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Havana Syndrome
35 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M get topical, and talk about Havana Syndrome!
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
That old Havana sound. We've talked a lot about Havana syndrome. That weird new buzzing sound that drives diplomats wild. Which almost makes it sound like some hip and cool jazz thing from the 1930s. Indeed, we've almost talked about Havana syndrome as much as we have the urtext for our podcast, Flight MH370. So much so that there is a clear and present danger that that old Havana sound might become the new MH370, and that it has consequences.
00:00:25
Speaker
which we won't talk about today. Rather, we're going to deep dive into Havana, Havana Sounds, Sound, the Milford Sounds, and possibly even Milford itself. Hmm, probably not. We are, though, going to talk about Havana Syndrome. Since we've never really talked about it as a topic in a main episode. And crucially, we've never talked about it in Havana Syndrome ease. Today, that ends. Today, we're covering Havana Syndrome in Havana Syndrome. Josh, get ready to oscillate those vocal chords.
00:01:01
Speaker
Well, wasn't that informative. So what's on the Patreon bonus episode this week? Well, I for one can't wait. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr.
Meet the Hosts
00:01:18
Speaker
M. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denter.
00:01:31
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison, sitting in Auckland, New Zealand. They are, of course, Dr. M. Denteth sitting in Zhuhai, China. I don't know that we have a lot to get out of the way before we start this episode. Can we just- No, we are somewhat bereft of administration. We are. No new patrons, but that's fine. We've got plenty. They pay the bills.
00:01:56
Speaker
um no no no papers no speeches delivered at recent conferences no embarrassing personal problems you want to share i mean i've got a lot of embarrassing personal problems but i'm not going to talk about them on this podcast although
00:02:14
Speaker
We're slightly delayed in getting to recording this week's episode, because I had someone come in to fix a leaky water heater, and in the process of fixing the leaky water heater, he broke the toilet. And so he then had to fix the toilet in order to then be able to fix the leaky water heater. I did think maybe things would escalate from there, but luckily, likely at this stage,
00:02:39
Speaker
everything's fine, although if there is a distant sound of explosion and then a plume of water, you'll know that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Nevertheless, so basically what we're saying is we have nothing to say, so we should get straight into it. But we've taken a long time talking about it.
00:02:58
Speaker
I guess the only other thing that's worth saying is it's probably worth keeping in mind that the entire time we're talking about Havana syndrome, I'll be having like the first two lines of that Havana song by Camila Watson and Havana.
00:03:13
Speaker
Half of my heart is in Havana. That will be in my head just forever. If I sound distracted, it's simply because I have that song stuck in my head, as I always do whenever we talk about this topic.
Havana Syndrome: History and Symptoms
00:03:30
Speaker
And that topic is, of course, Havana Syndrome. And before we go any further, we should probably actually play a sting to signify that we're starting things properly. We don't want to delay getting to the sting even further, having gone. There's not much to talk about, and then spending minutes talking about nothing. I mean, we could just keep making this go along, and along, and along. We could, but we won't.
00:03:53
Speaker
Was that Havana syndrome I heard in the background? No, it was the boys doing dishes, I think emptying the dishwasher. Well, that is all fine. When we talk about Havana syndrome, that might count. Let's play that sting. So Havana syndrome, obviously, is something we've talked about quite a bit in this podcast. I counted, I think, was it one, two, three, four, seven?
00:04:23
Speaker
seven different mentions of it in episodes over time. But we've never actually talked about it in depth as one thing. It's always just being started as this little, here's this funny thing, and then there's an update on the funny thing, and another thing happened again. And then it just kind of kept going and going. I assumed the first couple of times we talked about it, it was just going to be another one of those things that your wacky conspiracist types like to bring up about, you know,
00:04:49
Speaker
It's one of those dodgy things that governments get up to that Havana Syndrome and everyone else will just ignore about and go away. But it hasn't gone away. It's stuck around. It's escalated. Indeed, it's escalated all the way to the top, as we will see. Yeah, the escalation for this is really quite interesting because I think, as we noted back when we first mentioned Havana Syndrome back in 2017,
00:05:12
Speaker
There was a rather prosaic explanation for what was happening at the US embassy in Cuba, where people were claiming to be suffering from some kind of directed energy weapon, that it was probably just mass psychogenic illness of some kind, so basically just a mass delusion, which people were mistaking as some kind of attack.
00:05:34
Speaker
So we kind of mentioned it all those years ago as well. This is interesting, but nothing's going to come from it because people will soon come to realize this is just another example of a mass delusion. But as we're going to say, there is now an actual act.
00:05:51
Speaker
in American Congress about protecting the victims from something which probably doesn't exist. But maybe we're skipping too quickly to the end. Let's talk about the history of Havana Syndrome, going all the way back to the ancient year of 2017.
00:06:10
Speaker
Or indeed, 2017 is when the first public reports came out about it, but supposedly the incidents they referred to went all the way back to 2016. If I had my sting generator with me, that's where the dun dun dun would slip naturally in. Just imagine that, yes.
00:06:29
Speaker
So I mean, if you haven't been paying attention, and to be fair, the last few times we've talked about Havana syndrome, it's been in bonus episodes. So it hasn't been, it's been January 2019, I think was the last time we mentioned it in a public episode. But anyway,
00:06:45
Speaker
Havana Syndrome is a bit of a catch-all name given to a—problematically, as we will see, wide set of symptoms, including things like hearing loss, nausea, headaches, ringing in the ears, fatigue, dizziness, loss of balance, which are usually—the onset of which are usually accompanied by a strange sort of a buzzing noise that people report hearing.
00:07:12
Speaker
And often people who don't suffer these symptoms didn't hear a similar noise.
00:07:20
Speaker
And it's called Havana syndrome, obviously, because it was first reported in the US Embassy in Havana in 2016. But as we say, it's sort of these these things came out, but for some reason, the world I don't know whether stuff became declassified, or there was some official report somewhere or other, but it wasn't until midway through 2017, that the world started paying attention to it. And you started seeing sort of
00:07:49
Speaker
not necessarily mocking, but fairly non-serious articles about it. Here's this weird thing that's happened, how about that? You know, types of articles in newspapers, including our local newspapers, and so that's why we talked about it.
Embassy Incidents and Theories
00:08:07
Speaker
Now, I believe the reason why this became news in 2017
00:08:12
Speaker
was that people in the media noticed that there were a very large number of sick days being taken by staff at the embassy in Havana, which kind of just led to a natural question, what's going on there. But I think back at the time, people were concerned about, say, the water supply. Maybe there was something wrong with the potable water.
00:08:34
Speaker
leading towards people drinking water that was bad and thus they were unhealthy and eventually the investigation went no actually there just seems to be this this kind of strange sickness we cannot explain which everyone in this particular embassy is suffering from and that's when it became Havana syndrome and I think the sound based part kind of emerged after those initial reports.
00:08:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is there's a lot of a lot of sort of vagueness. It's not a it's it reminds me of when we've talked about more gallons disease, which reminded me of, I think what was the targeted individual stuff that you have these situations where
00:09:15
Speaker
you have a sort of a you can you can say a sort of a common pool of symptoms but not everybody has the same symptoms and they're all it's it's that you can't definitely say here is Havana syndrome it is these specific things experienced in this specific way
00:09:34
Speaker
And so it's always been a little bit difficult to do. And also, which is, as we see with things like Magellan's and indeed the targeted individual stuff makes it quite easy for people to say it's probably more likely to have a psychological cause, to be some sort of psychosomatic thing where, you know, some people start talking, have this problem, and then other people became become sort of hyper aware of a similar thing. And so they all start thinking they have or something like that, but I don't know. But as we will see,
00:10:01
Speaker
things have developed a little bit further from that. So I mean, if we were to take this podcast as a chronicle of the history of Havana syndrome, we first talked about it in episode 147, which was in August of 2017, where we've basically just, yeah, recapped these first, first mentions of it that appeared in the local media here. And then it popped up again in January of 2018,
00:10:32
Speaker
where we noted that a similar syndrome had been reported at embassies in Beijing. And then in June of 2018, which is in our episode 187, the number of which may or may not be significant, so I'm not sure if you like your demolition man or songs by Snoop Doggy Dogg, or I assume the actual whatever place it is that has 187 as the code for murder, but anyway.
00:11:02
Speaker
And that was, at the time, we just sort of, again, had a brief mention of it, you know, that I'll have anything, it's still around, and people think it might be caused by microwave weapons or something. I'm pretty sure we must have, that must have been prompted by the fact that around that time, there was a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association,
00:11:26
Speaker
which basically didn't say it wasn't obviously psychosomatic. They talked about a new syndrome in the diplomats that resembles persistent concussion and basically described these symptoms that that observed in these diplomats, these embassies. And so it was, I believe the person, one of the people responsible for this study was the first person to suggest
00:11:52
Speaker
that microwave weapons could perhaps cause these symptoms maybe possibly, not actually saying we have proof that microwave weapons are used, which is sort of a bit of a hypothesis. But the next time we heard about Havana Syndrome, the explanation being offered was a little bit more prosaic.
00:12:09
Speaker
So we're talking here about crickets? We're talking about crickets. Yes, so some people actually listen to the recording of the so-called Havana sound, and that's just normal background noise in Havana. That is the chirping of crickets.
00:12:29
Speaker
You might think that's a fairly odd explanation to give, because surely people know what crickets sound like. But of course, it turns out that if you live in different parts of the world, background noises can be remarkably different. And one thing which New Zealanders know in particular
00:12:47
Speaker
is the northern hemisphere fascination with cicadas every seven years, because for people in the northern hemisphere, the sound of cicadas doing their strumming is something which really doesn't happen particularly often, so when it occurs, it's really unusual.
00:13:06
Speaker
For those of us in the Southern Hemisphere, the sound of the cicada is basically the sound of summer every single year, to the point where the first day cicadas come out, you will notice the sound of cicadas everywhere.
00:13:22
Speaker
By the second day, it's just background noise and you are completely ignoring it. So of course, if you're someone who travels to Havana and you don't know what the background noise of Havana sounds like, the sound of the local insect life doing their thing is going to sound unusual. You are going to record it. And then because you are looking for a sound weapon,
00:13:46
Speaker
which is apparently causing the syndrome in the embassy, you're going to put this forward as, ah, we've located the Havana sound that causes the Havana syndrome. And yet the people who are kind of experts in listening to those sounds were going, yeah, that's, I mean, that does sound unusual if you're not used to crickets in the background and
Crickets vs Sound Weapons: A Theory Debunked
00:14:09
Speaker
actually those are crickets.
00:14:11
Speaker
don't think the crickets are causing the Havana syndrome, but if they are, that blows the case wide open. And again, of course, just because people have debunked this one particular, this slightly mysterious aspect of a weird sound that people had chosen to associate with these illnesses doesn't mean
00:14:31
Speaker
that there was nothing there at all in the first place, so people could still talk about it. Just because you've gone, look, the sound you're associating with the syndrome isn't the cause of the syndrome, doesn't tell you the syndrome doesn't exist. It simply tells you that one of the causal pathways that may present the symptoms is not the causal pathway you think it is.
00:14:54
Speaker
Now, as it turned out, we had two mentions of Havanissen German in quick succession. We had Episode 202 in January of 2019 is when we talked about crickets. And then two weeks later in Episode 204,
00:15:10
Speaker
wouldn't you know it another article about Havana syndrome popped up anyway and this time it was talking about Canadians because I think even right back from the beginning it was people in the US and Canadian embassies in Cuba who reported these things I assume the two are side by side or something and people in
00:15:30
Speaker
in the US embassies had been, or the US had withdrawn a lot of its non-essential staff right as far back as September 2017, but Canada hadn't. However, in January of 2019, there was then this article announcing that Canada had removed up to half of its staff at the embassy in Cuba after yet another case of one of their diplomats mysteriously falling ill.
00:15:59
Speaker
So at that stage Canada had had 14 cases of mysterious health problems.
00:16:07
Speaker
And the count was also 26 American embassy workers. And I mean, this was kind of starting to become a thing. Because obviously, when stuff like this happens, the question of blame starts to show up. Is somebody doing this to us? It was starting to feel like this was targeted in some ways. It seemed to be quite localized to specific people.
00:16:35
Speaker
And so the question, who might be doing this to us? Is it the Cubans? Is Cuba messing with our diplomats? And it was actually genuinely starting to harm diplomatic relations between Cuba and the likes of the US and Canada, especially I think because they were up until that point were in a better state than they had been for quite some time. So yes, the silly little thing
00:17:01
Speaker
that we at first had thought, well, this is a bit weird. It's going to join the likes of your Morgellons and your other tinfoil-hatty stuff has become kind of serious and real. Which is where the boffins come in. So the boffins got involved.
00:17:21
Speaker
And they did some studies to see if there's actually anything going on with the so-called Havana syndrome. And so we have a second report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was using MRI scans of the brain to reveal differences in whole brain, white matter volume, regional gray and white matter volume, cerebellar microstructural integrity and functional connectivity in the auditory and the geospatial subnetworks.
00:17:49
Speaker
But these studies found no differences in executive functions. So the study concluded that the US government personnel had been physically injured in a way consistent with the symptoms they described, but expressed no conclusion on the cause or source of those injuries.
Unexplained Physical Differences
00:18:08
Speaker
So it appeared that
00:18:10
Speaker
The people who had been reporting suffering from these symptoms did appear to have actual physical signs of something being wrong with them.
00:18:21
Speaker
But again, because the symptoms are so wide ranging and not 100% consistent from one person to another, you can't actually say, it's not like a pattern of bruising that would let you tell, that would show that they've been hit by something that looks like this or a scarring or a marking or anything. It's just there's...
00:18:45
Speaker
stuff's gone wrong with their brain, but we can't really tell you exactly how it happened. So that did seem to knock the psychogenic theory on the head. But maybe not again. Yeah, it could again be different things that are being tuned that people are choosing to lump together out of some sort of a cognitive bias kind of thing, I suppose.
00:19:12
Speaker
Yes, so note, they found no differences in executive functions. Look, there are differences in brain structure, but they don't seem to actually be differences that would lead to people having the kind of symptom, symptomatology or ongoing issues that they claim to have from Havana syndrome. And also secondly,
00:19:36
Speaker
This is a situation where you're looking for something and so you're sampling a subset of the population which claims to have this particular something and then you're finding that yes the members of this population all have brains which are slightly different from the norm and slightly different from each other.
00:19:55
Speaker
But of course, if you randomly sample any part of the population, when you're looking for salient differences, you are going to find that their brains are slightly deviant from the norm, because the norm isn't an actual thing. It's kind of a set of boundary conditions. But of course, when you're doing that and you're not looking for an underlying symptom or syndrome, you end up going, well, you know, these people all have slightly different brains from the norm.
00:20:24
Speaker
But when you're investigating it with the thesis that there is something wrong with them, so you're assuming the thing you're trying to prove, then you go, oh, these differences are probably in some way causative of the syndrome that we're looking for, rather than going, well, actually, we might be we might be looking for evidence and finding it in amongst the noise. Now, I'm not sure how this this particular study does seem to have passed us by because I see the episode we just talked about
00:20:54
Speaker
where we mentioned the goings-on in the Canadian Embassy was January 2019. This study came out sometime later in 2019, but we didn't talk about Havana Syndrome again until December of 2020.
Radio Frequency Energy Hypothesis
00:21:07
Speaker
And the bonus episode for accompanying episode 296. Maybe that episode has been suppressed and wiped from our minds. Maybe we did report it. But maybe Havana Syndrome wiped it out. Oh, it's entirely possible.
00:21:22
Speaker
But I mean, by December of 2020, yeah, again, things were starting to become serious. The US State Department was getting in on the act, commissioning a study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Which is a rare case in the US where they haven't also tried to make a wacky acronym to go with it.
00:21:47
Speaker
We'll be getting back to wacky acronyms, don't you worry. Oh, yeah. In fact, to the point where my conspiracy theory is this entire syndrome is designed to bring about a particular bit of legislation, but we'll get to that shortly.
00:22:01
Speaker
And actually, just looking at it now, looking at the article we referred to in December 2020, I see it now links to an article from September of 2019, another one in between these last two that we missed, which also was suggesting that pesticides could be the cause of Havana syndrome. There'd been some sort of a fumigation for mosquitoes or something.
00:22:27
Speaker
At that stage, there was people suggested as a possibility that it wasn't sonic attacks, it was just chemical poisoning from fumigation for mosquitoes. But nevertheless, December of 2020,
00:22:42
Speaker
We got this report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that suggested radio frequency energy was a possibility. The report concluded, after considering the information available to it and a set of possible mechanisms, the committee felt that many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms and observations reported by State Department employees are consistent with the effects of directed pulsed radio frequency energy.
00:23:09
Speaker
Now, they didn't say anything about sort of where this energy may have come from. There was no sort of, oh, you know, based on where they were, the energy must have been beamed at them from somewhere or anything like that.
00:23:25
Speaker
in particular didn't say who might have been directing these theoretical pulsed radio frequency energy weapons at the State Department employees. But they did say that Western and Soviet studies going back decades offered, quote, circumstantial support for this possible mechanism.
00:23:44
Speaker
So they basically mean that the Soviets and the Yanks were investigating pulse energy weapons during the Cold War. So they poured money into if we can make this work, wouldn't it be grand? Well, they weren't able to point to working prototypes of weapons that would do the thing that they've been alleged to do. Now, I think in a little bit, we'll get on to this this question, but it
00:24:10
Speaker
get on to an answer for this question, but the question it raises at the moment is, yeah, are these sort of weapons even a thing? It's sort of being theorized that you could do that. But at this stage, I don't know that anyone has said, you know, the energy, radio frequency energy of this kind beamed at a person could have these effects. But they've never said that we have the technology to actually be able to beam this kind of energy in this kind of pulses at a person.
00:24:40
Speaker
Now, later on, I think we will investigate that issue. But at the same time, as this story was coming out, there was another story going completely in the opposite direction. I think the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study did admit to that social factors might have played a part in how the effect was felt. You know, again, if you're
00:25:07
Speaker
preoccupied, if you're thinking about experiencing a certain thing, you're going to be hyper aware to something like that happening. So it could be that people experience symptoms more strongly than they might otherwise would have, but they still never the less said the actual mechanism behind it was something external, some sort of an attack. Then at the same time,
00:25:29
Speaker
a fellow called Robert Bartholomew, who lives in New Zealand, basically said no, it's just mass psychogenic illness. So tell me about Robert Bartholomew. So as I say, he lives in New... Ah, try the game. He lives in New Zealand. I've actually had some email correspondence with him. He apparently has a very, very large collection of UFO pamphlets and the like.
00:25:57
Speaker
He's very into looking into why people believe weird things. And so he wrote a book, basically, on how Havana Syndrome was just a case of mass psychogenic illness. And so he published a piece along with a co-author in Psychology Today,
00:26:16
Speaker
which was very skeptical of this report that had just come out from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. And he's skeptical of it for a variety of rationales. One rationale is purely the scientific evidence. He's going, well look,
00:26:34
Speaker
How is this RF energy being delivered to specific people in specific locations without affecting others nearby? This would defy the laws of physics, according to him. And indeed, many of the criticisms about the pulsed energy weapon stuff we're seeing at the moment
00:26:54
Speaker
is also based around the fact that yeah it's a really nice science fiction idea but you need to explain how it works because at the moment it doesn't really fit in with how we think the physical sciences describe how sound or energy even works within the world as we know it.
00:27:12
Speaker
So he's concerned to a very large extent about the physical aspect. If you're going to say it's a pulsed energy weapon, you've got to say simply more than, well, the Soviets and the Yanks were investigating these things back in the 1960s, so there must be something to it.
00:27:30
Speaker
As we'll discuss towards the end of this episode, the Soviets and the Yanks were also investigating psychic warfare back in the 1960s. And that doesn't mean there was something to it. There's another rationale as to why they were spending so much money on those particular programs back then.
00:27:48
Speaker
So he goes, look, the first criticism is purely scientific. You need to be able to explain the mechanism because if you simply posit it could be this thing, but don't explain how it could be this thing, then that just seems like an absolute stretch. His other concern is how did the report come to this particular conclusion? It was a pulse energy weapon. Well,
00:28:14
Speaker
The problem is, the report relies an awful lot on secret evidence, evidence that was given to the makers of the report by members of the intelligence community, evidence that we cannot examine the veracity thereof. And so he was going, look, this seems to be a case of putting forward a science fiction mechanism
00:28:38
Speaker
relying on evidence that comes from secret sources that independent scholars like myself cannot analyze. It seems like this report isn't very good and so he concludes, it might be that the panel sought to avoid a diagnosis of psychogenic illness knowing that such renderings are notoriously contentious.
00:29:00
Speaker
Such a conclusion could certainly be embarrassing to the same government officials who requested the study.
Criticism of Radio Frequency Theory
00:29:07
Speaker
Both the Centers for Disease Control and the FBI were tasked with investigating the case. Their findings have never been released, and all requests for US government freedom of information documents have since been denied. It is no small irony that when asked when these reports will be made public, the response has always been the same.
00:29:28
Speaker
crickets. And that's where we put it in the, given that he's of the firm belief that actually it was cricket and it's a mass psychogenic illness that's been associated with just a normal sound or background harm in Havana.
00:29:42
Speaker
Yes, so that's a dissenting opinion, but I think from the sounds of things, he's kind of in the minority there a little bit. Now, another thing possibly I should have mentioned just before is that as well as in Havana, there were cases in I think 2018 in embassies in China
00:30:01
Speaker
in Beijing, a bunch of cases of what was then being called Havana syndrome happening outside of Havana. And that sort of becomes significant when you see that, again, I suppose another thing to say is that there were
00:30:24
Speaker
have been similar events in Washington, D.C. But the next time we talked about Havana Syndrome was in April of this year, a bonus episode that went along with episode 318. And we talked about an article that came out with people claiming that microwave weapons that could cause Havana Syndrome do actually exist, according to some people.
00:30:48
Speaker
Now, it mostly was quoting a fellow called James Giordano, who I think you'll have something to tell us about. He's the Samueli Rockefeller professor in the departments of medicine and neurosciences and scholar in residence within the Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical Center. But people like to conspiracies about him, do they? He's been the
00:31:14
Speaker
He's been a figure of conspiracy theories in the past, I understand. So he has some controversial ideas in neuroethics, essentially about brain modification, and that the future battlegrounds are all going to be about the brain.
00:31:31
Speaker
So it's kind of a vested interest for him to then support the idea that there are weapons which affect the brain directly being used by our being used by the enemies of the US and apparently Canada at this particular time so.
00:31:50
Speaker
He is someone that people love to have conspiracy theories about because of his clinical background. He's the kind of person who might be doing research into these things in the first place, and also for the sheer fact that he's very much advocating that this is where this stuff is going to go. And once again, many of the criticisms of his work are once again based upon the, you talk about the stuff
00:32:17
Speaker
as if it's an impending threat. But once again, we kind of need to know what's the mechanism? Because yes, it would be terrible if the brain became the next battlefield. But that now makes me think of battlefield, the games. It would be terrible if the brain became the next battlefield. But at the same time, the kind of battlefield that you're describing sounds more science fiction than science fact. Nevertheless,
00:32:46
Speaker
He claimed that people, yes, people had looked into this sort of stuff before, the US, Russia, and possibly China. And Mr. Giordano said that the science had largely been abandoned, or as he put it, if not abandoned, pretty much left fellow in the United States, but it has not been fellow elsewhere, he wanted to claim. And these claims came alongside claims that a US company had made a prototype
00:33:15
Speaker
a sort of microwave weapon for the U.S. Marine Corps in 2004. And there's a lot of a lot of sciencey stuff going on. They talk about what the biological impact of microwave energy heating, heating a small amount, a tiny, tiny area of the rain could cause a thermoelastic pressure wave.
00:33:42
Speaker
to travel through the brain causing damage to soft tissues and what have you. But this particular thing, there's a company called Wave Band Corporation, which made this microwave weapon or says they made this microwave weapon called Codenamed Medusa, which was an acronym for Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio. Love their macronons.
00:34:04
Speaker
They were given $100,000 for a prototype that was required to be portable, require low power, have a controllable radius of coverage, be able to switch from crowd to individual coverage, cause a temporarily incapacitating effect, have a low probability of fatality or permanent injury, cause no damage to property, and have a low probability of affecting friendly personnel.
00:34:31
Speaker
A Navy document from 2004 apparently said that this hardware had been designed and built, and not really much more than that. Supposedly this device that people talk about was small enough that you could hide it in a car or a van, but there just hasn't been
00:34:55
Speaker
much more talk beyond that. It was sort of an aha moment. Look, here we go. Here's these people. Here's your nanothermite. Here's your mysterious technology. These people made their microwave death ray for the
00:35:13
Speaker
for the Marines, but know more about it than the claim that this thing actually happened. Nothing's saying whether or not it worked, for one thing. Whether or not it did what they want, whether or not it worked at all, or whether or not it worked in the way they said it worked.
00:35:31
Speaker
especially going from affecting whole crowds to homing in on individuals. Sounds like two very different things. Yeah, so this is one of the problems of the follow the money hypothesis. So the idea being, oh look, we found an example where the US military poured money into a device that, if it worked, would do something along the lines of causing Havana's syndrome.
00:35:56
Speaker
And of course, if you follow the money, it turns out that an awful lot of money is poured into free energy devices where people go, look, I can produce a device where you get more energy out than energy in. And people go, oh, that works.
00:36:12
Speaker
that would be amazing. I would spend a small fortune, because if the device works, then I'm going to be rich as Creosote, a reference that probably only someone from the early part of the 20th century would even understand. And
00:36:29
Speaker
And of course, the fact that people pour money into these things doesn't mean the devices in any way work. It's kind of a mistake to go, look, they invested in it, there must be something to it. That tells you more about the psychological motivation of the investors, and maybe also of the inventors. It tells you nothing about the actual utility of the device that is being built.
00:36:52
Speaker
And indeed, this article, the article that talked to Mr Giordano also quoted Cheryl Rofer, who's someone who worked on laser and auditory weapon research in the 1970s. So she says the military loves death rays. Everybody loves death rays. And lasers had some of the characteristics of death rays. So people kind of got excited about that. But she said while the research they did into into sort of auditory weapons,
00:37:21
Speaker
led to these sound cannons that have been used by police forces against demonstrators didn't lead to anything that any of these quote unquote death rays certainly not something that could be directed to anything smaller than a large crowd of people. She said
00:37:40
Speaker
thinking about something and actually building it are two different things. The military has a lot of money, a whole lot of money sloshing around and they'll try lots of different things and some of them are good and some of them are not so good. And she said, you know, she had personal experience with seeing billions of dollars spent on stuff with nothing much to show for it in the end. It was tried a bunch of stuff, but none of it stuck. So she seemed quite, quite leery of the idea that these
00:38:07
Speaker
these microwave weapons are out there, but that hasn't stopped people from continuing to take it very, very, very seriously. Including two people in Washington, DC. Yep. So we had this case in Washington, DC. Only two people this time, though.
00:38:24
Speaker
But I don't know, maybe that was a little bit too close for home, perhaps, to people. Although you had to say, so two people in Washington DC fell ill one day, and suddenly that's an example of Havana syndrome. I mean, I actually imagine people in Washington DC fall ill all the time. It's actually astounding. They can only find two examples, rather than, oh, but 136 people all fell ill on one day in Washington DC.
00:38:52
Speaker
That's got to be Havana syndrome. No, two people reported feeling drowsy, headaches and fatigue. Well, that's definitely Havana syndrome. That couldn't just be overworked bureaucrats in the nation's capital. No, it had to be some kind of external force. It can't be bad labor practices in the US causing these issues. But nevertheless, we said at the start of this episode that it's been escalated all the way to the top and it bloody well has because just this month,
Presidential Support for Victims
00:39:22
Speaker
Near the start of October of this year, President Joe Biden signed into law the Havana Act. That's the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act. They'd love a good acronym. I want you to know how much money was spent on developing that acronym, because it would have been a room in the White House.
00:39:45
Speaker
We've got this act and we need to have some kind of sexy name for it. It'd be really great if it's actually named after the syndrome. So, I mean, one of the A's can definitely stand for America. One of the A's can stand for Texas.
00:40:02
Speaker
That's two of the three A's done. I mean, the end... I mean, neurological makes sense. And that works with neurological attacks. So let's make the neurological attacks the end part. So we've got the nuh sound. And we've got, I mean, American victims. We've got AV. So we've got Av-Nuh.
00:40:22
Speaker
You always need to work out how to connect American victims and neurological attacks in one phrase here and we're going to sit down and we're going to work through the night and we're going to be paying consultancy rights here. You know, hairy American victims appreciate neurological attacks? No, you're saying hairy. I think more pursuit. Pursuit American victims.
00:40:47
Speaker
advocating neurological attacks. That sounds more like we're actually causing the attacks, rather than suffering for all of them. I can imagine a very lengthy process. The Patriot Act was an acronym, wasn't it? It was, yes. I don't know what that stood for, but anyway. Americans trying radical interventions overseas. Tonight!
00:41:14
Speaker
We should work for the White House. We should. Anyway, regardless of how long it took to come up with the acronym, come up with what they did. Good old Susan Collins, I believe, was the one from Maine, I believe. Susan Collins from Maine.
00:41:30
Speaker
Right. Was, I believe, the one who championed this. But on October the 10th, October the 8th, sorry, I'm getting my 10s and my 8s. I'm Americans and their dates are on the wrong way. In fact, they actually got the data around the right way in this and I assumed it was wrong. Because anyway, so on the on the 8th of this month, the White House issued the following statement signed by President Biden,
00:41:55
Speaker
Today I was pleased to sign the Havana Act into law to ensure we are doing our utmost to provide for you. Could you please do it in your best Biden impersonation? That was my best Biden impersonation. Right, could you do it in your worst Biden impersonation then? I don't even know what he sounds like. That's part of his thing. He just makes references to the good. To his dog the entire time, champ.
00:42:19
Speaker
Just put the word champ in. Okay, today champ, I was pleased to sign the Havana Act into law to ensure we're doing our utmost to provide for US government personnel who have experienced anomalous health incidents. I want to thank Congress for passing it with unanimous bipartisan support sending the clear message that we take care of our own.
00:42:37
Speaker
Cham. Civil servants, intelligence officers, diplomats and military personnel all around the world should be affected by all of its means. Some are struggling with debilitating brain injuries that have curtailed their careers of service to our nation. Addressing these incidents has been a top priority for my administration.
00:43:00
Speaker
Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure he's had bigger fish to fry. But anyway, we are bringing to bear the full resources of the US government to make available first class medical care to those affected and to get them to the bottom of these incidents, including to determine the cause and who is responsible, protecting Americans and all those who serve our country as our first duty and will do everything we can to care for our personnel.
00:43:21
Speaker
and their families and CHAM. So it's, I mean, yeah, it's not just, it's not just a bill to take care of people who... It's the final responsibility, which I think is the chief rationale behind the Havana Act, because technically, they've already got their reports that tell them what it is to suppose when it's a post-wenergy epon.
00:43:46
Speaker
Yes. Oh, I can't say any of those words. Polst, where did we Nippon? It's a Polst energy weapon according to at least one of the reports they've got. So they've technically already got a report that tells them what. They want to know who to blame.
00:44:04
Speaker
Because I think, I think they're going, well, Cuba's not the appropriate thing to blame. I mean, how would the Cubans do it? We need to be looking towards our enemies across the sea. Yeah. So, I mean, people have, have suggested, I mean, the talk is always, oh yeah, the Russians and the Chinese may have been looking into the, and it's always, it's always may hit, you know,
00:44:29
Speaker
We know people looked at it decades ago. We don't know that they aren't looking about it now. And in fact, we've even got evidence that we're doing it at home with Americans investing in microwave energy weapons. So then it goes, well, we're investing in this stuff.
00:44:49
Speaker
they're probably investing in it too. And it's wrong if they're investigating it. I mean, it's fine when we investigate these things, which seems to be the standard American response for you're not allowed to do what we do. So we investigate these things and that's fine. But if you investigate it, it's a clear and present threat to the American way of life. Justice, liberty, eagles, pie, El Paso. Yeah.
00:45:16
Speaker
And so basically, so that brings us up to three weeks ago, and that's really the state of the Havana incident at the current date. So yeah, I mean, nothing is settled.
00:45:31
Speaker
it seems the world is divided between those who aren't actually sure exactly what's happened, but pretty certain it's directed energy weapons, and then other people who are pretty sure it's not. And that divide, I would say, probably breaks down along intelligence lines and scientific lines. So by intelligence lines, I'm talking about the intelligence apparatuses that we see operating in the West.
00:45:58
Speaker
versus the scientists who go, yeah, you need to give us the mechanism. Because at the moment, what we're lacking is a mechanism, because it doesn't really seem like it fits in without understanding of the natural world. So the intelligence agencies are going, oh, it's definitely energy weapons. And we've got reports to back that up. Now we just need to find the bastards responsible. And the scientists are going, well, we don't even know whether it's energy weapons. There could be more prosaic explanations going on there.
00:46:27
Speaker
And I think this has shades of what happened in the Cold War over investigations into psychic warfare. So during the Cold War, both the Russians and the Americans were spending
00:46:43
Speaker
I see that in the earlier episode, vast sums of money, when you actually look at the amount of money that was spent on psychic warfare, it's a pittance compared to conventional arms. But they were spending substantial sums on investigating whether remote viewing works, or whether you can psychically reprogram someone or assassinate someone at a distance with thought.
00:47:05
Speaker
And often they were investigating these things knowing full well that the science said this probably isn't possible. But they were investigating it because the scientists were saying it probably isn't possible, which meant that there was a small chance that maybe upon investigation these things weren't. And the worry would be if our side
00:47:29
Speaker
gave up on investigating these things and the other side were able to prove it exists, then suddenly they have a major advantage over you. So you investigate things you think aren't likely to turn out to be correct, on the off chance that if they do,
00:47:46
Speaker
then you're not giving the advantage to the other side who are also doing exactly the same thing. Also see, for example, the proliferation of nuclear weapons over the course of the Cold War. Yes, well, we don't want to use them, but we think the other side might. And the other side is going, well, we don't want to use them, but we think the other side might. So we need to make sure we've got a really, really big arsenal.
00:48:12
Speaker
to ensure the other side won't use it. We saw the same thing with psychic warfare research and I think the same thing is going on in the intelligence community here. There's a vested interest to chase this idea down for the sheer fact that we don't think it's actually likely but if it turns out it's true
00:48:33
Speaker
We need to make sure that we're on top of it. We can't allow our enemies to have an advantage when it comes to pulse energy weapons. Also, from an economic perspective, those agencies want as much additional funding and power as possible. So the idea that there is a tax upon their personnel allows them to then go, oh, we need that extra money. We need that extra money now.
00:48:56
Speaker
So there you go. Now we can no longer say that we haven't properly talked about Havana Syndrome and the fact that there is now an actual act about it in the States, I'm pretty sure, ensures that it won't be the last time we're talking about it. But that's probably all there is to say today. I think it all just kind of comes down to evidence, doesn't it? There's nothing conclusive about anything and it
00:49:26
Speaker
If you start with a certain theory, you can probably find evidence to back up whichever theory you're looking for. Precisely. It's a case of you have your assumptions and then you're testing for those assumptions, rather than testing whether those assumptions are any good. Once you assume... See, I can't say it. When are you weapons? When are you weapons? When you assume...
00:49:53
Speaker
that pulsed energy weapons are responsible for a series of events, you go around looking at the evidence of pulsed energy weapons, rather than going, well, you know, might just be that sometimes people fall sick in embassies, and maybe we should look at why our working conditions are such that this happens more frequently than we'd like to think. Well, there you go.
00:50:22
Speaker
I believe that's the end of this episode, but of course there is a bonus episode to come for our beloved patrons, they who are the most radiant and sweet-smelling among all of you. The ones who are immune to Havana syndrome. Obviously, yeah, and I'm pretty sure I can guarantee there have been no instances of Havana syndrome within our patrons. Make of that what you will. So we have a few things to talk about.
00:50:46
Speaker
Lockdowns continue here in New Zealand with various lockdown protesting wakiness for us to talk about. The UK, we also just signed a trade deal with the UK, which among other things I think extended our copyright laws, didn't it?
00:51:03
Speaker
Yes, and as I remarked on Twitter the other day, I'm sure once we're scraping barrels for scraps of water and fighting over scraps of food after the climate apocalypse, we'll be really, really pleased that we extended copyright by another 20 years. In the apocalypse, at least Mickey Mouse will be protected. He'll outlive humanity, I'm quite sure. And also we actually, we have proof of election fraud in the US.
00:51:33
Speaker
Yep, big news, big news. So, if you want to hear about any of those bombshells, then you should become a patron. And if you've already become a patron, well, good job. You've done it again. And really, I think that's about all there is to say. I suppose if you're not a patron who wants to become one, go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. But apart from that,
00:51:58
Speaker
I don't think there's anything left to say is there? No, I think we should just oscillate our voices, express our Havana syndromes and bring this podcast to a close. I choose to do that in a method that sounds very much like me saying goodbye. I'm just going to go... Which is the sound that your mum makes. Class.
00:52:26
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R. Extenteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.