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‘Havana syndrome’ and the mystery of the microwaves
- markpapadakis 5y agoThis is a great related podcast episode: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/havana-syndrome/ https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/havana-syndrome/
- tiahura 5y agoI would assume that shortly after Havana, most embassies installed equipment to detect sonic or microwave blasts. Given that we haven’t heard anything about these sensors being tripped, I’m going to assume anything after Havana is mass hysteria.
- kritiko 5y agoYou’re absolutely right. One of the affected people claimed in an article that I read that they were attacked in the street in the middle of DC. If this tech exists and is really so portable, seems like you could do a lot more damage than just making some CIA and State Department employees retire early.
- ImPostingOnHN 5y agobelieve it or not, denying enemy spies from operating in a location, either directly, or via fear of direct action, is really useful for your own covert operations
- kritiko 5y agohttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/are-us-officials-under-silent-attack https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/are-us-officia... This New Yorker article from May alleges that somebody was hit on the grounds of the White House, one of the most heavily surveilled areas of the world... it's really hard for me to accept that there is a secret, highly portable tech that leaves no clear evidence and this is how it's being used.
- ImPostingOnHN 5y agothere are more things in this world, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy technology-wise, we humans are just fancy cavemen with fire (also, we don't know that this is portable)
- tiahura 5y agoSo, we should call the Ghostbusters?
- aaron695 5y agoSorry but you should be downvoted for comments like these. They have actual recordings. It sounds like crickets to those being attacked. This article says it's safe to listen to the noise, but be careful - https://apnews.com/article/health-north-america-ap-top-news-cuba-health-mystery-international-news-88bb914f8b284088bce48e54f6736d84 https://apnews.com/article/health-north-america-ap-top-news-... You can't explain things like this.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agowhy the downvotes? mass hysteria is the most likely explanation, and would still be even if you had evidence of a couple non-hysteria related cases (Such is the power of nocebos), but we don't even have that.
- Theory5 5y agoIt would be a likely explaination... if mass hysteria resulted in brain damage.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoFirst, I don't know of any "brain damage"; and second, yes, it can result in brain damage. Simplest way, by inducing insomnia, but there are many others.
- oxymoran 5y agoWhy would you assume that we would hear anything if the sensors were tripped? It would be considered an act of war and would promote real hysteria in the general population if that were the case. It’s far more plausible that it was an attack that is being covered up for national security purposes.
- macinjosh 5y agoBased on what evidence?
- thatjoeoverthr 5y agoIf it’s safe to pretend it’s not happening than it isn’t a useful attack. If they can detect it, they should be able to apply some kind of countermeasure, shielding or (if necessary) threat or sanction.
- kritiko 5y agoIf it's being covered up why have NY Times, New Yorker, etc. covered this extensively with quotes from the alleged victims?
- mbg721 5y agoThis seems like the opposite of a cover-up; media outlets are loudly and repeatedly covering this Mysterious Threat, and even gave it a catchy name.
- macinjosh 5y agoThis 1000%. I have been following this story closely and there has been no evidence of anything happening except symptomatic reports from government staff. It is all paranoia about Russian brain rays. Incredible.
- api 5y agoThe biggest mystery to me is why the hell someone would do this. What are they gaining? Are they trying to frame someone else? Just disrupt operations? For the spy vs spy lulz? Second biggest mystery is how they haven't just triangulated these. Someone in signals intelligence told me once that signal jamming is not a big problem on the battlefield because a signal jammer is also a bright RF beacon that says "shoot missile here." Seems like this should be the same. A microwave beam powerful or weirdly modulated enough to do this should also be an arrow that says "send camo dudes with big guns here." That's definitely going to happen if you are targeting the Vice President. Or maybe it did happen and it's secret.
- oxymoran 5y agoThis is why: “ Five years on, reports now number in the hundreds and, the BBC has been told, span every continent, leaving a real impact on the US's ability to operate overseas. ”
- Emma_Goldman 5y agoExactly. Russia's modus operandi for dealing with the West is asymmetric warfare designed to interrupt, hamstring and confuse, without ever crossing the line into conventional warfare - which Russia cannot finance or win. This would fit neatly into that category, not that I have any idea of who is responsible. The point is that if there is an attacker, the motives are far from inscrutable.
- alistaira 5y agoFor the second, I get the impression that this is less of a case of a building being bathed in EM radiation (as a jammer might) but (excuse my unscientific attempt at this description) several beams of EM radiation creating a superposition at their point of intersection in 3D space. The latter case would be harder to triangulate as you'd need to have multiple detectors positioned along each beam line in order to determine the range of each emitter.
- JoshTko 5y agoMany possible reasons. If Russia is behind this, it's a great proof of concept test of low traceable weapon that can target and disable high value targets of relatively high profile.
- thatjoeoverthr 5y agoWhere’s the part where they send a device to detect microwaves or sonic waves, and find them? How come it doesn’t occur to journalists to ask this? As per the article, they found the signal in Moscow, and there weren’t even symptoms to prompt them to do so. Another commenter mentioned “triangulation”. It’s less than that. There is no reported observation of a signal of any kind. History Channel “ghost hunters” are more serious than this.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoYep, detecing microwaves is easy, and the equipment cheap and available to everyone (relatively cheap, compared to other stuff embassys buy). Depending on the frequency, it should be detectable even with $10 rtl-sdr sticks with direct sampling. I'm fairly sure that most electrical engineering students could find out if their dorm rooms were targeted by microwaves, so why not the embassy of one of the richest and most powerfull countries in the world?
- akyu 5y agoThey do detect them.
- jjoonathan 5y agoSo what do they find when they send people to the originating location?
- tyingq 5y agoUnoccupied waters where a ship might have once been?
- thatjoeoverthr 5y agoMystery solved..?
- akyu 5y agoYou're assuming that they would get an answer if they asked those questions. I highly doubt that.
- yann2 5y ago> few people know the full picture In large orgs this always translates to no one knows shit. Anyway I am pretty sure its a sophon doing its thing.
- roberto2016 5y ago+1
- cwizou 5y agoThat article was much more informative than I thought it would be, there's some interesting background on previous public research on the topic of microwaves, but what was completely new to me was the fact that such cases go back decades. Slight off topic, but I do see a bit of a parallel between medical teams claiming that those are psychogenic illnesses and the way "long covid" has been considered by some practicians. There's a bit of "if we can't measure it, you must be (unconsciously) making it up". It's rationally convenient. In the "Havana Syndrome" case, the article claims that some blood markers have been found recently that correlate with brain damage (as long as measurements are done immediately), which certainly helps. But the mix of secrecy inherent to diplomacy and classical governmental bureaucracy makes considering it psychogenic a very satisfying solution to push the problem aside for years.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- saul_goodman 5y agoThere have been reports of this happening around the whitehouse in recent times as well.
- madengr 5y agoMicrowaves strong enough to do physical damage are trivial to detect. Sheesh, just deploy a few spectrum analyzers on max hold. Either it’s not RF, or someone is doing a lousy job.
- belter 5y agoMaybe somebody was playing with the current or future generation of the portable continuous wave generator we know the NSA has...Things got out of hand? Surely there is one deployed in each Embassy? See as of 57 min and 32 sec: https://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2013/mp4-web/30c3-5713-en-To_Protect_And_Infect_Part_2_h264-hq.mp4 https://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2013/mp4-web/30c3-5713-en-... Edit: In case you missed the detail...From the slide shown at 58 min and 35 sec notice it says up to...1 Kilowatt
- pjc50 5y agoDo you have a textual reference as well please? But that would be a plausible reason for why nobody gets to the bottom of this: they do find the source, but are immediately informed that it's a classified US weapon and they're not allowed to talk about it. Including telling their fellow US embassy employees who are experiencing headaches.
- formerly_proven 5y agoIt's not uncontroversial at all that microwaving people leads to health problems (the article seems to act like that's a contested idea, it is not). The US also has microwave weapons, not secret at all, even approved for use on humans and apparently also used in the US prison system (did they get the paperwork for use on animals?). Obviously, any CW-capable transmitter may be used for microwaving things, as long as it is sufficiently robust and outputs enough power somewhere in the GHz-range (preferentially). Within that range, anything works really. Penetration goes way down as you increase frequency, but that doesn't have to be a problem. The US Active Denial System uses 95 GHz radiation (at up to 100 kW) to selectively burn the upper 0.3 mm of skin, because this tends to discourage folks from sticking around, for example. This is also why microwaves are 2.4 GHz (besides this being an ISM band), it gives you just the right penetration depth to be quite useful at evenly cooking stuff.
- belter 5y agoNSA ANT catalog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog This is the target of the RF flooding... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog#/media/File:NSA_RAGEMASTER.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog#/media/File:NS...
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoInterestingly enough in the unexplainable podcast episode a doctor suggested a functional disorder- when the brain reroutes itself and assumes it’s damaged when it’s not. It seemed to a layperson, myself, more reasonable than a superweapon deployed internationally that fucks with but doesn’t kill people.
- ganzuul 5y agoA previously unknown functional disorder that stumps the government experts but this guy has figured it out, presumably from his armchair? It seems to me that this is a person who thinks they can explain everything as a consequence of their field of expertise.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoI say something like this every time I see a Havana syndrome article, but their summaries of the US National Academies of Sciences report is just ridiculous. >The panel looked at psychological and other causes, but concluded that directed, high energy, pulsed microwaves were most likely responsible for some of the cases, The panels ruling on a psychological cause was basically "all the available evidence fits it being a psychological cause, but as we didn't specifically test for that we can't rule it's the cause." How they completely ignored that and ruled microwaves the most likely cause is a mystery.
- coliveira 5y agoIt is not a mystery, the media is creating a narrative, and acknowledging this fact would prevent them from continuing this narrative that seems to be profitable. Now, millions of people around the world believe in the existence of a mysterious "Havana syndrome", and will continue reading articles that try to "investigate" it.
- Theory5 5y agoBut a psycological cause wouldnt result in the damage found on the victims, right? Didn't one doctor who examined some of these people describe damage that looked like "a concussion without a concussion"? I.e. damage to the brain you'd see on people who had conxussions, but they experienced no physical trauma?
- boomboomsubban 5y ago>But a psycological cause wouldnt result in the damage found on the victims, right? A psychological cause absolutely could have physical effects. It'd be really hard to develop an ethical experiment to test if these specific injuries could have a psychological cause, but other damage has had such a cause. Also, like two people had concussion like brain scans without knowing they had a concussion. They could have just unknowingly had a concussion, it's not like they had brain scans before and after the "attack" to compare. This would have been part of the evidence the panel ruled could fit a psychological cause anyway.
- bjourne 5y agoOd that Robert Baloh who with his colleague Robert Bartholomew has written a whole book on the subject - Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria - is only mentioned in passing. The author of the BBC article clearly believes that the microwave theory is more interesting than the mass psychogenic illness theory. I think it's embarrassing that mainstream media is selling this nonsensical story. If it was some Trumpist outlet pushing it, it would have been rightly deemed a baseless conspiracy theory.
- Theory5 5y agoHow many psycogenic illnesses are known to cause physical damage?
- ladyattis 5y agoWhy do folks keep insisting it's microwaves that cause the illness when no one has found any physical evidence for that? This is just such a hysterical nonsense story in my opinion all meant to grab attention with nothing to show for it.
- tomxor 5y agoHas anyone noticed this kind of sound at certain positions when swimming around a boat with it's radar on near shore? Just anecdotal I don't know for sure, but I've experienced it a couple of times, at first thinking it was dolphins or whales, but it's more of a continuous noise and seems quite positional as if it is a reflection and superposition... pretty much all boats have some kind of radar that operate in the microwave frequency range, so it seems like a strong candidate for the source. It wasn't so strong to be nauseating, just noticeable and weird sounding... then again I wasn't trying to sleep through it.
- coliveira 5y agoThe explanation of why these cases are increasing is simple: mass hysteria caused by articles that pretend to investigate something they don't know anything about.
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y agoI am a little bit skeptical about the microwave theory. The transmitters would have to be very powerful and very close by. Also, the signal would be very easy to detect with a cheap receiver. Since this problem seems to be around for a while, I would assume that embassies would be equipped with receivers.