Hacker News Reader

Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

This turned out just like mysterious Gatwick drone, mass hysteria in higher places followed by a lot of ass covering.

https://hackaday.com/2021/07/20/the-gatwick-drone-little-by-...

My understanding was that objective physiological differences were found in the original group reporting "Havana Syndrome", and clearly the government is still claiming it is real. Your link doesn't mention Havana at all - why do you think this case was mass hysteria? I'm aware that hysteria can cause physiological symptoms to some extent, but this doesn't read to me like something that was purely psychosomatic.

FND is very real and is as prevalent as MS [1]. Why are CIA operatives somehow different from the rest of the human race?

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6306282/

We understand so little about the brain I'm not sure how meaningful a label like FNSD is. I bet there are a bunch of issues that could be classified as FNSD today but will be one day understood as different well-defined disorders. And there are a lot of diseases with complicated interplay between inherent biology and the environment.

So they did MRIs, but I read some pretty intelligent commentary from someone that worked with MRIs in a lab setting. Essentially what they said is there's enough variation in brains and MRI data that if you go looking for differences in an open ended way, you'll find them. That's apparently why the criteria for diagnosing based on MRI are very narrow and specific.

Additionally, everyone keeps insinuating this is Russia, but I have yet to see a single person articulate an answer to "what does this actually accomplish?" that wasn't empty blather. Moreover, to carry out some similar attack in a variety of nations around the world would take an enormous investment in resources, and would carry a grave risk of exposure. Again, to accomplish what exactly?

The proposed mechanisms don't hold water either. Ultrasound doesn't go through masonry walls. Microwaves struggle to as well, but also embassy's are bristling with spectrum monitoring equipment. If someone was blasting buildings with RF they'd know it.

My personal view is something did happen in Havana, and organophosphate exposure seems the most likely to me. They fumigate way over health limits in the rich part of the city, and I could see embassy staff not acclimatized to it having a reaction.

Once the idea of a mystery weapon attacking embassy staff idea was planted in the minds of our diplomatic core, at that point I think it turned into hysteria. Suggestion is powerful and the human mind is definitively irrational.

I'll be glad to change my mind if anyone comes up with evidence that motivates it. Absent that I'm not going to assume an elaborate clandestine attack vs more banal explanations.

Interesting, I could definitely see it being some sort of weird environmental effect, I'm not convinced it's an attack.

>If someone was blasting buildings with RF they'd know it.

I believe in Havana they told us that it was their own equipment as that would make the most sense.

But you're right there are a lot of unknowns and wild reporting on it.

Don't forget that the high-pitched sound some of them claimed to hear and directly attributed to their immediate discomfort and subsequent symptoms seems to have been crickets. See https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/01/10/recorded-sounds-that-pl... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgbnZG85IRo

Many people seem to have this irrational bias that "nothing ever happens". If they hear of an event or phenomenon that doesn't fit into their model of the world, then it must be that the event was hallucinated, regardless of how much evidence there is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com