We were right about Havana syndrome

Posted by Bender 2 hours ago

Comments

Comment by PLMUV9A4UP27D 1 hour ago

I put my bet on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness If the authorities have made the same conclusion, it would be very difficult to tell the affected individuals that. This is since there is a misconception that mass psychosis A) only happens to mentally "weak" persons. B) Symptoms are made up/"just in your imagination"

But the symptoms are very much real, and it's not something that is easily treated. How mass psychosis can lead to actual medical illness is unknown, but the cause and effect is documented.

For that reason it might appear as a cover up, when authorities avoid giving answers.

Even though I'm familiar with the science behind mass psychosis illness, I would still probably have difficulties accepting that as an explanation if I were in a similar situation.

Comment by Nevermark 1 hour ago

If that is so, why not acknowledge that the current working theory is that it is psychogenic, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

The fact that psychogenic illness is not simply “weak” people, but a real phenomenon, strongly supports the fairness and necessity of offering treatment.

The wikipedia article says when authorities publicly take the effects seriously it can induce more cases. But the example was of getting help from a witch doctor, which was a remarkably dysfunctional “validation” to add to an already complex problem.

Another very dysfunctional “validation”: official denial, avoidance, obvious lack of work on solutions or mitigations, and all the trappings of a cover up!

Being direct has so many benefits, vs indirect denial or bad faith “treatments”.

It would be a reassuring response, to those in the same context without symptoms who are concerned about their own health.

Direct responses, with care given, are also in a better position to find treatments for psychogenic symptoms, preventative practices that reduce vulnerability, or alter working theories of cause, as any other evidence emerges.

Chronic anxiety and anxiety attacks are “psychosomatic” on an individual basis. But very real, often caused or impacted by working conditions, and important to diagnose and treat. Psychogenic illness should be the same. “Illness” is not a cause limited concept.

Comment by gcanyon 1 hour ago

Note: “We were right” here means “it’s a real thing,” but the article has almost nothing concrete to offer about what actually is going on or who is responsible.

Comment by matthewdgreen 1 hour ago

There has been some recent reporting that has made "Havana syndrome is a real thing" look more plausible:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/14/...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/13/politics/havana-syndrome-...

Comment by dmix 1 hour ago

> Pentagon bought device through undercover operation some investigators suspect is linked to Havana Syndrome

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/13/politics/havana-syndrome-devi...

Comment by vintermann 1 hour ago

I think that if you offer Russian criminals millions of dollars for a mysterious device which could possibly cause Havana syndrome, you're certain to get a mysterious device.

This is confirmation bias with the side step of giving a ton of money to Russian criminals.

Comment by matthewdgreen 1 hour ago

According to those reports, the US military tested it for more than a year on animals, and found that they suffered similar patterns of brain damage. They didn't just get a device and say "wow, this looks like a bunch of very suspicious electronics, too bad we can't turn it on!"

Naturally the testing claims from insiders could be specious. But once you go down the road of distrusting stories told by spooks, so could the purchase of a weapon in the first place. The CIA might not even be a real thing.

Comment by rurp 1 hour ago

Exactly, the definitive claim in the headline is not at all supported by the article.

Comment by colechristensen 1 hour ago

Russia developed a less lethal directed energy weapon which is essentially a microwave oven radio signal switched off and on very quickly (likely something like a GHz signal with a highly directional antenna being switched at kHz)

Eyewitness reports at the Maduro kidnapping raid and a recent leak in the last few days regarding the US purchasing such a weapon from Russia and testing it at least on animals tie all of this together.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-tested-device-that-...

Comment by 28 minutes ago

Comment by Fraterkes 1 hour ago

At the core of "Havana Syndrome" lies the idea that Cuba and/or Russia have managed to develop energy weapons so advanced that the American military command won't even entertain the thought of them existing. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Comment by Terr_ 1 hour ago

> won't even entertain the thought of them existing

Careful, it's also possible that they have thought very hard about such things, and they've decided that revealing what they know would lose them a technological edge.

In other words, what if the CIA/DOD already knows there's a class of devices which could explain the problems, and the denial is about maintaining secrecy over their own operational capabilities?

Imagine something similar in the 1980s: "This tragic mid-air collision was obviously caused by faulty radar or gross pilot error by at least one of the two military planes... Our brightest minds have looked very hard at the problem and there is no such thing as a 'stealth' airplane which doesn't show up on radar."

Comment by fragmede 10 minutes ago

Or going back further, Allies having cracked the Enigma encryption had to let Allied ships continue getting sunk and soldiers dying because to act otherwise would have revealed that the Enigma had been broken which would have led to an even greater loss of life.

Comment by sailfast 1 hour ago

The assumption with these weapons was that they would require too much energy to be portable enough to be undetectable in all of these circumstances (at least based on other reporting on the subject).

If the device doesn't require a lot of power, then it's entirely possible that American military commanders and research leadership would miss it.

Add to that an incentive to avoid helping the victims from a cost and overhead perspective, and you get a big ol' mess.

Comment by everdrive 1 hour ago

>At the core of "Havana Syndrome" lies the idea that Cuba and/or Russia have managed to develop energy weapons so advanced that the American military command won't even entertain the thought of them existing.

I just don't think that's true at all. The answer could easily be that Cuba and Russia have developed energy weapons that we only know about from classified sources and therefore cannot discuss their existence.

Comment by vintermann 1 hour ago

Sure, if you think the intelligence community is better at physics than the physics community.

Comment by MisterTea 1 hour ago

This was the point I made in another comment here. My bet is the US deployed the weapon and accidentally sickened their own people. So of course they play stupid and deny that any such tech could exist.

Though the Russians have been very clever in the past stumping the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Comment by bitexploder 59 minutes ago

Or that we have them too…

Comment by duped 1 hour ago

There's also the chance it's not a weapon, but something that mistakenly turned into a weapon when it was tested on live subjects.

I don't think randomly attacking embassy staff (iirc, not everyone was CIA - there were just desk people affected) makes sense for anyone to do, but trying to listen on them and fucking up sounds right up their (or our) alley.

Comment by Beestie 1 hour ago

Here is a 2019 study that supports the claims of actual injury:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2738552

Comment by why_at 1 hour ago

I am not very knowledgeable about this topic, but in my cursory reading of wikipedia I see that there's been some criticism of this study:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome#University_of_...

Comment by cleaning 1 hour ago

Reader's note: the author was a member of the CIA for 26 years

Comment by johncessna 56 minutes ago

As a reminder, they are likely subject to the lifetime prepublication review[1] which requires anything published to be reviewed by the agency prior to publishing.

[1]https://www.cia.gov/resources/publications/

Comment by halyconWays 1 hour ago

That should disqualify them from ever being taken seriously on anything. Would you trust water from a well that was once poisoned? Even if you scrubbed every inch with soap and water, wouldn't there still be some residue that you'd rather not ingest? And I don't think people's inner selves can actually be cleaned, nor do they even want to, usually.

Comment by PaulHoule 2 hours ago

It's amazing that everybody who has a tendency for paranoia or an interest in weird knowledge knows about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

but that kind of person can't get a security clearance or get taken seriously by the State Department.

Comment by MisterTea 1 hour ago

> but that kind of person can't get a security clearance or get taken seriously by the State Department.

This feels similar to the early Area 51 law suits which were thrown out because the government denied the facility existed. I feel that yes, the government was aware of the situation but downplayed it because they have something to hide.

My tin foil hat explanation is that the US government was fully aware of what was happening. Why is unknown though I could guess that A. the US denied knowledge of such weapons to give plausible deniability which leads to B. The US deployed such a weapon on premises to use/test against Cubans and inadvertently sickened their own people in an accident.

I don't doubt Cuba could initiate such an attack but I find it very unlikely the US would be befuddled when the US government along with others have developed and experimented with sonic weapons. Given the recent trends towards more authoritarian governments these weapons are easy to deploy against citizens. This article was posted to hn recently: https://earshotngo.substack.com/p/sonic-attack-on-a-silent-v...

Comment by matthewdgreen 1 hour ago

One proposal I've heard is that the US also has weapons like these and wanted to keep their existence classified.

Comment by MisterTea 25 minutes ago

I could have been more clear, but yes, that is my point too.

Comment by formerly_proven 37 minutes ago

MAE is kind of obvious, because healthy ears are incredibly sensitive. 0 dbSPL translates to attowatts on the eardrum displacing it just a few pm, with hair cells firing on sub-nm movements (after mechanical amplification). It is completely unsurprising that just the thermal effect of RF being pulsed in the general direction of the head can become audible in the right circumstances.

Comment by apalmer 1 hour ago

Didn't the US use some weapon that essential causes the same thing as Havana Syndrome?

Comment by ChrisArchitect 2 hours ago

60 Minutes Havana Syndrome report finds U.S. government tested energy weapon

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47314335

Comment by themafia 1 hour ago

I'm not sure having a microbiologist on to talk about RF energy weapons was a good choice. I also have significant doubts about this "black market Russian RF weapon" storyline. Just because you found an item on the black market doesn't mean it exists in general, is a viable weapon, or can be used to explain "Havanna Syndrome."

There's almost no data with which to draw any conclusions about this.

It seems convenient that this pops up right at the moment the government could use a distraction.

Comment by orbital-decay 1 hour ago

Yeah. For comparison, Novichok makes total sense, it's just a multi-component poison designed to avoid detection and used on dissidents and spies, and there were multiple insider leaks, starting with its creator literally giving interviews and other scientists publishing the research in the open. It's chemically sound, it's not something extraordinary, it's a known quantity. This story, on the other hand, says that for 30 years (including completely different times, the 90's) they arbitrarily targeted the CIA in particular with a weapon of unknown and pretty dubious nature, which was never replicated or even possibility investigated, in what could be described as James Bond-level operations (hilarious given their level of competence), CIA themselves helping cover it, and this incredibly secret clandestine weapon of unknown nature is casually sold in the black market. This is an extraordinary amount of extraordinary things that need to be true at the same time, and the story suddenly re-emerges in a pretty convenient moment.

I'm not necessarily saying this is a lie, but they certainly need extraordinary evidence for all this to be believable.

Comment by amarant 1 hour ago

Tbf, when was the last time the government didn't need a distraction?

Comment by zamadatix 1 hour ago

I'd apply the same level of skepticism to the bit at the end - the government seems to always be in the state of having use for a distraction so is it really surprising most stories can be labeled as "convenient" when the only alternative is reporting on nothing but what the government is up to today?

Comment by themafia 1 hour ago

The government needs different levels of distractions at different times. For example, when they're stuck in a boondoggle of a war with Iran that's not going nearly as well as they hoped or projected.

I'm sure RF weapons exist. They would need a pretty hefty power supply and heat sinks since microwave transmitters are often inefficient at high gain.

Saying "the russian black market" pretends to have one does not obviate from you the requirement to explain how this implementation is different or unique and overcomes the obvious challenges implied by _basic_ physics.

Comment by mschuster91 1 hour ago

> Just because you found an item on the black market doesn't mean it exists in general

RF based energy weapons have been a thing since (at least) 2010 [1]. According to folklore, the initial "microwave" cooking appliance was a side effect from some radar researcher noticing either his testicles or some chocolate got warmer than expected.

The interesting thing is, the rumors about the Russians using RF weapons have been circulating for well over a decade. Why has no one gone ahead and installed RF spectrometers and radio direction finding gear in and around sites with suspicious activity?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

Comment by jajuuka 1 hour ago

It's a lot of coincidences falling to place at the same time. Which is very suspicious. And doesn't seem to be well supported outside government agencies or controlled organizations like CBS either. Does feel like someone is jingling the keys.

Comment by beeburrt 1 hour ago

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Comment by throwawayqqq11 1 hour ago

Aggressive, inhumane weapons or sabotage programs are nothing new and using RF or acustics for it is almost trivial. My bet is, all the morally untethered states are in pursuite of something alike and someone spilled the sauce. So yes, its more distraction than uncovering to me.

Comment by swayam-41 1 hour ago

Even after serving 26 years, he has to left CIA.

Comment by mnmnmn 1 hour ago

The US government treats its employees like dog shit

Comment by stephbook 1 hour ago

My feeling has always been that there was no interest in investigating this.

The government can skirt medical help, can send the next batch of officers in without problems and doesn't need to confront an adversary that is politically.. difficult under Trump. It's certainly no coincidence that Russia would start using something like this in Cuba, a friendly state, and not say.. France. Where the local police and spy agencies could investigate and observe.

Just imagine what would have to happen if someone acknowledged Havanah syndrome is real.

Next up, burn pits cause lung damage and brain damage too.

Comment by aa_is_op 1 hour ago

These things happen next to Russian embassies and everyone goes... I wonder who could it be...

Comment by jmyeet 1 hour ago

Fentanyl has become a huge issue with street drugs. It's being laced in other drugs. It's an incredibly strong opiate and because the mixing is imprecise, it can be easy to overdose unintentionally.

What's more interesting is the hysteria around fentanyl, which is completely made up and has no basis in fact, but is perpetuated by police unions and media outlets who are likely currying favor with police unions or just trading on the hysteria.

In it's purest form, fentanyl can exist in a powder or liquid form. I could give you a massive quantity of either and you could handle them completely fine. How do I know this? Because health workers do this all the time. It's like handling talcum powder. I mean you would probably want to wash your hands and you wouldn't want to lick it but there are no fumes and you can't be poisoned or dosed just by being in the same room as fentanyl in any form.

Yet this completely made up fear has caused law enforcement officers to believe they've suffered from fentanyl exposure. For example [1]:

> Results

> Nearly all leaders and officers interviewed wrongly believed that dermal exposure to fentanyl was deadly and expressed fear about such exposure on scene. Officers had a lack of education about fentanyl exposure and faulty or dubious sources of information about it.

and [2]:

> Police in the United States have told implausible stories about airborne fentanyl exposures for years. The real symptoms appear related to panic attacks and the psychological trauma of policing.

So something that's completely made up can lead people to create their own symptoms. It also fits the narrative of people believing their jobs are more dangerous than they actually are.

So, back to Havana Syndrome. I've always been convinced that it's completely fake. There are probably people who like the narrative because it makes the Russians or Cubans scary with some unknown tech. And that means you need to research your own versions, right?

One possibility I might believe is that these people were exposed to something most likely from the CIA itself. You might say "the CIA wouldn't do this to their own". Think again [3].

So to believe any of this I want these people to release their medical records and have some independent medical analysis. Does the author really have TBI? Was there some other cause? Did this person suffer, say, an injury in a motor vehicle accident and is intentionally or unintentionally blaming it on Havana Syndrome?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...

[2]: https://www.leidenlawblog.nl/articles/police-panic-and-fenta...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra

Comment by vortegne 1 hour ago

Not gonna lie, it's impossible to feel bad for someone who has been in the CIA for decades.

A small-scale imperial boomerang. The gaslighting and other tactics coming to bite you in the ass for a change, instead of some nation where US has "interests".

Comment by SilentM68 1 hour ago

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Comment by leephillips 1 hour ago

The article seems to have been written by an LLM and is illustrated by an AI-generated image. And it contains little or no new information.

Comment by isamuel 1 hour ago

Very weird that clandestine imperial gophers start to feel anxious and have trouble sleeping after a while. must be a secret laser

Comment by ImPostingOnHN 1 hour ago

Radio waves aren't exactly a secret.

Pop the magnetron out of a microwave and direct it towards someone's head [0], and I imagine they're not gonna have a great time. And that's with parts available in many average homes.

The Active Denial System [1] works based on these principles, but different frequencies.

0 - Don't do this

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

Comment by janalsncm 1 hour ago

If it were just a magnetron shooting microwaves it would be blocked by a ton of materials. Maybe a microwave laser would work though.

Comment by ImPostingOnHN 30 minutes ago

The concept is the same: directed radio waves. They can be tuned and directed far better than a magnetron and waveguide pulled from a microwave. This is an adversary more sophisticated than some rando disassembling appliances in their garage, and even a moderately knowledgeable radio technician could improve upon it.

Comment by mschuster91 1 hour ago

Mount that magnetron in front of an ordinary satellite dish and oh boy whatever is at the focal point of it will not have a nice day either. Your average satellite dish has about 38 dBi of gain - an 1 kW magnetron will yield something around 3 MW EIRP if you manage to end up in the RF path.

That is why even around "small" scale radio transmitters such as phone cell towers you absolutely have to keep a safe distance, and even more around large broadcast towers or even radio amateurs doing serious satellite communication.

Comment by GuinansEyebrows 1 hour ago

it seems like there was an external physical cause of havana afterall... but i still laughed at this :)

Comment by Fraterkes 1 hour ago

Any source for that external physical cause? Ideally by a publication/source that a skeptic like me won't just dismiss?