ULTRALIGHT BEAM: HAVANA SYNDROME, MASS HYSTERIA...OR, THOUGHTS ON HOW TO READ THE NEWS

Recently the story about the so-called Havana Syndrome has reached a fever pitch, so much so that the normally intractable and non-working congress managed to pass a bipartisan bill, called the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks (HAVANA) Act to investigate the causes and to compensate the victims. Since we first heard about these strange events in 2016 it has been one the strangest news stories of the last few years. What are we to make of this whole story and the many possibilities it suggests, not least of which involves the debate about whether or not Havana Syndrome is even a “real” thing. To think about it helps to identify and separate off the possibilities each time they present themselves.

First, let's briefly outline what exactly is meant by Havana Syndrome and the swirl of news around it. This isn’t reportage or history, plus this story is constantly being updated and spun and leaked in different ways so I’d rather not get bogged down in those details. So if we take Havana Syndrome at its broadest it involves the suggestion that American (and Canadian) diplomats, first in Havana Cuba in 2016, were stricken with strange and debilitating symptoms. They mostly reported feeling pressure in their heads as well as a strange grating sound, almost always when they were in a hotel room. Occasionally other people were standing nearby the victim at the time of attack and didn’t hear the noise or feel the pressure. These experiences left these victims with memory loss, hearing loss, nausea, and, since these attacks are new, we don’t yet know the long term implications. Eventually, after these anomalous health incidents were widely reported, these attacks spread. They’ve now been reported not just in Havana but also in China, Vietnam, and in Washington D.C.. The CIA has also suggested agents of theirs, who’s locations cannot be disclosed, have been struck in yet more nations. The Canadians have gotten in on the action as well, with some on their Cuban Embassy staff succumbing in 2018. The line is that these symptoms are a mystery. They are most likely caused, we’re told, by microwave or infrasound weapon technology of a type we, the USA, doesn’t recognize because we don’t develop such technology. Due to its speculative and unknown nature, I’ll refer to this weapon as The Beam. It is suspected that this weapon, The Beam, is being deployed by some nefarious foreign actor, probably Russia. But people are split, pointing to causes as disparate as crickets-are-causing-this to this-is-in-these-neurotic-people's-heads. As unwieldy as it is, we can slice up the possible scenarios and explanations and gain a clearer and more useful understanding of what’s going on.

So the first split in possibilities is created when you have to answer the issue of whether or not the symptoms, the dizziness, the headaches, the memory loss and all the rest, are being caused by a weapon. If the answer is yes, we can move on to the next fork in the road. If it is a weapon we need to know who wielding it and how, despite spending orders of magnitude more on military research of the darkest, most comprehensive, most eldritch sort (to say nothing of the military budget overall) some other nation we to get so far ahead of us, in terms of this technology, that we not only do we not have our own version, we don’t know how to defend against it, and we’re so far behind we don’t even know what it is. The other answer, that the symptoms were not caused by a weapon, does not fully explain what’s going on either, but it does suggest two interesting possibilities.

First, it might be that the symptoms are psychosomatic or psychogenic, the fancier and nicer way of saying, “it’s all in your head.” This would play into the stereotypes of these diplomats, all career folks in the vast bureaucracy of the State Department Foreign Service (or some shadowy, parallel CIA bureaucrat/torturer/mindwarrior track, or, most likely, some combo) are dweeby PMC types that are simply hysterical hypochondriacs. There’s certainly a criticism of the security state, here meaning both the traditional armed forces as well as folks like the FBI and CIA, of going soft by adopting the sort of SJW language and attitudes that are, in this criticisms telling, endemic to middle-manager PMC-types, from academia to “woke” corporations. Being hypersensitive in that regard is manifesting, in this case, as out-of-control nerves and obsessive health-nuts, crossfit types, who are, not on purpose but merely through personal failings, experiencing things that aren’t really (or physically) happening to them. One could pair this with another explanation that the symptoms are the physical manifestation of guilt from people who were continuing on America’s dark legacy in Cuba. This slight variation, the Tell-Tale Heart scenario, is just another way to get at the same idea.

Here I suppose I should throw in another possible explanation besides psychosomatic or natural-but-unknown, which is the possibility that the victims made it up (or some number of them, especially towards the beginning) on purpose to advance their career or get some money. I view this as pretty unlikely, despite my suspicion of this type of person, and I haven’t seen anyone seriously suggest it so I’ll merely note and dismiss it, or, at least, classify it as “least likely”, for the sake of a complete review of the possibilities.

This possibility, hypochondria regardless of explanation (PMC goofiness vs. “are we the baddies?” guilt) was perhaps the first and most prominent counter-narrative, it seems supported by some of the physical evidence, or rather the lack of some crucial physical evidence. Specifically, at this point dozens of people have been examined by numerous experts in all sorts of niche medical fields, and have had the full clout and financial resources of the USA’s government trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. I can’t imagine there are tests to be run that haven’t been run yet, regardless of cost. And the medical community doesn’t seem to be able to agree on a physical explanation, backed up by some physical evidence, as to what has happened to these people. I think there is a tendency among people steeped in cultures that pride themselves for their “rationality,” and the USA is certainly one of those nations, there is a strong tendency to discount or underrate “irrational” impulses, urges and events. People in these places tend to think things like witch trial hysterics or mass irrationality are features of the past. This is simply not true, and people’s insistence that they and the people around them are enlightened and thus immune to irrationality and derangement is, somewhat ironically, itself deeply irrational. At the beginning this was the explanation that made the most sense to me and is still the one I tend to lean more towards when I think about Havana Syndrome.

The other fork off of the weapon-or-nah? split suggests that there is something physically happening, thus it isn’t in these folks’ heads, but that the cause isn’t a weapon, rather it is instead some heretofore unknown natural, environmental or biological phenomena. One more prominent version of this theory comes from Berkeley and University of London scientists who suggested these symptoms were caused by the song of a type of Cuban cricket (Anurogryllus celerinictus) Or, perhaps proximity to some sort of pollutant or pesticide is to blame. Global Affairs Canada, a government body, suggested as much in their report on the matter. The National Academy of Sciences reported suggested that the symptoms might be related to the then-current Zika virus, which Embassy staff were not tested for. These non-weapon theories have yet to find consensus, though they are being proposed by serious people with some evidence and shouldn’t be totally dismissed. It will be hard to disprove these theories, or ones like them, outside of a very convincing explanation. It’s pretty difficult to fully disprove the idea that something environmental that we don’t understand is doing something beyond our understanding, since we, by definition, know we don’t understand it. So these possibilities will always lurk in the background, but this explanation doesn’t feel very convincing to me.

So now that we’ve exhausted the endpoints not-a-weapon path, we can look at what happens if we assume that these injuries are being caused by a weapon. Two explanations present themselves at this point. First, the official story, which says that this theoretical weapon, The Beam as I’ve been calling it, is beyond the current understanding of the US Military-Industrial complex. This suggests we don’t know what The Beam is or really how it works, and we don’t have one, or some version of it, ourselves. This strikes me as unlikely for a couple of reasons. First, as stated more than once but really it can’t be harped on enough, the USA spends a lot of fucking money on “defense” and “research.” There’s the obvious stuff like the $750+billion a year we put directly into the Pentagon but, to get a real sense of the scope one would have to include organizations like the CIA, NSA and NASA, as well as things like government funding for certain projects at Universities, to name just a few examples, to actually get the full picture of how much we’re willing to spend to anticipate threats, develop technologies, “defend” American and maintain our imperial grip on much of the world. To me, the idea that another nation, even a big-defense-spender and a known irregular-warfare enthusiast like Russia doesn't spend fractions as much as we do and is constantly under surveillance and intelligence efforts from the USA and others. Under these conditions we’re to believe someone secretly built and deployed technology a)without the US or any of its allies knowing anything about it and, b) so technologically advanced that the limitlessly rich American Defense apparatus can’t identify it. Hard to believe.

Which leaves us with another explanation, that the powers that be do recognize these injuries since they themselves also have The Beam or equivalent technologies and understand their causes and effects. In this scenario they’re lying to the public by suggesting they don’t know what is causing these injuries, though it is possible that under these circumstances they still wouldn’t necessarily know which nation (or which non-nation-state-actor, like a terrorist group) is wielding The Beam. If The Beam does turn out to be real, this scenario seems more likely than the one described immediately above, i.e. The-Beam-is-real-and-beyond-American-tech, mostly because of the money and funding issue I outlined.

That leads us to ask, why would they lie about this? Why not tell us about The Beam and put all one’s cards on the table to get to the bottom of this strangeness? The most likely answer to this, it seems to me, is that they would very much like The Beam, or, more specifically, the American iteration, to remain a secret. Is this because they use The Beam in similar ways, against enemy diplomats, and this admission might lead people to look back at strange symptoms patterns from the past and identify possible American instigated Beam attacks? Likewise for the idea that The Beam has been used by these same agencies against American citizens here at home. The idea of a Beam is ubiquitous in gang-stalking accusations and the more fringe wing of US conspiracy talk, perhaps some instances of such Beam usage does exist in the past and the American Beam’s owners really don’t want journalists and others looking back into such accusations. Heavy suggestions of MKULTRA and other dark-arts projects float right up to the surface when one indulges speculation in this direction. Perhaps there is a fear that if our government admits that these attacks are the result of a weapon that we ourselves have a version of, but whose existence, creation and use was a secret, would cause renewed interests into what other sorts of secret weapons the US has, how much we’re really paid to create them and, if the weapon is secret, surely the ways in which its deployed are secret too, how we’ve used them.

A version of this happened, at a smaller scale, when WikiLeaks published their “Vault 7” findings which detailed secret technologies the CIA had created and deployed to fight cyberwars. They include tools to compromise smart devices, hack phones, insert and manipulate malware, hack and control cars from afar and all sorts of other devious tricks. They’ve been relentlessly pursuing the people responsible for this leak since it dropped in 2017 and are, as a write this, still harassing and tormenting Assange to foment suicidal madness. We just learned about their plans to kill him in a London shootout. All that’s to say if they’re willing to pursue a relatively smaller leak about some cyber tools, what would they do to protect information about much more dangerous and shocking Beam technology?

That’s a quick summary of issues and explanations surrounding Havana Syndrome. When given bizarre and ongoing news events, especially ones that involve dozens of actors, some of whom, like the CIA, are literally in the deception business, I think it’s helpful to admit one does not have all the facts, indeed it is more likely than not that certain facts are being withheld or spun on purpose, but to still try to follow out all the possible explanations. From there we can sort of rank the possibilities and when new information comes in we can reevaluate which scenarios now seem more likely and whether new explanations have presented themselves. At this junction, regarding Havana Syndrome, the most likely scenario to me is that most of the victims have been hit by a Beam, and that the American government knows much more about this technology than they’re admitting at present, but is acting faux-naively to protect American Beam tech. Second most likely, to me, is the psychosomatic explanation. After that I’d rank the theory that the symptoms are caused by something physical but unknown and thus there is no weapon. Least likely to me is the explanation most pushed through official channels, namely that these victims have been hit by a Beam of some sort by another country, using technology that we don’t know about.