Sonic Weapon in Cuba: Mystery of Health Attacks Deepens

russ_watters said:

Maybe, though xenophobia is not really the right word. Even if Cuba has earned non-adversary status, it is a built-in job requirement of a diplomatic mission anywhere to view their host as an adversary.

jack476 said:

And ideally diplomats would be expected to be sufficiently well-composed to not allow healthy suspicion to devolve into conspiracy theories about mind control devices.

My confidence in the US government to responsibly deal with racially or ethnically charged issues (or non-white countries in general) is...limited right now, to put it mildly.

russ_watters said:

They are missing a critical property: volume.

Here are the questions needing answers in this case:

1. Did any staff sustain real injuries?
2. Did the sound cause any of the injuries?
3. What is the nature of the sound?
4. What is the source of the sound?

All of these are separate questions. The recent report seeks to answer only #3, which is the least consequential of them.

Other hypotheses that invoke stable digital signal sources for this sound (a) do not explain the few-percent drift in the PRR, (b) are not as well-matched spectrally , and (c) fail to explain the pulse structure and frequency decay through each pulse seen in the AP recording. The first individual to believe this sound was associated with health issues reported that the sound stopped abruptly when he opened the front door. This and other reports of the sound abruptly stopping with movement in a room are also consistent with an insect stopping a call when threatened.

nsaspook said:

I don't think the volume is a missing property as the recorded microphone level to recording media clipping and background noises gives an reasonable calibration of sound.

As for the source, there are 'tells'.

While the temporal pulse structure in the recording is unlike any natural insect source, when the cricket call is played on a loudspeaker and recorded indoors, the interaction of reflected sound pulses yields a sound virtually indistinguishable from the AP sample. This provides strong evidence that an echoing cricket call, rather than a sonic attack or other technological device, is responsible for the sound in the released recording.

russ_watters said:

Here's the paper:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2019/01/04/510834.full.pdf

I see nothing in there suggesting the authors attempted to ascertain the volume of the original source by any method, much less that one, nor do I think such a thing is possible from a recording. I think it is impossible to tell the difference between a loud sound slightly further away than a softer sound. Or, for that matter, a more or less sensitive microphone or recording gain level. Also, since the recording was produced for the purpose of telling people what to "look" for, I would think the government would have chosen as "clean" a recording as they could make, devoid of background noise. But in any case, they made no comment on having done any of that. All they said they did is waveform matching.In order to create a match, they played recorded sounds on a loudspeaker and re-recorded them. And that tells them the sounds in the government recording are natural? Obvious question: why doesn't it tell them the sounds were created in exactly the same way they created their sounds? They're skipping a step in logic like so many others are.

Tillerson’s comments and the FBI report illustrate how befuddled the U.S. still seems about the mystery in Havana, more than a year after embassy workers started reporting illnesses including hearing loss, vision problems and memory issues. Symptoms often followed unexplained sounds in diplomats’ homes that led investigators to suspect a futuristic sonic weapon. The U.S. has said 24 government workers were harmed. Canada has reported some of its diplomats were affected, too.

The FBI report, which hasn’t been released publicly, is the clearest sign to date of the U.S. ruling out the sonic weapon theory. The report says the FBI tested the hypothesis that air pressure waves via audible sound, infrasound or ultrasound could be used to clandestinely hurt Americans in Cuba, and found no evidence. Infrasound waves are below the range of human hearing. Ultrasound is above.

The FBI declined to comment Monday.

Despite the buzz over microwaves, advanced in news reports in recent days, experts warn that caution is in order. There’s an old scientific aphorism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “And they’re not giving the extraordinary evidence. They’re not giving any evidence,” said physicist Peter Zimmerman, an arms control expert and former scientific adviser to the State Department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

No microwave weapon that affects the brain is known to exist. The FBI has investigated the Cuba cases and found no evidence of a plot. Searches of the U.S. Embassy and other locations in Havana have turned up no sign of a weapon.

Most significantly, doctors examining the sickened diplomats have established no clear link between their symptoms and any external source.
...
“It’s crazy,” said Kenneth R. Foster, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania who studied microwave phenomena while working at the Naval Medical Research Center in Bethesda. Foster, who was not involved in examining the diplomatic personnel, said that the reported illnesses remain mysterious and that he doesn’t have an explanation.

“But it’s sure as heck not microwaves,” he added.

University of Cincinnati neurologist Alberto J. Espay said, “Microwave weapons is the closest equivalent in science to fake news.”

nsaspook said:

Are you saying the audio level of the recorded 'crickets' caused the medical issues the people reported?

The FBI reportedly doesn't believe that after analyzing recordings of the reported sounds and testing the hypothesis in general.
https://apnews.com/37deffe6a9ad408abc5a1a0277056d90

It's possible (but not likely) that some sort of new Russian RF/EM weapon was used...

russ_watters said:

I'm saying it is a possibility that should be investigated, not assumed.

Yes, and hopefully they investigated it instead of assuming it too, but unfortunately we don't have access to their report.

I agree this is the least likely explanation.

[edit] One thing that bugs me about the crickets explanation is its obviousness. Every locale has unique fauna, but any local can tell you "what's that annoying noise?" I had such an experience in Puerto Rico last year (answer: frogs). It strains credulity that such an obvious explanation - or red herring - could be missed so easily with or without an investigation.

Thursday night’s special did not present an alternate explanation for the facts presented by U.S. officials, with one significant exception. Officials with Cuba’s Interior Ministry said that U.S. investigators had presented them with three recordings made by presumed victims of sonic attacks and that analysis of the sounds showed them to be extremely similar to those of crickets and cicadas that live along the northern coast of Cuba.
...
Cuba said it had reported its findings on the similarity of the recordings to cricket sounds, and the U.S. had not responded.

The mysterious ailment known as “Havana syndrome” did not result from the actions of a foreign adversary, according to an intelligence report that shatters a long-disputed theory that hundreds of U.S. personnel were targeted and sickened by a clandestine enemy wielding energy waves as a weapon.
...
Seven intelligence agencies participated in the review of approximately 1,000 cases of “anomalous health incidents,” the term the government uses to describe a constellation of physical symptoms including ringing in the ears followed by pressure in the head and nausea, headaches and acute discomfort.

Five of those agencies determined it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible for the symptoms, either as the result of purposeful actions — such as a directed energy weapon — or as the byproduct of some other activity, including electronic surveillance that unintentionally could have made people sick, the officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the findings of the assessment, which had not yet been made public.

One agency, which the officials did not name, determined that it was “unlikely” that a foreign actor was at fault, a slightly less emphatic finding that did not appreciably change the consensus. One agency abstained in its conclusion regarding a foreign actor. But when asked, no agency dissented from the conclusion that a foreign actor did not cause the symptoms, one of the intelligence officials said.
Click to expand...

One of the officials said that even in geographic locations where U.S. intelligence effectively had total ability to monitor the environment for signs of malicious interference, analysts found no evidence of an adversary targeting personnel.

“There was nothing,” the official said. This person added that there was no intelligence that foreign leaders, including in Russia, had any knowledge of or had authorized an attack on U.S. personnel that could explain the symptoms.

Question Can a systematic evaluation using quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) metrics identify potential brain lesions in patients who have experienced anomalous health incidents (AHIs) compared with a well-matched control group?

Findings In this exploratory study that involved brain imaging of 81 participants who experienced AHIs and 48 matched control participants, there were no significant between-group differences in MRI measures of volume, diffusion MRI–derived metrics, or functional connectivity using functional MRI after adjustments for multiple comparisons. The MRI results were highly reproducible and stable at longitudinal follow-ups. No clear relationships between imaging and clinical variables emerged.

Meaning In this exploratory neuroimaging study, there was no significant MRI-detectable evidence of brain injury among the group of participants who experienced AHIs compared with a group of matched control participants. This finding has implications for future research efforts as well as for interventions aimed at improving clinical care for the participants who experienced AHIs.