Here's why 60 Minutes and The Insider just reported "Havana Syndrome" was real
If you saw the 60 Minutes segment or read the article on The Insider, here is the antidote you need.
Thanks for reading my newsletter separating reality from bullshit in pop culture. This week we had a triple dose of such bullshit. Monday editions are free to all; paid subscribers get an additional edition on Thursdays (like this one) — yay!
I wish I had a nickel for every email I’ve received in the past 72 hours of the form “60 Minutes just reported that Havana Syndrome was an actual attack by a Russian superweapon, so you need to retract your episode about it.”
The episode referred to was either of my two Skeptoid episodes about Havana Syndrome: the first from 2017 laying out the finding, supported by virtually all scientists, that it was merely a mass sociogenic event. This was easily determined in the very first weeks, and has never been seriously challenged; it is, in fact, a nearly perfect textbook example. The second was in 2021 and was mainly to refute a boggling 2020 government report placing the likely cause on science fiction microwave weapon types that have never even been theorized, as they make no sense. I’ve also reported twice previously here on Substack on the ignorant tabloid journalism that has mindlessly parroted these conjectures as fact to a credulous and scientifically illiterate general public, here and here.
In brief, 60 Minutes, Russian outlet The Insider, and the German outlet Der Spiegel all jointly reported this week that a shadowy Russian military assassination unit called GRU Unit 29155 was responsible for the “attacks” on Western diplomats. You may have heard of them before, even if not by name; it was reported in 2020 that Unit 29155 had offered Taliban fighters bounties for killing Americans in Afghanistan. The reports accepted as a given that Havana Syndrome was “attacks” and offered their evidence — mainly claimed movements of 29155 personnel and Russian mentions of crowd control sound cannons (similar to LRAD systems) — and put the pieces together into a tidy explanation. Americans are now, apparently, being widely and openly attacked with these exotic sci-fi weapons by Russians.
Despite these “shocking new reports” three points remain unchallenged, and all three disprove the new claims: