Scientists have separately concluded that diplomats working in U.S. embassies in Cuba and China who reported of mysterious sounds seeming penetrating their heads were attacked by adversaries using microwave weapon. The scientists, who conducted separate studies, outlined similar symptoms observed between affected diplomats and cases of microwave weapon attack during the Cold war era.
Microwaves are now very common in practically every household across the world. This seemingly innocent home appliance, however, contains radio waves in the form of electromagnetic radiation that can be classified on the same spectrum as light and X-rays. These radio waves, aside from heating or cooking food, can power radars, relay messages, and link cellphones to antenna towers.
From late 2016 through August 2017, American diplomats stationed at the U.S. embassy in Cuba complained of hearing strange piercing noises seemingly penetrating their heads. In May 2018, U.S. diplomats assigned in China complaint of the same debilitating noises in their heads.
Subsequent reports following the incidents blamed the mysterious phenomena to sonic weapon attacks coming from enemies. A study, published in the journal JAMA in March, detailed the symptoms felt by the 21 diplomats from Cuba but did not specify the source of the mysterious attack.
The study's lead author, Douglas Smith, director of University of Pennsylvania's Center for Brain Injury and Repair, however, told The New York Times in a report on Sept. 1, that the most likely source of the eerie attack are microwaves.
This is the same conclusion discussed in a separate scientific paper by James Lin of the University of Illinois and the editor-in-chief- of Bio Electro Magnetics. Lin wrote that high-intensity beams of microwaves could be behind the diplomats' illnesses, particularly hearing loud noises, nausea, vertigo, headaches, and most likely brain-tissue injury. Lin theorized that the beams used for the attacks may have been fired discreetly and only intended to the target individual.
Most recently, Beatrice Golomb, professor of medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, construed that the widely reported symptoms of the diplomats' mysterious illness strongly matched the known impacts of radiofrequency/microwave electromagnetic radiation. In her paper, to be published in Neural Computation on Sept. 15, Golom said the diplomats in Cuba felt similar symptoms suffered by people in Japan who were affected by electromagnetic radiation as revealed in a paper previously published in 2012.
The report published in JAMA in March outlined the specific symptoms suffered by the diplomats as well as some of their family members. Twenty-one affected people examined for the study reported hearing eerie, localized sounds that seemed to be surrounding their homes and hotel rooms. The sound was depicted as directional, intensely loud, with notable pure and sustained tonality. Sixteen of the patients said the sound was high-pitched while 2 patients said it was low-pitched. The patients' descriptions of the sound ranged from buzzing, grinding metal, humming, and piercing sounds.
That microwaves can be weaponized has long been discovered by American scientists Allan Frey according to The New York Times. Specifically, Frey found that the microwaves can deceive the brain into thinking that it merely perceives ordinary sounds. In a paper published in 1961, Frey said that continuous exposure to microwave attacks with power densities 160 times lower than the safe level can trigger sonic delusions. In a paper published in 1962, Frey said the impact of a microwave attack specifically happened in the brain's receptor site as the temporal lobes.
After the initial publications of the papers, Frey was invited back then by the Soviet Academy of Sciences to share his research in a series of lectures. At one point, he was asked to speak in a military base outside of Moscow. At the time, Moscow was extremely interested in how the microwaves attack can trick the mind.
At present, The New York Times said Russia, China, and many European states, aside from the United States, know how to weaponize the microwaves. There were also indications that some nations have advanced the weapons and could use microwaves to dictate spoken words into the mind of the person that is being attacked. The weapon usually comes in the form of a small satellite dish.
Frey, now 83, suspects that Cubans aligned with Russia, are the ones behind the attacks against the diplomats in the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
Commenting on Golomb's study, David Carpenter of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University of Albany concurred that evidence highlighted by Golomb are indeed indications of microwave hearing attack. Carpenter underlined that similar symptoms were seen before, back in the time when the Soviets exposed the U.S. Embassy to radiation during the Cold War.
