Doctors stumped by sonic experiences, doubt cause is viruses, delusions, or chemicals.
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“Injury to widespread brain networks” in victims of mystery attacks in Cuba
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
We don't exactly know it's an attack. It could be a natural or manmade event in the general area. Maybe Cubans in the area are experiencing similar symptoms but aren't reporting them? Maybe they think the headaches and forgetfulness are just life?
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Maybe. But 20 years ago in 1997 (date of the article)? Was the ubiquity of lasers commonplace or was it still more exotic?
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The Interesting part of all this is that the skeleton crew now there is fine. What ever it is did not seem to hurt everyone or even be present now. Find it still hard to believe this is a weapon but then we don't know all the information the govt. does which seems to be the norm more and more.
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I guess that is what I am saying. Seems like every article on Ars frames this as an attack... Since we don't know can't we just frame it as... "We don't know"?
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Whoa that CNN article from 1997... No popups. No autoplay ads. No tracking cookies. No ads that follow as you scroll. No interstitials. No popup nagging me to like their social media page... Gawd I miss the internet of yesteryear.
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Havana is not that backward at all. there are other hotels and lots people from all kinds of countries around. They have pretty good doctors and they even export their medical knowledge and medicine. If it was natural in the middle of Havana Vedado district where the big hotels and the embassy are that seems really strange to me. Or some machinery to produce radiation or sound that would seem really out of place.
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Not if you know where it all is supposed to have happend. It has to be mass hysteria there is no other reasonable explanation.
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Your argument does not make sense given the date (1997) and the visible wavelength. No one uses visible high power lasers because #1 they are not eyesafe and #2 they are dumb for guided missiles because you are showing your target that munitions are incoming.
There may be some obscure atmospheric science happening at a specific wavelength, but scientists are typically very public and very safety conscious.
This scenario definitely points to a covert military operation trying to scare a helicopter away.
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Clearly one of those "psychic warfare" programs has finally borne fruit and the men who stare at goats are testing their Scanners-like abilities /s
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It's not only Russia that doesn't want that to happen. The Cuban ex-pat communities in the US don't want it, either, and elements of the US government.
Also, the Dominicans stand to lose a huge amount of exports in cigars if the US trade sanctions against Cuba are lifted.
This is quite strange. It sounds like something might have been planted in the residence at the embassy, if the attacks are mostly while people are in bed. I suppose that's an ideal situation for embedding something like that in a wall or mount it in a supply closet on the other side of the wall. You just point it at the head of the bed, and turn it on in the middle of the night. Have they tried rearranging the bedroom? Or sleeping the other way round? (Not being facetious, seriously these are things that would add valuable data points if you're investigating the problem.)
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It is Cuba so it must be brujeria and some evil santeros are doing this.
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You wouldn't necessarily feel it because you have no sensory nerves in your brain. Microwaves will naturally have "hot spots" and can be tuned to maximize this effect (which is why microwave ovens rotate your food.) It's not inconceivable that you could even use several beams of slightly different frequency to create a hotspot even further away. It might be possible to create a hotspot inside a person's head that they wouldn't feel on their skin surface, at least not for a while.
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Of course you have to do all of this from another room, or another building. Then if you have somehow focussed a beam to avoid the skin but dump thermal energy say 3 cm into the skull, you are running a risk that a sleeping person might move their head 3 cm whilst sleeping, and be woken up with a painful skin burn. And the person could easily be 6 feet from the nearest wall, in which case very extreme angles, which means large areas for individual transmitters to be spread over, will be needed to have any chance of putting significantly more energy density at a point inside the skull than on the skin surface. So, now you need an adaptive focusing system, and a sensor system to tell you exactly where the skull is, and since one can sleep in several positions, this has to be a 3D sensor system. Once you get beyond the woo-woo, the idea is farcical.
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Because if it was an attack, the attacker likely would have stopped once found out, so recording now probably wouldn't going to do any good? Unless the attacker wanted to get caught it would be pretty damn stupid to continue.
If it's not, maybe they'll find something. But what evidence do you have that such devices haven't been deployed?
As far as the recording, it may have been captured by something set up to record something else, and only captured it coincidentally. Or captured on something of poor quality, like a cellphone. Or by someone who heard it, but wasn't in the location it was loudest. Etc. Again, the volume of the recording is entirely irrelevant. Just hook it up to a more powerful sound system and crank it up and suddenly it's a loud recording.
Yeah, that's a better analogy.
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And personnel in the buildings. Is anyone talking to the local clinics/hospitals about similar incidences?
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What if they some how got Lead slipped in their food in situ with a pressure wave to deteriorate some bone matter, re releasing the Plumbum back into their blood stream, and affecting the brain?
What I'm going at is it could be something that is delivered in two parts, or is a combination of things, not just one factor to consider.
Also, since Cuba could not get nuclear weapons, would it be absurd to suggest they spent some of their time and resources, developing some sort of neurological weapon, or control program in the past, to use on others, or their own people?
What I'm going at is it could be something that is delivered in two parts, or is a combination of things, not just one factor to consider.
Also, since Cuba could not get nuclear weapons, would it be absurd to suggest they spent some of their time and resources, developing some sort of neurological weapon, or control program in the past, to use on others, or their own people?
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Hmm. I'm not a government employee, but I look like one. I went to Cuba on a person to person visa in 2015, and have developed some eye control/palsy issues since then. However, it was closer to 350-400 days after the trip took place, and I don't recall any type of exposure event.
Is that 204 days average self-reporting of symptoms coupled with a fairly small range?
Is that 204 days average self-reporting of symptoms coupled with a fairly small range?
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It may be a little early to speculate as the real effects will only become know over time.
However if I had to guess I'd say both groups will have similar long-term health effects.
and with that assumption, I'd extrapolate that main difference between the two groups will be that once they quit their government positions, the US staff will become quite poor.
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This is the first Google hit. It is audio, so not likely to be recorded on a SD.
https://www.apnews.com/88bb914f8b284088bce48e54f6736d84
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Given the mysterious complaints, I was convinced this was "hysteria" or a group nocebo effect (officially termed MPI these days, I guess). But now I wonder.
I don't think projected energy weapons (sonic, microwave, or ionizing) are plausible given the symptoms and the difficulty of making such systems work in a covert and targeted way.
But a brand new CBW agent of one sort or another? That's MUCH more likely. It may have been easy to contaminate embassy food or water for a period of time. OK, so there was no evidence of a classic biological infection. But could a prion agent be responsible? The resulting encephalopathy wouldn't be detectable by imaging until it was very advanced.
Heck, the "sounds" reported by the staffers could have been intentional red-herrings for what was really going on.
Scary thoughts.
I don't think projected energy weapons (sonic, microwave, or ionizing) are plausible given the symptoms and the difficulty of making such systems work in a covert and targeted way.
But a brand new CBW agent of one sort or another? That's MUCH more likely. It may have been easy to contaminate embassy food or water for a period of time. OK, so there was no evidence of a classic biological infection. But could a prion agent be responsible? The resulting encephalopathy wouldn't be detectable by imaging until it was very advanced.
Heck, the "sounds" reported by the staffers could have been intentional red-herrings for what was really going on.
Scary thoughts.
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I'm unclear if this is just in the building or a wider area? Could it be as simple as the break-room microwave is faulty and leaking and people are unwittingly microwaving their brains while they heat their frozen pizza?
Or maybe some damaged mis-aimed high power communications microwave link blasting high-power RF energy at someplace people go?
Though I have to admit...some kind of new super-secret long-range weapon was the first thing that came to mind...sounds more conspiracy-theory than a faulty cooking appliance.
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Sounds like malware to me.Ars, this page keeps serving up a redirect pop-up ad.Bad ad network, bad!
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I want to say the word "psychotronics" here.
Scalar waves.
Not sound.
Sometimes perceived as sound.
Sometimes not.
More in heaven and earth...
Bearden.
Scalar waves.
Not sound.
Sometimes perceived as sound.
Sometimes not.
More in heaven and earth...
Bearden.
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It depends which brown acid you are talking about really.
It was the Orange Barrels that did many people in. It was actually fucked up STP. Now yer Blue Flats and Pinky Purple Double Domes were amazing.
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I dunno, it seems that the symptoms could be a first stage of zombie conversion. That part of the world is known for that kind of thing..
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WTF did I just read?
That sub-Reddit is enough to literally put you in the Twilight Zone ... or cause weird brain issues like in the article.
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Clearly, these were LRAD events (Long Range Acoustic Device)
Loss of hearing, balance and tinnitus are signature results.
Also, very clear the government has stamped top secret all over it/them.
That's leaves it open to a wide range of interpretations, most all quite sleazy.
Loss of hearing, balance and tinnitus are signature results.
Also, very clear the government has stamped top secret all over it/them.
That's leaves it open to a wide range of interpretations, most all quite sleazy.
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I saw an interview with the guy who made the announcement about the brown acid. Turns out he was selling the blue acid. Or so he claims, he might have just been joking, but he certainly couldn't remember any actual problem with the brown acid.It depends which brown acid you are talking about really.
It was the Orange Barrels that did many people in. It was actually fucked up STP. Now yer Blue Flats and Pinky Purple Double Domes were amazing.
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I saw an interview with the guy who made the announcement about the brown acid. Turns out he was selling the blue acid. Or so he claims, he might have just been joking, but he certainly couldn't remember any actual problem with the brown acid.It depends which brown acid you are talking about really.
It was the Orange Barrels that did many people in. It was actually fucked up STP. Now yer Blue Flats and Pinky Purple Double Domes were amazing.
I can't help it:
"The blue plates are nice, but the brown ones seem to last longer"
Points for identifying what game I'm playing.
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Wild speculation seems fairly appropriate when the tame speculation comes up empty
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What was their control group's results? I've got balance issues, for example, but I've never been near Cuba, and in my case it's a muscular problem, not a neurological one. A sampling of people in my office would probably turn up similar results in each category given, if only because we tend to be an older group.
Also, this group has had over six months of exposure to every bizarre theory the Internet and their own government has had to offer, and these results rely entirely on self-reporting; whenever an attempt is made to find actual evidence of illness, nothing turns up.
I'm leaning more and more toward mass hysteria here. The notion that this was some sort of "attack" has never been anything but extremely weak, and seems to grow weaker with every report despite tremendous efforts to reinforce a nefarious source.
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Too bad for that theory that only a small number of "victims" have reported such symptoms; the majority report nothing of the kind.
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Because that's the narrative being pushed. It seems as though hardly anyone is bothering to look into whether there's another explanation, or even if there's any actual thing happening here. A nebulous cloud of self-reported, widely varying systems is all being tossed with "Attack!" dressing without much cogency at all.
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CLEARLY, this is work of the US government, testing their weapons in Cuba to cover it up!
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I expected more from Ars. This is why we need to teach people to critically think when they read. I am blow away at how many comments are about how or why vs if this is even an attack... as for Ars this would never have passed my desk as an editor.
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If certain people are trying to mock and cover up an article, then perhaps there's something to it?
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