No, US forces didn't use "sonic weapons" in Maduro raid

These magical science fiction weapons didn't exist in Cuba in 2016, and still don't exist today.

If you haven’t yet seen the headlines on tabloid news websites (like this and this) claiming that a mysterious “sonic weapon” was used by the US forces that renditioned Maduro, you will soon — and probably on proper news sites. Nothing spreads as fast as bullshit.

What happened was that some online rando posted a tweet that was a translation of Spanish text from various garbage websites, purporting to be a statement from a Venezuelan security guard who was on the losing end of the January 3 raid that removed Nicolás Maduro. It said in part:

At one point, they launched something — I don’t know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move.

In no version of the text is any source given, or an identification of this alleged security guard. It’s almost certainly just random made-up crap.

Its probable nature as “made-up crap” is likely why it was eagerly retweeted by the exhaustively silly White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Promotion from this source constitutes official acknowledgement that “sonic weapons in Venezuela” are fake bullshit.

The relationship between “sonic weapons” and reality has a long and fascinating history. The short version is that its genesis, the 2016 event in Cuba where some American diplomats in Cuba felt ill, was determined at the time — and confirmed many times since — to have been a sociogenic event triggered by crickets and someone who probably had an ear infection. No mystery; never was.

However, since then, the story has been magnified, exaggerated, and had more fuel poured on its fire than all of Venezuela’s sanctioned tankers can carry. It was even given a name: “Havana Syndrome.” The basic conjecture is a weapon that destroys or damages using sound that is inaudible. Both infrasound and ultrasound are around us all day every day; both are known to be harmless.

The most bizarre chapter was this 2020 report published by the National Academies titled An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies, which essentially endorsed these science-fiction weapons as real, and offered a number of possible explanations for what they might be; all of which were extremely speculative, and most of which contained flagrant factual errors. The report reads far less like a science paper, and far more like a piece of propaganda intended to feed think tanks.

I discussed this paper, and also the real sonic weapons that actually exist and are loud as hell in this Skeptoid episode. There are also microwave based weapons systems that are real, such as LRADs (fancy megaphones) and the Active Denial System (a non-lethal crowd control device). None of these employ non-existent science-fiction technologies.

I fully expect this story to grow in the coming days — so I’ve left this Thursday post open to all readers including free subscribers. I’ll wrap it up with some recommended resources for further reading:

• The most comprehensive and authoritative book on Havana Syndrome, what it actually is, and what it is not: Baloh, R., Bartholomew, R. Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. Göttingen: Copernicus, 2020.

• Stone, R. "Stressful conditions, not sonic weapons, sickened U.S diplomats, Cuba panel asserts." Science. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 5 Dec. 2017. Web. 15 Dec. 2017.

• Both of my Skeptoid episodes on the subject have references and further reading suggestions at the bottom: Dunning, B. (2021, January 5) Havana Syndrome, Microwaves, and Hearing RF. Skeptoid Media; Dunning, B. (2017, December 26) Sonic Weapons in Cuba. Skeptoid Media.

Please leave this story where it belongs: In the dustbin of made-up Internet crap.