11 ms·

Explanations for the Havana Syndrome

111 points by firebaze 5y ago

api 5y ago
Any energy weapon seems unlikely. I recall asking a signals intelligence person once if jamming is ever a problem on battlefields. He said no because any jammer is emitting a signal and that tends to also say “fire missile here.” Same would apply in this situation I would guess.
- not-elite 5y ago
  Sounds right. [1] The mission patch is hilarious. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel
- dendrite9 5y ago
  I felt a little dumb reading this, it just wasn't something I had thought about much. But radiating is useful location information even if you cannot tell what is being sent out. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-ground-forces-look-like-to-an-electronic-warfare-system-and-why-its-a-big-deal https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-gro...
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Oh wow > Brose describes an incident in which someone, likely a member of Russia's intelligence community, spuriously called the mother of a Ukrainian commander and told her that her son was dead. She then hurriedly called his unencrypted cell phone to try to confirm whether this was true. When he called her back to tell everything was okay, Russian troops geolocated his forces' positions from his cell phone signal and hit them with a rocket artillery barrage, killing him in the process.
redis_mlc 5y ago
[dead]
culturthrowaway 5y ago
RIP Terry
thrower123 5y ago
It sounds like the DTs, or maybe a really wild hangover.
- dustintrex 5y ago
  For what it's worth, alcoholism is a well known occupational disease for diplomats. Repeated tours to unfriendly host countries, isolation from friends and family, and a significant part of the job is hanging out at boring cocktail parties.
  - fnord77 5y ago
    Perhaps the local hooch has toxic byproducts
    - jhugo 5y ago
      It certainly does, because ethanol does
    - CTDOCodebases 5y ago
      I was thinking along the same lines. Have they ruled out poisoning?
dkdk8283 5y ago
Still unsolved?
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Rather the answer the cia wants published hasn't come around to be popular enough yet so they gotta keep pushing it even when the Pentagon itself discarded the existence of such a syndrome as mere mass psychosis mixed with disinformation clandestine operations to drive animosity against US enemies such as well.. Cuba
- neom 5y ago
  The Canadian government is still denying new cases in Canadian diplomats since 2018: https://globalnews.ca/news/7809823/havana-syndrome-canadian-recent-cases/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7809823/havana-syndrome-canadian-...
derbOac 5y ago
Not trying to discredit any particular hypothesis — if I were forced to bet I'd probably bet on something involving physical harm from adversaries — but the idea of using normal controls to investigate a psychosomatic hypothesis has always seemed a little off. Normal controls are reasonable, but wouldn't you want to compare individuals to a group with psychosomatic diagnoses as well? I would probably expect a group of individuals with psychosomatic problems to look different from normal controls also.
- woopwoop 5y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking reading that section as well.
bb123 5y ago
The thing is, as touched on in the article, microwaves and ultrasound are trivially easy to detect. So if it was either of those I expect it would have been measured pretty quickly by even the most cursory investigation. Which I think means the most likely explanation is that it’s a solved phenomenon, but the information just hasn’t been made public.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Narrow beams, pulsed at different windows per night, noise floor from other nearby legitimate sources, etc. Could have been harder to detect than you might think.
  - TeeMassive 5y ago
    Beams bounces
    - tyingq 5y ago
      If I understand correctly, the buildings are mostly stone and concrete. And sit on the waterfront, so the beams could have been from ships that can come and go.
- grayfaced 5y ago
  One explanation for ultrasound/microwave is that it's for powering a recording device. If it's solved secret, I would expect them to locate and remove/disable the devices. Then at that point the signals should stop shortly after because there is no point in powering devices that are no longer working.
  - bongoman37 5y ago
    Not a spook, but often known devices are not removed because they are a great way to pass on false information. If you know they are listening and they don't know you know they are listening, you could have fake meetings with fake information for them to waste their resources on.
krisoft 5y ago
> During the cold war, the US embassy in Moscow was permanently radiated by microwaves, presumably by the Soviets. No one knows exactly why, but the speculation is that it was for surveillance or counter-surveillance and not designed to cause health damage. Is this really a “no one knows” situation? The Great Seal bug[1] was in the Moscow embassy and it needed microwave irradiation to function. We also know that the USA suspected that their new embassy building had similar devices planted in the walls. [2] 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) 2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/06/18/unbeatable-bugs-the-moscow-embassy-fiasco/5bb6dcbf-0a61-4948-a953-e2d81085ed05/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/06/18/u...
- oliv__ 5y ago
  Perhaps, it's because of this: https://mdsafetech.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/biological-effects-of-millimeter-wavelengths.-zalyubovskaya-declassif-by-cia-1977-biol-eff-mm-waves.pdf https://mdsafetech.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/biological-ef...
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    How do the power levels, wavelengths etc. compare to the body scanners at airports?
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > Is this really a “no one knows” situation? FYI: There's a cultural gap with Gen Z. You can't assume that anybody knows anything anymore, no exaggeration. There's also shifting goalposts with government departments that confuses people - it used to be that TLA's focused on foreigners, but in the US they've all been turned on residents.
harry8 5y ago
So putting a faraday cage like thing in your hat would protect from this, if we believe it, right? So all the CIA needs to do is have a standard issue hat. Lined with the right stuff. Tinfoil is probably the right thing for many reasons.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Doesn't ventilate well. 2mm mesh should work fine.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  A faraday cage must be enclosed metal all around. A hat has a big hole where the head goes :) I don't think it will function as one. Microwaves are very prone to bouncing. It should significantly reduce the signal strength though.
  - IanSanders 5y ago
    Can also trap reflected waves inside and focus them right in the middle
Sporktacular 5y ago
What no one seems to be connecting is revelations about the NSA-SCS presence in US embassies, including the one in Cuba, to the microwave theory. The RF spectrum around those sites are probably the world's most monitored places in the world, done so by some of the most sensitive instruments available. If this was due to microwaves, the USG would know it, and it would now be too politically difficult to hide or ignore. So we would know it by now too.
fnord77 5y ago
Preexisting neurological disorders + mass hysteria + wildcard (jet lag, bad water, etc)
ratsbane 5y ago
I was in Havana in January, 2017, around the time that this was happening. I walked around the US embassy one day. The weather was sunny but cold and windy; the embassy is on the Malecón, the seafront that stretches around Havana, and waves were crashing over the walls. It was unpleasant. I had never heard of the "Havana Syndrome" thing then, but in describing that day in my notes, I wrote that there was a feeling of pressure from the wind and sea spray. In hindsight, I wonder if this sort of weather condition contributed to perceptions of this syndrome. In videos I took that day you can sense this from the wind noise.
- s5300 5y ago
  I wonder if specific wind patterns could be causing a building wide Vic Tandy's Ghost in the Machine - which is a great read for any HN viewer... (I would link, but most results are of a PDF & linking those never goes well for me) tl:dr standing waveforms and infrasound can do some strange things to humans.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24236415_A_Ghost_in_the_Machine https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24236415_A_Ghost_in... (scroll down - for some reason the author listed above and the authors listed in the doc don't match)
stefantalpalaru 5y ago
"The report said the diplomats’ illnesses coincided with increased fumigation in and around residences where they lived. One of the authors of the study, the professor Alon Friedman, clarified in an email to Reuters that both Canadian and Cuban authorities were fumigating." - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/havana-syndrome-mosquitos-cuba-diplomats https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/havana-syndrom...
jonnycomputer 5y ago
re: the mri paper discussed, I haven't read it, but between-group comparisons of that sort are always prone to confounding variables--you can try to match on things like race, gender, social status, age, iq, and diagnoses, etc. but its hard to know whether you've matched everything you need to do. My recommendation is a longitudinal design. Mass brain scans of diplomatic staff at yearly intervals. You'll want to control for age-related changes, though there won't be that many over the course of one or two years, and other things, like covid, which seems to reduce grey matter quite substantially.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Yeah, Even more, it's confounded by picking a control group and a study group and then asking "what's different?" without necessarily knowing why X should be different. What reason do they have to think white matter should be less? Afaik, none. It's something like p-hacking.
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    I'm inclined to agree with you. But, not having read the paper, they may have cited research that would discuss what sorts of damage would be likely to occur if it were a radio or sonic attack. I think that any radio or sonic attack would probably cause whole-brain damage, not localized lesions. Also white matter, gray matter volumes, DTI tract length and connectivity measures would be the first things I would look at for this sort of thing, so its not necessarily like you are p-hacking by looking for outcome measures that happen to be significant. But again, haven't read the paper.
tiahura 5y ago
Microwave detectors are $29.99 on Amazon. I can’t image a scenario where the day after the initial reports of Havana Syndrome that Raytheon, Honeywell, L3 etc didn’t sell the State Department billions of sensors for our embassies. Yet, in all of the subsequent reporting, there’s never been confirmation of sensors being tripped. Mass hysteria still seems the most plausible.
grapevines 5y ago
I believe it’s a sort of satellite-mounted weapon, and not extricable in any way from full surveillance a la smartphone location or - even worse, multiple exploited access points thus triangulating location. I think it’s most logically a geo-stationary satellite, so wherever launches those might have more information about who might have a radio transmitter or two up there.
- ggm 5y ago
  This was Philip K Dicks persistent hallucination/psychosis. It has been a constant in SF culture since he wrote on it in "valis" and other novels. He was however, quite open about the hallucinatory qualities of his belief.
- crummy 5y ago
  are there satellites in geostationary orbits directly above these embassies? we could find them pretty easy, couldn't we?
  - detaro 5y ago
    You can't put geostationary satellites over random points of the globe, they have to be over the equator.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
ilikehurdles 5y ago
> let me know what you think in the comments. Followed by > comments on this blog are permanently closed
- spillguard 5y ago
  The blog post is a transcript of the video embedded near the top of the page, as it mentions, and the video itself has an open comments section.
RivieraKid 5y ago
The hard question is, if it's the Russians using a microwave weapon, which seems like the most likely explanation to me - how should the US react? This would be a very difficult situation.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  The real hard question is whether this is a physical phenomenon or a purely psychological one. The idea that we should speculate about "how should we respond?" before we've answered that is disturbing. This is how wars start.
  - RivieraKid 5y ago
    Based on what is publicly known I think that it's very unlikely that it's purely psychological.
    - cpncrunch 5y ago
      Why? Are you familiar with FND? Did you read Jon Stones's analysis? If not, you need to do more research.
  - smcl 5y ago
    Yeah this is the peculiar thing to me. Fairly soon after the phenomenon was noted, the irritating noise that linked all the cases (and what caused people to suggest it was some special sonic/microwave weapon) was explained as a particularly loud and annoying cricket. The way this has been discarded and how the whole issue has snowballed is insane and kinda worrying.
- rvba 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvi...
boomboomsubban 5y ago
>The lead author of the paper, told the New York Times that this means a wholly psychogenic or psychosomatic cause is very unlikely If that means a psychosomatic cause is very unlikely, why did they only feature that information in an interview with a newspaper rather than in the conclusion of their paper? Do neurologists train to know what damage psychosomatic illnesses can cause to the brain? From my understanding, their paper basically just compared every possible metric from the "victims" with a sample group, and listed the significant differences. When you compare scores of different metrics, it becomes more likely some of then are significantly different.
- dundarious 5y ago
  My understanding from previous reading is that after just one or two staff suffered vague symptoms, the rest of the Havana staff were briefed that they may be under attack in some way, and to be hyper vigilant. These are the perfect circumstances for mass hysteria. Sabine is doubtful of such a prospect because her analysis seems to be based on the idea that mass hysteria must arise from newspaper articles, and those were written much later, therefore mass hysteria unlikely. That seems like a silly assumption. Such events commonly occur in closed or tightly knit communities or institutions, like schools. An embassy/intelligence station is such an institution.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
    >My understanding from previous reading is that after just one or two staff suffered vague symptoms, the rest of the Havana staff were briefed that they may be under attack in some way Citation please.
    - dundarious 5y ago
      The transcript[0] for the Havana syndrome episode of Science Vs[1]. I guess I was wrong that it was "one or two", it was about three. You can argue I was also wrong with "vague symptoms", since they did leave to get medically checked out., but read the footnotes, [6] in particular. So my comment was incorrect in the specifics, but the important thing is that the transcript is an indication that mass hysteria is still a perfectly plausible option. Citations [2-12] are from the podcast. > Let's set the scene. It's 2016… and government officials from the U.S. are working in Cuba -- and before they even get there, they're warned -- it's going to be a little hostile. > TG: they're told - you know, you don't have any privacy, you're going to be listened to, your phones are going to be tapped, you're going to be followed on the street[2] > This is Tim Golden, Editor at Large for ProPublica.[3][4] Tim and a colleague tried to work out how this mystery started… > TG: Initially it was all very murky, and it was unclear what was going on… > They dug into this - talking to more than 3 dozen officials and poring through confidential government documents.[5] And Tim told us that Patient Zero was a young CIA officer > TG: Who had been a fairly athletic guy[6] who in December 2016… wakes up one night because he hears this loud, piercing sound in one ear…and it seems to be following him around the room[7] He feels unstable… nauseated, and soon after said he couldn't think properly[8]…. Just over a month later, two other CIA officers say the same thing happens to them.[9] > TG: Hearing a kind of a sharp sound that was a kind of metallic sound and then they had had headaches and dizziness and other symptoms that had followed that and being sort of shaken by this > These CIA officers were sent back to the US to get checked out-- and a doctor said they'd sustained serious injuries.[10] When the top guy at the Embassy heard this -- in late March[11] - Tim says he called a staff-wide meeting to tell people what they knew. > TG: You know everybody had to leave their cell phones outside and go into what’s called a SCIF - a sensitive compartmented information facility - so you know, a secure, windowless room > He said that some people might have been attacked -- described the loud sound, the weird symptoms. And told diplomats that if they thought they were getting hit... they should move away from windows. At the the time, the US Government's best guess about what was going on - was that this was coming from some kind of sonic device[12]. [0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQd3rwju7de2NP7QPEsLwAfO9YU7vs61UetSl9fbeHjo_0RJOq24ZsjipwZliFXHpkpquG8saPl_eXU/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQd3rwju7de2NP7Q... [1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1fWVwFPU3cUka8lfaSKU2V https://open.spotify.com/episode/1fWVwFPU3cUka8lfaSKU2V [2] “Before we go to Cuba, it is drilled into our heads: There will be surveillance. There will be listening devices in your house, probably in your car. Assume they are always watching.” [3] Tim Golden; Editor at Large: Tim Golden is a journalist and filmmaker who has worked primarily on issues of national security, foreign policy and criminal justice. [4] Tim’s first ProPublica article on the Havana Sonic Attacks was published on Feb 14, 2018. And here’s Tim’s second ProPublica article on the subject [5] A ProPublica investigation of the case, based on interviews with more than three dozen U.S. and foreign officials and an examination of confidential government documents, represents the first detailed public account of how the Cuba incidents unfolded. [6] it was not until the end of December that the first victim sought help at the small medical clinic inside the embassy. That officer — the fit younger man in his 30s — came with a more serious complaint: He had developed headaches, hearing problems and a sharp pain in one ear, especially, following a strange experience in which something like a beam of sound seemed to have been directed at his home. [7] According to Science magazine: the agent said he had heard “a really odd, loud noise that seemed to follow him in the room,” says Hoffer, who examined him in February. [8] An individual assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Cuba was awakened one night at home in Havana in 2016 by severe pain and a sensation of intense pressure in the face, a loud piercing sound in one ear with directional features, and acute disequilibrium and nausea. Symptoms of vestibular and cognitive dysfunction ensued. [9] On December 30, 2016, Patient Zero in the Cuba crisis visited the Embassy health office... Around January 9, 2017, the same C.I.A. officer reported a second incident to the medical office. [10] The New Yorker (details confirmed through other interviews): In early February, 2017, Michael Hoffer, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Miami, received a call from a State Department doctor, who told him, “We have a problem.” Hoffer—who had worked with the military to treat head traumas, and had kept his security clearance—agreed to help. He soon saw one of the victims, and in the following months others flew to Miami. Hoffer ran a battery of tests, which confirmed that the C.I.A. officers had sustained serious injuries. [11] In late March, DeLaurentis convened a town-hall-style meeting for staff at the Embassy. Several of Lee’s colleagues came forward to report that they, too, had been exposed. And : At the end of March 2017, recalls the U.S. diplomat who spoke with Science, then Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis summoned personnel with security clearances—about 30 in all—for a classified briefing in a special installation in the embassy. Also, confirmed through Conversation on Background [12] The “working hypothesis,” the diplomat says, was the victims were being targeted by a long-range acoustic device
gre 5y ago
I mean, it's probably crickets. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/havana-syndrome-jason-crickets https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/havana-syndr...
nitin-pai 5y ago
While microwaves might produce those effects under certain conditions, the problem with this explanation is that the transmitter will be huge, loud and difficult to hide. https://www.nitinpai.in/2021/11/8/the-unlikeliness-of-a-directed-microwave-weapon https://www.nitinpai.in/2021/11/8/the-unlikeliness-of-a-dire...
idontwantthis 5y ago
Are many affected diplomats ex-Military? I wonder if preexisting inner ear and brain damage may have been common in this population from explosions.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
Some of explanations sound (no pun intended) as Woody Norris best-known invention, HyperSonic Sound technology (HSS). HSS, or directional sound, targets a listener with sound waves similar to the way a laser beam directs light, so that the individual who is targeted is the only one who can hear it.
codezero 5y ago
What happened to the theory that this was a side effect of exposure to insecticide spraying?
dragonelite 5y ago
US personal just being crybabies. The US already tried doing a regime change twice this year in Cuba.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > regime change Nice euphemism for coup d'etat...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ncmncm 5y ago
I read a suggestion that all these symptoms could also be a product of poisoning. Microwaves and ultrasound are not just there or not there. Besides all the usual frequencies and amplitudes, and different mixes of those, there is modulation, which can vary in unlimited ways. For example, you can amplitude- modulate microwaves at ultrasound, infrasound, and/or audible frequencies. There are infinitely many other possible modulations harder to describe, simpler ones involving harmonic relations between modulations. It is traditional among physicists to insist that the only possible effects of electromagnetic fields and radiation is from heating, but this is absurd on its face: practically everything that happens in your body involves ions interacting, usually across membranes. Eyes don't work by light heating your retina. The molecules in your retina, or molecules like them, may appear in any tissue, for any reason. They may respond to photons accidentally, or for some evolved fitness reason which might have nothing to do with how they respond to artificial events. For many decades it was career death in biology to even mention these things. You couldn't publish papers about them; trying made you unable to get grants. George Becker author of "The Body Electric", somehow got a free pass, working for the US Veterans Administration, where he demonstrated systematic effects of sub-nanoampere current on healing processes. (I attended a talk by an American biologist who was presenting in Hungary in 1987 because she could not at US conferences.) The chill on such work has not dissipated. So Sabine is only barely scratching the surface of what might be happening.
xilinx_guy 5y ago
It's hard to credit "mass hysterical brain damage" as being real. Nor are these ultrasound attacks. Ultrasound doesn't penetrate walls and windows. Microwaves, on the other hand, directed by large panels of phased array patches, can not only focus and track objects through walls (i.e. radar vision), with a proper control system, can focus intense CW or Pulses directly on a moving target, like a persons skull. These were not surveillance attempts, these were focused attacks on lone victims who weren't carrying microwave field meters, nor any RF protection. Both the Russians and Chinese have the technical skill and motivation to develop these microwave attack systems. What is not clear is whether there are magic frequencies and waveforms that cause more neural damage than ordinary microwave white noise. Exciting resonances in particular biological molecules could possibly cause enhanced long term damage, with fairly low peak power limits. This type of research, of course, is kept secret.

111 points by firebaze 5y ago

api 5y ago

Any energy weapon seems unlikely. I recall asking a signals intelligence person once if jamming is ever a problem on battlefields. He said no because any jammer is emitting a signal and that tends to also say “fire missile here.” Same would apply in this situation I would guess.

not-elite 5y ago
Sounds right. [1] The mission patch is hilarious. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel
dendrite9 5y ago
I felt a little dumb reading this, it just wasn't something I had thought about much. But radiating is useful location information even if you cannot tell what is being sent out. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-ground-forces-look-like-to-an-electronic-warfare-system-and-why-its-a-big-deal https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33401/this-is-what-gro...
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Oh wow > Brose describes an incident in which someone, likely a member of Russia's intelligence community, spuriously called the mother of a Ukrainian commander and told her that her son was dead. She then hurriedly called his unencrypted cell phone to try to confirm whether this was true. When he called her back to tell everything was okay, Russian troops geolocated his forces' positions from his cell phone signal and hit them with a rocket artillery barrage, killing him in the process.

redis_mlc 5y ago

[dead]

culturthrowaway 5y ago

RIP Terry

thrower123 5y ago

It sounds like the DTs, or maybe a really wild hangover.

dustintrex 5y ago
For what it's worth, alcoholism is a well known occupational disease for diplomats. Repeated tours to unfriendly host countries, isolation from friends and family, and a significant part of the job is hanging out at boring cocktail parties.
- fnord77 5y ago
  Perhaps the local hooch has toxic byproducts
  - jhugo 5y ago
    It certainly does, because ethanol does
  - CTDOCodebases 5y ago
    I was thinking along the same lines. Have they ruled out poisoning?

dkdk8283 5y ago

Still unsolved?

CyanBird 5y ago
Rather the answer the cia wants published hasn't come around to be popular enough yet so they gotta keep pushing it even when the Pentagon itself discarded the existence of such a syndrome as mere mass psychosis mixed with disinformation clandestine operations to drive animosity against US enemies such as well.. Cuba
neom 5y ago
The Canadian government is still denying new cases in Canadian diplomats since 2018: https://globalnews.ca/news/7809823/havana-syndrome-canadian-recent-cases/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7809823/havana-syndrome-canadian-...

derbOac 5y ago

Not trying to discredit any particular hypothesis — if I were forced to bet I'd probably bet on something involving physical harm from adversaries — but the idea of using normal controls to investigate a psychosomatic hypothesis has always seemed a little off. Normal controls are reasonable, but wouldn't you want to compare individuals to a group with psychosomatic diagnoses as well? I would probably expect a group of individuals with psychosomatic problems to look different from normal controls also.

woopwoop 5y ago
This is exactly what I was thinking reading that section as well.

bb123 5y ago

The thing is, as touched on in the article, microwaves and ultrasound are trivially easy to detect. So if it was either of those I expect it would have been measured pretty quickly by even the most cursory investigation. Which I think means the most likely explanation is that it’s a solved phenomenon, but the information just hasn’t been made public.

tyingq 5y ago
Narrow beams, pulsed at different windows per night, noise floor from other nearby legitimate sources, etc. Could have been harder to detect than you might think.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  Beams bounces
  - tyingq 5y ago
    If I understand correctly, the buildings are mostly stone and concrete. And sit on the waterfront, so the beams could have been from ships that can come and go.
grayfaced 5y ago
One explanation for ultrasound/microwave is that it's for powering a recording device. If it's solved secret, I would expect them to locate and remove/disable the devices. Then at that point the signals should stop shortly after because there is no point in powering devices that are no longer working.
- bongoman37 5y ago
  Not a spook, but often known devices are not removed because they are a great way to pass on false information. If you know they are listening and they don't know you know they are listening, you could have fake meetings with fake information for them to waste their resources on.

krisoft 5y ago

> During the cold war, the US embassy in Moscow was permanently radiated by microwaves, presumably by the Soviets. No one knows exactly why, but the speculation is that it was for surveillance or counter-surveillance and not designed to cause health damage. Is this really a “no one knows” situation? The Great Seal bug[1] was in the Moscow embassy and it needed microwave irradiation to function. We also know that the USA suspected that their new embassy building had similar devices planted in the walls. [2] 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) 2: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/06/18/unbeatable-bugs-the-moscow-embassy-fiasco/5bb6dcbf-0a61-4948-a953-e2d81085ed05/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/06/18/u...

oliv__ 5y ago
Perhaps, it's because of this: https://mdsafetech.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/biological-effects-of-millimeter-wavelengths.-zalyubovskaya-declassif-by-cia-1977-biol-eff-mm-waves.pdf https://mdsafetech.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/biological-ef...
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  How do the power levels, wavelengths etc. compare to the body scanners at airports?
redis_mlc 5y ago
> Is this really a “no one knows” situation? FYI: There's a cultural gap with Gen Z. You can't assume that anybody knows anything anymore, no exaggeration. There's also shifting goalposts with government departments that confuses people - it used to be that TLA's focused on foreigners, but in the US they've all been turned on residents.

harry8 5y ago

So putting a faraday cage like thing in your hat would protect from this, if we believe it, right? So all the CIA needs to do is have a standard issue hat. Lined with the right stuff. Tinfoil is probably the right thing for many reasons.

dboreham 5y ago
Doesn't ventilate well. 2mm mesh should work fine.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
A faraday cage must be enclosed metal all around. A hat has a big hole where the head goes :) I don't think it will function as one. Microwaves are very prone to bouncing. It should significantly reduce the signal strength though.
- IanSanders 5y ago
  Can also trap reflected waves inside and focus them right in the middle

Sporktacular 5y ago

What no one seems to be connecting is revelations about the NSA-SCS presence in US embassies, including the one in Cuba, to the microwave theory. The RF spectrum around those sites are probably the world's most monitored places in the world, done so by some of the most sensitive instruments available. If this was due to microwaves, the USG would know it, and it would now be too politically difficult to hide or ignore. So we would know it by now too.

fnord77 5y ago

Preexisting neurological disorders + mass hysteria + wildcard (jet lag, bad water, etc)

ratsbane 5y ago

I was in Havana in January, 2017, around the time that this was happening. I walked around the US embassy one day. The weather was sunny but cold and windy; the embassy is on the Malecón, the seafront that stretches around Havana, and waves were crashing over the walls. It was unpleasant. I had never heard of the "Havana Syndrome" thing then, but in describing that day in my notes, I wrote that there was a feeling of pressure from the wind and sea spray. In hindsight, I wonder if this sort of weather condition contributed to perceptions of this syndrome. In videos I took that day you can sense this from the wind noise.

s5300 5y ago
I wonder if specific wind patterns could be causing a building wide Vic Tandy's Ghost in the Machine - which is a great read for any HN viewer... (I would link, but most results are of a PDF & linking those never goes well for me) tl:dr standing waveforms and infrasound can do some strange things to humans.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24236415_A_Ghost_in_the_Machine https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24236415_A_Ghost_in... (scroll down - for some reason the author listed above and the authors listed in the doc don't match)

stefantalpalaru 5y ago

"The report said the diplomats’ illnesses coincided with increased fumigation in and around residences where they lived. One of the authors of the study, the professor Alon Friedman, clarified in an email to Reuters that both Canadian and Cuban authorities were fumigating." - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/havana-syndrome-mosquitos-cuba-diplomats https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/havana-syndrom...

jonnycomputer 5y ago

re: the mri paper discussed, I haven't read it, but between-group comparisons of that sort are always prone to confounding variables--you can try to match on things like race, gender, social status, age, iq, and diagnoses, etc. but its hard to know whether you've matched everything you need to do. My recommendation is a longitudinal design. Mass brain scans of diplomatic staff at yearly intervals. You'll want to control for age-related changes, though there won't be that many over the course of one or two years, and other things, like covid, which seems to reduce grey matter quite substantially.

joe_the_user 5y ago
Yeah, Even more, it's confounded by picking a control group and a study group and then asking "what's different?" without necessarily knowing why X should be different. What reason do they have to think white matter should be less? Afaik, none. It's something like p-hacking.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  I'm inclined to agree with you. But, not having read the paper, they may have cited research that would discuss what sorts of damage would be likely to occur if it were a radio or sonic attack. I think that any radio or sonic attack would probably cause whole-brain damage, not localized lesions. Also white matter, gray matter volumes, DTI tract length and connectivity measures would be the first things I would look at for this sort of thing, so its not necessarily like you are p-hacking by looking for outcome measures that happen to be significant. But again, haven't read the paper.

tiahura 5y ago

Microwave detectors are $29.99 on Amazon. I can’t image a scenario where the day after the initial reports of Havana Syndrome that Raytheon, Honeywell, L3 etc didn’t sell the State Department billions of sensors for our embassies. Yet, in all of the subsequent reporting, there’s never been confirmation of sensors being tripped. Mass hysteria still seems the most plausible.

grapevines 5y ago

I believe it’s a sort of satellite-mounted weapon, and not extricable in any way from full surveillance a la smartphone location or - even worse, multiple exploited access points thus triangulating location. I think it’s most logically a geo-stationary satellite, so wherever launches those might have more information about who might have a radio transmitter or two up there.

ggm 5y ago
This was Philip K Dicks persistent hallucination/psychosis. It has been a constant in SF culture since he wrote on it in "valis" and other novels. He was however, quite open about the hallucinatory qualities of his belief.
crummy 5y ago
are there satellites in geostationary orbits directly above these embassies? we could find them pretty easy, couldn't we?
- detaro 5y ago
  You can't put geostationary satellites over random points of the globe, they have to be over the equator.
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ilikehurdles 5y ago

> let me know what you think in the comments. Followed by > comments on this blog are permanently closed

spillguard 5y ago
The blog post is a transcript of the video embedded near the top of the page, as it mentions, and the video itself has an open comments section.

RivieraKid 5y ago

The hard question is, if it's the Russians using a microwave weapon, which seems like the most likely explanation to me - how should the US react? This would be a very difficult situation.

AlexandrB 5y ago
The real hard question is whether this is a physical phenomenon or a purely psychological one. The idea that we should speculate about "how should we respond?" before we've answered that is disturbing. This is how wars start.
- RivieraKid 5y ago
  Based on what is publicly known I think that it's very unlikely that it's purely psychological.
  - cpncrunch 5y ago
    Why? Are you familiar with FND? Did you read Jon Stones's analysis? If not, you need to do more research.
- smcl 5y ago
  Yeah this is the peculiar thing to me. Fairly soon after the phenomenon was noted, the irritating noise that linked all the cases (and what caused people to suggest it was some special sonic/microwave weapon) was explained as a particularly loud and annoying cricket. The way this has been discarded and how the whole issue has snowballed is insane and kinda worrying.
rvba 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvi...

boomboomsubban 5y ago

>The lead author of the paper, told the New York Times that this means a wholly psychogenic or psychosomatic cause is very unlikely If that means a psychosomatic cause is very unlikely, why did they only feature that information in an interview with a newspaper rather than in the conclusion of their paper? Do neurologists train to know what damage psychosomatic illnesses can cause to the brain? From my understanding, their paper basically just compared every possible metric from the "victims" with a sample group, and listed the significant differences. When you compare scores of different metrics, it becomes more likely some of then are significantly different.

dundarious 5y ago
My understanding from previous reading is that after just one or two staff suffered vague symptoms, the rest of the Havana staff were briefed that they may be under attack in some way, and to be hyper vigilant. These are the perfect circumstances for mass hysteria. Sabine is doubtful of such a prospect because her analysis seems to be based on the idea that mass hysteria must arise from newspaper articles, and those were written much later, therefore mass hysteria unlikely. That seems like a silly assumption. Such events commonly occur in closed or tightly knit communities or institutions, like schools. An embassy/intelligence station is such an institution.
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- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  >My understanding from previous reading is that after just one or two staff suffered vague symptoms, the rest of the Havana staff were briefed that they may be under attack in some way Citation please.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    The transcript[0] for the Havana syndrome episode of Science Vs[1]. I guess I was wrong that it was "one or two", it was about three. You can argue I was also wrong with "vague symptoms", since they did leave to get medically checked out., but read the footnotes, [6] in particular. So my comment was incorrect in the specifics, but the important thing is that the transcript is an indication that mass hysteria is still a perfectly plausible option. Citations [2-12] are from the podcast. > Let's set the scene. It's 2016… and government officials from the U.S. are working in Cuba -- and before they even get there, they're warned -- it's going to be a little hostile. > TG: they're told - you know, you don't have any privacy, you're going to be listened to, your phones are going to be tapped, you're going to be followed on the street[2] > This is Tim Golden, Editor at Large for ProPublica.[3][4] Tim and a colleague tried to work out how this mystery started… > TG: Initially it was all very murky, and it was unclear what was going on… > They dug into this - talking to more than 3 dozen officials and poring through confidential government documents.[5] And Tim told us that Patient Zero was a young CIA officer > TG: Who had been a fairly athletic guy[6] who in December 2016… wakes up one night because he hears this loud, piercing sound in one ear…and it seems to be following him around the room[7] He feels unstable… nauseated, and soon after said he couldn't think properly[8]…. Just over a month later, two other CIA officers say the same thing happens to them.[9] > TG: Hearing a kind of a sharp sound that was a kind of metallic sound and then they had had headaches and dizziness and other symptoms that had followed that and being sort of shaken by this > These CIA officers were sent back to the US to get checked out-- and a doctor said they'd sustained serious injuries.[10] When the top guy at the Embassy heard this -- in late March[11] - Tim says he called a staff-wide meeting to tell people what they knew. > TG: You know everybody had to leave their cell phones outside and go into what’s called a SCIF - a sensitive compartmented information facility - so you know, a secure, windowless room > He said that some people might have been attacked -- described the loud sound, the weird symptoms. And told diplomats that if they thought they were getting hit... they should move away from windows. At the the time, the US Government's best guess about what was going on - was that this was coming from some kind of sonic device[12]. [0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQd3rwju7de2NP7QPEsLwAfO9YU7vs61UetSl9fbeHjo_0RJOq24ZsjipwZliFXHpkpquG8saPl_eXU/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQd3rwju7de2NP7Q... [1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1fWVwFPU3cUka8lfaSKU2V https://open.spotify.com/episode/1fWVwFPU3cUka8lfaSKU2V [2] “Before we go to Cuba, it is drilled into our heads: There will be surveillance. There will be listening devices in your house, probably in your car. Assume they are always watching.” [3] Tim Golden; Editor at Large: Tim Golden is a journalist and filmmaker who has worked primarily on issues of national security, foreign policy and criminal justice. [4] Tim’s first ProPublica article on the Havana Sonic Attacks was published on Feb 14, 2018. And here’s Tim’s second ProPublica article on the subject [5] A ProPublica investigation of the case, based on interviews with more than three dozen U.S. and foreign officials and an examination of confidential government documents, represents the first detailed public account of how the Cuba incidents unfolded. [6] it was not until the end of December that the first victim sought help at the small medical clinic inside the embassy. That officer — the fit younger man in his 30s — came with a more serious complaint: He had developed headaches, hearing problems and a sharp pain in one ear, especially, following a strange experience in which something like a beam of sound seemed to have been directed at his home. [7] According to Science magazine: the agent said he had heard “a really odd, loud noise that seemed to follow him in the room,” says Hoffer, who examined him in February. [8] An individual assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Cuba was awakened one night at home in Havana in 2016 by severe pain and a sensation of intense pressure in the face, a loud piercing sound in one ear with directional features, and acute disequilibrium and nausea. Symptoms of vestibular and cognitive dysfunction ensued. [9] On December 30, 2016, Patient Zero in the Cuba crisis visited the Embassy health office... Around January 9, 2017, the same C.I.A. officer reported a second incident to the medical office. [10] The New Yorker (details confirmed through other interviews): In early February, 2017, Michael Hoffer, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Miami, received a call from a State Department doctor, who told him, “We have a problem.” Hoffer—who had worked with the military to treat head traumas, and had kept his security clearance—agreed to help. He soon saw one of the victims, and in the following months others flew to Miami. Hoffer ran a battery of tests, which confirmed that the C.I.A. officers had sustained serious injuries. [11] In late March, DeLaurentis convened a town-hall-style meeting for staff at the Embassy. Several of Lee’s colleagues came forward to report that they, too, had been exposed. And : At the end of March 2017, recalls the U.S. diplomat who spoke with Science, then Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis summoned personnel with security clearances—about 30 in all—for a classified briefing in a special installation in the embassy. Also, confirmed through Conversation on Background [12] The “working hypothesis,” the diplomat says, was the victims were being targeted by a long-range acoustic device

gre 5y ago

I mean, it's probably crickets. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/havana-syndrome-jason-crickets https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/havana-syndr...

nitin-pai 5y ago

While microwaves might produce those effects under certain conditions, the problem with this explanation is that the transmitter will be huge, loud and difficult to hide. https://www.nitinpai.in/2021/11/8/the-unlikeliness-of-a-directed-microwave-weapon https://www.nitinpai.in/2021/11/8/the-unlikeliness-of-a-dire...

idontwantthis 5y ago

Are many affected diplomats ex-Military? I wonder if preexisting inner ear and brain damage may have been common in this population from explosions.

deleted 5y ago
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NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

Some of explanations sound (no pun intended) as Woody Norris best-known invention, HyperSonic Sound technology (HSS). HSS, or directional sound, targets a listener with sound waves similar to the way a laser beam directs light, so that the individual who is targeted is the only one who can hear it.

codezero 5y ago

What happened to the theory that this was a side effect of exposure to insecticide spraying?

dragonelite 5y ago

US personal just being crybabies. The US already tried doing a regime change twice this year in Cuba.

rbanffy 5y ago
> regime change Nice euphemism for coup d'etat...
- deleted 5y ago
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ncmncm 5y ago

I read a suggestion that all these symptoms could also be a product of poisoning. Microwaves and ultrasound are not just there or not there. Besides all the usual frequencies and amplitudes, and different mixes of those, there is modulation, which can vary in unlimited ways. For example, you can amplitude- modulate microwaves at ultrasound, infrasound, and/or audible frequencies. There are infinitely many other possible modulations harder to describe, simpler ones involving harmonic relations between modulations. It is traditional among physicists to insist that the only possible effects of electromagnetic fields and radiation is from heating, but this is absurd on its face: practically everything that happens in your body involves ions interacting, usually across membranes. Eyes don't work by light heating your retina. The molecules in your retina, or molecules like them, may appear in any tissue, for any reason. They may respond to photons accidentally, or for some evolved fitness reason which might have nothing to do with how they respond to artificial events. For many decades it was career death in biology to even mention these things. You couldn't publish papers about them; trying made you unable to get grants. George Becker author of "The Body Electric", somehow got a free pass, working for the US Veterans Administration, where he demonstrated systematic effects of sub-nanoampere current on healing processes. (I attended a talk by an American biologist who was presenting in Hungary in 1987 because she could not at US conferences.) The chill on such work has not dissipated. So Sabine is only barely scratching the surface of what might be happening.

xilinx_guy 5y ago

It's hard to credit "mass hysterical brain damage" as being real. Nor are these ultrasound attacks. Ultrasound doesn't penetrate walls and windows. Microwaves, on the other hand, directed by large panels of phased array patches, can not only focus and track objects through walls (i.e. radar vision), with a proper control system, can focus intense CW or Pulses directly on a moving target, like a persons skull. These were not surveillance attempts, these were focused attacks on lone victims who weren't carrying microwave field meters, nor any RF protection. Both the Russians and Chinese have the technical skill and motivation to develop these microwave attack systems. What is not clear is whether there are magic frequencies and waveforms that cause more neural damage than ordinary microwave white noise. Exciting resonances in particular biological molecules could possibly cause enhanced long term damage, with fairly low peak power limits. This type of research, of course, is kept secret.