Recent investigative news reports about "Havana syndrome" stir up older controversies about "psychotronic" weaponry
But this time the issue may not simply fade away
The media was abuzz at the beginning of this week about simultaneous reports from multiple international news sources that the mysterious illness known as “Havana syndrome” could in all likelihood be traced to targeted attacks using directed energy weapons by Russian intelligence operatives, more specifically the GRU’s Unit 29155, on their American counterparts.
So-called “Havana syndrome”, a neuro-cerebral disorder marked by a variety of painful, disorienting, and disabling symptoms along with its sudden onset, is named after the Cuban capital city where it first gained attention in 2016.
American embassy personnel told of unexplained headaches and recounted hearing high-pitched sounds after dark. Since that time well over a 1000 of these so-called “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs) in 96 countries have been catalogued worldwide, primarily among the American diplomatic corps.
A 2023 intelligence assessment by multiple US agencies insisted that it is “very unlikely” Havana Syndrome is caused by deliberate targeting of American foreign service personnel by bad actors.
However, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal in the aftermath of the news reports asked pointedly “why the intelligence community is so intent on discounting that Havana Syndrome could be caused by Russia.”
In addition, it noted:
Researchers have also found that pulsed radio-frequency and magnetic fields can stimulate electric currents in the brain. Electromagnetic pulses and focused ultrasound are being studied to treat myriad diseases. The Food and Drug Administration has approved transcranial magnetic stimulation for major depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It doesn’t require a major logical or scientific leap to suspect that pulsed radio-frequency energy could be harnessed for harmful purposes. A panel of experts from within and outside the U.S. government with access to classified documents concluded in 2022 that pulsed radio-frequency energy and focused ultrasound were plausible explanations.
Efforts to downplay, or even suppress, such information actually go all the way back to the 1980s when Ron McRae, a close associate of the celebrated investigative journalist Jack Anderson published a controversial book entitled Mind War: The True Story of Government Research Into the Military Potential of Psychic Weapons.
McRae argued at the time that U.S. intelligence operatives were already involved in top-secret research into the development of what at the time was called “psychotronic” weaponry in order to play catch up with the Soviet Union.
McRae was ridiculed and panned in the popular press, even though his research was very meticulous and detailed.
A variety of books published during this period and later, including those by retired army colonel Thomas Bearden and journalist Alex Constantine, made similar claims.
A very sober scientific overview of the physics that makes its deployment in such weaponry plausible can be found in Robert Becker’s The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life, which appeared in 1985,
I myself witnessed a demonstration of such devices at Colorado School of Mines in September 1982. As a result I begin to do research and discovered countless abstracts of technical articles going as far back as the early 1950,s which had been published by the Office of Naval Research and dealt specifically with the principles of “bio-electromagnetism” along with their possible application to directed energy weaponry.
Even if such research was never brought to fruition in the actual production of lethal devices, the basic science and its deployment in the medical field is already well-established.
Think Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which is used routinely to diagnose everything from brain tumors to spinal deformations.
Public concern about the weaponization of such science is at least two decades old.
In 2004 115 members of the European Parliament entered Petition 1168/2003, which called for such weaponry to be banned.
The Petition stated:
…the development and circulation of anti-personnel directed energy technologies and weapons, inaccurately termed 'non-deadly', is a danger which is generally under-estimated. The military and civil objectives of this technology are unknown. It could also be used as a weapon to prevent mass disorder at demonstrations or other public events. The expert reports …show that no effective legislation exists to protect individuals from the harmful effects of such weapons, should they fall into the hands of aggressive and intolerant public organisations or simply terrorist or criminal networks.
So why has American intelligence not been at all forthcoming?
The editorial board at the Wall Street Journal speculated that the intelligence community might not want to scare the public. But that is beside the point.
A far more cynical explanation perhaps may turn out to be the more reasonable one, namely, the intelligence community doesn’t want us to know it already has such weapons to use covertly, not just on our enemies by possible in certain situations on its own citizens whenever necessary.
That, at least, is the premise of an extensive research prospectus by Alvar Gilguitierre entitled “Mind Weapon”.
Strong evidence that America’s spooks have not been exactly candid or transparent in the past concerning these murky matters can be found in how it dealt with the whisperings about its own stealth experiments with paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy or “remote viewing”, in the 70s and 80s, which were summarized in McRae’s reporting.
At the time the intelligence community not only dismissed the rumors but actively sought to discredit the claim that any such inquiries could be entertained by sane people.
Lo and behold, however, several decades later the CIA not only admitted it had been actively financing this kind of research, it even made public the files on the project which was carried on over many years under a variety of names, the most prominent of which was “Stargate”.
One of the major hurdles in uncovering the truth about what lies behind the Havana syndrome is that the public has been conditioned over the years by both the news media and much of academia, let alone the mainstream scientific community, to react almost instinctively to the suggestion that directed energy weapons might be deployed by shadowy personnel against their adversaries as a “conspiracy theory.”
The word “conspiracy theory” is increasingly dredged up by enemies of the truth in such a manner that it functions semantically as what experts in psychological warfare refer to as a “thought-stopping cliché”, the mere utterance of which stifles all serious discussion. The vernacular term “psychotronics” , which really misrepresents the more sophisticated scientific theory behind it, almost automatically conjures up Star Wars types of fantasies that muddies the waters beyond recognition.
Combine that with the fact that in its earlier phases psychotronic enthusiasts were more often than not rather apt to mingle credible scientific insight with occultist and spiritualist folderol as well as regularly indulging in conjectures about UFOs and extraterrestials.
It is not even inconceivable that such confusion was tolerated, if not encouraged, by certain players as a familiar tactic of disinformation in the “great game” of information warfare.
Now that, unlike the endless controversy over the reality of UFO (or UAVs as they are more politely called), the science of bio-electromagnetism and directed energy ordnance is fairly well-established, it is time for our political leadership to show some spine in actually taking on the intelligence community and confronting the issue.