NIH cancels ‘Havana syndrome’ research, citing unethical coercion
cnn.com
cnn.com
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?
However 1500 people is truly a large number. But they do say reported cases, not confirmed.
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.
[1] - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2816532
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich NietzscheSuppose 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.
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.
A) exploit the advantage
B) squander the advantage
C) also squander the advantage, but in a much weirder and more convoluted way
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.
I did not read the rest of the post by way of laughing. But your are right here, I feel it in my gut.
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.
Who's saying it's a test?
Your premise assumes they haven't already done A and B, and after successful testing moved on to C.
"Sir, the results are in: this weapon causes mild headaches and sleep difficulties lasting a few months."
"Excellent! Deploy it against American embassies immediately. Surely this will absolutely cripple their espionage efforts."
The idea that it's a side-effect of directed- energy _surveillance_ seems a vastly more sensible hypothesis in every way.
You don't think people are actively monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum, in a US embassy?
Why in the world do you think that?
The notion that they would direct something at those devices to activate them is neither fantastical or foolish to investigate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
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.
They don't tell you what equipment is on the roof.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer
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
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.
> 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.
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
https://x.com/tony_breu/status/1034891346069413888
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.
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 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..
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
It doesn’t have much in common with premodern/medieval light table beer.
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.
Regardless there is plenty of evidence that medieval people drank plenty pf water. Why do some people feel so strongly about this myth?
Weak unfiltered beer will go bad on a couple of days even if you keep it in a fridge if it’s not properly sealed.
Also hoops weren’t widely used until the high/late middle ages.
It shouldn’t be particularly crazy or controversial
Any evidence besides conjecture to back this up?
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].
[0] https://www.wateraid.org/uk/what-we-do/water [1] https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240075610
Workers often couldn’t find clean water in the field - just like today. Near beer also has some properties of sports drinks and hydrates better.
The world is a complex place. Like today, availability and quality of potable water varies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(some Guardian stuff https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/01/havana-syndrom...)
https://patents.google.com/patent/RU2526478C2/en Method and Device of Microwave Electromagnetic Impact at Trespasser
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7841989B2/en Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control Method and System
https://patents.google.com/patent/CN106643287A/en Method and System for Eliminating Fighting Strength of Opposing Combatant Using Electromagnetic Wave
http://www.gbppr.net/mil/havana
You can use the microwave auditory effect with a modulation at the resonant frequency of the target's skull to "induce pain."
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
The agent that was allegedly targetted has a similar opinion to this. This is the 60 minutes episode where they talk about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COWTBEl1rRc&pp=ygURNjAgbWlud...
Also, maybe the FUD caused was a desirable outcome in its own right.
Why assume a hostile nation-state and not just USA doing more testing on its own people. It's just something we do.
It’s A. Testing of surveillance among other things.
Source: me and my friends stuck in here
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.
Arthur C Clarke
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.
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.
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).
My point was that the community of DWE believers know about Seattle. There's entire podcasts dedicated to it.
Importantly however, this doesn't mean that any random embassy jackass claiming to be a victim of one actually was.
Take apart your microwave oven and put the magnetron in a wave guide and point it at your face. Go ahead and tell me its theoretical after that.
By “well known in that community” you mean “a lot of nutters speculate with no credible evidence”.
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.
Wikipedia thinks otherwise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon
The "active denial system" is a millimeter wave weapon against humans and the LRAD-500X a sonic weapon against humans.
> It is too dangerous to be discovered
If everyone says that the targets are delusional, it seems 100% safe to test it anywhere.
> 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.
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?
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 kind of convinced that if there is a symptom, our brains can probably cause it.
I need a name for this phenomenon. Maybe North American Hallucination Syndrome, or maybe McDonalds Induced Reality Deviation or something.
Has there ever been any secret weapon that was not leaked to other states?
Isn't it the other way around ? People forced to enroll, not people enrolling to get a monetary compensation
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.
https://www.smobserved.com/story/2022/04/03/crime/court-take...
Victim and attacker knew each other, was immediately noticed by bartender and caught on security cameras, drugs easily detected, etc.
Sounds like maybe he'd done it several times and then finally gotten caught.
I'm certain it happens sometimes, but I doubt it's even a fraction of a percent of claimed cases.
[1] https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-dancing-plague-of-1...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
In any case.. the energy there is so high.. you can literally feel it happening to you.
> “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.
I wonder what the underlying angle is here.
I'm not sure what you're asking/suggesting?
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.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1175726650/fentanyl-police-ov...
You can't really blame them for thinking this, the DEA actually released this info and a video saying it was true to law enforcement in 2016.
https://healthandjusticejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/1...
Right now there seems to be an unnatural lack of curiosity about it from the government, media, and public.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/01/havana-syndrom...
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.
it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.