January 14, 2022 • 60 mins
The story started in 2016, when US and Canadian embassy staff in Havana began reporting mysterious medical symptoms -- headaches, vertigo, strange sounds and more. As time went on, more employees in other embassies started reporting similar experiences, causing international concern. But what was actually happening? Was this the result of widespread panic? A side-effect of arcane spying equipment? Something else? Tune in to learn more about the controversy that continues today.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Alexis code named Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. I'd like to start out
today's episode with a shout out to our good pal
(00:47):
Jack O'Brien, creator of crack dot com as well as
creator and co host of the Daily Zeitgeist. Jack and
I were talking on Twitter a little bit about today's episode.
This is our update on something we've done recently, and
maybe the best way to get into it is to
(01:07):
say life is tough in public service. If you are
a firefighter, a teacher, a public defender, or even a diplomat,
um thank you for your service. You know that there's
a ton of stuff you have to deal with every
day that just doesn't get much media attention. And so
in the world of foreign service, the question people have
(01:28):
been asking in the US is what happens when a
disease seems made just for you? What happens when the
only demographic indicator for some kind of affliction isn't your
you know, it's not your makeup necessarily, it's entirely your
employment a job based on disease. This is a question
(01:51):
we touched on the past, from explorations a tailor made
diseases to the inexplicably efficient curses like bone pointing in
Australian Papua New Guinea. Today we're diving into a new
iteration of this phenomenon folklore that's occurring as we record.
It's something the world is still trying to figure out.
It's something called the Havana syndrome. Here are the facts, well,
(02:15):
the Havana syndrome. It's currently being described as a quote
set of medical symptoms with unknown causes. Uh. If there's
a description that's any more vague and amorphous than that,
I would love for you to show it to me. Um. Uh.
You know, a syndrome being a kind of catch all
of a group of symptoms, you know, a series of
(02:36):
kind of interrelated maladies, sort of like a ben as
you put it, A extra value meal where they used
to call them extra value meals. Do they still call
them that? Yeah? Probably probably a combo um, not necessarily
one singular condition with a singular cause. Um. It is
inherently vague and kind of, you know, a little bit mysterious.
(03:00):
The idea of a syndrome, the China syndrome, for example,
you know. Yeah, and in this particular syndrome is pretty strange.
It's got a lot of different symptoms. You'll hear a
lot about migraines, about brain fog, tiredness, and inability to
complete simple tasks for your job, especially you know, as
(03:21):
a diplomat, just simple things that your computer or sending emails,
making phone calls, things like that. Um. There's other things too, hearing, clicking,
bringing in the ears. It's a it's a whole bunch
of weird stuff going on at one time. Yeah, yeah tonight,
as uh, the the sensation of pressure or vibration in
(03:42):
one's head, and of course nausea, lack of coordination, things
like that. It is a panopoly of symptoms, right, And
this again seems to primarily target government officials, members of
the intelligence community in the US, and a couple I
think a couple of folks in Canada where this was
(04:05):
first reported. But but particularly when they're operating abroad. Yes, yes, exactly,
So this is not happening in Langley. Very important note.
So first things first, and I I am so glad
that we are returning to this we talked about in
Strange News, we talked about it in a previous episode,
(04:26):
but one thing we didn't point out. Regardless of what
you think of Havannah syndrome after hearing our show today,
we need to agree on this one thing. The name
is utter bullet and it's unfair. It's like it's called
the Havannah syndrome only because the first publicly acknowledged reports
(04:49):
surfaced amid US and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba.
And that's similar to the way the world did Spain
so very dirty with the nineteen eighteen Spanish flu epidemic.
It didn't come from Spain. It's called the Spanish flu
because Spain, out of all the countries, did the right
(05:09):
thing and did not suppress reports of a deadly influence
of virus spreading. Yeah, but we also know that, like
I mean, these types of names have political clout to
them or they are their political capital in some ways,
like you know how Donald Trump very desperately tried to
rebrand UH COVID nineteen to the Chinese flu or the
China virus or whatever. Um. You know, the idea of
(05:32):
calling it the Havanna syndrome UH in some way sort
of displaces the blame or kind of you know, makes
people think of it in a certain light. Um. You know,
similarly to the Spanish flu, even though it isn't necessarily
wasn't necessarily something that was caused by um Spain, as
in the case of the Havanna syndrome, not necessarily caused
(05:53):
by you know, the government of Cuba. Per se. It's
it's it's still a little up in the air. But also,
I just want to backtrack really quickly, I said at
the beginning of the show, when describing what a syndrome was,
I I dropped the term China syndrome, which is a
movie about a nuclear meltdown. Um, not a disease, but
the word syndrome it's so amorphous and catch all that
it can also refer to just like a set of
(06:13):
circumstances like not in my backyard syndrome is that Wikipedia
puts it um. So there are lots of ways of
using syndrome and and and of itself. It's kind of
like the vaguest of possible catch all terms. Just for
my money, guys, Havana syndrome does make sense because it
was the American embassy in Havana, Cuba, where it originated,
right where we first noticed it in reports first came
(06:34):
out at least. But I think we should call it
the the Moscow signal to agree. So, but I I
think we are making an important point. You know, the
government of Cuba, as he said earlier, likely has nothing
to do with this, and they're probably rightly a little
(06:58):
peeved that they're being that they the name of the
capital of their country is now attached to an amorphous
thing that people consider either a uh possibly a disease
or injury from some sort of Sci Fi level uh
directed energy weapon. But what you know, what you call it?
If you live in Cupid, you know what they call it.
(07:18):
They don't call if it is like the what do
you call a quarter pounder conversation? Right this uh in Cuba?
If you are working in this field or if you're
working in the field of medicine, etcetera. You will probably
not call it, well, you definitely won't call it havana syndrome.
You'll probably call it unidentified health incidences or you h
(07:42):
I it's our our new addition to all the unidentified
things we love, unidentified submerged objects, unidentified aerial phenomenon. Now
we have unidentified health incidents. Less sexy, less provocative, much
more accurate. But maybe we did when we talked about
this when the news was breaking. But maybe we should
(08:04):
start by doing a quick recap of what went down
in Cuba, which, by the way, I love that we
have a job where I can say sentences like that
at work, Like, maybe let's start with what went down
in Cuba? All right, Well, yeah, we first learned about
it in seventeen when the first reports began coming out,
(08:25):
but we do know that it was in sixteen when
diplomats and people working there in a Vana Cuba noticed
that something was happening. They were experiencing symptoms. And let's
see what was it. There were twenty one individuals initially
I think, or around around twenty one individuals or at
least twenty one that were acknowledged of having symptoms in
(08:48):
ten when those reports first came out, but then uh,
it was up to twenty six individuals, and that that's
really what we would call the the original class of
p a group of people who were affected by this. Yeah. Yeah.
And then, just like maybe a contagious or transmissible disease,
(09:11):
this syndrome, reports of it at least quickly expanded to
other locations across the planet, with one commonality. It seemed
to exclusively affect US government personnel, like people living in
the neighborhood of embassies nationals and say China or Taiwan
or something. They weren't being affected. The people reporting this
(09:34):
were virtually all working for Uncle Sam and the New
York Times. That have just been really quickly that has
expanded to some families of diplomats now and intelligence agents. Yes,
that is correct, and that's a very that's a very
important point. But the point still holds that people who
(09:54):
are not working with where were relationships with these people,
but we're living the same geographic area, were not infected,
which is not the way transmissible disease usually works. Right.
Disease or an infection does not necessarily care what kind
of job you have, And that's already you know, curious,
(10:15):
or and curious, or as Lewis Carroll would say. New
York Times had a great article on this, summing up
some of the events, and they said that the way
they put it is in seen those twenty one folks
that you mentioned, Matt, they started to report neurological symptoms.
These were serious. These weren't just you know, bouts of
(10:39):
migraine headaches that come and go. In some cases, the
people involved seemed debilitated and they had no real um
They had no real explanation for what was happening. And
some of them are actually the majority of the original
folks they said. These symptoms were she did by a
(11:02):
high pitched piercing sound, which they reported differently. They have
varying kind of interpretations and recollections of what they heard.
But they felt like they have walked through a quote,
invisible beam of energy. This is under the Trump administration,
and the Trump administration reacted quickly. Fifteen Cuban diplomats foreign
(11:26):
officers got kicked out at d C, and then the
White House also moved the majority of its staff out
of the embassy in Havana. Yes, it's interesting, there's a
there's a really cool new Yorker piece about this by
Adam and Twoson John Lee Anderson called the Mystery of
the Havannah Syndrome UM. And one of the central characters
or figures I guess and it was a career diplomat
(11:48):
named Audrey Lee Um. And she described on March seventeen
of UM she came home from working at the embassy
and made supper for our family. She had twins or
has twins, UM and her husband who who was not
there at the time, he was away on business of
his own. UM. And then she started experiencing those symptoms
that you're talking about. She described it as feeling as
(12:10):
though she had been I was the word she used,
like something had struck her. She had been struck, That's
how she described it. Um. And she felt this burst
of pressure in her head and then stabbing sensations, very
very very painful, she described. And Um it was determined
by her paste on these rumors I guess at the
(12:31):
time were rumors around the embassy that these were due
to some kind of attack of some sort, some sort
of sonic weapon. And the reason I get to this
is um she overheard it was such common knowledge around
the embassy that she actually heard security guards kind of
having a conversation about it and saying the phrase get
off the X. That was what really hit me. Um.
(12:53):
There's a really good NBC mini doc about this um
as well, you can look down on YouTube. But that
refers to the dea of this being a localized thing.
Move off the X if you're feeling these symptoms, moved
to a different area where maybe it'll go away because
whatever is affecting you isn't there. And she did that
and she felt better. Mm hmmm. Yeah. And this is
(13:15):
this is important too, because there's a point you brought
up that I want to kind of highlight, which is
the role of communication. Uh. There is validation in all
communication or in you know, effective communication, and that's something
we're gonna see play out in a big, big way here.
So since those initial reports in Cuba, more reports came in.
(13:40):
People in Russia, people in Georgia, the Country, people in Poland, Taiwan, Australia, Columbia, Kyrgyzstan, Austria,
I thought you would like that with me, of course, Austria,
Uzbekistan and China. And these reports will probably continue coming in.
We don't know, given given some of the necessary secrecy
(14:05):
around some of these events. We probably won't know for
a while the full number of people who believe that
they have been affected by this, and the U S
Government has at this time not released any official tally
of the number of people reporting these symptoms. Uh, the
closest you can find is some reports in US media,
(14:28):
like September of one, MPR had a piece on on
the CIA chief in Vienna getting recalled because of the
way he was handling this, and they noted that there
are currently an estimated two hundred plus cases around the world.
(14:48):
In a world of almost eight billion people, that's not
a lot. But in the world of in this rarefied
air of diplomacy and intelligence and all of that muky stuff,
two plus is a lot of people. It's not that
you'd be worried if you worked at an embassy. I
think that's that's the story how this came back into
(15:09):
our lives because of that that small you know, the
stories that Jimson in about Vienna. Then we had that
tiny little piece. It was like, oh, yeah, it's happening
in Vienna now too, and now we're here talking about
it again because we didn't realize I didn't realize personally
how far this thing had spread. As Ben just described,
there all these different countries, you'll even see it being reported.
(15:30):
I think there's a one off case that occurred in
Vietnam when current Vice President Kamala Harris was in like
visiting in Vietnam and then one of her one of
her staff that was there was along with her, was
affected by this. Yeah, yeah, you're right, and that that
interfered with the VPS trip as well because they wanted
(15:51):
to air on the side of costume. Which makes sense
at this point, folks. Havana syndrome, whatever it is or
is not, it doesn't appear to be lethal, which is
good news. What we mean is no one has died
as a result of this set of ill defined get it,
ill defined symptoms, but yet yet it's very important. It's
(16:15):
a very important figure to raise there. But here's the
strangest part. It's a question we asked in our previous
episode on this what exactly is Havannahs syndrome? Aside aside
from the terrible branding of the name, what's causing it?
Multiple individuals right now, scientists and several individuals in the
(16:35):
employee of the government a really cool group called the Jason's.
They all will tell you that they are pretty conclusive
on the answer, but there's a big problem here. They
don't agree with each other. There there is no official
conclusion yet, there are a lot of officials who have
(16:57):
reached conclusions, and these conclusions contradict. So what's really going on.
We're gonna pause for work from our sponsor and then
we're diving in. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, this
(17:18):
is this is something we we also need to talk about.
Then it's something that I know the three of us
have talked about pretty often off air and maybe on
air a little bit too. There is a dangerous potential
side effect any time an official makes a conclusion on
their own, right like if if a president, if a
(17:40):
police chief, if an ambassador, what have you, states their
opinion as a conclusion or says I believe this, Then
that opinion or that personal conclusion can be confused with
an actual official conclusion. This means that if you were
just to watch one person talking on one news report,
(18:05):
you read one article, one statement by saying I don't know,
like a CIA chief in Vienna or something, you might
think that the case is wrapped up, but you probably
don't know the whole story. That's why that's why we're
still doing this episode today because it gets so weirdly complicated.
(18:27):
Experts disagree, and we say experts, we mean like the
experts capital T, capital E. So we talked about this before, um,
the idea of directed energy attacks. I used the phrase
earlier sonic weapon, which again is another kind of like
vague sci fi catch all kind of term that was
used in that New Yorker article. Um, but what is
(18:48):
a directed energy weapon? Microwaves is one of the most
plausible causes identified by a National Academies of Science report
that was commissioned by the Department of State. But initially
they've floated out the idea that this could be that
aforementioned sonic weapon, which we'll get to in just a sec.
And this is also a reason that you'll find some
folks that believe that this is some sort of example
(19:11):
of mass hysteria, a psycho somatic phenomenon where people observe
others freaking out and essentially it becomes contagious. You know,
this idea of um mimicking the behavior of others or
it becoming you know, in some way a thing that
can spread like a Salem witch trials kind of thing
(19:32):
or a Satanic panic type of situation. So these are
the two kind of big buckets of explanations for these
symptoms um and currently very important members of the same
governments seem to not be on the same page about
which of these it is at all. Well, and there's
a I mean you could hopefully you can see why
(19:55):
these are the two prevailing things, right, just do the
Due to the nature of some of these simple ms,
you can imagine why any expert who's imagining the possible
tech out there that could cause something like this, you
go to, Okay, it's something that's using sound waves, that
would that would account for the high pitched, you know,
stuff going on with the ears and how it affects
the brain that way, or it's microwaves, because we've seen
(20:17):
this kind of thing before, Ben and All. I think
the big issue here is the word weapon. I think
that's where we're getting tripped up on all this, where
someone who's on the highly skeptical side saying this is,
you know, this is psycho somatic because these that kind
of weapon doesn't exist. I think that's the problem. The
(20:38):
weapon because this kind of tech exists, just not as
a directed weapon that you would fire at an adversary. Right, Like,
the first thing you want to find in a murder
is the murder weapon, right, or it's one of the
first things you want to find. So the big, big question,
this is a question Jack and I had as well,
is like where is the weapon? Right? If we know
(21:02):
this kind of technology exists, Um, but due to the
nature of it, and we talk a little bit about
the possible physics here in our previous episode, due to
the nature of it, you can get a kind of
spider sense for where this thing, like the distance within
which it would have to be located to have these
(21:24):
effects on people. Again, all theoretical at this point, but
that didn't stop people like Christopher Miller, it was, a
former Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, for claiming
publicly this was a directed energy weapon. He also called
it an act of war. This is hashtag no chill,
by the way, and multiple former and current members of
(21:48):
the intelligence community appear to agree. In in a political way,
we're talking about people you might consider being left wing
people you might consider being right wing um who usually
disagree about everything. Right, That this camp has both of
those folks in it. They and most of those most
of the people who believe it was a directed energy
(22:09):
weapon also believe Russia is behind the syndrome. Uh spoiler alert.
Russia denies any involvement. When do they ever cop to
anything that you know, oh man, yeah, yeah, but it's
it's funny like with I mean, this is terrible to say,
but with polonium assassinations, that was pretty much copying to evolvement.
(22:32):
You know. Also, if you're listening to Russia's stay away
from the windows. Yeah, but it may very well not
be Russia at all. I mean, that's we got to
keep that as a possibility, even though it's gonna get
into there's there's a precedent. But okay, let's let's get
and I am not trying to disparage the average Russian
(22:54):
citizens out there who may may not be listening to
the show. I just think Russia as a government has
a history of being pretty tricksy. I think we can
all kind of agree on that. Not that we don't,
but uh, they sort of pride themselves on, uh, you know,
admitting nothing. Um so it just doesn't really surprise me there.
But there's a lot of descent as well, you know,
(23:17):
voices of dissent. Uh. Some people believe that this is
the result of some sort of intentional attempt to harm
intelligence officials, which is what we talked about, but others
think it's some sort of side effect of some high
tech attempt to you know, steal classified intelligence from phones
(23:38):
and computers. So perhaps a proximity effect from some technology
that's being used within the agency, as Ben said, it
can be also it can also be stolen from windows,
not the software hardware, right right. And then what's interesting
about that too is just just so we all have
(23:59):
a scope of how advanced some of that observational technology
can be. It's totally possible to hear a conversation by
aiming a laser at a window and the people in
the room with the window will be discernible. So like
(24:21):
it's not out of the realm of possibility as space
age as it sounds. One one thing we mentioned radio
frequencies too, by the way, Yes, and name for it.
There's a name for that piece of equipment. It's called
like a something catcher or like a something fisher. There's
there's there's names for like there's a name for a
piece of equipment like that you can literally use to
(24:41):
like intercept radio frequencies or um, you know, cell phone conversations.
But I think I may be miss book earlier when
I was saying, um, that this maybe would have been
as a result of stuff being used within the embassy.
This would have been stuff that was being targeted at
the embassy to try to steal their intel. Correct, Uh, yeah,
it could have been with that explanation, or in that case,
(25:04):
it could be possible that there was an inside person
who likes set the thing up. Um, no one knows. Well,
if it's when someone knows, no one publicly knows. So
they're not saying they're not saying that's right. They have
not made an official statement. So if you are diving
(25:25):
into this, one of the first questions you're gonna ask is, rightly,
if it's a weapon, where's the weapon? But another question
we need to ask immediately is if there are symptoms,
what are the symptoms and can we find physical traces
of those. This is where the Journal of the American
Medical Association or JAMA comes into play. In eighteen, they
(25:50):
published a study I alluded to this. When we're talking
about this earlier led by a guy who's pretty legit.
His name is Douglas H. Smith. He's the director of
the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at University of Pennsylvania.
And his team looked at people reporting these symptoms and
they found signs of brain damage, but they found no
(26:13):
signs of impact to the patient's skull. And they used
a really weirdly poetic term for this. They called this
kind of trauma and immaculate concussion and I know what
what an album named uh? And so. Smith also said
most of most of the folks on his team were
(26:34):
pretty skeptical about this going in, and then later they
all unanimously concluded something is there, so much so that
they did another study the next year in nineteen and
they largely agreed with their earlier findings. That's fascinating, And
we're gonna get to the whole idea of like mass
hysteria and what that means. But this stuff sure points
(26:57):
the finger at something. It felt quite know what that is? Uh,
there's involved, I mean, and you can touchless brain damage,
you know what I mean, Like an unseen mover causing
people's brains to malfunction. Just wait until their white blood
cell levels are are heightened in the next couple of years.
(27:18):
And I think we maybe brushed over it a little
bit or maybe not, but like, I mean, one of
the big things that was described here is the idea
of brain fog and of not being able to like
read things, you know, like the woman that I described,
miss lee Um in the New Yorker piece, she at
breakfast with her kids, like couldn't read the cereal box
and things like that. Like this the sort of like
(27:38):
bursts of uh confusion and and this is sort of
like you know, almost like borderline stroke like symptoms, you know,
like where you like kind of just like are all
of a sudden like in a fugue state. Yeah, and this, Uh,
I think this goes back to what you were saying earlier, Matt,
Like the one of one of the key things is
uh temporary inability to pomplish relatively simple task. Let's let's
(28:04):
go into this. Let's go into the idea of something
being psychogenic or psycho semantic, attic, insane. Uh. There there
there's another. There's the other side of the camp. The
other contradictory information here or contradictory belief is a growing
number of people. Also high level experts, also high level scientists,
(28:29):
think that this is quite possibly entirely psycho semantic. What
does that mean, Well, first, it does not mean that
people are purposely making something up. It does not mean
that they are lying, and it does not mean that
their experiences are invalid. It means that while people may
genuinely believe they've been affected by some sort of James
(28:51):
Bond level spy machinery, they have instead succumbed somehow to
an outbreak of mass hysteria. And shout out to the excellent,
excellent book Outbreak if you would like to learn more
about this. It's it's the best encyclopedia I've found of
mass hysteria outbreaks throughout history. It is such a good
(29:12):
and disturbing read. It's one of the things that almost
just connected to like the placebo effect, where if you
truly believe that you're getting the right medication or something
that's supposed to have an effect, then you can trick
your body into experiencing a positive result. Um and I
believe there's an opposite of that called the no sebo effect,
where you can literally trick your body into being sick,
(29:33):
which you know in this scenario is kind of what
this would be if people truly believe based on remember
all that communication you were talking about Ben and overhearing
kind of the scuttle butt around the embassy about sonic
weapons and hearing whispers of all this kind of stuff.
If you really believe that you're being targeted by this,
and you start to hear other people that validate your belief,
then it can make it persevere and maybe you can
(29:56):
get more intense. Can I tell you guys that want
to comment on this? Uh? Yeah, no, you're right. Um.
A couple of days after we recorded that episode featuring
the stories from Vienna where we brought Havana syndrome back up,
I think I experienced something kind of like this where
I was thinking about it a lot. I was talking
about it with you guys, and then uh talking about
(30:18):
it with a couple of other friends, and late at
night when I was getting just hanging around in my house,
I was in my bedroom and my I heard a
clicking sound in my right ear I'm not kidding, and
then a high pitched tone like tenitis like I get
when with when I'm playing symbols too much or something,
and it lasted for quite a while. I felt nauseous
(30:40):
and I had to lay down, and I felt really weird.
Um And I don't know if it's possible that my
brain could just cause these effects to occur, because I've
been thinking about it and talking about it a lot.
You know, I don't know what happened within my brain
when I experienced it, but I know I experienced something
like it. Um. And I highly doubt that I'm being targeted,
(31:02):
that my house is being targeted for any reason. So
I'm just putting it out there that, like you may
think that, oh, that's impossible. I my brain could never
like trick itself into experiencing something. But I just would
say to you, it can. Um. And it feels very
weird when you identify that it has. Yeah. And then also,
(31:23):
I mean it goes back to in some ways, it's
like a version of peer pressure, right, Uh, like that
experiment I talked about earlier, where where it was clear
that people will, uh, people will make a inaccurate or
incorrect conclusion just so they can fit in with a group,
(31:44):
like which line is longer, which line is the same length.
That's scary and it's very human. Other historical examples of
mass psychogenic illnesses or phenomenon would be stuff like the
dancing plagues of the Middle Ages, or our episode on
the screaming epidemics in rural Malaysia, or for something more recent,
(32:06):
what about the various accounts of uh teenagers developing facial
ticks after watching a lot of videos of someone with
Tourette syndrome on TikTok. There's a level of communication here
that is maybe not entirely consensual, is what I'm saying.
The anti weapon school of thought, let's call them, that
(32:30):
found some pretty high level proponents and this is this
is a story that I think it's funny. I don't
know if we need to go too deep on this,
but it's it's interesting because it's a great illustration of
how science should work. The initial claims of sonic weapons.
This came about because a lot of the victims description
(32:52):
included those noises similar to what you're mentioning, matt Uh.
Not everyone reported hearing a sound. Not everyone said they
heard the same thing, but still that's a good place
to start. So were these folks in Cuba hearing a weapon?
Various physicists have shot this down. Dr Jurgen Altman particular
(33:14):
stood out to me. He said, I know of no
acoustic effect that can cause concussion symptoms. Sound going through
the air cannot shake your head. And then there was
an alleged recording of the sonic attack. Cool, that's evidence, right,
That's like the recording of a gunshot if there is
a weapon in play. But some biologists got in the game.
(33:34):
They investigated this and they were able to conclusively identify
the sound. It wasn't a sonic weapon. Well, it wasn't
a man made sonic weapon. It was the banging tunes
of the humble a neuro grillis Sellernicus. Uh allowed cricket,
a very very loud cricket. Look, but look upon my chirps,
(33:57):
he mighty. It's basically when those uh, those cricket legs
are deadly, uh you know, and they're like the tiny
world's tiniest violin playing the saddest song on massum. But no,
I mean, anyone that lives around the neck of the
woods that we're at um, you know this sound, or
at least that's cicada's and crickets they make a similar sound,
(34:17):
and it's a giant group of them, and it creates
something that the ear perceives as being a kind of
a continuous um kind of hum. Right, m hmm, yeah,
and uh we go to Fernando monte Al grey Zapata,
who was a professor of sensory biology at the University
(34:39):
of Lincoln, and this guy was involved in the study
the biologists conducted and he confirmed that this is a
Caribbean species of cricket. Its call is going through it
about seven killer hurts and it's at a high rate,
which means if you're walking around rocking human general issue ears,
(35:01):
you're gonna hear a continuous, sharp trill when these crickets
are emitting their calls. So they're not superspies, they're just
very loud. They don't have indoor voices. That's what happened
and this, Yeah, but it's it's interesting if you've got
a loud enough you know, sound at the same frequency
occurring for a long enough period of time, it can
(35:23):
cause hearing damage. And some of those things those sensations
like losing some losing a frequency or two in your ears,
so you know there that could be part of the problem.
And it doesn't that often, Like when you lose that frequency,
then you get tonitis like in that frequency where you
hear it constantly. It's that's true, and that's valid. Point counterpoint,
(35:48):
I would say, why did no one in Havana report
that before? Well, and to your earlier point, been about
the proximity effect, right, like if if short of these
devices being stationed directly in the homes of these individuals
that were being you know, afflicted, Um, what about the
(36:08):
people standing in between? You know what? I mean? What
about the people in the streets? You know? What about
the other people living in the neighborhoods and nearby houses?
These are presumably maybe passed through. That's the part again,
because the technology is so we don't know what this is,
So we don't know how with the mechanism of targeting
would be and how to even deploy it. So I
think that's what causes a lot of like head scratching
(36:30):
at least in like the with the people that are
able to talk about it. I mean, maybe this does
exist and there's just like a small cadre of folks
that know about what this is, but we can't hear
about it. Uh, A conspiracy of crickets, I love it, Ben,
What if the crickets can send that send seven killer
hurt signal, bounce it off the windows, and then record
(36:55):
it in their little cricket robot bodies are saying, aren't real,
Let me get my matrix glasses out. Saved that for
this one. So yes, uh uh man, all right, well
I'm putting away the glasses there, So we ruled out
one possible explanation. Crickets are probably not superspies. But what
(37:18):
about the other possibilities? To answer that, we have to
turn on the microwave after a word from our sponsors.
Beep beep beep, No, Doc, don't cut those beeps. This
is we're doing a bit uh microwave. But for your
(37:40):
mind one of the strongest supporting mind crow wave. There
it is there, it is cut print. No, that's perfect.
Uh the mind crow wave brilliant. So one of the
strongest arguments for the idea of a directed energy weapon
and the idea that Russia might be behind it. Is
(38:02):
something that you mentioned earlier, Matt, the Moscow's signal. What
is that uh messed up thing that you barely hear about,
Like I barely know about this, and I'm so interested
in this stuff, and I barely know about it. Uh,
because I've never had proximity to the State Department, I
(38:24):
suppose I don't know, Um, but it's it's an older
story from I want to say, the nineteen seventies, Ben.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm just pulling this from the top
of my head. I think it was nineteen seventies in Moscow,
at an embassy there and in a couple of other
places in Moscow where Americans were operating. Uh is that right? Yeah? Yeah, okay, okay, yeah.
(38:50):
But the thing I remember, Ben, is a specific listening
device that was placed in a couple like within the
walls of a building where diplomats were we're functioning. That
required I think it was microwaves to be sent into
the building to activate the listening devices. I think that's
(39:10):
what you tell me the actual story, Ben, That's just
what I remember. Well, well, first this is not we're
not experts on this, but this is not a classified
thing any longer, I think. Uh, Noel, Matt, I think,
first off, most importantly, we can agree that the Moscow
Signal is a great name for a band and their album,
(39:33):
their debut album is Immaculate Concussion. Right. Also, either of
those could be a good name for a nice stiff cocktail.
That's true. I would be frightened of a cocktail called
immaculate concussion. I'll have yours then, Ben, Okay, well you
have to when I'll drive, because I don't think you
(39:53):
could drive after those. But but yes, So the Moscow
signal is public knowledge now, to the point that there
is a Wikipedia page on this that you can read
that has some pretty good sourcing, which you can't always
say about Wikipedia. So this describes a microwave transmission that
(40:14):
was directed at the U. S. Embassy and as Matt said,
probably some other places as well, starting in at least
nineteen fifty three to about nineteen seventy nine. It was
around for a long time. Um, and I need to
lean on you guys for a little bit of of
a comparison description of how this signal was rated. So
(40:35):
the Moscow Signal over those decades is varying between two
point five to four gigga hurts, and that cricket over
there terrorizing the embassy in Cuba allegedly is calling at
about seven killer hurts. So what's what's the difference here?
What what gives? How do they compare? Well, typically, like
(40:59):
something that would be can said at a high frequency
in sound way, It's just be something between thirty killer
hurts and three hundred mega hurts. So what you're describing
is a little below that. And for reference, Matt, what
is the typical range of the ability of human ears
to perceive sound in frequencies? My understanding is twenty hurts
(41:20):
on the low end to like the super low frequencies
all the way up to about twenty killer hurts, which
would be twenty k when I'm thinking about it in
my editing brain. Got it awesome? Okay? Plus I love
the idea. Uh. I love the idea of this cricket talking.
For some reason, when you guys are describing this to me, uh,
it makes me think of the cricket as some insect
(41:45):
version of those screaming goats. Have you ever seen those
that they're like eerily human like in their bleats. I'll
send it to you, um, I'll send it to you
over the weekend, because I don't think you want to
hear it on a school night, and just just for
a little friends, for like your own personal hearing. The
human voice a male voice covers a fundamental frequency range
(42:06):
of between one hundred hurts and nine hundred hurts um.
And you know, once we get past the range of
human hearing, when we start getting into things like mega
hurts and and gigga hurts. Between three hunder mega hurts
and gigga hurts is considered microwaves UM. And above that,
between three hundredig hurts and four hundred terror hurts that's infrared.
(42:26):
And then you start getting into the visible light spectrum.
So all of these things are related. So the we're
talking about two point five to four gigga hurts with
this Moscow signal, and that's definitely microwaves. That's definitely you're
not going to hear it necessarily, but you could be
affected by it theoretically. And I just last thing on
that seven seven uh killer hurts thing. I don't know about,
(42:50):
you know, but when I'm going going through and using
a d S er on somebody's voice, generally it's around
seven killer hurts, which might make you like understand why
that cricket sound is so jarring and so like irritating,
because that's the thing that many audio professionals remove from
speaking voices just because it's kind of a it can be.
(43:13):
It's the sibilants it's sometimes the the hard ask that
you hear. They take like that's the thing that's just
coming at you from several hundred thousand crickets or whatever. Yeah,
and and I felt a disturbance in the sound, as
though a million crickets cried out at once. Uh So,
(43:33):
later the US government will conclude that the Moscow signal
is likely an attempted espionage and in this conclusion, they
also determined that there were no ill health effects on
their staff as a result. Forty years after the fact,
this would be disputed, which is important. You can find
(43:56):
a report on this called the Moscow Signal Epidemiological a
forty years on by jose A. Martinez from Reviews on
Environmental Health. So people are still debating that one decades later.
Here's the big problem we mentioned already with the microwave proposal.
No one's found the weapon. No one's literally no one
(44:17):
has found the microwave. If these are purposeful attacks, I
would say it's also interesting that no one has determined
a solid motive. Would you blast people's brains just to
like troll them. There's no there's no indication that this
was pushing them to perform certain tasks. But yeah, but
(44:39):
still the inescapable fact is that the Moscow signal was
a real thing, and this plays a big role in
the minds of people who argue that there are current
microwave attacks. But I have to say I have to
slightly disagree, just slightly disagree. I think there's clear motive
with the Moscow signal, which was signals intellig on the
(45:01):
behalf of you know, an opposition force the United States.
In this case it was likely Moscow or it was
like likely the Russian government, and they were they were
blasting microwaves at uh the embassy locations, at diplomatic locations
in order to gain intel by using devices theoretically inside
(45:21):
that building. We know for sure there was one and
several others the typewriters that were discovered, and there's we
know that for sure. Like you can go head on
over to I think it's the American Foreign Service Association website.
Then you posted a link there. The title is today
Savanna syndrome is like deja vu all over again, as
Yogi Berra might have put it by James Shoemaker. Yeah,
(45:43):
I'm not saying that the Moscow signal didn't have a motive.
I think that's very clear. I But then I think, like,
I don't know, I'm pretty convinced by some of the
writing in that particular article and a couple others I've
been reading that if if this is in fact an
actual physical thing where microwaves are bombarding these locations now
in twenties you know sixteen too, that it's the same deal.
(46:08):
It's a side effect of signals intelligence gathering by some opposition.
I mean, to me, that makes the most sense, that
this is like a side effect of those lasery things
that they're shooting in to capture phone calls, uh and
and intel of other kinds. That's the thing that makes
the most sense to me. It just doesn't seem like
the thing in and of itself is focused enough or
(46:31):
has enough of a predictable outcome other than just sewing
what seeds of discord within the government, like you know
what I mean, Like it's it's definitely becoming a bit
of a pr nightmare. But that's not enough to to
be a motive. And it took a long time for
it to even come out. Okay, yeah, you know you
inspired me here. I've got a new conspiracy theory on this.
(46:52):
What if it's big ibew proofing, right, like they're giving
these incredibly important people a lot of headaches his cell No, No,
well yeah, I mean look according to I hear, you've
been according to the author, uh two D and fifty
(47:13):
it's crazy. Be careful. Um. But the one of the
side effects, allegedly, at least according to some of the writing,
I can't prove this of the Moscow signal was leukemia,
and you know, or theoretically was leukemia. At least it
showed up in many people who were affected by the
Moscow signal, including the guy who wrote the article. So
(47:34):
I don't know. It's just yeah, that's the pickle here.
Lest we forget about another syndrome. Wasn't agent orange considered
a syndrome? I believe so you have for a time
because it was a collection again a combo meal of symptoms.
I'm thinking about Gulf War syndrome. It was. It was
another syndrome. Obviously, agent orange is now something that people
(47:57):
collect disability for collecting known offense from from the v
A four, But for a long time that was buried
in the same way. And you gotta wonder, as new
a story as this is, maybe this is totally our fault.
You know, yeah, you know, that's an inescapable possibility. There's
one more possibility that we we need to dive back into,
(48:18):
and it's a It's something that I think the majority
of opinions you read now will agree with. Doesn't make
it correct, but it is important. You do need to
know this. What if it is all a case of
the made it up skis? Everybody involved here is human.
They're inherently vulnerable to the usual human misconceptions and frailties.
(48:39):
And that's why a growing majority of scientists and skeptics
have clapped back at those conclusions by Jamma and those
statements from you know, various politicians and military officials. You
can find an example of this reasoning, this argument that
Havana syndrome is a result of psychogenic phenomena in a
(48:59):
book that is published in March of March of last
oh March of two years ago, Havana Syndrome, Mass Psychogenic
Illness and the Real Story behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. UM.
This can be sound offensive to people. If we have
people who are in the audience today who know someone
who's been affected by this, this can sound like maybe
(49:21):
those authors are ignoring legitimate claims of people who have
been injured. This is not the case. Instead, the way
we put it is, there is a viable possibility that
people were already experiencing various symptoms for any number of
unrelated reasons, and upon communicating with people with their colleagues,
(49:47):
their peers, other folks in the area, they heard a
phrase that could explain what they were experiencing. They were able,
they had a name to hang their experience upon, havan
a syndrome. You know, you thought you just had some headaches,
You thought you just maybe we're getting to nitis, and
then someone said, I have a headache too. It's not
(50:10):
just a headache. It's Havannah syndrome. And then you have
that light bulb Eureka moment and you say, oh, that's
what's happening to me. It is not random, It is
not damage from you know, playing symbols too loudly or
too often. It is Havana syndrome, and we are under attack.
I'm not saying that's what's happening, but psychologically there is
(50:32):
a viable possibility. Again, especially when you look at how
um if you look at the spread of the symptoms
for this syndrome, you know what I mean, A lot
of them are could be caused by other events. And
then also a lot of them are tough to verify
unless you have doctors in the room at the time
(50:56):
doing like brain scans and so on. Even then, I mean,
you know, I just had a health scare with my mom,
you know where um, we genuinely thought she had a stroke, uh,
and we had her in the hospital and they did
a CT scan on her and they found something that
indicated that we were likely right that she had a stroke.
But then they did another scan on her that was
(51:17):
totally clean. And any fans of the show Succession will
probably remember the episode where Logan Roy, the main character,
one of the main characters UM, appears to be demonstrating
stroke like symptoms and then it just turns out he
had a really bad urinary tract infection, which is a
thing that can present those kind of symptoms and older people. UM.
So it's just there's so many factors that can go
(51:39):
into these kinds of things, and and it's impossible to
uh even like the pain scale that we used to
measure um people's pain. As we know, if anyone watched
that show Dope Sick or it was followed, you know,
the whole uh Sackler family debacle. We know that that
was largely invented by pharmaceutical companies, the idea of like,
how can you describe your pain on a scale of
like one to to ten or whatever. Uh, it's all
(52:00):
very subjective. And I was just going to mention when
you mentioned the made it up skis, like, couldn't you
argue that the initial impetus for some, not all psychogenic
events is a single or a couple of cases of
the made it up skis that are so convincing that
people just hop on board and believe the hype. Quite possibly,
(52:22):
I mean it's a it's a it could be a
case of retroactive explanation, irrationalization. One looks back upon what
they've experienced and now has a new frame of reference
through which to view it. Again, this is not this
is not us saying that it isn't happening. And we
(52:43):
want to uh first and foremost, we want to be
respectful to the people who have experienced these conditions. Uh.
And you know this is the opinion of our show,
but it's also echoed on a macro stage on a
much larger stage. The debate over what actually went down
(53:06):
continues today. UH. Congress and the White House under the
Biden administration have also recently passed a bill that set
aside funding to assist victims of this syndrome, whatever it
turns out to be. Uh. And then also the scientists
are still clapping back and forth at each other. Man.
(53:27):
There's an often ignored report from the Jason's on the
possibility of a psychogenic illness being at play. There's a
redacted version of this. It's out now. You can read
it online. But essentially they and several other scientists don't
agree with those two studies from ten and twenty nineteen,
(53:48):
and they questioned the methodology. But I what are you
to oh man, We mentioned that Jason's previously right. Yeah,
we did a strange news or listener male episode about it.
I'll tell you what they're hiding. There's some really good
sexy heads of hair is Oh you got a picture
(54:11):
of them? You know, I just picture them all as
being very good looking boys named Jason. So for anybody
who doesn't know uh, and maybe this is a lighter
place for us to to end today's show. For anybody
who isn't aware the Jason's Technically, Jason is a independent
(54:34):
group of top notch scientists. They formed because the US
freaked out when the Soviet Union launched spot Nick and
they said, okay, no, no, no, we can't do this.
And uh. In my favorite like fictional Tarantino Wes Anderson
version of the story, there's a very um off the
(54:56):
wall presidential meeting and some and says we've got a
round up everybody named Jason. And someone's like, uh, Mr President,
don't you think that's a bit extreme, And he goes, yeah, no,
good point. Just the scientist, just the scientist named Jason. Uh.
But but it's it is a real thing, and they
(55:18):
continue today. Was established nineteen sixty. No one's quite sure
how many members they are. They are not all named Jason. UM.
I'm just imagining Brian Cox going Jason chair. So so
shout up, so shout out to the Jason's UM, a
(55:42):
group that still is conducting both classified and declassified research.
It's important stuff. Uh. And if we're if we're roasting
you a little bit about the name, that's just because
it's cool. But whatever the case may be. With quote unquote,
havanis and him, which again is an unfair term in
my opinion. The investigation continues as we record, and this
(56:07):
is where you come in, fellow conspiracy realist, we would
like to hear from you. What do you think about this?
We've outlined the major possibilities. We were able to eliminate
one um, we found one villain a Caribbean species of cricket.
But now we now we passed the the microwave to you,
(56:28):
is this is this possible? I don't know, Like I
think all three of us are kind of this on
the same page here, because outside of the sonic weapon
being relatively debunked, the other explanations all have a couple
of sticky things about them, things that I think still
(56:48):
prevent us from dismissing them entirely. I don't know, what
do you guys? Yeah, well, look for my money, it's
Moscow Signal two point Oh, that's what it is. Uh,
it's I don't think you know, in my opinion that
it doesn't matter who's I'm some guy in Georgia, But
in my opinion, it was just it was tradecraft and
(57:08):
it's a technology used with that. It's not a weapon,
it's it's a byproduct of that technology being in use.
I tend to lead in the same direction because I
do not feel like the ends justified the means if
in fact this technology exists and they are targeting you know, uh,
US diplomats in Cube in Cuba, like to what end? Ay,
(57:32):
we don't have an answer to that, and be could
you do a little bit better job, like have introduced
a little mind control into the equation, you know, something,
make them do a thing. That's I was thinking about
that too, and and again now not and I'm not
I'm not being a jerk here. Um. I I do
think maybe there are This is the kind of thing
where maybe we only see some symptoms and maybe there
(57:52):
is there are there are future symptoms that could be
the real thing that actually is the desired and ole
of something like this. Um, it just happens that the
hand was tipped by you know, these early um symptoms.
Maybe there is something more nefarious at play, like a man.
I mean again, we don't have any evidence of that
ever actually having successfully taken place throughout the course of
(58:16):
human history. I mean we've got like sir hand, sir
hand and that kind of stuff, but like it usually
involves some level of mental illness um on the part
of the individual making the claims. Um, But who knows.
I mean, maybe there is a deeper layer to this,
and now that it's making the news, perhaps whatever party
was at play doing that has abandoned it and they're
they're they're taking this underground again, you know, and maybe
(58:38):
they're gonna tweak the their technology so that it doesn't
give the game away so quickly. Again, total blue sky
sci fi kind of conjecture there, so what so yeah,
let us know what you think, folks. What is this
conspiracy of crickets? Um? Is Moscow's signal a better name
for an album? Or is it a better name for bands? Uh?
(59:02):
These and other very important questions we'd love to hear
from you. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right. You can find us on the Internet in
the usual places of note, Facebook, Twitter, you Tuo. I
like to really double pronounce that double T and Twitter.
I think it really gives it a nice, a nice
ear feel. Um. You can find us on those platforms
under the handle at conspiracy stuff. If you want to
(59:24):
go to Instagram, you can find us at conspiracy stuff Show.
There are other non Internet e ways to get in
touch with us as well. Yes, you can give us
a phone call. Our number is one eight three three
st d w y t K. When you call in,
give yourself a cool nickname. You've got three minutes. Say
whatever you'd like. We'd love it. If you're silly like
(59:47):
Optimus Prime. Uh, thank you again for sending in your
message and telling us all about Omicron H. Thank you Optimus,
as well as thank you everybody else who's been calling
in U we have to. We have two voicemails in
our inbox right now, guys too, and it's just because
they came in while we were recording. Uh. So I'm
(01:00:09):
really excited about that state. We're gonna do everything we
can to keep on that track. So again, our number
one three st d w y t K. If you
don't want to jump on the phone and you still
want to send us some information, links, files, whatever you've got,
please shoot us an email. We are conspiracy at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know.
(01:00:49):
Is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Alexis code named Doc Holiday Jackson. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. I'd like to start out
today's episode with a shout out to our good pal
(00:47):
Jack O'Brien, creator of crack dot com as well as
creator and co host of the Daily Zeitgeist. Jack and
I were talking on Twitter a little bit about today's episode.
This is our update on something we've done recently, and
maybe the best way to get into it is to
(01:07):
say life is tough in public service. If you are
a firefighter, a teacher, a public defender, or even a diplomat,
um thank you for your service. You know that there's
a ton of stuff you have to deal with every
day that just doesn't get much media attention. And so
in the world of foreign service, the question people have
(01:28):
been asking in the US is what happens when a
disease seems made just for you? What happens when the
only demographic indicator for some kind of affliction isn't your
you know, it's not your makeup necessarily, it's entirely your
employment a job based on disease. This is a question
(01:51):
we touched on the past, from explorations a tailor made
diseases to the inexplicably efficient curses like bone pointing in
Australian Papua New Guinea. Today we're diving into a new
iteration of this phenomenon folklore that's occurring as we record.
It's something the world is still trying to figure out.
It's something called the Havana syndrome. Here are the facts, well,
(02:15):
the Havana syndrome. It's currently being described as a quote
set of medical symptoms with unknown causes. Uh. If there's
a description that's any more vague and amorphous than that,
I would love for you to show it to me. Um. Uh.
You know, a syndrome being a kind of catch all
of a group of symptoms, you know, a series of
(02:36):
kind of interrelated maladies, sort of like a ben as
you put it, A extra value meal where they used
to call them extra value meals. Do they still call
them that? Yeah? Probably probably a combo um, not necessarily
one singular condition with a singular cause. Um. It is
inherently vague and kind of, you know, a little bit mysterious.
(03:00):
The idea of a syndrome, the China syndrome, for example,
you know. Yeah, and in this particular syndrome is pretty strange.
It's got a lot of different symptoms. You'll hear a
lot about migraines, about brain fog, tiredness, and inability to
complete simple tasks for your job, especially you know, as
(03:21):
a diplomat, just simple things that your computer or sending emails,
making phone calls, things like that. Um. There's other things too, hearing, clicking,
bringing in the ears. It's a it's a whole bunch
of weird stuff going on at one time. Yeah, yeah tonight,
as uh, the the sensation of pressure or vibration in
(03:42):
one's head, and of course nausea, lack of coordination, things
like that. It is a panopoly of symptoms, right, And
this again seems to primarily target government officials, members of
the intelligence community in the US, and a couple I
think a couple of folks in Canada where this was
(04:05):
first reported. But but particularly when they're operating abroad. Yes, yes, exactly,
So this is not happening in Langley. Very important note.
So first things first, and I I am so glad
that we are returning to this we talked about in
Strange News, we talked about it in a previous episode,
(04:26):
but one thing we didn't point out. Regardless of what
you think of Havannah syndrome after hearing our show today,
we need to agree on this one thing. The name
is utter bullet and it's unfair. It's like it's called
the Havannah syndrome only because the first publicly acknowledged reports
(04:49):
surfaced amid US and Canadian embassy staff in Havana, Cuba.
And that's similar to the way the world did Spain
so very dirty with the nineteen eighteen Spanish flu epidemic.
It didn't come from Spain. It's called the Spanish flu
because Spain, out of all the countries, did the right
(05:09):
thing and did not suppress reports of a deadly influence
of virus spreading. Yeah, but we also know that, like
I mean, these types of names have political clout to
them or they are their political capital in some ways,
like you know how Donald Trump very desperately tried to
rebrand UH COVID nineteen to the Chinese flu or the
China virus or whatever. Um. You know, the idea of
(05:32):
calling it the Havanna syndrome UH in some way sort
of displaces the blame or kind of you know, makes
people think of it in a certain light. Um. You know,
similarly to the Spanish flu, even though it isn't necessarily
wasn't necessarily something that was caused by um Spain, as
in the case of the Havanna syndrome, not necessarily caused
(05:53):
by you know, the government of Cuba. Per se. It's
it's it's still a little up in the air. But also,
I just want to backtrack really quickly, I said at
the beginning of the show, when describing what a syndrome was,
I I dropped the term China syndrome, which is a
movie about a nuclear meltdown. Um, not a disease, but
the word syndrome it's so amorphous and catch all that
it can also refer to just like a set of
(06:13):
circumstances like not in my backyard syndrome is that Wikipedia
puts it um. So there are lots of ways of
using syndrome and and and of itself. It's kind of
like the vaguest of possible catch all terms. Just for
my money, guys, Havana syndrome does make sense because it
was the American embassy in Havana, Cuba, where it originated,
right where we first noticed it in reports first came
(06:34):
out at least. But I think we should call it
the the Moscow signal to agree. So, but I I
think we are making an important point. You know, the
government of Cuba, as he said earlier, likely has nothing
to do with this, and they're probably rightly a little
(06:58):
peeved that they're being that they the name of the
capital of their country is now attached to an amorphous
thing that people consider either a uh possibly a disease
or injury from some sort of Sci Fi level uh
directed energy weapon. But what you know, what you call it?
If you live in Cupid, you know what they call it.
(07:18):
They don't call if it is like the what do
you call a quarter pounder conversation? Right this uh in Cuba?
If you are working in this field or if you're
working in the field of medicine, etcetera. You will probably
not call it, well, you definitely won't call it havana syndrome.
You'll probably call it unidentified health incidences or you h
(07:42):
I it's our our new addition to all the unidentified
things we love, unidentified submerged objects, unidentified aerial phenomenon. Now
we have unidentified health incidents. Less sexy, less provocative, much
more accurate. But maybe we did when we talked about
this when the news was breaking. But maybe we should
(08:04):
start by doing a quick recap of what went down
in Cuba, which, by the way, I love that we
have a job where I can say sentences like that
at work, Like, maybe let's start with what went down
in Cuba? All right, Well, yeah, we first learned about
it in seventeen when the first reports began coming out,
(08:25):
but we do know that it was in sixteen when
diplomats and people working there in a Vana Cuba noticed
that something was happening. They were experiencing symptoms. And let's
see what was it. There were twenty one individuals initially
I think, or around around twenty one individuals or at
least twenty one that were acknowledged of having symptoms in
(08:48):
ten when those reports first came out, but then uh,
it was up to twenty six individuals, and that that's
really what we would call the the original class of
p a group of people who were affected by this. Yeah. Yeah.
And then, just like maybe a contagious or transmissible disease,
(09:11):
this syndrome, reports of it at least quickly expanded to
other locations across the planet, with one commonality. It seemed
to exclusively affect US government personnel, like people living in
the neighborhood of embassies nationals and say China or Taiwan
or something. They weren't being affected. The people reporting this
(09:34):
were virtually all working for Uncle Sam and the New
York Times. That have just been really quickly that has
expanded to some families of diplomats now and intelligence agents. Yes,
that is correct, and that's a very that's a very
important point. But the point still holds that people who
(09:54):
are not working with where were relationships with these people,
but we're living the same geographic area, were not infected,
which is not the way transmissible disease usually works. Right.
Disease or an infection does not necessarily care what kind
of job you have, And that's already you know, curious,
(10:15):
or and curious, or as Lewis Carroll would say. New
York Times had a great article on this, summing up
some of the events, and they said that the way
they put it is in seen those twenty one folks
that you mentioned, Matt, they started to report neurological symptoms.
These were serious. These weren't just you know, bouts of
(10:39):
migraine headaches that come and go. In some cases, the
people involved seemed debilitated and they had no real um
They had no real explanation for what was happening. And
some of them are actually the majority of the original
folks they said. These symptoms were she did by a
(11:02):
high pitched piercing sound, which they reported differently. They have
varying kind of interpretations and recollections of what they heard.
But they felt like they have walked through a quote,
invisible beam of energy. This is under the Trump administration,
and the Trump administration reacted quickly. Fifteen Cuban diplomats foreign
(11:26):
officers got kicked out at d C, and then the
White House also moved the majority of its staff out
of the embassy in Havana. Yes, it's interesting, there's a
there's a really cool new Yorker piece about this by
Adam and Twoson John Lee Anderson called the Mystery of
the Havannah Syndrome UM. And one of the central characters
or figures I guess and it was a career diplomat
(11:48):
named Audrey Lee Um. And she described on March seventeen
of UM she came home from working at the embassy
and made supper for our family. She had twins or
has twins, UM and her husband who who was not
there at the time, he was away on business of
his own. UM. And then she started experiencing those symptoms
that you're talking about. She described it as feeling as
(12:10):
though she had been I was the word she used,
like something had struck her. She had been struck, That's
how she described it. Um. And she felt this burst
of pressure in her head and then stabbing sensations, very
very very painful, she described. And Um it was determined
by her paste on these rumors I guess at the
(12:31):
time were rumors around the embassy that these were due
to some kind of attack of some sort, some sort
of sonic weapon. And the reason I get to this
is um she overheard it was such common knowledge around
the embassy that she actually heard security guards kind of
having a conversation about it and saying the phrase get
off the X. That was what really hit me. Um.
(12:53):
There's a really good NBC mini doc about this um
as well, you can look down on YouTube. But that
refers to the dea of this being a localized thing.
Move off the X if you're feeling these symptoms, moved
to a different area where maybe it'll go away because
whatever is affecting you isn't there. And she did that
and she felt better. Mm hmmm. Yeah. And this is
(13:15):
this is important too, because there's a point you brought
up that I want to kind of highlight, which is
the role of communication. Uh. There is validation in all
communication or in you know, effective communication, and that's something
we're gonna see play out in a big, big way here.
So since those initial reports in Cuba, more reports came in.
(13:40):
People in Russia, people in Georgia, the Country, people in Poland, Taiwan, Australia, Columbia, Kyrgyzstan, Austria,
I thought you would like that with me, of course, Austria,
Uzbekistan and China. And these reports will probably continue coming in.
We don't know, given given some of the necessary secrecy
(14:05):
around some of these events. We probably won't know for
a while the full number of people who believe that
they have been affected by this, and the U S
Government has at this time not released any official tally
of the number of people reporting these symptoms. Uh, the
closest you can find is some reports in US media,
(14:28):
like September of one, MPR had a piece on on
the CIA chief in Vienna getting recalled because of the
way he was handling this, and they noted that there
are currently an estimated two hundred plus cases around the world.
(14:48):
In a world of almost eight billion people, that's not
a lot. But in the world of in this rarefied
air of diplomacy and intelligence and all of that muky stuff,
two plus is a lot of people. It's not that
you'd be worried if you worked at an embassy. I
think that's that's the story how this came back into
(15:09):
our lives because of that that small you know, the
stories that Jimson in about Vienna. Then we had that
tiny little piece. It was like, oh, yeah, it's happening
in Vienna now too, and now we're here talking about
it again because we didn't realize I didn't realize personally
how far this thing had spread. As Ben just described,
there all these different countries, you'll even see it being reported.
(15:30):
I think there's a one off case that occurred in
Vietnam when current Vice President Kamala Harris was in like
visiting in Vietnam and then one of her one of
her staff that was there was along with her, was
affected by this. Yeah, yeah, you're right, and that that
interfered with the VPS trip as well because they wanted
(15:51):
to air on the side of costume. Which makes sense
at this point, folks. Havana syndrome, whatever it is or
is not, it doesn't appear to be lethal, which is
good news. What we mean is no one has died
as a result of this set of ill defined get it,
ill defined symptoms, but yet yet it's very important. It's
(16:15):
a very important figure to raise there. But here's the
strangest part. It's a question we asked in our previous
episode on this what exactly is Havannahs syndrome? Aside aside
from the terrible branding of the name, what's causing it?
Multiple individuals right now, scientists and several individuals in the
(16:35):
employee of the government a really cool group called the Jason's.
They all will tell you that they are pretty conclusive
on the answer, but there's a big problem here. They
don't agree with each other. There there is no official
conclusion yet, there are a lot of officials who have
(16:57):
reached conclusions, and these conclusions contradict. So what's really going on.
We're gonna pause for work from our sponsor and then
we're diving in. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, this
(17:18):
is this is something we we also need to talk about.
Then it's something that I know the three of us
have talked about pretty often off air and maybe on
air a little bit too. There is a dangerous potential
side effect any time an official makes a conclusion on
their own, right like if if a president, if a
(17:40):
police chief, if an ambassador, what have you, states their
opinion as a conclusion or says I believe this, Then
that opinion or that personal conclusion can be confused with
an actual official conclusion. This means that if you were
just to watch one person talking on one news report,
(18:05):
you read one article, one statement by saying I don't know,
like a CIA chief in Vienna or something, you might
think that the case is wrapped up, but you probably
don't know the whole story. That's why that's why we're
still doing this episode today because it gets so weirdly complicated.
(18:27):
Experts disagree, and we say experts, we mean like the
experts capital T, capital E. So we talked about this before, um,
the idea of directed energy attacks. I used the phrase
earlier sonic weapon, which again is another kind of like
vague sci fi catch all kind of term that was
used in that New Yorker article. Um, but what is
(18:48):
a directed energy weapon? Microwaves is one of the most
plausible causes identified by a National Academies of Science report
that was commissioned by the Department of State. But initially
they've floated out the idea that this could be that
aforementioned sonic weapon, which we'll get to in just a sec.
And this is also a reason that you'll find some
folks that believe that this is some sort of example
(19:11):
of mass hysteria, a psycho somatic phenomenon where people observe
others freaking out and essentially it becomes contagious. You know,
this idea of um mimicking the behavior of others or
it becoming you know, in some way a thing that
can spread like a Salem witch trials kind of thing
(19:32):
or a Satanic panic type of situation. So these are
the two kind of big buckets of explanations for these
symptoms um and currently very important members of the same
governments seem to not be on the same page about
which of these it is at all. Well, and there's
a I mean you could hopefully you can see why
(19:55):
these are the two prevailing things, right, just do the
Due to the nature of some of these simple ms,
you can imagine why any expert who's imagining the possible
tech out there that could cause something like this, you
go to, Okay, it's something that's using sound waves, that
would that would account for the high pitched, you know,
stuff going on with the ears and how it affects
the brain that way, or it's microwaves, because we've seen
(20:17):
this kind of thing before, Ben and All. I think
the big issue here is the word weapon. I think
that's where we're getting tripped up on all this, where
someone who's on the highly skeptical side saying this is,
you know, this is psycho somatic because these that kind
of weapon doesn't exist. I think that's the problem. The
(20:38):
weapon because this kind of tech exists, just not as
a directed weapon that you would fire at an adversary. Right, Like,
the first thing you want to find in a murder
is the murder weapon, right, or it's one of the
first things you want to find. So the big, big question,
this is a question Jack and I had as well,
is like where is the weapon? Right? If we know
(21:02):
this kind of technology exists, Um, but due to the
nature of it, and we talk a little bit about
the possible physics here in our previous episode, due to
the nature of it, you can get a kind of
spider sense for where this thing, like the distance within
which it would have to be located to have these
(21:24):
effects on people. Again, all theoretical at this point, but
that didn't stop people like Christopher Miller, it was, a
former Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, for claiming
publicly this was a directed energy weapon. He also called
it an act of war. This is hashtag no chill,
by the way, and multiple former and current members of
(21:48):
the intelligence community appear to agree. In in a political way,
we're talking about people you might consider being left wing
people you might consider being right wing um who usually
disagree about everything. Right, That this camp has both of
those folks in it. They and most of those most
of the people who believe it was a directed energy
(22:09):
weapon also believe Russia is behind the syndrome. Uh spoiler alert.
Russia denies any involvement. When do they ever cop to
anything that you know, oh man, yeah, yeah, but it's
it's funny like with I mean, this is terrible to say,
but with polonium assassinations, that was pretty much copying to evolvement.
(22:32):
You know. Also, if you're listening to Russia's stay away
from the windows. Yeah, but it may very well not
be Russia at all. I mean, that's we got to
keep that as a possibility, even though it's gonna get
into there's there's a precedent. But okay, let's let's get
and I am not trying to disparage the average Russian
(22:54):
citizens out there who may may not be listening to
the show. I just think Russia as a government has
a history of being pretty tricksy. I think we can
all kind of agree on that. Not that we don't,
but uh, they sort of pride themselves on, uh, you know,
admitting nothing. Um so it just doesn't really surprise me there.
But there's a lot of descent as well, you know,
(23:17):
voices of dissent. Uh. Some people believe that this is
the result of some sort of intentional attempt to harm
intelligence officials, which is what we talked about, but others
think it's some sort of side effect of some high
tech attempt to you know, steal classified intelligence from phones
(23:38):
and computers. So perhaps a proximity effect from some technology
that's being used within the agency, as Ben said, it
can be also it can also be stolen from windows,
not the software hardware, right right. And then what's interesting
about that too is just just so we all have
(23:59):
a scope of how advanced some of that observational technology
can be. It's totally possible to hear a conversation by
aiming a laser at a window and the people in
the room with the window will be discernible. So like
(24:21):
it's not out of the realm of possibility as space
age as it sounds. One one thing we mentioned radio
frequencies too, by the way, Yes, and name for it.
There's a name for that piece of equipment. It's called
like a something catcher or like a something fisher. There's
there's there's names for like there's a name for a
piece of equipment like that you can literally use to
(24:41):
like intercept radio frequencies or um, you know, cell phone conversations.
But I think I may be miss book earlier when
I was saying, um, that this maybe would have been
as a result of stuff being used within the embassy.
This would have been stuff that was being targeted at
the embassy to try to steal their intel. Correct, Uh, yeah,
it could have been with that explanation, or in that case,
(25:04):
it could be possible that there was an inside person
who likes set the thing up. Um, no one knows. Well,
if it's when someone knows, no one publicly knows. So
they're not saying they're not saying that's right. They have
not made an official statement. So if you are diving
(25:25):
into this, one of the first questions you're gonna ask is, rightly,
if it's a weapon, where's the weapon? But another question
we need to ask immediately is if there are symptoms,
what are the symptoms and can we find physical traces
of those. This is where the Journal of the American
Medical Association or JAMA comes into play. In eighteen, they
(25:50):
published a study I alluded to this. When we're talking
about this earlier led by a guy who's pretty legit.
His name is Douglas H. Smith. He's the director of
the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at University of Pennsylvania.
And his team looked at people reporting these symptoms and
they found signs of brain damage, but they found no
(26:13):
signs of impact to the patient's skull. And they used
a really weirdly poetic term for this. They called this
kind of trauma and immaculate concussion and I know what
what an album named uh? And so. Smith also said
most of most of the folks on his team were
(26:34):
pretty skeptical about this going in, and then later they
all unanimously concluded something is there, so much so that
they did another study the next year in nineteen and
they largely agreed with their earlier findings. That's fascinating, And
we're gonna get to the whole idea of like mass
hysteria and what that means. But this stuff sure points
(26:57):
the finger at something. It felt quite know what that is? Uh,
there's involved, I mean, and you can touchless brain damage,
you know what I mean, Like an unseen mover causing
people's brains to malfunction. Just wait until their white blood
cell levels are are heightened in the next couple of years.
(27:18):
And I think we maybe brushed over it a little
bit or maybe not, but like, I mean, one of
the big things that was described here is the idea
of brain fog and of not being able to like
read things, you know, like the woman that I described,
miss lee Um in the New Yorker piece, she at
breakfast with her kids, like couldn't read the cereal box
and things like that. Like this the sort of like
(27:38):
bursts of uh confusion and and this is sort of
like you know, almost like borderline stroke like symptoms, you know,
like where you like kind of just like are all
of a sudden like in a fugue state. Yeah, and this, Uh,
I think this goes back to what you were saying earlier, Matt,
Like the one of one of the key things is
uh temporary inability to pomplish relatively simple task. Let's let's
(28:04):
go into this. Let's go into the idea of something
being psychogenic or psycho semantic, attic, insane. Uh. There there
there's another. There's the other side of the camp. The
other contradictory information here or contradictory belief is a growing
number of people. Also high level experts, also high level scientists,
(28:29):
think that this is quite possibly entirely psycho semantic. What
does that mean, Well, first, it does not mean that
people are purposely making something up. It does not mean
that they are lying, and it does not mean that
their experiences are invalid. It means that while people may
genuinely believe they've been affected by some sort of James
(28:51):
Bond level spy machinery, they have instead succumbed somehow to
an outbreak of mass hysteria. And shout out to the excellent,
excellent book Outbreak if you would like to learn more
about this. It's it's the best encyclopedia I've found of
mass hysteria outbreaks throughout history. It is such a good
(29:12):
and disturbing read. It's one of the things that almost
just connected to like the placebo effect, where if you
truly believe that you're getting the right medication or something
that's supposed to have an effect, then you can trick
your body into experiencing a positive result. Um and I
believe there's an opposite of that called the no sebo effect,
where you can literally trick your body into being sick,
(29:33):
which you know in this scenario is kind of what
this would be if people truly believe based on remember
all that communication you were talking about Ben and overhearing
kind of the scuttle butt around the embassy about sonic
weapons and hearing whispers of all this kind of stuff.
If you really believe that you're being targeted by this,
and you start to hear other people that validate your belief,
then it can make it persevere and maybe you can
(29:56):
get more intense. Can I tell you guys that want
to comment on this? Uh? Yeah, no, you're right. Um.
A couple of days after we recorded that episode featuring
the stories from Vienna where we brought Havana syndrome back up,
I think I experienced something kind of like this where
I was thinking about it a lot. I was talking
about it with you guys, and then uh talking about
(30:18):
it with a couple of other friends, and late at
night when I was getting just hanging around in my house,
I was in my bedroom and my I heard a
clicking sound in my right ear I'm not kidding, and
then a high pitched tone like tenitis like I get
when with when I'm playing symbols too much or something,
and it lasted for quite a while. I felt nauseous
(30:40):
and I had to lay down, and I felt really weird.
Um And I don't know if it's possible that my
brain could just cause these effects to occur, because I've
been thinking about it and talking about it a lot.
You know, I don't know what happened within my brain
when I experienced it, but I know I experienced something
like it. Um. And I highly doubt that I'm being targeted,
(31:02):
that my house is being targeted for any reason. So
I'm just putting it out there that, like you may
think that, oh, that's impossible. I my brain could never
like trick itself into experiencing something. But I just would
say to you, it can. Um. And it feels very
weird when you identify that it has. Yeah. And then also,
(31:23):
I mean it goes back to in some ways, it's
like a version of peer pressure, right, Uh, like that
experiment I talked about earlier, where where it was clear
that people will, uh, people will make a inaccurate or
incorrect conclusion just so they can fit in with a group,
(31:44):
like which line is longer, which line is the same length.
That's scary and it's very human. Other historical examples of
mass psychogenic illnesses or phenomenon would be stuff like the
dancing plagues of the Middle Ages, or our episode on
the screaming epidemics in rural Malaysia, or for something more recent,
(32:06):
what about the various accounts of uh teenagers developing facial
ticks after watching a lot of videos of someone with
Tourette syndrome on TikTok. There's a level of communication here
that is maybe not entirely consensual, is what I'm saying.
The anti weapon school of thought, let's call them, that
(32:30):
found some pretty high level proponents and this is this
is a story that I think it's funny. I don't
know if we need to go too deep on this,
but it's it's interesting because it's a great illustration of
how science should work. The initial claims of sonic weapons.
This came about because a lot of the victims description
(32:52):
included those noises similar to what you're mentioning, matt Uh.
Not everyone reported hearing a sound. Not everyone said they
heard the same thing, but still that's a good place
to start. So were these folks in Cuba hearing a weapon?
Various physicists have shot this down. Dr Jurgen Altman particular
(33:14):
stood out to me. He said, I know of no
acoustic effect that can cause concussion symptoms. Sound going through
the air cannot shake your head. And then there was
an alleged recording of the sonic attack. Cool, that's evidence, right,
That's like the recording of a gunshot if there is
a weapon in play. But some biologists got in the game.
(33:34):
They investigated this and they were able to conclusively identify
the sound. It wasn't a sonic weapon. Well, it wasn't
a man made sonic weapon. It was the banging tunes
of the humble a neuro grillis Sellernicus. Uh allowed cricket,
a very very loud cricket. Look, but look upon my chirps,
(33:57):
he mighty. It's basically when those uh, those cricket legs
are deadly, uh you know, and they're like the tiny
world's tiniest violin playing the saddest song on massum. But no,
I mean, anyone that lives around the neck of the
woods that we're at um, you know this sound, or
at least that's cicada's and crickets they make a similar sound,
(34:17):
and it's a giant group of them, and it creates
something that the ear perceives as being a kind of
a continuous um kind of hum. Right, m hmm, yeah,
and uh we go to Fernando monte Al grey Zapata,
who was a professor of sensory biology at the University
(34:39):
of Lincoln, and this guy was involved in the study
the biologists conducted and he confirmed that this is a
Caribbean species of cricket. Its call is going through it
about seven killer hurts and it's at a high rate,
which means if you're walking around rocking human general issue ears,
(35:01):
you're gonna hear a continuous, sharp trill when these crickets
are emitting their calls. So they're not superspies, they're just
very loud. They don't have indoor voices. That's what happened
and this, Yeah, but it's it's interesting if you've got
a loud enough you know, sound at the same frequency
occurring for a long enough period of time, it can
(35:23):
cause hearing damage. And some of those things those sensations
like losing some losing a frequency or two in your ears,
so you know there that could be part of the problem.
And it doesn't that often, Like when you lose that frequency,
then you get tonitis like in that frequency where you
hear it constantly. It's that's true, and that's valid. Point counterpoint,
(35:48):
I would say, why did no one in Havana report
that before? Well, and to your earlier point, been about
the proximity effect, right, like if if short of these
devices being stationed directly in the homes of these individuals
that were being you know, afflicted, Um, what about the
(36:08):
people standing in between? You know what? I mean? What
about the people in the streets? You know? What about
the other people living in the neighborhoods and nearby houses?
These are presumably maybe passed through. That's the part again,
because the technology is so we don't know what this is,
So we don't know how with the mechanism of targeting
would be and how to even deploy it. So I
think that's what causes a lot of like head scratching
(36:30):
at least in like the with the people that are
able to talk about it. I mean, maybe this does
exist and there's just like a small cadre of folks
that know about what this is, but we can't hear
about it. Uh, A conspiracy of crickets, I love it, Ben,
What if the crickets can send that send seven killer
hurt signal, bounce it off the windows, and then record
(36:55):
it in their little cricket robot bodies are saying, aren't real,
Let me get my matrix glasses out. Saved that for
this one. So yes, uh uh man, all right, well
I'm putting away the glasses there, So we ruled out
one possible explanation. Crickets are probably not superspies. But what
(37:18):
about the other possibilities? To answer that, we have to
turn on the microwave after a word from our sponsors.
Beep beep beep, No, Doc, don't cut those beeps. This
is we're doing a bit uh microwave. But for your
(37:40):
mind one of the strongest supporting mind crow wave. There
it is there, it is cut print. No, that's perfect.
Uh the mind crow wave brilliant. So one of the
strongest arguments for the idea of a directed energy weapon
and the idea that Russia might be behind it. Is
(38:02):
something that you mentioned earlier, Matt, the Moscow's signal. What
is that uh messed up thing that you barely hear about,
Like I barely know about this, and I'm so interested
in this stuff, and I barely know about it. Uh,
because I've never had proximity to the State Department, I
(38:24):
suppose I don't know, Um, but it's it's an older
story from I want to say, the nineteen seventies, Ben.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm just pulling this from the top
of my head. I think it was nineteen seventies in Moscow,
at an embassy there and in a couple of other
places in Moscow where Americans were operating. Uh is that right? Yeah? Yeah, okay, okay, yeah.
(38:50):
But the thing I remember, Ben, is a specific listening
device that was placed in a couple like within the
walls of a building where diplomats were we're functioning. That
required I think it was microwaves to be sent into
the building to activate the listening devices. I think that's
(39:10):
what you tell me the actual story, Ben, That's just
what I remember. Well, well, first this is not we're
not experts on this, but this is not a classified
thing any longer, I think. Uh, Noel, Matt, I think,
first off, most importantly, we can agree that the Moscow
Signal is a great name for a band and their album,
(39:33):
their debut album is Immaculate Concussion. Right. Also, either of
those could be a good name for a nice stiff cocktail.
That's true. I would be frightened of a cocktail called
immaculate concussion. I'll have yours then, Ben, Okay, well you
have to when I'll drive, because I don't think you
(39:53):
could drive after those. But but yes, So the Moscow
signal is public knowledge now, to the point that there
is a Wikipedia page on this that you can read
that has some pretty good sourcing, which you can't always
say about Wikipedia. So this describes a microwave transmission that
(40:14):
was directed at the U. S. Embassy and as Matt said,
probably some other places as well, starting in at least
nineteen fifty three to about nineteen seventy nine. It was
around for a long time. Um, and I need to
lean on you guys for a little bit of of
a comparison description of how this signal was rated. So
(40:35):
the Moscow Signal over those decades is varying between two
point five to four gigga hurts, and that cricket over
there terrorizing the embassy in Cuba allegedly is calling at
about seven killer hurts. So what's what's the difference here?
What what gives? How do they compare? Well, typically, like
(40:59):
something that would be can said at a high frequency
in sound way, It's just be something between thirty killer
hurts and three hundred mega hurts. So what you're describing
is a little below that. And for reference, Matt, what
is the typical range of the ability of human ears
to perceive sound in frequencies? My understanding is twenty hurts
(41:20):
on the low end to like the super low frequencies
all the way up to about twenty killer hurts, which
would be twenty k when I'm thinking about it in
my editing brain. Got it awesome? Okay? Plus I love
the idea. Uh. I love the idea of this cricket talking.
For some reason, when you guys are describing this to me, uh,
it makes me think of the cricket as some insect
(41:45):
version of those screaming goats. Have you ever seen those
that they're like eerily human like in their bleats. I'll
send it to you, um, I'll send it to you
over the weekend, because I don't think you want to
hear it on a school night, and just just for
a little friends, for like your own personal hearing. The
human voice a male voice covers a fundamental frequency range
(42:06):
of between one hundred hurts and nine hundred hurts um.
And you know, once we get past the range of
human hearing, when we start getting into things like mega
hurts and and gigga hurts. Between three hunder mega hurts
and gigga hurts is considered microwaves UM. And above that,
between three hundredig hurts and four hundred terror hurts that's infrared.
(42:26):
And then you start getting into the visible light spectrum.
So all of these things are related. So the we're
talking about two point five to four gigga hurts with
this Moscow signal, and that's definitely microwaves. That's definitely you're
not going to hear it necessarily, but you could be
affected by it theoretically. And I just last thing on
that seven seven uh killer hurts thing. I don't know about,
(42:50):
you know, but when I'm going going through and using
a d S er on somebody's voice, generally it's around
seven killer hurts, which might make you like understand why
that cricket sound is so jarring and so like irritating,
because that's the thing that many audio professionals remove from
speaking voices just because it's kind of a it can be.
(43:13):
It's the sibilants it's sometimes the the hard ask that
you hear. They take like that's the thing that's just
coming at you from several hundred thousand crickets or whatever. Yeah,
and and I felt a disturbance in the sound, as
though a million crickets cried out at once. Uh So,
(43:33):
later the US government will conclude that the Moscow signal
is likely an attempted espionage and in this conclusion, they
also determined that there were no ill health effects on
their staff as a result. Forty years after the fact,
this would be disputed, which is important. You can find
(43:56):
a report on this called the Moscow Signal Epidemiological a
forty years on by jose A. Martinez from Reviews on
Environmental Health. So people are still debating that one decades later.
Here's the big problem we mentioned already with the microwave proposal.
No one's found the weapon. No one's literally no one
(44:17):
has found the microwave. If these are purposeful attacks, I
would say it's also interesting that no one has determined
a solid motive. Would you blast people's brains just to
like troll them. There's no there's no indication that this
was pushing them to perform certain tasks. But yeah, but
(44:39):
still the inescapable fact is that the Moscow signal was
a real thing, and this plays a big role in
the minds of people who argue that there are current
microwave attacks. But I have to say I have to
slightly disagree, just slightly disagree. I think there's clear motive
with the Moscow signal, which was signals intellig on the
(45:01):
behalf of you know, an opposition force the United States.
In this case it was likely Moscow or it was
like likely the Russian government, and they were they were
blasting microwaves at uh the embassy locations, at diplomatic locations
in order to gain intel by using devices theoretically inside
(45:21):
that building. We know for sure there was one and
several others the typewriters that were discovered, and there's we
know that for sure. Like you can go head on
over to I think it's the American Foreign Service Association website.
Then you posted a link there. The title is today
Savanna syndrome is like deja vu all over again, as
Yogi Berra might have put it by James Shoemaker. Yeah,
(45:43):
I'm not saying that the Moscow signal didn't have a motive.
I think that's very clear. I But then I think, like,
I don't know, I'm pretty convinced by some of the
writing in that particular article and a couple others I've
been reading that if if this is in fact an
actual physical thing where microwaves are bombarding these locations now
in twenties you know sixteen too, that it's the same deal.
(46:08):
It's a side effect of signals intelligence gathering by some opposition.
I mean, to me, that makes the most sense, that
this is like a side effect of those lasery things
that they're shooting in to capture phone calls, uh and
and intel of other kinds. That's the thing that makes
the most sense to me. It just doesn't seem like
the thing in and of itself is focused enough or
(46:31):
has enough of a predictable outcome other than just sewing
what seeds of discord within the government, like you know
what I mean, Like it's it's definitely becoming a bit
of a pr nightmare. But that's not enough to to
be a motive. And it took a long time for
it to even come out. Okay, yeah, you know you
inspired me here. I've got a new conspiracy theory on this.
(46:52):
What if it's big ibew proofing, right, like they're giving
these incredibly important people a lot of headaches his cell No, No,
well yeah, I mean look according to I hear, you've
been according to the author, uh two D and fifty
(47:13):
it's crazy. Be careful. Um. But the one of the
side effects, allegedly, at least according to some of the writing,
I can't prove this of the Moscow signal was leukemia,
and you know, or theoretically was leukemia. At least it
showed up in many people who were affected by the
Moscow signal, including the guy who wrote the article. So
(47:34):
I don't know. It's just yeah, that's the pickle here.
Lest we forget about another syndrome. Wasn't agent orange considered
a syndrome? I believe so you have for a time
because it was a collection again a combo meal of symptoms.
I'm thinking about Gulf War syndrome. It was. It was
another syndrome. Obviously, agent orange is now something that people
(47:57):
collect disability for collecting known offense from from the v
A four, But for a long time that was buried
in the same way. And you gotta wonder, as new
a story as this is, maybe this is totally our fault.
You know, yeah, you know, that's an inescapable possibility. There's
one more possibility that we we need to dive back into,
(48:18):
and it's a It's something that I think the majority
of opinions you read now will agree with. Doesn't make
it correct, but it is important. You do need to
know this. What if it is all a case of
the made it up skis? Everybody involved here is human.
They're inherently vulnerable to the usual human misconceptions and frailties.
(48:39):
And that's why a growing majority of scientists and skeptics
have clapped back at those conclusions by Jamma and those
statements from you know, various politicians and military officials. You
can find an example of this reasoning, this argument that
Havana syndrome is a result of psychogenic phenomena in a
(48:59):
book that is published in March of March of last
oh March of two years ago, Havana Syndrome, Mass Psychogenic
Illness and the Real Story behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. UM.
This can be sound offensive to people. If we have
people who are in the audience today who know someone
who's been affected by this, this can sound like maybe
(49:21):
those authors are ignoring legitimate claims of people who have
been injured. This is not the case. Instead, the way
we put it is, there is a viable possibility that
people were already experiencing various symptoms for any number of
unrelated reasons, and upon communicating with people with their colleagues,
(49:47):
their peers, other folks in the area, they heard a
phrase that could explain what they were experiencing. They were able,
they had a name to hang their experience upon, havan
a syndrome. You know, you thought you just had some headaches,
You thought you just maybe we're getting to nitis, and
then someone said, I have a headache too. It's not
(50:10):
just a headache. It's Havannah syndrome. And then you have
that light bulb Eureka moment and you say, oh, that's
what's happening to me. It is not random, It is
not damage from you know, playing symbols too loudly or
too often. It is Havana syndrome, and we are under attack.
I'm not saying that's what's happening, but psychologically there is
(50:32):
a viable possibility. Again, especially when you look at how
um if you look at the spread of the symptoms
for this syndrome, you know what I mean, A lot
of them are could be caused by other events. And
then also a lot of them are tough to verify
unless you have doctors in the room at the time
(50:56):
doing like brain scans and so on. Even then, I mean,
you know, I just had a health scare with my mom,
you know where um, we genuinely thought she had a stroke, uh,
and we had her in the hospital and they did
a CT scan on her and they found something that
indicated that we were likely right that she had a stroke.
But then they did another scan on her that was
(51:17):
totally clean. And any fans of the show Succession will
probably remember the episode where Logan Roy, the main character,
one of the main characters UM, appears to be demonstrating
stroke like symptoms and then it just turns out he
had a really bad urinary tract infection, which is a
thing that can present those kind of symptoms and older people. UM.
So it's just there's so many factors that can go
(51:39):
into these kinds of things, and and it's impossible to
uh even like the pain scale that we used to
measure um people's pain. As we know, if anyone watched
that show Dope Sick or it was followed, you know,
the whole uh Sackler family debacle. We know that that
was largely invented by pharmaceutical companies, the idea of like,
how can you describe your pain on a scale of
like one to to ten or whatever. Uh, it's all
(52:00):
very subjective. And I was just going to mention when
you mentioned the made it up skis, like, couldn't you
argue that the initial impetus for some, not all psychogenic
events is a single or a couple of cases of
the made it up skis that are so convincing that
people just hop on board and believe the hype. Quite possibly,
(52:22):
I mean it's a it's a it could be a
case of retroactive explanation, irrationalization. One looks back upon what
they've experienced and now has a new frame of reference
through which to view it. Again, this is not this
is not us saying that it isn't happening. And we
(52:43):
want to uh first and foremost, we want to be
respectful to the people who have experienced these conditions. Uh.
And you know this is the opinion of our show,
but it's also echoed on a macro stage on a
much larger stage. The debate over what actually went down
(53:06):
continues today. UH. Congress and the White House under the
Biden administration have also recently passed a bill that set
aside funding to assist victims of this syndrome, whatever it
turns out to be. Uh. And then also the scientists
are still clapping back and forth at each other. Man.
(53:27):
There's an often ignored report from the Jason's on the
possibility of a psychogenic illness being at play. There's a
redacted version of this. It's out now. You can read
it online. But essentially they and several other scientists don't
agree with those two studies from ten and twenty nineteen,
(53:48):
and they questioned the methodology. But I what are you
to oh man, We mentioned that Jason's previously right. Yeah,
we did a strange news or listener male episode about it.
I'll tell you what they're hiding. There's some really good
sexy heads of hair is Oh you got a picture
(54:11):
of them? You know, I just picture them all as
being very good looking boys named Jason. So for anybody
who doesn't know uh, and maybe this is a lighter
place for us to to end today's show. For anybody
who isn't aware the Jason's Technically, Jason is a independent
(54:34):
group of top notch scientists. They formed because the US
freaked out when the Soviet Union launched spot Nick and
they said, okay, no, no, no, we can't do this.
And uh. In my favorite like fictional Tarantino Wes Anderson
version of the story, there's a very um off the
(54:56):
wall presidential meeting and some and says we've got a
round up everybody named Jason. And someone's like, uh, Mr President,
don't you think that's a bit extreme, And he goes, yeah, no,
good point. Just the scientist, just the scientist named Jason. Uh.
But but it's it is a real thing, and they
(55:18):
continue today. Was established nineteen sixty. No one's quite sure
how many members they are. They are not all named Jason. UM.
I'm just imagining Brian Cox going Jason chair. So so
shout up, so shout out to the Jason's UM, a
(55:42):
group that still is conducting both classified and declassified research.
It's important stuff. Uh. And if we're if we're roasting
you a little bit about the name, that's just because
it's cool. But whatever the case may be. With quote unquote,
havanis and him, which again is an unfair term in
my opinion. The investigation continues as we record, and this
(56:07):
is where you come in, fellow conspiracy realist, we would
like to hear from you. What do you think about this?
We've outlined the major possibilities. We were able to eliminate
one um, we found one villain a Caribbean species of cricket.
But now we now we passed the the microwave to you,
(56:28):
is this is this possible? I don't know, Like I
think all three of us are kind of this on
the same page here, because outside of the sonic weapon
being relatively debunked, the other explanations all have a couple
of sticky things about them, things that I think still
(56:48):
prevent us from dismissing them entirely. I don't know, what
do you guys? Yeah, well, look for my money, it's
Moscow Signal two point Oh, that's what it is. Uh,
it's I don't think you know, in my opinion that
it doesn't matter who's I'm some guy in Georgia, But
in my opinion, it was just it was tradecraft and
(57:08):
it's a technology used with that. It's not a weapon,
it's it's a byproduct of that technology being in use.
I tend to lead in the same direction because I
do not feel like the ends justified the means if
in fact this technology exists and they are targeting you know, uh,
US diplomats in Cube in Cuba, like to what end? Ay,
(57:32):
we don't have an answer to that, and be could
you do a little bit better job, like have introduced
a little mind control into the equation, you know, something,
make them do a thing. That's I was thinking about
that too, and and again now not and I'm not
I'm not being a jerk here. Um. I I do
think maybe there are This is the kind of thing
where maybe we only see some symptoms and maybe there
(57:52):
is there are there are future symptoms that could be
the real thing that actually is the desired and ole
of something like this. Um, it just happens that the
hand was tipped by you know, these early um symptoms.
Maybe there is something more nefarious at play, like a man.
I mean again, we don't have any evidence of that
ever actually having successfully taken place throughout the course of
(58:16):
human history. I mean we've got like sir hand, sir
hand and that kind of stuff, but like it usually
involves some level of mental illness um on the part
of the individual making the claims. Um, But who knows.
I mean, maybe there is a deeper layer to this,
and now that it's making the news, perhaps whatever party
was at play doing that has abandoned it and they're
they're they're taking this underground again, you know, and maybe
(58:38):
they're gonna tweak the their technology so that it doesn't
give the game away so quickly. Again, total blue sky
sci fi kind of conjecture there, so what so yeah,
let us know what you think, folks. What is this
conspiracy of crickets? Um? Is Moscow's signal a better name
for an album? Or is it a better name for bands? Uh?
(59:02):
These and other very important questions we'd love to hear
from you. We try to be easy to find online.
That's right. You can find us on the Internet in
the usual places of note, Facebook, Twitter, you Tuo. I
like to really double pronounce that double T and Twitter.
I think it really gives it a nice, a nice
ear feel. Um. You can find us on those platforms
under the handle at conspiracy stuff. If you want to
(59:24):
go to Instagram, you can find us at conspiracy stuff Show.
There are other non Internet e ways to get in
touch with us as well. Yes, you can give us
a phone call. Our number is one eight three three
st d w y t K. When you call in,
give yourself a cool nickname. You've got three minutes. Say
whatever you'd like. We'd love it. If you're silly like
(59:47):
Optimus Prime. Uh, thank you again for sending in your
message and telling us all about Omicron H. Thank you Optimus,
as well as thank you everybody else who's been calling
in U we have to. We have two voicemails in
our inbox right now, guys too, and it's just because
they came in while we were recording. Uh. So I'm
(01:00:09):
really excited about that state. We're gonna do everything we
can to keep on that track. So again, our number
one three st d w y t K. If you
don't want to jump on the phone and you still
want to send us some information, links, files, whatever you've got,
please shoot us an email. We are conspiracy at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff they don't want you to know.
(01:00:49):
Is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com