literature also points to the fact that aclohol was consumed mostly for inebriation.
Alcohol being a diuretic is not a myth. All Alcoholic drinks being enough of a diuretic to dehydrate you is. A small beer that is less than 1% is definitely not going to net dehydrate you. The alcohol is still a diuretic, but it does not offset the fact that you’re also consuming a large amount of water in the drink.
Your reference to “literature” is not correct. The drinks being discussed here were incredibly weak, and were often given to folks like workers and children. Definitely not to get drunk. That is not to say there wasn’t other alcoholic drinks that people consumed for the purpose of getting drunk.
It has nothing to do with alcohol though. Unfiltered and unpasteurized weak beer will go bad in a few days even if you have a fridge.
It was boiling that kills the bacteria and people knew that it improved the “quality” of water that wasn’t safe to drink.
I wonder if people in a few hundred years will think that we drank so much coke/etc. because tap water was dirty an polluted with lead. Because that sounds about as silly as this myth..
Ambiguous. Smaller ABV will still have some effect. Small beers were typically started at 10% ABV and brought down. Other alcohols were typically made strong and then diluted with plain water. Boiling is of course good.
Also, people regularly drink bottled beverages to avoid unsafe water conditions. A light Beer is actually one of the very safest things you can drink because the carbonation makes it very unlikely that they’re not giving you a refilled bottle while traveling
Germ theory wasn't widespread throughout the time period we're talking about, so they wouldn't have been able to give the reasoning that we would about why clean water is important or how alcohol acts as a disinfectant.
However, the Small beer Wikipedia page says that very large quantities of these drinks were consumed
> It was common for workers who engaged in laborious tasks to drink more than ten imperial pints (5.7 litres) of small beer a day to quench their thirst
And that it was believed to be good for people
> "For the drink of the more robust children water is preferable, and for the weaker ones, small beer"
The fact that aqua vitae means "water of life" is also evidence for this.
To make beer, you boil the wort, after fermentation the finished beer keeps for sometime and you can taste when it’s gone off. Also hops is a preservative.
The claim is simply that people drank large volumes of alcoholic beverages across history and an important reason for that was it was generally safer to drink than water.
It shouldn’t be particularly crazy or controversial
It's not in there, I just read the articles. Maybe the point is about how low alcohol beer was commonly drunken, though I'm not sure how that relevant either.
> what about the billions of uneducated rural people today that get along fine without treated water and don't drink wine or beer?
Less than 1 billion now without reliable nearby access to clean water[0], and "get along fine" is dubious - an estimated 1.4 million people died in 2019 from unsafe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (more than 500000 from drinking water specifically) [1].
I agree the world is complex and there isn't one way people did everything.
That said, 1) the English mass-adopted tea for reasons other than cost (cost just enabled it), 2) for water in the field, canteens had been around for thousands of years (horns, animal skins, wooden cups, buckets, pots, kettles, etc) and there is tons of writing of farm hands being brought water in the field by womenfolk, 3) nobody understood the concept of hydration or electrolytes, but they did think beer makes you grow stronger and more invigorated, just like they thought of wine... farmers in the American colonies would have drank switchel rather than low beer. Another similar drink in ancient times was posca, mostly drank as a cheap alternative to wine, because water is so boring even flavored vinegar is more enjoyable. And then you break off into the medicinal cordials which were a product of wanting to improve your health, as opposed to the common myth "they couldn't figure out how to get clean water so they had to drink X". We're the same today, with our flavored vitamin waters and kombuchas. We don't actually need to drink these things, and our health will be fine without them, but we enjoy making up stories for ourselves, "health remedies", etc, and we enjoy different flavors.
>"they couldn't figure out how to get clean water so they had to drink X"
Anything sound absurd when you misrepresent what's actually said. No one is saying that "they couldn't figure out how to get clean water" just that the water was dirty and beer was healthier because boiling the water was part of the brewing process and being beer meant it stayed clean for a while, whereas just boiled water reverts to being unclean pretty quickly.
This is made up. Most people had access to clean water, and water that we might today consider dirty, they didn't. (municipal water today is often "dirtier" than some fresh water sources were back then. even today, when natural habitats are restored to their pristine forms, many rivers and streams become clean enough to drink from)
> beer was healthier because boiling the water was part of the brewing process and being beer meant it stayed clean for a while
I'll grant you they knew that boiling water made it healthier, but if they just needed to drink a healthier version of their water source they could have drank boiled water. They drank beer because beer is tasty (and because it was basically liquid bread)
> whereas just boiled water reverts to being unclean pretty quickly
This is made up. Boiled water put into a clean vessel with a lid stays clean. Anybody with a kettle (any person for 3,000+ yrs...) can tell you that.
Until the 19th/20th century, nobody thought this way about water or beer. All of these things were made up after people finally realized that water could have pathogens. The whole idea is an anachronism.
They could, and water was free and did not need heat unlike table beer. In 1300 europe was 45Million strong, i guarantee you you had enough clean, fresh water for everybody as long as you did not live in a city. I'm pretty sure cities created pipe system around that time too. The issue with spirits and table beer was it needed heating, and that was costly. It probably was still one of the cheapest way to ingest grain, so from late autumn to early spring, people drank a lot of "beer porridge" for lack of a better term, but hydration was done with clean water.
Real, filtered table beers didn't really exist until the first industrial revolution (coal did help make it cheaper).
Who said anything about "filtered"? We're talking about watered-down beer here (or rather, to put a fine point on it, beered-up water.) In other words, grog, but with [whatever spirit is commonly produced locally] instead of rum.
> The issue with spirits and table beer was it needed heating, and that was costly.
Let's walk through the lifecycle of a small beer here, because I think you're conflating a decentralized economic logistical workflow as if it was all the responsibility of one dude.
A local brewer/distiller makes high-proof beer/spirits. Which does require heating, sure, but just once, when making the batch.
Then pub/tavern-keepers buy those high-proof spirits, by the caskful. They can let them sit around forever until they use them up, despite the casks not being particularly sanitary, because these wholesale spirits' high alcohol content and low water content prevents spoilage indefinitely. So they're good investments, something they're willing to put money up front for. (And these large infusions of revenue — perhaps even on a predictable contractual basis, for something like a tavern — are how the brewer stays in business, despite the expense of burning wood/coal to brew.)
Each day, any given tavern-keeper might fetch a barrel of fresh-ish creek/well/lake water. Might be infectious, might not. Even fresh creek water can have Giardia.
When a tavern keeper wants to serve someone small beer, they take a mug of the creek water, measure out a jigger of the high-proof spirit, and stir it in. The alcohol content kills whatever might be in the water, and if it's something like beer, probably maybe makes it taste better, too.
The creek water will spoil in a tavern-kitchen environment, but that's fine: it's just water. Treat it as grey water at the end of the night — use it for dishes or whatever. Maybe take some for boiling puddings in. Dump the rest on your garden.
This is basically the same logic as fountain drinks. A central provider spends a bunch of ahead-of-time effort to make a bunch of concentrated syrup that's too high-sugar and low-water-content to ever spoil. Then restaurant owners buy this, and combine it just-in-time with water to produce drinks.
Well the nation state we are talking about here is Russia. They are known to do things like invade countries, hack US systems and emails and on. Their behaviour seems weird to me but they have form.
It's quite likely Unit 29155 of the Russian GRU, who did the Skipal poisonings and blew up an arms dump in Finland. I think they saw Albert Averyanov, the son of the brigade commander mucking about with equipment in a van outside one of the attacks.
The value is in disruption. Headaches are not just headaches, but also intimidation and harassment. When there is a person working a case important to a state actor, if that person is delayed a week due to a health problem, that case is delayed a week. If they develop permanent health issues and have to leave, the case starts from zero with a new investigator.
The technology is unprecedented and doesn't provoke retaliation because the US either can't prove it happened or won't declassify documents to show the technology exists. All the other, more conventional methods can be easily traced and retaliated
Supposedly this “weapon” had been put in place by the Russians who had used the
Cubans as a proxy, maybe if not the Russians then the Chinese, either way, one of these two big nuclear powers that had almost nothing to fear from the Americans. Or so I gathered by reading “between the lines” when this story first broke out.
This logic is good as a first approximation but completely breaks down in situations like this. In geopolitics there are simply so many unknown variables that it is completely inscrutable from the outside. Plus, state actors do seemingly dumb and irrational things all the time.
Also, maybe the FUD caused was a desirable outcome in its own right.
You know, the sort of weapon everyone agrees is not possible or feasible at this stage.
And definitely not a hysterical reaction based on some people who faked the most common symptoms ever and tried to make it look like something it wasn't by saying "it' s affecting intelligence assets".
I have Havana syndrome on a regular basis. But not being an intelligence assets, I get no compensation and no sensationalist article in the press praising my incredible bravery and feeling sorry for me.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.”
As the article states, studies have found (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-havan...) no clear correlation of self-reported Havana syndrome with any physical indications. I vaguely recall an old article where they did some brain scans of Havana syndrome patients, and found “abnormalities”, but did not compare these scans against any sort of control group.
One of those things. A guy I work with who I (still) consider to be highly intelligent and down to earth insists he was affected by tests of this in a well known and highly populated metropolitan area, which is well known in that community to have been a target area of directed energy weapons.
I didn't believe any of this when I first heard about it but I'm now a skeptic believer. He was able to explain, in detail, what he felt - both physically and mentally - and could name when they happened and for how long.
He underwent a bunch of medical and physiological tests as he didn't know what it was at first, mostly because it started to impact his relationship. I'm not sure he even knew about the whole thing until he started searching around on the web for his symptoms and came across others in the same neighborhood where it happened, claiming to have reported similar things.
I brushed it off at first as it seemed clear it must have been something else, but it didn't help that in literally every other aspect he's an empirical, grounded, down to Earth and totally intelligent person, an expert in his technical field, etc.
Still not sure where I stand on it as it's incredibly difficult to study or even justify scientifically. I'm still not even convinced it was "directed energy". But I do at least believe people who say they've been affected by whatever it was. It's certainly lessened his quality of life, whatever it is.
It's worth emphasising in cases like this that even an individual experiencing completely phsycosomatic ('all in their head') symptoms is still experiencing real symptoms. That is, rejecting the idea that your friend's symptoms are caused by energy weapons is not rejecting the idea that he is experiencing negative effects (which to be clear, may still have an 'external' cause)
Just to add some context about how extreme psychosomatic stuff can be, one of my friends experienced significant pain at seemingly random parts of his body throughout college, and almost dropped out because it interfered do strongly with his studies. He had physical bruising, which I saw. We did an internship as a team one year, because we had similar interests and I could “be the hands”. It was a long arduous saga. Turns out it was all in his head, he has to just ignore it and convince himself it wasn’t real. He still has occasional pains that he is very suspicious of, it’s very hard to tell when he’s really unwell or his mind is just tricking him.
Another example/generalization of this is the opposite of the placebo effect, the nocebo. [1] A person is able to suffer real and measurable effects, up to and including death, based on their belief and expectation of such effects. A well studied example of this is in terminal cancer where patients will die of no clear cause long before the cancer, or any other related effect, could have killed them. The mind is extremely powerful.
Yes exactly my point - I'm not sure what it was that caused these experiences. I fully believe that he experienced them and they're affecting him, though. I also believe him when he says they were external.
>Seattle, which is well known in that community to have been a target area of directed energy weapons.
This statement needs to be qualified. Unless there was a development breakthrough, energy weapons are still theoretical. Much less for them to be utilized so widely for specific communities of the public to become "well known" targets.
> Unless there was a development breakthrough, energy weapons are still theoretical
More precisely, energy weapons that cause the specific set of things in Havana syndrome.
Lasers, focused ultrasound, and ADS all count in the broader category and have been developed to the level of getting tested by law enforcement and military — it's just that none of them do anything like Havana syndrome.
There is also the microwave auditory effect, but from what I've read it requires a peak (not average) power so high you'd have to hold the magnetron from a high-end microwave oven against your ear for the effect to be strong enough to do what's been reported.
(This is also why that never got developed past research: in practice it would kill people well before the sound became an annoyance).
Are these the same people who think they're being gang stalked? Because I know that those guys sometimes think that there are microwave weapons being used on them.
Direct energy weapons have existed for years. Blinding lasers and pain-inducing microwave rays are both direct energy weapons that are known to exist and have been used "in anger."
Importantly however, this doesn't mean that any random embassy jackass claiming to be a victim of one actually was.
could you share any links you have? I'm fascinated by the whole saga of Havana syndrome, plus I live in Seattle. I'm on the skeptical side but my mind is open.
Highly intelligent people are still susceptible to conspiracy thinking. It only takes one person who is delusional or read about Havana syndrome to influence everyone else. Then they believe it and soon it is “well known in community”.
But they can’t know it was directed energy weapon because there is no evidence just rumors. There isn’t evidence that directed energy weapons exist or cause those symptoms. Does everyone even have the same symptoms? How did they determine the area? How did the rule out chemicals or other causes?
Finally, testing in Seattle doesn’t make sense. It is too dangerous to be discovered, and easier to test where won’t be noticed. Also, using public means can’t collect reliable results.
Directed energy weapons exist. They are huge class of weapons, from millimeter wave to sonic to lasers. The ones you mentioned are big, mounted on top of vehicles. Since commenter didn't mention symptoms, we can't tell if some kind can produce symptoms or if they are similar to Havana syndrome.
> If everyone says that the targets are delusional, it seems 100% safe to test it anywhere.
You are missing the point. It is super risky for foreign powers or US to test in public in Seattle. It is too easy for it to be discovered. Like they get into a car accident. Or someone takes a picture. We are getting this second hand, but it is strange that no one has taken a picture of suspicious van.
Also, testing in public is less useful because can't get detailed results. They might be able to tell something happened but not what without talking to the victims. Controlled tests give reliable results.
1,500 cases, and only 80 in this (supposedly the largest) study? Released just after an intelligence agency report said "nothing to see here?" Are we really so naive as to be trusting intelligence agencies at their word now? :-\
Smells a lot like counter-intel. It's a common tactic to use "friendly" scientists to release dismissive reports that shut down public debate on certain topics. People trust scientists ("studies have found" is all you need say), so this can be a very effective technique.
Closing the NIH studies only strengthens the smell. Why study something (and risk the 'wrong' information getting out) when you can commit misconduct and then use your own misconduct as an excuse to shut down the investigation?
> that showed micro damage all over the brain of some victims.
How you do this accurately without a biopsy or autopsy is a good question. The other one is are we sure these people aren't making "lifestyle" choices that are contributing to their health problems?
> 1500 people is truly a large number.
Given the size of the civil service, this would be close to the number of people with undisclosed drug problems, I would expect.
I’m not sure, you should look up functional neurological disorder (FND). It’s very much a real disorder, but it’s 100% causes by our subconscious brains. There are honest people who just suddenly lose the ability to walk *or even go blind*.
I’m kind of convinced that if there is a symptom, our brains can probably cause it.
What if it is an orbiting particle accelerator? Edward Teller suggested such a thing in the 1980s. It would explain both the worldwide occurrences and deep penetration into brain matter.
I assume the CIA is trying to save a buck by pulling healthcare money from someone else’s line item. Also, by forcing people to do this it makes it easier for national adversaries to figure out who is in the CIA. To hide information like this you need to inject randomness.
This is probably an unpopular opinion and I don't know if it applies in this case, but I'm pretty convinced that a lot of instances like this are social contagions running wild.
Every few years in the city I live in there's a sudden uptick in reports of drinks getting spiked at local bars. I've seen the mere suggestion that there's a risk of heightened risk of getting roofied at a bar make otherwise intelligent people paranoid or start using it as an excuse for their over-indulgence. And of course, there is never any concrete evidence - nothing shows up in bloodwork, nobody is ever caught doing it... the chatter just eventually fades away.
This is obviously a different situation, but I'm weary of the massive scope this has taken on with so little concrete evidence that anything was actually happening. Maybe I'm totally wrong, or maybe it was a real phenomenon that many others hitched onto later on (seems even more plausible.) The point is that we seem to increasingly discount how much incentives and social dynamics play a role in situations like this.
As sort of an exception that proves the rule thing, there was a real recent-ish case of (attempted) drink spiking in the LA area that demonstrates how it would actually go in real life vs the "unexplained mystery blackout while out drinking, must have been roofied by a stranger":
> An electronic search warrant of HSU's cellular phone device later revealed images and videos of HSU digitally penetrating the victim in an incapacitated state at various stages of their friendship, then dating relationship," Lt. Rudy Flores of the Santa Monica Police Department wrote in a press release, which follows.
Sounds like maybe he'd done it several times and then finally gotten caught.
I never understood why somebody would fuck around with spiking drinks with exotic drugs when they could simply ask the bartender to keep refilling the target's drink. Alcohol is by far the most likely drug to be used in these scenarios.
I'm certain it happens sometimes, but I doubt it's even a fraction of a percent of claimed cases.
I tend to agree. Humans are all about 98%the same and anything like this that causes issue should have had very similar symptoms across the board and it didn’t seem to and it shouldn’t have been that only a few from large groups were “affected” when it was reported. I think this is more of a mind over matter thing and where undiagnosed health issues got misreported. I think it was probably shut down not because of ethics but because it wasn’t real.
Most likely a funny woman or a woman who went out of her mind, then some people laughing and copying her as a joke. Then others see a group of people dancing uncontrollably and now you have rumors going around aaaand it's mass hysteria. Some maybe even copied it to other parts of town or restarting the next day in a kind of flashmob way. My 2 cents.
Apparently how powered radars are fairly common on US navy vessels, and injuries not uncommon from walking in front of them or otherwise being exposed. One would think there exists a body of knowledge on exposure to at least this sort of “high energy”?
There's definitely research. In fact, the US has the "Active Denial System", an experimental directed-energy weapon built on those principles whose effects have been studied on humans. It causes temporary pain, potentially thermal damage if left on for too long. One of the big reasons I'm skeptical of Havana Syndrome is that its symptoms are nothing at all like that.
Are you making up the "big reasons"? There is a wide spectrum of radio waves, and they have very different affects on living tissue. The one you speak about is a very specific slice of spectrum.
There's a wide spectrum of radio waves, so it's impossible to conclusively prove that there's no frequency which might be consistent with reports of Havana Syndrome, but nobody has proposed one and I see no strong reason to believe it exists. The microwave auditory effect is the closest I'm aware of, and my understanding is that it would explain only the weird audio perception.
Remember that this entire EM spectrum idea is the second proposed mechanism. When Havana Syndrome was getting off the ground, advocates thought it was a directed sonic attack - many of the early victims claimed to have recordings of it!
Look up ionizing radiation, that’s what you need short of sheer directed power. Obviously radio/microwave frequency waves can affect the flesh in concentrated enough power. However the symptoms from “Havana syndrome” are all over the place. We’re all just slabs of meat to some potential real version of this, and it should have been fairly similar symptoms across the board.
> However the symptoms from “Havana syndrome” are all over the place. We’re all just slabs of meat to some potential real version of this, and it should have been fairly similar symptoms across the board.
If you imagine a weapon that does some damage to whatever part of a person's brain it's aimed at, but not the whole brain, then it doesn't seem a leap to think that it could cause different symptoms in different people depending on how much damage gets done to which bits of the brain?
Not that I think there is some secret weapon in this case, I'm just responding to your point about people being the same as each other with the thought that surely brain damage could lead to a wide range of different symptoms.
Microwaves can do this. They can cause enough damage to cause effects to the brain without massive damage to skin. Some people did have vision problems btw.
But you are just distracting from the topic at hand. The system talked about above is 95 gigaherz and doesn't even penetrate the skin.
No, you are completely misunderstanding. Let's explain this again.
Original post talks about US "Active Denial System". This system works at 95 Gigaherz, which does not penetrate the skin.
Microwave beams are a different part of the spectrum, and definitely penetrate the skin, and the whole body. These are what were theorized to have been used against embassy staff.
I understand just fine but you're not making any sense. Microwaves powerful enough to cause brain damage would also cause visible skin damage. Some radiation may pass through the skin but some will be absorbed in it. What you're suggesting isn't physiologically possible.
> Microwaves powerful enough to cause brain damage would also cause visible skin damage.
Citation needed.
As a general idea, if you heat an area 20 degrees at the surface, slowly dropping as you get deeper, the skin will be unharmed but that's really bad for a brain.
You're bullshitting. You thought I was talking about ghz radiation, then go back to microwaves once I clarify. But putting that aside...
Is the brain not more sensitive to non-macroscopically visible damage than the eye and skin? And have no skin and eye damage been found? Have people not reported visual disturbances?
The engineer I used to work with said he would warm his hands with "spare" RF energy on a cold day. Just put your hands in front of the element and they warm up.
In any case.. the energy there is so high.. you can literally feel it happening to you.
I mean, you can see the effects of high-powered radar any time you use a microwave; certainly one can imagine how that could be used to harm a person. But if someone was firing high-powered anything at a US Embassy, there would be ways to detect it.
So last week there was a big Rolling Stone article bemoaning the CIA's lack of mental health support, and now this with a similar line.
> “They wanted us to be a lab rat for a week before we actually got treatment at Walter Reed — and at bare minimum, that is unethical and immoral,” Marc Polymeropoulos told CNN in May.
My money is on some combination of "comppletely made up" to "psychosomatic".
We see no better evidence of this than how cops treat fentanyl exposure. Cops act like if they're in the same room as fentanyl they might die. This has been perpetuated in media. Thing is, it's completely made up.
Fentanyl is no more dangerous to handle than talcum powder. I mean, don't ingest or inhale the powder. There are no "fumes" however.
But the cops themselves believe this to the point that they report oversdoses in the field and have legitimate panic attacks for fear of exposure [1].
Havana Syndrome was suspicious from the go. Just the association with Cuba screams CIA psy op.
Local news will still put on a crying puking fentanyl cop, and angrily defend the story against every doctor and scientist that objects. They don't care if it's true; if you don't believe it, you're anti-cop and pro-drug.
I think the need to produce "actual evidence" (physical) should be placed on those who believe Cuba has a magical weapon previously unknown to modern science.
The association with Cuba persists despite the official line now being that personnel in at least 96 different countries have been affected by Havana Syndrome. If it really is a secret weapon by the dastardly Communists then they must be deploying it all around the world, including in many friendly US-allied states, without anyone ever catching them in the act over nearly a decade. That's considerably less plausible than Cuba doing covert shenanigans around an embassy on their own soil.
> and the people who were interviewed on 60 Minutes? They were made up, too?
Some? Yes. Absolutely. But the point of pscyhosomatic symptoms is that it feels real. That person has become so convinced of something that they truly believe in their symptoms. It's not conscious.
> You cite all this irrelevant stuff about fentanyl,
It's not irrelavent. It shows just how powerful pscyhosomatic symptoms can be.
> Or do you have some actual evidence?
I don't need evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraodinary evidence. There were various claims with Havana Symdrome like "energy weapons". Even the more realistic "unknown substances" still requires something that wouldn't show up when looked for either in the physical presence of supposed victims or in toxicology.
If someone is making the claim that this happened to them, then the onus is on them to produce evidence, not on everyone else to disprove it.
So in the fentanyl case, there is motive to lie about it because it makes their job seem more dangerous than it actually is. The peceived danger of fentanyl is used to justify all sorts of things like questionable searches or even not doing your job (for fear of fentanyl exposure).
Havana Syndrome has similar motive concerns. Compensation, attention, sympathy, that sort of thing.
Even if the Havana Syndrome isn't entirely psychosomatic it likely has nothing to do with Cuba (just like the Spanish flu isn't particularly related to Spain). It has been found in other countries as well.
Respond to what's out there, then ask people to come up with something new. Putting "reasoning" in scare quotes is not an argument. Certainly fentanyl is more relevant than making up from whole cloth a quote about Cuba, then getting upset about it. And how did China get roped in again?
> Right now there seems to be an unnatural lack of curiosity about it from the government
Since the government has been forcing/coercing government workers into participating in research studies it seems they've been pretty curious about it.
I've seen a lot of reporting on it in the media too, even though there's not much known about it yet so it's not exactly being ignored.
The is a lack of curiosity because there is no evidence.
Microwave energy has been found many times to be directed at embassies (such as the Moscow signal), but it wouldn't be any form of weapon. Such transmissions would likely be RF power for passive bugs, radar, or jamming signals.
I find it hard to square the idea of a great government coverup with the story at hand, which is that the CIA was forcing people to participate in NIH studies that produce public papers.
What's to be curious about? There's no evidence of cool sci-fi stuff, no evidence of spy intrigue, according to the symptoms half thr people over the age of 35 have Havana syndrome (but no free healthcare). The only thing I'm curious about is when any of this is going to have evidence or matter.
This is quite obviously not a “real” syndrome caused by foreign adversaries. The physics, scale of “attack”, timeline, vagueness of symptoms, etc, all do not add up to a coherent phenomenon. Please put your skeptic hats on regarding this subject.
My friend described the original symptom cluster as "Havana few too many syndrome" (as in a few too many drinks), which I think is probably about right. From there it's just people working themselves into a panic over nothing, like american cops with fentanyl "exposure": https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-ov...
I find it funny when people write this off a psychosomatic. I find it similarly funny when people claim a conspiracy
I find the skeptical view that it would have to be some crazy science fiction "sick ray" kind of childish. The CIA literally had a "heart attack gun", and it was just a dumb dart gun with some drugs. It's easy to make simple technology sound wild and interesting and impossible. A weapon of this kind would either be very simple, or not. If it's an EM based weapon, there aren't a lot of dials to turn, so either there is a power/frequency combo that causes these effects, or not.
Likewise, I find the conspiratorial view that it definitely happened and there is some kind of cover up to hide either the weapon or some conflict pretty ridiculous. Partially for the same reasons outlined above (a weapon like this wouldn't be very interesting IMO), and partially because it took place in Cuba. Its obviously a somewhat adversarial nation. Something like this would normally be a news story for a week, if at all, then maybe be a footnote in some history books at most.
This whole episode was essentially a conspiracy theory that was taken seriously because the paranoid people who came up with it happened to be in positions of power and respect. Additionally, this whole milieu (DC gov/media) just automatically believed it because they feel like Russians are lurking behind every corner. If an average citizen went to the doctor and claimed these things they'd be shown to the psych ward.
if an average citizen claims they're being followed by government agents, they probably have paranoid schizophrenia. if a diplomat in an unfriendly host country claims the same, they probably are.
it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
Several comments are assuming the goal of the secret method is making someone sick. But as others have said, becoming sick may be a symptom of exposure, so the intended purpose is something else like surveillance. Here’s the problem though, this genie is already out of the bottle, even if something like this didn’t exist and the Havana syndrome is mass psychosis, someone I am sure is busy making a directed-energy surveillance mechanism because the “enemy may do it first”. Isn’t it possible to know what’s going on in the environment though, for example by using a spectrum analyzer, or detection methods for ultrasound?
How many of those reports were after they passed the HAVANA Act, which grants significant compensation (up to one years salary) to any personnel who were affected by this vaguely defined condition with no known cause and no definitive physical indicators?