I don't really understand how there can be so much back and forth on this issue. We already know directed-energy weapons are possible [0], what are the challenges in exploring the space until you're able to build an approximate match for what people report having experienced?
The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, it could be used to attack people working for rival organizations as well as general harassment. Imagine a tool that lets you disrupt someone's sleep, using that over months would be enough to drive them insane or at least seriously hamper their productivity and performance. For example: if a rival sports team is visiting and you're able to disrupt their sleep that might be enough to give your team an edge. How far are people really willing to go in order to win?
Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic.
It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.
> Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense.
We all have fairly compact devices in our kitchens which, if you were to put your head in them and press the start button, would literally cook your brain.
Why wouldn’t a directed version of that make practical sense? Just because it’d be bulky compared to a gun? But that would depend on what you were trying to achieve. Killing people with polonium or ricin isn’t the most efficient approach either, but it’s been done.
Note that I’m not saying that’s what happened in the Havana case. Just questioning the statement I quoted.
It's weird to me to think that you could beam hundreds to thousands of watts of some sort of energy at an American embassy and not be detected. That's what has always made it seem rather outlandish. My suspicion has always been some sort of burnout/anxiety as the actual explanation, but certainly there could be another possibility.
Again, I wasn’t proposing this is what happened in the Havana case. It’s not clear to me that what happened in Havana wasn’t just a panic of some sort, much like the recent drone panic. If it were some sort of attack, it raises a lot of questions about what the purpose was, why Cuba, why we haven’t seen anything like it since, why all the victims of the attack are still walking around attending meetings in Washington DC, etc.
That all said, I still don’t see why a microwave beam weapon is implausible in principle. It might not be the most practical thing ever - that’s why I compared it to polonium and ricin. But for example, using a parabolic reflector you can focus microwaves over the kind of distance between two buildings perhaps across the street from each other. If the beam only has a diameter of a few feet at the target, and only used for a short period, how is that going to be detected? You’d aim it at someone’s head visible through a window, for example, and the source of the beam could be behind a closed window with a curtain.
Btw this subthread seems to have been removed from the OP page at this point, apparently because the comment I replied to was flagged.
You are drawing a false equivalence and being willfully obtuse. It's clear and obvious that the conventional sense of the term refers to technology like lasers and microwave. Please don't try to split hairs over semantics. Unless you are one of the spiritual nuts who claim "we are all creatures of energy" just because of the mass energy equivalence. Unless you are building a nuke in your kitchen, there's a clear difference in meaning in the conventional usage of the term "kinetic" weapon and "direct energy" weapon.
The point is that matter is by far the most concentrated form of energy we’re able to manipulate. The original comment seemed to be saying something along those lines, although it seems to have been flagged and I can’t check it now.
> [...] urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, [...]
That's obviously bad, but it's not really terrorism. There's no one universally agreed on definition of terrorism, but instilling terror is commonly a big part, and for that you want people to notice.
Perhaps you want people to notice for overt action, but deniability is useful for covert action. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be considered a hostile act, and if it results in what would otherwise appear to be a psychosomatic illness that causes distress in order to muddy the waters to conceal the affiliation of the actors involved, I think it’s fair to call it a terror attack.
Speaking from the point of view of other idiopathic chronic conditions....if it doesn't show up in a blood test or a scan, many doctors will just call it psychological.
I think having a long range explosives laden drone hit that sports stadium is way more scary. And more likely to come to an urban center as urban terrorism. Unfortunately. My 2c.
This is one of my biggest concerns for our future. What happens when the costs of drones or 3D printing become so cheap, and the learning curve shrinks to the extent that a terrorist, crazy person or school shooter can semi easily deploy their own deadly drone swarms.
Cars are really deadly and readily available without raising any suspicion.
(And only fairly recently have we really seen anyone use cars for terror attacks. And they are still fairly rare, considering how ubiquitous cars are.)
I believe we’ve passed this point many years ago. These are already extremely cheap and accessible to anyone, you can buy 20-30 small drones for less than the price of one firearm.
In reality there are hundreds of other ways someone could devise attacks like these, technology doesn’t really matter that much.
well, we did just see a 3D printed weapon used, but the stories about the perp's looks shouted over the other details. I'm sure the gun lobby was pleased with that. so to the idea of school shootings, drone swarms would probably be too much for that, but a kid printing up their own guns to use is definitely something I could see happening. drone swarms would to me still be limited to a more well funded group to achieve instead of a lone wolf scenario.
My guess is there would be a strong selection against impulsive non-experts. That’s on my “No-MacGyver” list with garage door springs and AC unit capacitors .
You don't have to use it just for winning - consider sports betting, you can definitely place multi-million dollar bets, on the team that isn't a favorite, then use your Havana Ray to disturb a couple key players - make millions, repeat.
Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite. When the news comes out, you'll make millions.
Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER.
A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.
> a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic,
You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening.
A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage.
You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you.
And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.
There's no chance this is disinformation muddying the online argument to prevent people from intelligently concluding that this is a directed energy weapon, of course.
I read it was caused by pesticides that were being applied extra heavily in the areas around the embassy, inside the embassy, and even in the “victim’s” homes due to concerns about zika virus which were hyped at the time
The link below includes results from a study which included brain imaging and comparing the results with other victims of neurotoxicity poisons
No, you should read the article. They cite the previous review by seven intelligence agencies. That had been publicly reported, so for folks who had been following it, the consensus was most recently that it wasn't a mystery weapon.
Another part of this is that these agencies by temperament hedge their answers and were remarkably unequivocal, noting "new evidence could change their mind" -and they have become less unequivocal. This strongly suggests new evidence, but since this is in the secrecy-strategic space, we're not going to know.
It could be somebody senior said "change tone of voice" or it could be something new was found. We can't know.
Nope! Most people think this is a conspiracy theory.
Maybe it is maybe it isn't, but it's interesting for both sides to keep in mind the actual state of play as this continues to develop.
For you, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a weapon", it's interesting to know that no, your perspective is being skewed somehow, probably by the media you consume.
For me, who thinks "duh, everyone knows this was a paranoid conspiracy theory", it's interesting to follow the actual investigation into it, because maybe we're wrong.
A key point I feel, is that psychogenic illnesses are illnesses. People who get them should be treated as ill, and should be entitled to support and respect.
Putting it into the "not a real illness" bucket is why people with ME, and Long covid are so deeply unhappy with the state response to their problems.
I have had a theory this is a "blowback" effect of counter-intel functions inside US diplomatic and related facilities. The amount of RF, sound and other burdens inside the suspended secure communications facility, and the ubiquity of these facilities inside US state functions operated in potentially adverse economies.
Like EMP, you protect to the level you can afford, and demonstrate inside your own testing it's operationally feasible to prevent, not the actual scale an attacker can elect to deploy. It's a variant of the 'look for your lost keys under the lamppost because you can see' problem: to protect secure communications you need to do work, in the radio and sound spectrum, at least as energetic as the attacks you have hypothesised, and you probably wind up injecting TWICE the effective energy overall, if an attack happens: their energy, and your mitigation.
If these defences are purely passive, I'd be deeply wrong. I doubt if anyone who knows what active defences are deployed would be able to say so.
edit: if this is potentially caused by US counter-intel efforts, they'd probably seek to deny it, but that heads to a conspiracy theory place. A lot of Iraq veterans can testify to how much the forces seek to minimise the damages of service, I would be totally unsurprised if state department and foreign affairs doesn't want a multi-million dollar health claim on their books. No matter what, they have one, but for now it's without associated damages. If they admit to it being their own fault the class action lawyers will have a field day.
I also think that some sort of embassy-operated anti-eavesdropping emitters being the cause is the most plausible explanation.
Embassies are typically espionage stations, i.e. they're almost certainly full of equipment that monitors every measurable aspect of the EM spectrum and probably various other things too. Covertly deploying any kind of electromagnetic weapon near an embassy sounds like an impossibility to me.
But if the embassy's own security hardware caused it, it's very likely that it would be kept secret (also to protect the secrecy around such hardware). It would also explain why it happened in multiple locations.
As an aside, I’m rather tired of every discussion being implicated as some grand conspiracy or coverup. It’s possible that things simply move from “we have almost no evidence that this happened” to “we have some evidence to support that this happened”. That’s not admitting some grand mistake, that’s just the normal progression of the facts.
Respectfully, the issue here was not that intelligence agencies were saying "we have no eveidence of this".
first few sentences of the article shows the reality, these agencies were vehemently stating that it was not possible that the Havana Syndrome was caused by bad foreign actors, full stop.
The narrative might have started with electric fields from the grid stressing people if not causing cancer. Then moved to radio, wifi, the so called biological radio frequency spectrum. Etc
It was always an engineered argument between one camp advocating absurdly human fragility vs the other camp pretending we are indestructible supper beings and no form of radiation could harm us - ever!
It sets up the perfect climate to prevent a honest objective scientific discussion.
Saying "we have no evidence that directed energy weapons caused this syndrome," is not the same as emphatically saying, "this syndrome was not caused by directed energy weapons," which is what the reporting in this piece indicates was said. The latter is an affirmative statement intended to eliminate doubt and which has the effect of denying the experiences of those affected.
Nailed it! The right stance in most cases is "I don't know, I'll wait until more information is available". Doesn't seem too popular in the social media era, but this should be the default.
"we have almost no evidence" / "we have seen no evidence that" / "there is no evidence that" phrasing, without reference to the extent of investigation incurred or not incurred to ascertain the evidence base, I treat by default as go-to institutional gaslighting until verified otherwise.
I seem to remember that Russia has significant expertise in building powerful and compact microwave sources to control and heat plasma in tokamaks. Nizhny Novgorod is a known centre of expertise in such technology. It wouldn’t be such a stretch to imagine that Putin’s thugs have commandeered it to build a crude, nasty means of messing with their perceived enemies in a deniable way.
While I think you may be right, I wish you could find a way to say it which is evidence based, and something we can look at more deeply. Because right now, what you said carries the preface: "In my personal opinion"
I read the atlantic precisely because I am sure it doesn't align with my non-US, world view. I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think. I don't mind reading things I may disagree with. I'm tired of reading things grounded in fantasy which is what Fox sells. At least the atlantic is grounded in a version of ground-truth I can usually get behind, and is clear when its opinions, or reflecting opinionated sources.
I want to understand what vaguely rightist, middle-of-the-road corporates and old school william buckley types think.
Wow, that's wild. I don't think you are reading the right magazine for that. Atlantic is vaguely left of center, middle of the road oligarchic old school Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ish. It's a good read! But will tell you nothing about the right. If you want that, just read National Review, or The Dispatch for something a little more modern.
If its "left" I'm a dutchman. It's as middle-of-the-road as it can be, and for me, thats right of center. National Review is foaming at the mouth.
Remember I said I'm not an american, I don't regard "liberal" as a slur of the right against the left, in Australia the "liberal" party are the rightists.
It sounds mysteriously like the American medical and health insurance systems:
"disabled, struggling with chronic pain, and drowning in medical bills."
Maybe the US should inflict it's medical and health insurance systems on foreign adversaries as a "mystery weapon" to inflict disability, pain, and medical bills on them.
WWIII was ended when the US dropped the world's first beauracracy bomb on Brussels, followed by an assault of, also unprecedented at the time, regulatory-capture missiles.
It's not expected that the Brussels that existed prior to the war will ever be seen again. It is expected that it's populace will continue to decline for the foreseeable future.
1. Just look at the completely made up fears about ODing from fentanyl just by touching it or even just breathing in the fumes. There is absolutely no truth to these dangers [1][2], yet the myth persists. It's so pervasive that cops actually have panic attacks; and
2. US authorities and the intelligence community has a vested interest in exaggerating the risks of foreign actors to get more funding. You see this everywhere, even in domestic affairs: the "crime panic" of recent times that is completely made up, completely overblown fears of looting in the aftermath of the LA fires (while there's little to no attention on the price gouging and profiteering that's going on) and so on.
Those domestic manufactured panics are copaganda to justify further militarization and funding for the police.
My point is that there is a significant part of the US government gearing up for and wanting an escalation of conflict with China in particular. Cuba of course has been a bogeyman for decades.
So my money is still firmly on "Havana Syndrome is completely made up".
> Just look at the completely made up fears about ODing from fentanyl just by touching it or even just breathing in the fumes.
It's not really made up, it's a case of mistaken identity. Carfent is potent enough that accidentally disturbing an open container of it and breathing in the dust kicks up will knock you out cold. LD50 in the hundreds of micrograms range.
Carfent and fent are different molecules, but it's not really reasonable to expect the average person to know they're different. They will however know that fentanyl is particularly potent (which it is, albeit not quite a chemical weapon like carfentanyl) which compounds this misunderstanding.
Regarding #2, then why would US intelligence agencies state that these incidents were not caused by foreign state actors? You'd expect the opposite given your hypothesis.
The main possibility, I'd say, is that organizationally there's a push and pull of wanting to have the fear of secret weapons programs existing (for funding) and not wanting to seem incompetent. For example, if the CIA doesn't come out and deny these weapons, your geriatric boss calls up and says where are our secret sound guns? Why don't we have countermeasures?
In general, I think intelligence agencies are not monolithic and probably have many different factions etc. vying for funding, power, and control. It seems reasonable that many in the CIA would benefit from denying this, and many would benefit from exaggerating it.
> completely overblown fears of looting in the aftermath of the LA fires (while there's little to no attention on the price gouging and profiteering that's going on) and so on
I’ve seen news mention both looting and price gouging. I didn’t feel any fearmongering or lack of attention related to those issues.
My completely unfounded wild ass guess is that its some form of remote monitoring that has the noted side effects (that is, the harm to the personnel affected is unintentional).
At one point, the narrative (2021) landed on this native insect whose frequency was so loud that you could "hear it from inside a car while driving [40+] mph down the highway" (paraphrased).
Was this debunked or just another conspiracy™?
edit:
> The heavily redacted report notes that “many” of those reporting symptoms described hearing “unusual sounds” but states that in only one instance someone experienced medical symptoms immediately after hearing the sounds. The report goes on to say that JASON could identify “no plausible single source of energy (neither radio/microwaves nor sonic) [that] can produce both the recorded audio/video signals and the reported medical effects.”
Instead, the scientists wrote that the most likely source of the sound heard in the recordings is the Indies short-tailed cricket, whose call, it says, “matches, in nuanced detail, the spectral properties of the recordings from Cuba.” Still, the report hedges, saying that “other hypotheses are plausible,” including that the sounds were created by a mechanical device or “structure-borne vibrations.” [0]
> The geopolitical consequences are profound, especially as a new president prepares to take office: If Russia, or any other country, were found culpable for violent attacks on U.S. government personnel, Washington would likely feel compelled to forcefully respond.
Seeing how Trump has repeatedly praised Putin and criticized Zalensky, it's doubtful there'd be any consequences if Russia really turned out to be behind all this.
It'll just mean that China is behind this, which means the tariffs are actually benign and justified response, not kickstarting a trade war. It'll be the truth, some new kind of Truth (Social.)
I don't want to sound apocalyptic, but I think the media and political narratives of the mainstream lost all reality checks in the past few decades (not for the first time - historically, it happens ever-so-often), which means that there's no point trying to reconcile them with facts mentally. It's tiring and pointless - politicians, commentators, and the public allowed their Overton windows to slide way too far from the reasonable. It'll pass - meanwhile, we can only hope the effects won't be as pronounced as if ImageMagick finally broke for good.
Trump gets elected, he is not a Russophobe like the deep state. Deep state begins having panic attacks and constant cognitive dissonance due to TDS. Deep state blames Russia.
Watch Jack Kruze on Robert Breedlove's podcast (near the end of Pt II will blow your mind blown right out of your skull.) A medical revolution? -- perhaps something much more.
