The new "Havana Syndrome" news, explained
Were US diplomats around the world actually subjected a mysterious "directed energy" energy weapon?
Thanks for reading my newsletter that valiantly attempts to separate reality from bullshit in pop culture. Tuesday editions are free to all; Thursday editions (like this) are available in full to paid subscribers only. Become one, and get the whole thing! It would bring both of us joy.
Science reported this week “Mystery illness among U.S. diplomats did not cause permanent brain damage.” By way of background, the article opens with:
For several years, dozens of U.S. diplomats and intelligence agents have fallen ill with a perplexing array of symptoms that some politicians, intelligence analysts, and physicians have speculated may have been triggered by a so-called directed-energy weapon.
Indeed, at the time, the US State Department put out the following statement:
Over the past several months, 21 U.S. Embassy employees have suffered a variety of injuries from attacks of an unknown nature. The affected individuals have exhibited a range of physical symptoms, including ear complaints, hearing loss, dizziness, headache, fatigue, cognitive issues, and difficulty sleeping. Investigators have been unable to determine who is responsible or what is causing these attacks.
But as anyone knows who has followed the science bloggers keeping pace with this story ever since it broke in 2016, there are no such weapons, not even theoretical ones. It’s purely a science fiction proposition suggested by people who couldn’t otherwise come up with an explanation. Americans (but no Cubans) working at the US Embassy in Havana started reporting a wide array of disparate symptoms, and many of them reported hearing a strange sound when the symptoms began, and the descriptions of the sounds varied too. Once news broke out, other embassy workers around the world began reporting the same thing. And then people working in intelligence.
Scientific studies of the affected workers began to be published, making findings such as the gray matter in their brains had been reduced. It turned into a whole huge thing, and the media named it Havana Syndrome.
This week’s news is that two large studies have now been published in JAMA (here and here) finding that the affected workers suffered no degenerative brain impacts at all. In other words, a direct contradiction of the earlier findings.
How do we square all of this? Here’s how.