Where’s the part where they send a device to detect microwaves or sonic waves, and find them? How come it doesn’t occur to journalists to ask this? As per the article, they found the signal in Moscow, and there weren’t even symptoms to prompt them to do so. Another commenter mentioned “triangulation”. It’s less than that. There is no reported observation of a signal of any kind. History Channel “ghost hunters” are more serious than this.

Maybe somebody was playing with the current or future generation of the portable continuous wave generator we know the NSA has...Things got out of hand? Surely there is one deployed in each Embassy?

See as of 57 min and 32 sec:

https://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/2013/mp4-web/30c3-5713-en-...

Edit: In case you missed the detail...From the slide shown at 58 min and 35 sec notice it says up to...1 Kilowatt

Has anyone noticed this kind of sound at certain positions when swimming around a boat with it's radar on near shore?

Just anecdotal I don't know for sure, but I've experienced it a couple of times, at first thinking it was dolphins or whales, but it's more of a continuous noise and seems quite positional as if it is a reflection and superposition... pretty much all boats have some kind of radar that operate in the microwave frequency range, so it seems like a strong candidate for the source.

It wasn't so strong to be nauseating, just noticeable and weird sounding... then again I wasn't trying to sleep through it.

> few people know the full picture

In large orgs this always translates to no one knows shit.

Anyway I am pretty sure its a sophon doing its thing.

The explanation of why these cases are increasing is simple: mass hysteria caused by articles that pretend to investigate something they don't know anything about.

Interestingly enough in the unexplainable podcast episode a doctor suggested a functional disorder- when the brain reroutes itself and assumes it’s damaged when it’s not. It seemed to a layperson, myself, more reasonable than a superweapon deployed internationally that fucks with but doesn’t kill people.

The biggest mystery to me is why the hell someone would do this. What are they gaining? Are they trying to frame someone else? Just disrupt operations? For the spy vs spy lulz?

Second biggest mystery is how they haven't just triangulated these. Someone in signals intelligence told me once that signal jamming is not a big problem on the battlefield because a signal jammer is also a bright RF beacon that says "shoot missile here." Seems like this should be the same. A microwave beam powerful or weirdly modulated enough to do this should also be an arrow that says "send camo dudes with big guns here." That's definitely going to happen if you are targeting the Vice President. Or maybe it did happen and it's secret.

This is a great related podcast episode: https://maximumfun.org/episodes/sawbones/havana-syndrome/

Why do folks keep insisting it's microwaves that cause the illness when no one has found any physical evidence for that? This is just such a hysterical nonsense story in my opinion all meant to grab attention with nothing to show for it.

Od that Robert Baloh who with his colleague Robert Bartholomew has written a whole book on the subject - Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria - is only mentioned in passing. The author of the BBC article clearly believes that the microwave theory is more interesting than the mass psychogenic illness theory. I think it's embarrassing that mainstream media is selling this nonsensical story. If it was some Trumpist outlet pushing it, it would have been rightly deemed a baseless conspiracy theory.

I am a little bit skeptical about the microwave theory. The transmitters would have to be very powerful and very close by. Also, the signal would be very easy to detect with a cheap receiver. Since this problem seems to be around for a while, I would assume that embassies would be equipped with receivers.

I would assume that shortly after Havana, most embassies installed equipment to detect sonic or microwave blasts.

Given that we haven’t heard anything about these sensors being tripped, I’m going to assume anything after Havana is mass hysteria.

I say something like this every time I see a Havana syndrome article, but their summaries of the US National Academies of Sciences report is just ridiculous.

>The panel looked at psychological and other causes, but concluded that directed, high energy, pulsed microwaves were most likely responsible for some of the cases,

The panels ruling on a psychological cause was basically "all the available evidence fits it being a psychological cause, but as we didn't specifically test for that we can't rule it's the cause." How they completely ignored that and ruled microwaves the most likely cause is a mystery.

There have been reports of this happening around the whitehouse in recent times as well.

That article was much more informative than I thought it would be, there's some interesting background on previous public research on the topic of microwaves, but what was completely new to me was the fact that such cases go back decades.

Slight off topic, but I do see a bit of a parallel between medical teams claiming that those are psychogenic illnesses and the way "long covid" has been considered by some practicians. There's a bit of "if we can't measure it, you must be (unconsciously) making it up". It's rationally convenient.

In the "Havana Syndrome" case, the article claims that some blood markers have been found recently that correlate with brain damage (as long as measurements are done immediately), which certainly helps. But the mix of secrecy inherent to diplomacy and classical governmental bureaucracy makes considering it psychogenic a very satisfying solution to push the problem aside for years.

This is why: “ Five years on, reports now number in the hundreds and, the BBC has been told, span every continent, leaving a real impact on the US's ability to operate overseas. ”

For the second, I get the impression that this is less of a case of a building being bathed in EM radiation (as a jammer might) but (excuse my unscientific attempt at this description) several beams of EM radiation creating a superposition at their point of intersection in 3D space.

The latter case would be harder to triangulate as you'd need to have multiple detectors positioned along each beam line in order to determine the range of each emitter.

One reason to do this is to disrupt activities of foreign intelligence services, increase their paranoia, decrease their morale. The key is to do it randomly and not too often. That is under the assumption it's not a side-effect of surveillance tools, which would also be possible.

To give you a comparison, the East-German Stasi used to enter the homes of dissidents and do things like re-arranging towels, replacing fresh milk with rotten milk, etc. They also occasionally forced or convinced personal physicians to hand out the wrong medication to dissidents, worsening conditions of the patients or creating strange side-effects. They also radiated political detainees in prison to cause cancer. These were called Zersetzungsmaßnahmen.

I'd consider it credible that modern successors of the KGB like GRU and SRV, as well as related or allied agencies, could do something nefarious using technical equipment. That's why US agencies are investigating the reports, I guess.

Maybe it’s currently just a test to see if it works & can be gotten away with.

Does anyone know how powerful it would have to be and therefore how mobile it could be?

Many possible reasons. If Russia is behind this, it's a great proof of concept test of low traceable weapon that can target and disable high value targets of relatively high profile.