Remember those mysterious symptoms embassy staff in Cuba were suffering?

American officials in Cuba and China have experienced ‘Havana Syndrome’ : hearing strange sounds, then suffering dizziness, headaches and memory loss. A new report in New York Times suggests that the cause of the syndrome is being covered up by the State Department.

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The incidents, first reported in Cuba in 2016, have been controversial from the start. Victims typically hear a burst of high-pitched, grating noise with no obvious source before suffering other symptoms. Other people in the same building do not experience either the sound or the other effects.

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[E]xtensive brain scans of the victims found signs of injury, described as “a new syndrome….that resembles persistent concussion” in a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2018.

Such effects could not be produced by a sonic weapon, which cannot travel through walls or be localized in this way. But researchers suggested that a microwave device might be involved.

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“A minuscule but rapid rise in tissue temperature, resulting from the absorption of pulsed microwave energy, creates a thermoelastic expansion of brain matter,” says James Lin, a professor emeritus of bioelectromagnetic engineering at the University of Illinois, who has been investigating the effect for decades.

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[T]here have been attempts to weaponize the effect.

In the early 2000s, the Sierra Nevada Corporation developed a device called MEDUSA, or Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio, for the U.S. Navy. The aim was to generate a microwave auditory effect loud enough to cause severe discomfort and disperse crowds – a microwave scream inside your skull. The most significant development was a novel electronic antenna able to form a narrow beam and target a specific individual. MEDUSA never made it past the prototype stage, and Sierra Nevada have declined to comment on later developments.

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In the same time period, the U.S. Marine Corps funded work on another non-lethal weapon called EPIC — Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control. This aimed to disable people inside a building through the walls using pulsed radio waves to influence tiny hairs in the vestibular system. These hairs give us our sense of balance and orientation; hitting then with a resonant frequency can make them vibrate, causing dizziness and loss of balance. EPIC was intended to prevent subjects from moving or even standing up, forcing them to give up without a fight.

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However, the technology was not developed beyond this initial stages.

  Forbes

So they say. There was also, I recall hearing, interest in tuning microwaves to affect specific races of people.

Chinese researchers found that rats exposed to pulsed microwaves had difficulty in learning to negotiate a water maze for up to three days after exposure. The researchers believed this was due to damage to the hippocampus, a part of the brain associated with memory. It is suggestive of the memory loss and mental impairment suffered by some of the victims in Cuba and China.

In 2015, scientists in Tokyo carried out their own tests on rats, using intense pulsed power to cause microwave-induced traumatic brain injury. When they examined the damage to brain tissue afterwards, they concluded that “microwave-induced neurotrauma shows the same pathological changes as blast traumatic brain injury.” In other words, it is possible to produce concussion inside the skull with microwave pulses, exactly as seen in Havana Syndrome.

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In August, the National Academies of Sciences finished up the most thorough study to date of the likely causes of the incidents in Cuba and China. [...] However, the State Department is withholding the report.

Dr. David A. Relman, chairman of the National Academies of Sciences committee that examined the cases, told the New York Times that the situation was “immensely frustrating” and that he did not know why the State Department is refusing to share the report with Congress or the public.

One possibility is that the report might complicate relations with China if it indicates that a Chinese weapon caused some of the cases.

It would also raise questions of whether U.S. agencies possess similar technology and whether it has ever been used.

Count on it. Or we will be doing so. 

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.