March 23, 2018 • 51 mins
Recently employees at the US Embassy in Cuba reported a strange and disquietening phenomenon. They complained of vertigo, nausea, hearing loss and more accompanied by a strange hum and whine that followed them into their homes. The State Department refused to comment on the cause of these symptoms even as they shipped employees back home to the States. However, some anonymous government officials stated that the employees fell victim to an unorthodox, top-secret, sound-based weapon. Could it be true? You can turn back now, or learn The Stuff They Don't Want You To Know.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we begin today show, we have a very special announcement.
Who is that guy? Get him out of here, baby bye. Oh.
He's a very important person and you should listen to
what he's gonna say. I guess if no one else
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but coming soon. Stuff they don't want you to know.
Not only have we not gotten canceled, We're gonna up
(00:20):
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Next week you're gonna get two episodes in your feed.
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gonna be another one earlier on in the week. That's right, folks.
The primary complaint we have received about this show ever
since we started it is that we need more episodes
coming out, and we're finally doing it. We're doubling down,
(00:43):
we're doubling up. We're doubling something. That's right. Our show,
from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff. They don't want you to know. Hello,
(01:11):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Night. They called me Ben. We're joined with
our super producer Paul Decans as always, but most importantly
you are you, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. The U. S. Military has cooked
up some pretty bizarre ideas over the past few decades,
(01:32):
and longtime listeners you know that. Matt Nolan I have
covered some of the more nefarious ones in past episodes. Yeah,
when you're on the edge and you're the leader of
all the military technology, you really just got to test
it all, man. You just throw stup at the wall
and see if it blows it up. Literally like the
jet copter, Yes, the jet copter where someone finally came
(01:55):
together with their friends and said, what if we had
a jet that wait for it, guys, has three wings.
Wait for it, guys, and each of those wings has
a jet engine, and wait for it, and we spin
it really really fast and make it go somewhere to
what end? Is a vehicle or just an agent of chaos?
(02:16):
It's both meant to be. A vehicle. Didn't work out though.
There's also the idea of a blinding phaser. Yeah, they
went Star Trek with that one. It looks really cool. Actually,
it looks like one of those heavy duty Star Trek
phasers that they only use when they're facing a serious
threat like the board. Yeah, set your phasers to blind
(02:36):
cass you bog. I wonder how that would affect, you know,
because they've got the one human eye usually and then
the other eye. Well, they adapt their hive mind on
the land of the borg. The one eyed man is
a borg assimilated, right. They'll also they also tried, of course,
the one of the more infamous ones was they worked
(03:00):
on a plan for a bomb that would turn people
into homosexuals. Is that the one that Alex Jones is
always talking about turns to all the frogs gay? He's
also he's thinking about environmental contaminant too, I think right. Uh,
hands down my favorite one was a pigeon guided missile.
(03:23):
This one just really quick to get into it. I
don't think we've ever talked about it before in the show. Maybe, Okay, No,
So this guy B F. Skinner during around the World
War two times, I was trying to figure out a
way to basically having missile hone in on somebody and
he thought, oh, you know what I've got honing pigeons
honing missile. Let's put these two together, and he literally
(03:45):
made a warhead that was three pigeons sitting inside of warhead,
live pigeons that had these rudimentary screens of and it
would show what the ground looked like as this missile
is flying through the air, and the pigeons, if they
see the target that they've been trained to attack, they
would all, in theory, pick at the screen, and if
(04:08):
all three pecked at the screen, then detonation would occur.
Of course, this makes quite a few assumptions, the idea
that the pigeons would behave normally when they're strapped into
this contraption, right, uh, the idea that that redundancy would work.
Members of the National Research Defense Committee did give him
twenty five grand to do this. So again, throw it
(04:31):
at the wall, see if it blows up. They're also
bat bombs, seeking to utilize the echolocative abilities of bats.
There's actually a really great episode of the lovely podcast
The Memory Palace called Itty Bitty Bombs that talks about
that very thing. Nice and check it out if you
get a chance. Of course, this isn't gonna be an
(04:52):
episode where we just heap ridicule on Uncle Sam, because
Uncle Sam is not the only government thinking outside of
the box when it comes to military hardware and techniques.
In the cryptocurrency series that we earlier recorded, we spoke
with our old friend Jonathan Strickland about a larger trend
toward what's called asymmetrical warfare. And that's the idea that
(05:16):
if you and like, if the three of us are
the top military minds of China or Russia or something,
we know that we cannot compete one on one in
a conventional battle with the United States. But maybe it
turns out that Noel has a great lead on information warfare.
(05:37):
Maybe it turns out that Matt is super good at
delivering poison and unexpected ways. It's all about innovation, and
you're right, unexpectedness, right, the element of surprise, And this
is where we see things like Soviet attack dolphins, or
like the United Kingdom's ill fated attempt to build an
aircraft carrier that was also an iceberg because no one
(05:59):
would ever see it coming because it moves so slowly
it's almost imperceptible that it's coming at you. Yeah, and
sure it's that I could be doing much damage around
the equator, but man, but they wanted to try it.
And there are there numerous other silly examples. We've looked
at the assassination attempts for Fidel Castro. In a different show,
(06:23):
Nolan and I looked at uh an attempt to kill
Winston Churchill via an evil chocolate bars bloating chocolate wear
and when you broke that delightful little line of demarcation
to get that perfect chocolate square, it would blow your
fingers and face off. Jeez. And there was also a
halitosis bomb, which is super interesting because halitosis was primarily
(06:46):
condition made up by advertisers. So it's a bad breath bomb, right,
and halitosis has a condition is not real? That sounds
like more of a prank. Yeah, I think you just
get that by eating regular and then not brushing your
teeth because you Americans full ruining. How a great even
then bio without terrible breath, so minty freshness. Aside, a
(07:11):
lot of these techniques and these weapons and this hardware
the various governments dream up never make it past the brainstorming.
Wouldn't it be cool if phase or the research and
development phase, somebody somewhere along the line thankfully says, guys,
I think jet copter is kind of a dumb idea,
or someone says, would ever say that it sounds amazing?
(07:34):
Sounds of it, I guess depends on what you want
it for. As an agent of chaos, it would be
one of the coolest fireworks ever. That's true. But the
problem is this, it can be very difficult for us,
the general public, even members of other militaries, even at
the top levels of intelligence, it can be very difficult
to tell what has actually been deployed, what was kicked
(07:57):
around and then scrapped, what's active working is under wraps,
or as we saw often the Cold War, what's been
just sort of marketed as something to be scared of,
as an attempt to drain the other side's resources. Right,
there's a lot of propaganda around, you know, a lot
of these things do come into the public eye, but
only after something goes really really wrong, as we saw
(08:20):
in the case with that stealth helicopter. Yeah, in the
US raid on the bin laden compound in Islamabad, most
of the taxpayer public learned that stealth helicopters were a
thing when one of them crashed. And you guys remember that, right, Well,
you would hope that you wouldn't know about a stealth
(08:41):
helicopter unless it's stealth abilities failed drastically, yeah, Or or
you wouldn't know about it until you heard the sound
of whatever you know, weaponry it's got on it. Yeah.
So this is interesting because ethically, there's a little bit
of a pickle. You know, most people pay taxes on
(09:04):
some level, right, whether it's sales or property or income,
it's just something. Most people pay taxes and often don't
know where that money is going. So these weapons, this
suppressed technology, of this classified technology definitely does exist. It's
not a conspiracy theory to say that, it's conspiracy realism.
(09:24):
And there are a number of compelling arguments for why
that should be kept secret, why we should be paying
for things that we don't know about, and even when
they might adversely affect US national security. And let's move
on the Great Boogeyman, right, And now we're at a
point where it turns out that just last year we
(09:46):
may have learned of another type of weapons, something we
knew could exist in theory but hadn't seen an action
This way here's where it gets crazy already already. Yeah,
So over the course of two years, two thousand sixteen
and two thousands seventeen, there was some weird stuff going
(10:07):
on in Cuba. Specifically, there were U. S Citizens who
were serving at the embassy there. They were complaining of
these various strange ailments. A lot of it had to
do with things affecting their ears and their ability to hear,
like they were they were experiencing hearing loss, they were
experiencing vertigo, feeling like they were going to fall or
we're falling, they were having headaches. They were even complaining
(10:30):
about cognitive cognitive deficiencies like having problems remembering something. Uh,
you know, more than just when you walk through a
door and you forget something, which is something we all experienced.
They're talking about much more severe versions of this um
and just just so everybody knows, severe hearing loss was
the most common complaint, like I cannot hear right now,
(10:51):
and I've never had a problem with this before in
my life. And the injuries were thankfully not found to
be life threatening. But all of the victims had a
primary complaint that preceded their experience of this vertigo. This
hearing loss, this difficulty with recollection, and it's this They
(11:15):
heard a distinct, loud, pitched, incredibly annoying and painful sound
and unusual places, including their homes. Shall we punish our
listeners with a clip, yes, and ourselves. So the caveat
(11:37):
that there are a few limiting factors here. Um, this
is multiple frequencies stacked together, but they're not just the
ones that the human ear can perceive or that can
be recreated with phones or speakers or any other method
of reproducing sound. That's a really good point exactly that
that sound comes from the Associated Press. They actually went
(11:57):
in they got this sound while they were in Cuba,
and they were just mentioning that there's a lot of
lower much lower frequency and much higher frequency stuff going on. Sure. Yeah,
And eventually the State Department did go public with this.
Keep in mind first reports or from sixteen so seen.
The State Department goes public, they pull all the non
(12:21):
essential staff from the embassy there in Havana and the
capital of Cuba, and they allow others to return to
the US for treatment. On May twenty three, the State
Department also began expelling Cuban diplomats. They started with two.
Eventually they would expel fifteen in total from the United States.
(12:42):
And it should be noted here that the Cuban the
Cuban government vehemently denies that anything is going on here
like there they had any involvement in these health incidents. Uh,
And there's a quote right here. Cuba has never, nor
would it ever allow that the Cuban territory be used
for any action against accredited diplomatic agents or their families
(13:03):
without exception, full stop, pretty categorical there, you know. And
although the US officially states they're still investigating the cause
of these conditions, government officials from the U s side,
from Uncle Sam, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have
said that they believe someone in Cuba was operating a
(13:25):
quote sonic weapon. So what could the sonic weapon be,
we'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. So
sonic weapons. You might also hear these called ultrasonic weapons
or us ws do what it says on the tin.
(13:47):
They use sound to incapacitate, injure or potentially in theory
kill their victims, believe it or not, through the use
of sound alone. And perhaps you've heard of these web
and being deployed by police and for the purposes of
crowd disposal or cralling. One of the most well known
(14:07):
examples of this, at least in the world of policing,
is something called the long range acoustic device or l RAD. Yeah,
this thing produces noises fifty times above the human threshold
for pain, So that moment when you're listening to music
at a concert and you start to go, oh wait,
this actually hurts a little bit. It's it's fifty times
above that. It's about around one twenty one and forty
(14:32):
decibels at high power. This sort of stuff can cause nausea, vomiting,
and so on. However, it is considered a non lethal weapon.
It's literally just so loud that it hurts to be there.
So crowds that you know, occupy Wall Street or um
the ferguson Um protests. Sure, yeah, for any protests or something.
(14:56):
The ideas that they go, ah, my ears, I'm leaving.
I'm more of a fan of non lethal weapon two.
Which one is that the one with I wonder why
they never do a non lethal weapon. That's actually a
good idea, And I think I think it'd be kind
of dull, right, nothing would happen, What was the what
(15:17):
was the parody of the lethal weapon series was naked gun,
Naked gun, well weapon, police squad Leslie Nielsen. Wasn't there
one called legal weapon or something like that. It doesn't matter,
I think one of those Hollywood knockoffs. So we'll get
back to it that we've got top men on the
research here. In the meantime, you'll hear a lot of
(15:39):
variations on this basic idea of sound as a weapon,
loaded weapon, loaded weapon there go, and it was called
loaded weapon one, and there wasn't a sequel that. I'm sorry,
it's important that we have that solved. So the variations
you'll hear, much like the variations of lethal versus loaded weapon,
we're all gonna be new takes on the same concept.
(15:59):
You'll hear about grenade, something you could throw that emits
a powerful, dangerous sound, sonic cannons, sonic guns, and so on,
and this hardware can produce different effects. The majority that
we know about right now are designed to be non lethal, painful,
slap on the wrist, don't do it. We're not minimizing
(16:19):
the effects of these because non lethal weapons that terms
sometimes gets a better rep than it deserves. Technically, people
who shoot rock salt at you out of a shotgun
are exercising a non lethal weapon. But I can tell
you that is a very painful experience. And I mean
it could you know, injure you such that you could
(16:42):
die from your wound if there'sn't you get an infection
or something like that. Totally you would bleed from getting
shot with rock salt, I think right, Yes, depend on distance. Yeah, Well,
in things like tasers too that are considered less than lethal,
do have you can be killed by that because you're
dealing with your heart and everybody has a different leaf
functioning heart and circulatory system and everything, so much in
(17:05):
the same way you can imagine, there are there are dangers, yeah,
especially you might have a pre existing heart condition or
something and then it's boom, game over. So some are designed.
Some of these weapons are designed to shoot what's called
a focus point or focused area sound like a bullet
from a gun or maybe a laser is a better
(17:25):
a better description, while others create a sustained field of effect.
Despite their names, not all these weapons are gigantic, big booming,
oversized nighties Golden era of hip hop boom boxes. They're
operating some of them are operating outside of the range
of human hearing, like Nolan, Matt we're talking about with
(17:48):
the clip that they played and what what's happening there.
It's similar to that so called brown note. Do you
guys remember the story of the brown note? I think
South part made it famous. Yeah, yeah, it's the one
you can't hear but makes you poop, which we we've
(18:09):
examined in the past. At this point, there is no
universally accepted proof of the brown note, and who knows.
Maybe it's because it's not real. Maybe it's because everybody
who proved it was too embarrassed, you know, nobody wanted
to soil themselves for the sake of scientific research. But
we're pretty sure it's not at this point. Yeah, there's
(18:30):
no there's no real solid proof. So what this means
if something is outside the range of conscious human hearing,
is that victims can feel the effects of one of
these pieces of technology without necessarily associating those effects with
an actual sound. And through part of this, I have
(18:50):
to defer to my colleagues Matt and Null here because
you all are audio experts and you have I think
you can give a good explanation at times with what
sound is, how it works, how the perception of sound works,
what we mean when we say a frequency, and all that.
(19:12):
So I just want to set that up that I
may ask some questions that relatively elementary to you. All, okay,
no problem, and I will probably defer to Knowel. So
I'm gonna set him up with a question right now,
and I will defer and turn back to Matt, and
then I will then defer to Paul and and then
he will defer to you, ben Um, and then we'll
defer to you specifically. You listen, So here we go.
(19:35):
Here's the round robin. So when you're dealing with sounds,
you're talking about waves. You're talking about energy being moved
through the air with these waves, so you've got amplitudes,
you've got frequencies, so like how close together, uh, the
sound wave is happening, how large that wave actually is,
which translates to volume. So there are all kinds of
(19:58):
things that we're gonna be discussed as we get into this,
and we're talking about hurts, killer hurts and mega hurts.
Do you want to walk us through any of that?
I mean only that it's a spectrum in the same
way that color is a spectrum. And you know, sound
is measured from the lowest uh to the highest in
terms of and then you know as something goes from
(20:20):
a low frequency to high frequency, they get closer together,
so you can see it like on a wave form,
a lower sound is gonna be is going to have
more space in between them than the higher sound is
going to have less space between And just to jump in,
when I say low, I mean low and pitch and
high end pitch when I'm talking about volumes. So a
lower sound could have a wavelength up to seventeen meters,
(20:42):
which would be twenty hurts, and then a high frequency
could have something that you would measure in centimeters, which
would be twenty thousand hurts. Wow. And it's also important
to remember that when you're hearing sounds, it's not just
your ears. Your entire body is being embarded by these
waves that are coming from a source. So you know,
(21:04):
when you imagine as a weapon, it's it's not like
they're attacking your ears, they're attacking your entire corporeal form.
And in the case of the brown note, your bowels.
That would be a very low sound that would move
you and your bowels and make you And that's it.
That's an incredibly important point. You know, the brown note
(21:24):
may sound humorous, but not You're absolutely correct in that
this does. It's a body wide affect. Your drums and
the auditory system are going to be the most sensitive
and the thing we notice the most, but that doesn't
mean the rest of the body is immune to it.
And if you hear a low sound, like a real
bassi sound and a concert, you can feel it in
your guts and your sternum and stuff, you know, And
(21:46):
that's what sound is, right, vibration. So this idea of
taking taking a phenomenon is responsible for some of the
most beautiful moments of human existence. Listening to music, communicating,
saying I love you to a relative, or you know,
someone you're hitting on a romantic partner, hearing your son's
(22:08):
voice for the first time. There we go, There we go.
The idea of turning that into a weapon sounds like
some old school sci fi comic book stuff from the
golden age of comics, But the truth is this technology
is not theoretical. It's already being deployed in the field
on an experimental, marginal basis, and research on it continues
(22:28):
and this is not just a thing that is the
domain of DARPA. Multiple government agencies across the world have
conducted research with this, along with quite a few private entities.
And they're doing that because science backs up the claim
that sound can be used as a weapon. Earlier, we
had explored the use of sound as a psychological or
(22:48):
even a supernatural weapon shout out to us, See you
next time, But the weapons were exploring now are meant
to physically injure people. We know that high powered sound
waves can easily disrupt or even destroy ear drums, and
this creates intense disorientation because our inner ear is a
primary method of determining balance for an individual body. It's
(23:13):
making me think back to those side effects you talked
about at the top of the show, that it could
cause you to get a little caddy wamp us and
start to kind of get that vertigo. Makes me think
of the character on Arrested Development played by Liza Manelli
who's always got that she's got a case of the disease,
and she'll be walking around normal and then all of
a sudden kind of like what stubble and then kind
(23:34):
of have to pick herself back up. You know, it's
a it's a legitimate thing that people suffer from, just
you know, without being afflicted by weird secret government sound cannons. Yes, yeah,
and high intensity ultrasound of frequencies from seven kill it
hurts to three point six mega hurts can cause lung
and intestinal damage in mice. So it's beyond the year.
(23:57):
We luckily don't have hard data about that in the
realm of human experimentation, at least not that is publicly available. Right,
heart rate patterns following vibroacoustic simulation can create serious negative
consequences uh, such as brady cardia atrial flutter. Sonic weapons
(24:18):
are used in non military applications too. Yes, there is
a ship called the s Born Spirit that at one
point used a long range acoustic device and l RAD
to deter some pirates they were attempting to board the
ship and and take things from it, and perhaps even
take the ship. And they successfully used it. Yeah, they did.
(24:40):
There's there's another example that I find pretty funny, and
I hope that no one was seriously injured with this.
But in the United Kingdom, some stores began using sonic
devices to prevent teenagers from loitering because as as you age.
As the human body ages, you're hearing begins to decay,
(25:01):
and there are certain sounds that you will not be
able to hear later in life. It's generally the higher
frequencies right right, spot on. And so these store owners
were taking mobile devices and setting them up to admit
a sound at a pitch. Only younger ears were capable
(25:22):
of hearings, Like, only teenagers could hear this kind of thing.
It's like the millennial yelp, yeah, I think so. In
every song and every song it's that like I think
it's well, yeah, only millennials can hear that. Oh man,
it does remind me of the sonic anti pest devices
(25:44):
that exists. You can find them in any hardware store
for you know, rodents and insects that admit a high
pitch sound. But if you turn those things on, I
swear to you you can. You can. You can hear it,
there's air moving and you can tell. Do you think
those actually work? Have you seen evidence that they that
they work? I've not. I've never wanted to have one
in my home. Wait, but you can actually go real
(26:05):
clean home, yeah, and you can actually hear them. You said, so,
maybe they work on you not it's not so much
hearing as sensing. There's a disturbance. Does that compute at all? Yeah, totally,
and there's probably an obvious one. But like things like sonar,
where you know, you use sonic waves to detect objects
and map distances underwater, but it can really mess with
(26:30):
underwater creatures who encounter it. It can jack with their equilibrium,
like things we're talking about whales exactly. Yeah, whales will
have migration roots disrupted, and there's a dearth of very
significant or substantial research on that. Because I'm gonna argue
maybe this is this a topic for a different show,
(26:52):
but because various governments operating submarines don't want to admit
that they're destroying this wildlife. And of course I'm sure
there are a lot of people who say, oh, you're
gonna put the price of wales life over national security, yeah,
j to which I say, oh, national security. But overall,
(27:18):
this is fascinating but pretty spooky stuff, right, Yeah, actual
humans being affected somehow by some sound. So what happened next? Well,
we'll tell you after a quick word from our sponsor,
as the US Cuba Joint Investigation into this incident continued
(27:41):
with the US staff leaving or leaving specifically for treatment,
and Cuban staff being expelled from the US and so on.
More theories cropped up. For example, what if this was
a weapon operating in the infrasound ranges. Anyone who's stuck
with us for a while will pyric their ears when
(28:03):
they hear infrasound. It's because we've covered this before. We
we talked about it. With regards to Vic Tandy. It's
the man that thought he'd encountered some kind of actual ghost,
like for real, before discovering that there was a fan,
literally a fan, an oscillating fan nearby that was emitting
a sound below the range that he could hear, and
(28:25):
it was triggering all kinds of things in his body, hallucinations, headaches,
just weird feelings. And eventually what Victandy learned was that
there actually was something like a ghost. It was this frequency.
So the effects he was encountering were not just his
(28:47):
mind playing tricks on him. They were his body responding
to an external stimulus. And what's fascinating about this, at
least to me, is that if it's true, if somebody
weaponized this infrasound idea then and if it works the
way that this worked in vict Handy's experience, then someone
(29:08):
literally invented a ghost gun. Yeah, and can you imagine
if you had a large enough whatever you would need
set of speakers. I don't know exactly how large you
have to be to omit that kind of low frequency
sound that far or that loud, but what you could
do to a population in a building or in maybe
an entire city. I'm just picturing like a giant, massive subwaffer,
(29:32):
just a single one. You carry it around like on
a ham trunk. No, no, you'd you would put it
on a jet copter and you just go around the city.
So you're always thinking one step ahead. However, there are
some issues with the idea of infrasound. If infrasound is
the culprit here or the means of transmission, then why
(29:54):
did Handy not experienced severe hearing loss? Is that is that,
you know? The two Matts point is that because the
source of Tandy's experience was just not as large or
perhaps not as optimized for damage, and maybe the frequencies
were a little different, or maybe we're what we're dealing
with in the in the Cuban embassy case, is this
(30:16):
infrasound mixed with the high pitched shone we heard? Oh yeah,
that's right. Because multiple frequencies, we have an audio potpourri.
That's a very important point. Additionally, according to New York Times,
are reported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
that came out in two thousand two noted that the U.
S Military tried to weaponize in for sound, but had
(30:38):
not succeeded because it was so hard to focus the wavelengths.
The primary effective infrasound they found appears to be annoyance.
That's a quote. H It just it's just like silly.
It goes to what Noel was saying about pranks. You know,
is this just a is Is this just the equivalent
(31:01):
of incessantly Facebook poking people? You know, you use it
on the enemy and it keeps them from getting any
work done. See. I like, but I gotta say, I
don't know if I really believe this. I mean, I
hate to say I don't believe a report by the
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, but I think it's fine. Well,
(31:23):
you it feels like you could definitely weaponize this thing.
I can understand the biggest problem being not being able
to focus the wavelengths because maybe you're affecting the people
who are also supposed to be operating whatever you're deploying,
or something like like those giant guns like the Babylon
gun and rockets where they had to the where the
(31:44):
gun was so large that the operators had to go
three hundred yards away, cover their eyes, nose, ears, and
I think basically all their other orifices with cotton and
then would still be bleeding when they launched it. She
So maybe it's maybe it's a situation where they said
they couldn't effectively weaponize it because they couldn't weaponize it
(32:06):
in a way they conformed to the operational constraints like
if it needs to affect somebody with an x amount
of yards and making everyone's anus bleed without making everyone's
anus bleed, and and if you know, like those are considerations,
and right now we don't know what those exact constraints
would be. But this leads us to another possible culprit.
(32:29):
So if infrasound, if we are taking the word of
the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and their second
hand report, when it is second hands, not primary source.
If we're taking their word for an infrasound for some
reason doesn't work out, then what about ultrasound? Okay, So
with infrasound, we're talking about the lowest end of the
(32:52):
spectrum as far as wavelengths go. What about that high
end stuff? So at those really high frequencies they were
talking about, with the really small wavelengths that are measured
in centimeters rather than you know, meters um higher than
twenty thou hurts, which is beyond the range of human hearing,
ultrasound can totally do serious tissue damage if produced with
(33:17):
enough juice. That's key, right, that's why. Okay, So for
anybody in the audience who had kidney stones or knows
somebody in your family who had kidney stones, that's why
one of the treatments that doctors used for kidney stones
is ultrasound. They'll use focus blast of this very high
frequency sound to break kidney stones apart and do small
(33:41):
enough pieces that they can pass through your body. But
luckily it does not affect your boys. You're right, yeah, luckily, Yeah,
we're sure about that, because I still haven't had one. Well,
I don't know, that's my question. I mean it. I
guess it's the focused nature of it. Like if they
shot you directly in the testes with that, maybe it
(34:02):
could have impact. I imagine, Well, yeah, that's that's good.
It just turns it from kidney stones into kidney shards.
Balls aren't built for ultrasound. But yeah, without without being
frightening about it or alarmist, it is, it is absolutely
true that this stuff can do physical damage in this
(34:24):
focus form of damaging kidney stones is only one application.
You know. You also hear about lower versions of this
when someone has an ultrasound during a pregnancy. Right, So,
why again can't they focus it more and and and
raise the power If we're talking about doing you know,
tissue damage, if it's produced with enough energy, why can't
(34:44):
they just use a really really in my day, I mean,
the the ultimate evil that's out to destroy us all,
whoever that may be. Why can't they just use a
giant power source and do the same technology and have
it be focused enough to shoot over long distances and
you know, use it to like assassinate somebody for example,
and it would be undetectable, like like like an invisible bullet. This,
(35:06):
you know, this reminds me of Illumination Global Unlimited and
their fantastic products would like to thank them sponsored the show.
Uh and we assure you that we are required to
say they are in no way related to the Shadowy
Cabal NOL just mentioned it is. It is a question, though,
it's a great question, why can't we Why can't they
(35:27):
use it as a bullet, and their advantages to this
invisible bullet. First off, there wouldn't be a physical artifact
in the dead body of the victim, right, it would
look as though their body were shattered. But the issue
is even though they found researchers found that they could
create beams that were powerful enough in a laboratory so
(35:50):
maybe not mobile to kill a mouse at close range
a fatal sonic weapon. But despite the fact that you
could take the same technology that's used in medical scans
and so on and up up its power level to
the point of causing death, the problem is that it's
(36:12):
almost like DC power. So direct current power had one
primary one big disadvantage was that it dissipated quickly over distances.
So in Edison's original plan for an energy infrastructure, there
would have to be these stations and a relatively small
distance apart from one another repeater pretty much. Yeah, yeah,
(36:33):
And what's happening with this idea with ultrasound is that
it's also losing power pretty quickly over long distances. And
you know the reality is that if you have a
gun that you could go and point at someone, say
Paul finally gets tired of us and decides to kill
us with a sonic weapon, because it's like, I don't know,
(36:55):
you got time on your hands or something, and right then,
how close does he have to be? The other problem
with it, specifically in the case of Havana, is that
humidity really really messes with the effect. Well that's a
dampener no pun intended, but I mean it is. It's
like another material that it has to pass through that
(37:17):
dissipates the sound in the same way we have crap
up on the walls here in this here room that
soaks up sound waves and and keeps the room from
sounding echo e. That's because it's dissipating those sound waves
in a way. And you could use the same stuff
to break up a sound wave or damping it like
and keep it from transmitting from one room to another,
(37:38):
because it's literally stopping it or at least slowing it
down or breaking it up to the point where it's
not going to be as powerful. So for a second,
let's imagine that something like this weapon exists out there
and it's in the hands of somebody in Cuba and
it was being deployed in Who would be doing it
(38:02):
the Cuban government. That's a really interesting question because naturally
the Cuban government is going to deny this stuff, but
some people from the U. S side would be tempted
to agree with them. Former officials from the Obama administration
believe that if there were a weapon in play, Cuba
(38:22):
would definitely not be the person or the organization pulling
the trigger. Really, yeah, you're setting me up, and I
appreciate it. Well, no, I'm I'm. I think it's just
because it's the U. S. Embassy inside Cuba. There have
been tensions there for a long time between the United
States and Cuba, and it seems like if you're attacking them,
(38:44):
as if that's your target, then it would be motivated
for some reason because of those tensions. At least that's
me coming from a complete novice of international affairs side.
You know, I think that's completely reasonable too, that doesn't
seem a far leap to make. According to a foreign
policy advisor for the Obama administration, a guy named Ben Rhodes,
(39:08):
go Ben's this is it's sort of counterintuitive to blame
Cuba for this. Rhodes says, I don't think the Cuban
government is behind it. He was also involved in negotiating
the opening or the approachment between Havana and d C. Well,
(39:30):
that is true, and around this time, we're like human
the United States are going through kind of a reconnecting,
right Yeah, huh first, says Rhodes. These things apparently started
in December. At the same time attacks were starting, the
Cuban government was frantically concluding agreements with US, US being
the Obama administration, signing business deals, in other words, trying
(39:51):
to preserve the relationships. So the notion that at the
same time is doing that, they would initiate something that's
so obviously designed to blow up the relationship doesn't make sense. Ah,
but you know it does make sense. What's that a
splinter group within the government or within the some intelligence
agency that's functioning in the Cuban government or the United
(40:12):
States government, or yeah, an agent of chaos who doesn't
want the relationship to go a jet copter of sorts.
I could totally see that happening somebody, even from the
U S side. This is complete speculation. Um, someone from
the U S side that didn't want the relationship, relationship
to be rekindled, and so they do an attack on
(40:34):
the U. S. Embassy to make it look as though
relations are souring. So this takes us to another question then,
which would be um, Who then would be the hand
that moves the sonic weapon. It could be, as you proposed, Matt,
a splinter group on the U. S side or on
the Cuban side who doesn't want to see the relationship
(40:56):
open or wants to at least maintain his status quo
of isolation on on Cuba's end. Other people will point
the finger at some of the US is long time
recurring boogeman. A similar case was reported in Uzbekistan. A
U S. A I D officer and his wife had
symptoms that closely matched what was happening, what the what
(41:20):
the employees in Cuba said was happening to them, and
this led some media sources to blame Russia and say
that Russia was deploying this. They did it in Uzbekistan,
they're doing it in Cuba, interesting because they're bad. It's like,
that's like the assumption. Well yeah, but there is another
angle though, I guess because Quba and Russia again have
(41:43):
a long standing relationship, and I wonder if there was
anything there. Oh man, I love I love pondering these
things without knowing all the information because it leaves so
many different avenues open to think about. So the other
twist there's Cuba went a step further. They said there's
absolutely no proof that any weapon exists or was deployed,
(42:06):
not just by them, but by anyone. They're saying, look
at what happens, look at what people are reporting. There's
no gun, Yeah, you know what I mean, at least
no large gun. Right into Noel's earlier point, how large
would have to be. Now we have to ask ourselves,
what if there's no weapon, What if there's no spoon
(42:28):
to quote the matrix? What if what if no actual
weapon exists? What what does that even mean? I mean,
you know, skeptics will say that allegations of this kind
of sonic weaponry just don't add up and kind of
defy the laws of nature of science. Yeah, right, Like
(42:48):
just the everything we know about how sound works, how
it travels, like the points you brought up earlier in
no like humidity, which I now feel like a fool.
We were, well, I don't know about the long distance.
I I don't think was why can't we have a
sonic sniper gun that just uses the technology that used
to break up your kidney stones to assassinate someone from
far far away? And um, I realized now that that
(43:09):
is a pipe dream. Maybe not. It just really were
arguing the size of the gun. I guess it's true.
And like you know, and when I say a long distance,
I'm not saying miles, that just mean far enough away
that it could be focused and used unseen. But maybe
there is a way. I don't know. Yeah, I keep backpedaling,
(43:30):
you know, I'm going out there on the limb. What
I'm saying, it's but it's possible. Well, so far we've
kind of been imagining that it's one large weapon that
a military someone would deploy. What if we're talking more
about very tiny maybe not maybe not so tiny, but
small versions that are maybe littered throughout an embassy where
(43:50):
they're able to produce that kind of sound and have
that frequency response. But they're just in the walls somewhere,
or in the ducting system or somewhere where they can
where it's audible, and you can still get hit with
the sound waves, but you wouldn't see it. Similar preps
to the way that the hotel room would be bugged
with cameras, or to get really dark and disturbing about it,
(44:14):
the way in that show ODZ. A lot of times
folks were killed by slowly being fed ground up glass
and their food. Right, So if you have these sonic
devices that are in your office and you go in
there every day and you're constantly getting doses of this stuff,
maybe it wouldn't hit you all at once, but it
would slowly weaken you over time. Maybe there's an aggregate effect,
(44:35):
especially in your sleep. Yeah, but if the noise was
audible to them, how could they sleep? You know what?
There are questions they wouldn't it not be audible though,
because I mean, surely when you get that treatment done,
you know, for kidney stones, you're not hearing a horrible, shrill,
high pitched sound. That's true, you're not. But in this
case we have an example of what it did sound
like that, and they were they did report an audible
(44:57):
shrill sound, so oh yeah, I don't know, but that's
what they heard. Also, so they may have had other
times where they only you know, maybe an iceberg of sorts,
like the audible stuff is what they can see. That's
the iceberg above the water. Audible dot Com is the
leading provider of audiobooks and yeah, if you enter our
promotion code um sonic Death Ray, yep, you can get
(45:21):
ten percent off a cookie at my house. Really yep.
How's your cookie business going so far? We're just hemorrhaging money.
They're just giving them away. Oh man, well, I am
a little bit offended. Or maybe no cookies exist, just
like maybe no sonic weapons exist in this situation. In fact,
(45:42):
some neurologists have argued that the real source of the
problem is not a weapon and not a sound at all. Instead,
they think it's a sort of mass hysteria. Yeah. This
is according to Mark Hollett, the head of the Human
Motor Control section of the u S National Institute of
(46:03):
Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Would you love to see that
in your email every time you have to send something
out the head of Human Motor Control. That's very that's Yeah,
it's important. It does, and he says, from an objective
point of view, it's more like mass hysteria than anything else.
Mass hysteria is something we've mentioned before. What maybe we'll
(46:27):
talk about Salem witch trials, which was the source of
my ou By the way, I'm not dismissing mass hysteria,
and of course can absolutely be a thing. I was
just trying to play the game. Yeah, and I think
it works. So we know mass hysteria is real. We
know it's dangerous. It's resulted in deaths throughout history, right
oftentimes the deaths of completely innocent people. It describes an
(46:51):
outbreak among groups of people that are partially or holy
psycho somatic, and the that means, without deriving these victims
were placing any blame upon them. That means that their
perceptions or their beliefs of what are happening, their internal
(47:11):
narratives are determining these symptoms that they are encountering, and
they're attributing that to an external source. YEA, And I
wonder throughout the investigation that's being conducted, if they're focusing
on everything like the water supply for that building, because
you're talking about a lot of people who are drinking
the same water, who are using the same facilities, who
(47:32):
are breathing the same air. You know, that's all in
a closed system. So I wonder if you know there
are other extenuating circumstances there. That's a good that's a
good question. We don't know how far the investigation has
gone because they're not completely public about much else other
than the investigation is ongoing, phrase we hear often. Well,
(47:52):
Alex says this is more commonly a thing that affects
smaller groups of people, often in families, But he does
say it's feasible for a large group to be affected
if they're working together closely, especially in a tense and
hostile environment. There you go, and it's probably true they
are seeing the same people every day. They're probably living
(48:12):
in somewhat of a bubble. So that's that's a neurologist
take on it, and it leads us to some conclusions
where we at now. Well, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign
Affairs claimed that it learned of these health issues on
February seventeenth and opened a quote comprehensive priority and urgent
(48:35):
investigation and quote and they formed a committee to carry
out set investigation. And so that's uh, February seventeen, seventeen,
and we know what's been happening since before that. In
sen that's just when they heard about it. And they
also said the ministry had increased security around the American
embassy and all of the diplomatic residences where people working
(48:57):
at the embassy reside. And they additionally said, as as
we have mentioned earlier, there's not a weapon. If there was,
Cuba had nothing to do with it. Why on earth
will we do that? Stop accusing stuff. And according to
a spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs,
(49:17):
since September, the Department of State has been contacted by
nineteen US citizens who are reported experiencing symptoms similar to
those listed in the travel warning after visiting Cuba. So
these are extra other people right who are reporting these symptoms.
At this point, we do not have a conclusive cause.
(49:41):
It's up in the air as to whether we will
ever find a conclusive cause. Two of the big front
runners for this event are going to be mass hysteria
if you listen to some neurologists, sonic weapon if you
listen to some again enough anonymous government officials. You have
(50:02):
to wonder about the timing of this, as Matt said,
you have to wonder about the specifics and how much
happened behind the curtain. But as we know now, something happened.
Something happened. Is there is there a cover up? Is
it just a case of people being misinformed? Do you
(50:25):
have some insider info that you would like to share
with us? If so, we'd love to We'd love to
hear your thoughts. You can find Matt Noel's super producer
Paul and I on Instagram. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter, and we're conspiracy stuff
at most of those but conspiracy stuff show on Instagram.
And uh oh, one last thing before we before we leave,
(50:46):
there is there's a declassified department of the Army. I
guess it's just a report or part of a report
that you can read search bio effects of selected non
lethal weapons and you should find a pdf. There's one
on Wired I know that you can get. It's just
going through a lot of the stuff with microwaves and
(51:08):
radio frequencies and everything that they've tested over the years
to see like what negative effects on the humans and
other animals can occur. It's a huge read. You probably
won't get through all of it, but there is some
meaty stuff in there, just about the possibilities and all
of that social media stuff that we rattled off. That's
all cool, but if you don't feel like reaching out
(51:28):
in that particular way, we've got a perfect solution for you.
You can send us an email. We are conspiracy at
how stuff works dot com.
Before we begin today show, we have a very special announcement.
Who is that guy? Get him out of here, baby bye. Oh.
He's a very important person and you should listen to
what he's gonna say. I guess if no one else
is gonna be serious here, I might as well make
the announcement myself. What's the halfs surprise? Wait, not yet,
but coming soon. Stuff they don't want you to know.
Not only have we not gotten canceled, We're gonna up
(00:20):
the Annie and get a two a week. That is correct.
Next week you're gonna get two episodes in your feed.
One's gonna be on Friday, the way you always get
a stuff they don't want you to know episode. There's
gonna be another one earlier on in the week. That's right, folks.
The primary complaint we have received about this show ever
since we started it is that we need more episodes
coming out, and we're finally doing it. We're doubling down,
(00:43):
we're doubling up. We're doubling something. That's right. Our show,
from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff. They don't want you to know. Hello,
(01:11):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is Night. They called me Ben. We're joined with
our super producer Paul Decans as always, but most importantly
you are you, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. The U. S. Military has cooked
up some pretty bizarre ideas over the past few decades,
(01:32):
and longtime listeners you know that. Matt Nolan I have
covered some of the more nefarious ones in past episodes. Yeah,
when you're on the edge and you're the leader of
all the military technology, you really just got to test
it all, man. You just throw stup at the wall
and see if it blows it up. Literally like the
jet copter, Yes, the jet copter where someone finally came
(01:55):
together with their friends and said, what if we had
a jet that wait for it, guys, has three wings.
Wait for it, guys, and each of those wings has
a jet engine, and wait for it, and we spin
it really really fast and make it go somewhere to
what end? Is a vehicle or just an agent of chaos?
(02:16):
It's both meant to be. A vehicle. Didn't work out though.
There's also the idea of a blinding phaser. Yeah, they
went Star Trek with that one. It looks really cool. Actually,
it looks like one of those heavy duty Star Trek
phasers that they only use when they're facing a serious
threat like the board. Yeah, set your phasers to blind
(02:36):
cass you bog. I wonder how that would affect, you know,
because they've got the one human eye usually and then
the other eye. Well, they adapt their hive mind on
the land of the borg. The one eyed man is
a borg assimilated, right. They'll also they also tried, of course,
the one of the more infamous ones was they worked
(03:00):
on a plan for a bomb that would turn people
into homosexuals. Is that the one that Alex Jones is
always talking about turns to all the frogs gay? He's
also he's thinking about environmental contaminant too, I think right. Uh,
hands down my favorite one was a pigeon guided missile.
(03:23):
This one just really quick to get into it. I
don't think we've ever talked about it before in the show. Maybe, Okay, No,
So this guy B F. Skinner during around the World
War two times, I was trying to figure out a
way to basically having missile hone in on somebody and
he thought, oh, you know what I've got honing pigeons
honing missile. Let's put these two together, and he literally
(03:45):
made a warhead that was three pigeons sitting inside of warhead,
live pigeons that had these rudimentary screens of and it
would show what the ground looked like as this missile
is flying through the air, and the pigeons, if they
see the target that they've been trained to attack, they
would all, in theory, pick at the screen, and if
(04:08):
all three pecked at the screen, then detonation would occur.
Of course, this makes quite a few assumptions, the idea
that the pigeons would behave normally when they're strapped into
this contraption, right, uh, the idea that that redundancy would work.
Members of the National Research Defense Committee did give him
twenty five grand to do this. So again, throw it
(04:31):
at the wall, see if it blows up. They're also
bat bombs, seeking to utilize the echolocative abilities of bats.
There's actually a really great episode of the lovely podcast
The Memory Palace called Itty Bitty Bombs that talks about
that very thing. Nice and check it out if you
get a chance. Of course, this isn't gonna be an
(04:52):
episode where we just heap ridicule on Uncle Sam, because
Uncle Sam is not the only government thinking outside of
the box when it comes to military hardware and techniques.
In the cryptocurrency series that we earlier recorded, we spoke
with our old friend Jonathan Strickland about a larger trend
toward what's called asymmetrical warfare. And that's the idea that
(05:16):
if you and like, if the three of us are
the top military minds of China or Russia or something,
we know that we cannot compete one on one in
a conventional battle with the United States. But maybe it
turns out that Noel has a great lead on information warfare.
(05:37):
Maybe it turns out that Matt is super good at
delivering poison and unexpected ways. It's all about innovation, and
you're right, unexpectedness, right, the element of surprise, And this
is where we see things like Soviet attack dolphins, or
like the United Kingdom's ill fated attempt to build an
aircraft carrier that was also an iceberg because no one
(05:59):
would ever see it coming because it moves so slowly
it's almost imperceptible that it's coming at you. Yeah, and
sure it's that I could be doing much damage around
the equator, but man, but they wanted to try it.
And there are there numerous other silly examples. We've looked
at the assassination attempts for Fidel Castro. In a different show,
(06:23):
Nolan and I looked at uh an attempt to kill
Winston Churchill via an evil chocolate bars bloating chocolate wear
and when you broke that delightful little line of demarcation
to get that perfect chocolate square, it would blow your
fingers and face off. Jeez. And there was also a
halitosis bomb, which is super interesting because halitosis was primarily
(06:46):
condition made up by advertisers. So it's a bad breath bomb, right,
and halitosis has a condition is not real? That sounds
like more of a prank. Yeah, I think you just
get that by eating regular and then not brushing your
teeth because you Americans full ruining. How a great even
then bio without terrible breath, so minty freshness. Aside, a
(07:11):
lot of these techniques and these weapons and this hardware
the various governments dream up never make it past the brainstorming.
Wouldn't it be cool if phase or the research and
development phase, somebody somewhere along the line thankfully says, guys,
I think jet copter is kind of a dumb idea,
or someone says, would ever say that it sounds amazing?
(07:34):
Sounds of it, I guess depends on what you want
it for. As an agent of chaos, it would be
one of the coolest fireworks ever. That's true. But the
problem is this, it can be very difficult for us,
the general public, even members of other militaries, even at
the top levels of intelligence, it can be very difficult
to tell what has actually been deployed, what was kicked
(07:57):
around and then scrapped, what's active working is under wraps,
or as we saw often the Cold War, what's been
just sort of marketed as something to be scared of,
as an attempt to drain the other side's resources. Right,
there's a lot of propaganda around, you know, a lot
of these things do come into the public eye, but
only after something goes really really wrong, as we saw
(08:20):
in the case with that stealth helicopter. Yeah, in the
US raid on the bin laden compound in Islamabad, most
of the taxpayer public learned that stealth helicopters were a
thing when one of them crashed. And you guys remember that, right, Well,
you would hope that you wouldn't know about a stealth
(08:41):
helicopter unless it's stealth abilities failed drastically, yeah, Or or
you wouldn't know about it until you heard the sound
of whatever you know, weaponry it's got on it. Yeah.
So this is interesting because ethically, there's a little bit
of a pickle. You know, most people pay taxes on
(09:04):
some level, right, whether it's sales or property or income,
it's just something. Most people pay taxes and often don't
know where that money is going. So these weapons, this
suppressed technology, of this classified technology definitely does exist. It's
not a conspiracy theory to say that, it's conspiracy realism.
(09:24):
And there are a number of compelling arguments for why
that should be kept secret, why we should be paying
for things that we don't know about, and even when
they might adversely affect US national security. And let's move
on the Great Boogeyman, right, And now we're at a
point where it turns out that just last year we
(09:46):
may have learned of another type of weapons, something we
knew could exist in theory but hadn't seen an action
This way here's where it gets crazy already already. Yeah,
So over the course of two years, two thousand sixteen
and two thousands seventeen, there was some weird stuff going
(10:07):
on in Cuba. Specifically, there were U. S Citizens who
were serving at the embassy there. They were complaining of
these various strange ailments. A lot of it had to
do with things affecting their ears and their ability to hear,
like they were they were experiencing hearing loss, they were
experiencing vertigo, feeling like they were going to fall or
we're falling, they were having headaches. They were even complaining
(10:30):
about cognitive cognitive deficiencies like having problems remembering something. Uh,
you know, more than just when you walk through a
door and you forget something, which is something we all experienced.
They're talking about much more severe versions of this um
and just just so everybody knows, severe hearing loss was
the most common complaint, like I cannot hear right now,
(10:51):
and I've never had a problem with this before in
my life. And the injuries were thankfully not found to
be life threatening. But all of the victims had a
primary complaint that preceded their experience of this vertigo. This
hearing loss, this difficulty with recollection, and it's this They
(11:15):
heard a distinct, loud, pitched, incredibly annoying and painful sound
and unusual places, including their homes. Shall we punish our
listeners with a clip, yes, and ourselves. So the caveat
(11:37):
that there are a few limiting factors here. Um, this
is multiple frequencies stacked together, but they're not just the
ones that the human ear can perceive or that can
be recreated with phones or speakers or any other method
of reproducing sound. That's a really good point exactly that
that sound comes from the Associated Press. They actually went
(11:57):
in they got this sound while they were in Cuba,
and they were just mentioning that there's a lot of
lower much lower frequency and much higher frequency stuff going on. Sure. Yeah,
And eventually the State Department did go public with this.
Keep in mind first reports or from sixteen so seen.
The State Department goes public, they pull all the non
(12:21):
essential staff from the embassy there in Havana and the
capital of Cuba, and they allow others to return to
the US for treatment. On May twenty three, the State
Department also began expelling Cuban diplomats. They started with two.
Eventually they would expel fifteen in total from the United States.
(12:42):
And it should be noted here that the Cuban the
Cuban government vehemently denies that anything is going on here
like there they had any involvement in these health incidents. Uh,
And there's a quote right here. Cuba has never, nor
would it ever allow that the Cuban territory be used
for any action against accredited diplomatic agents or their families
(13:03):
without exception, full stop, pretty categorical there, you know. And
although the US officially states they're still investigating the cause
of these conditions, government officials from the U s side,
from Uncle Sam, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have
said that they believe someone in Cuba was operating a
(13:25):
quote sonic weapon. So what could the sonic weapon be,
we'll tell you after a word from our sponsors. So
sonic weapons. You might also hear these called ultrasonic weapons
or us ws do what it says on the tin.
(13:47):
They use sound to incapacitate, injure or potentially in theory
kill their victims, believe it or not, through the use
of sound alone. And perhaps you've heard of these web
and being deployed by police and for the purposes of
crowd disposal or cralling. One of the most well known
(14:07):
examples of this, at least in the world of policing,
is something called the long range acoustic device or l RAD. Yeah,
this thing produces noises fifty times above the human threshold
for pain, So that moment when you're listening to music
at a concert and you start to go, oh wait,
this actually hurts a little bit. It's it's fifty times
above that. It's about around one twenty one and forty
(14:32):
decibels at high power. This sort of stuff can cause nausea, vomiting,
and so on. However, it is considered a non lethal weapon.
It's literally just so loud that it hurts to be there.
So crowds that you know, occupy Wall Street or um
the ferguson Um protests. Sure, yeah, for any protests or something.
(14:56):
The ideas that they go, ah, my ears, I'm leaving.
I'm more of a fan of non lethal weapon two.
Which one is that the one with I wonder why
they never do a non lethal weapon. That's actually a
good idea, And I think I think it'd be kind
of dull, right, nothing would happen, What was the what
(15:17):
was the parody of the lethal weapon series was naked gun,
Naked gun, well weapon, police squad Leslie Nielsen. Wasn't there
one called legal weapon or something like that. It doesn't matter,
I think one of those Hollywood knockoffs. So we'll get
back to it that we've got top men on the
research here. In the meantime, you'll hear a lot of
(15:39):
variations on this basic idea of sound as a weapon,
loaded weapon, loaded weapon there go, and it was called
loaded weapon one, and there wasn't a sequel that. I'm sorry,
it's important that we have that solved. So the variations
you'll hear, much like the variations of lethal versus loaded weapon,
we're all gonna be new takes on the same concept.
(15:59):
You'll hear about grenade, something you could throw that emits
a powerful, dangerous sound, sonic cannons, sonic guns, and so on,
and this hardware can produce different effects. The majority that
we know about right now are designed to be non lethal, painful,
slap on the wrist, don't do it. We're not minimizing
(16:19):
the effects of these because non lethal weapons that terms
sometimes gets a better rep than it deserves. Technically, people
who shoot rock salt at you out of a shotgun
are exercising a non lethal weapon. But I can tell
you that is a very painful experience. And I mean
it could you know, injure you such that you could
(16:42):
die from your wound if there'sn't you get an infection
or something like that. Totally you would bleed from getting
shot with rock salt, I think right, Yes, depend on distance. Yeah, Well,
in things like tasers too that are considered less than lethal,
do have you can be killed by that because you're
dealing with your heart and everybody has a different leaf
functioning heart and circulatory system and everything, so much in
(17:05):
the same way you can imagine, there are there are dangers, yeah,
especially you might have a pre existing heart condition or
something and then it's boom, game over. So some are designed.
Some of these weapons are designed to shoot what's called
a focus point or focused area sound like a bullet
from a gun or maybe a laser is a better
(17:25):
a better description, while others create a sustained field of effect.
Despite their names, not all these weapons are gigantic, big booming,
oversized nighties Golden era of hip hop boom boxes. They're
operating some of them are operating outside of the range
of human hearing, like Nolan, Matt we're talking about with
(17:48):
the clip that they played and what what's happening there.
It's similar to that so called brown note. Do you
guys remember the story of the brown note? I think
South part made it famous. Yeah, yeah, it's the one
you can't hear but makes you poop, which we we've
(18:09):
examined in the past. At this point, there is no
universally accepted proof of the brown note, and who knows.
Maybe it's because it's not real. Maybe it's because everybody
who proved it was too embarrassed, you know, nobody wanted
to soil themselves for the sake of scientific research. But
we're pretty sure it's not at this point. Yeah, there's
(18:30):
no there's no real solid proof. So what this means
if something is outside the range of conscious human hearing,
is that victims can feel the effects of one of
these pieces of technology without necessarily associating those effects with
an actual sound. And through part of this, I have
(18:50):
to defer to my colleagues Matt and Null here because
you all are audio experts and you have I think
you can give a good explanation at times with what
sound is, how it works, how the perception of sound works,
what we mean when we say a frequency, and all that.
(19:12):
So I just want to set that up that I
may ask some questions that relatively elementary to you. All, okay,
no problem, and I will probably defer to Knowel. So
I'm gonna set him up with a question right now,
and I will defer and turn back to Matt, and
then I will then defer to Paul and and then
he will defer to you, ben Um, and then we'll
defer to you specifically. You listen, So here we go.
(19:35):
Here's the round robin. So when you're dealing with sounds,
you're talking about waves. You're talking about energy being moved
through the air with these waves, so you've got amplitudes,
you've got frequencies, so like how close together, uh, the
sound wave is happening, how large that wave actually is,
which translates to volume. So there are all kinds of
(19:58):
things that we're gonna be discussed as we get into this,
and we're talking about hurts, killer hurts and mega hurts.
Do you want to walk us through any of that?
I mean only that it's a spectrum in the same
way that color is a spectrum. And you know, sound
is measured from the lowest uh to the highest in
terms of and then you know as something goes from
(20:20):
a low frequency to high frequency, they get closer together,
so you can see it like on a wave form,
a lower sound is gonna be is going to have
more space in between them than the higher sound is
going to have less space between And just to jump in,
when I say low, I mean low and pitch and
high end pitch when I'm talking about volumes. So a
lower sound could have a wavelength up to seventeen meters,
(20:42):
which would be twenty hurts, and then a high frequency
could have something that you would measure in centimeters, which
would be twenty thousand hurts. Wow. And it's also important
to remember that when you're hearing sounds, it's not just
your ears. Your entire body is being embarded by these
waves that are coming from a source. So you know,
(21:04):
when you imagine as a weapon, it's it's not like
they're attacking your ears, they're attacking your entire corporeal form.
And in the case of the brown note, your bowels.
That would be a very low sound that would move
you and your bowels and make you And that's it.
That's an incredibly important point. You know, the brown note
(21:24):
may sound humorous, but not You're absolutely correct in that
this does. It's a body wide affect. Your drums and
the auditory system are going to be the most sensitive
and the thing we notice the most, but that doesn't
mean the rest of the body is immune to it.
And if you hear a low sound, like a real
bassi sound and a concert, you can feel it in
your guts and your sternum and stuff, you know, And
(21:46):
that's what sound is, right, vibration. So this idea of
taking taking a phenomenon is responsible for some of the
most beautiful moments of human existence. Listening to music, communicating,
saying I love you to a relative, or you know,
someone you're hitting on a romantic partner, hearing your son's
(22:08):
voice for the first time. There we go, There we go.
The idea of turning that into a weapon sounds like
some old school sci fi comic book stuff from the
golden age of comics, But the truth is this technology
is not theoretical. It's already being deployed in the field
on an experimental, marginal basis, and research on it continues
(22:28):
and this is not just a thing that is the
domain of DARPA. Multiple government agencies across the world have
conducted research with this, along with quite a few private entities.
And they're doing that because science backs up the claim
that sound can be used as a weapon. Earlier, we
had explored the use of sound as a psychological or
(22:48):
even a supernatural weapon shout out to us, See you
next time, But the weapons were exploring now are meant
to physically injure people. We know that high powered sound
waves can easily disrupt or even destroy ear drums, and
this creates intense disorientation because our inner ear is a
primary method of determining balance for an individual body. It's
(23:13):
making me think back to those side effects you talked
about at the top of the show, that it could
cause you to get a little caddy wamp us and
start to kind of get that vertigo. Makes me think
of the character on Arrested Development played by Liza Manelli
who's always got that she's got a case of the disease,
and she'll be walking around normal and then all of
a sudden kind of like what stubble and then kind
(23:34):
of have to pick herself back up. You know, it's
a it's a legitimate thing that people suffer from, just
you know, without being afflicted by weird secret government sound cannons. Yes, yeah,
and high intensity ultrasound of frequencies from seven kill it
hurts to three point six mega hurts can cause lung
and intestinal damage in mice. So it's beyond the year.
(23:57):
We luckily don't have hard data about that in the
realm of human experimentation, at least not that is publicly available. Right,
heart rate patterns following vibroacoustic simulation can create serious negative
consequences uh, such as brady cardia atrial flutter. Sonic weapons
(24:18):
are used in non military applications too. Yes, there is
a ship called the s Born Spirit that at one
point used a long range acoustic device and l RAD
to deter some pirates they were attempting to board the
ship and and take things from it, and perhaps even
take the ship. And they successfully used it. Yeah, they did.
(24:40):
There's there's another example that I find pretty funny, and
I hope that no one was seriously injured with this.
But in the United Kingdom, some stores began using sonic
devices to prevent teenagers from loitering because as as you age.
As the human body ages, you're hearing begins to decay,
(25:01):
and there are certain sounds that you will not be
able to hear later in life. It's generally the higher
frequencies right right, spot on. And so these store owners
were taking mobile devices and setting them up to admit
a sound at a pitch. Only younger ears were capable
(25:22):
of hearings, Like, only teenagers could hear this kind of thing.
It's like the millennial yelp, yeah, I think so. In
every song and every song it's that like I think
it's well, yeah, only millennials can hear that. Oh man,
it does remind me of the sonic anti pest devices
(25:44):
that exists. You can find them in any hardware store
for you know, rodents and insects that admit a high
pitch sound. But if you turn those things on, I
swear to you you can. You can. You can hear it,
there's air moving and you can tell. Do you think
those actually work? Have you seen evidence that they that
they work? I've not. I've never wanted to have one
in my home. Wait, but you can actually go real
(26:05):
clean home, yeah, and you can actually hear them. You said, so,
maybe they work on you not it's not so much
hearing as sensing. There's a disturbance. Does that compute at all? Yeah, totally,
and there's probably an obvious one. But like things like sonar,
where you know, you use sonic waves to detect objects
and map distances underwater, but it can really mess with
(26:30):
underwater creatures who encounter it. It can jack with their equilibrium,
like things we're talking about whales exactly. Yeah, whales will
have migration roots disrupted, and there's a dearth of very
significant or substantial research on that. Because I'm gonna argue
maybe this is this a topic for a different show,
(26:52):
but because various governments operating submarines don't want to admit
that they're destroying this wildlife. And of course I'm sure
there are a lot of people who say, oh, you're
gonna put the price of wales life over national security, yeah,
j to which I say, oh, national security. But overall,
(27:18):
this is fascinating but pretty spooky stuff, right, Yeah, actual
humans being affected somehow by some sound. So what happened next? Well,
we'll tell you after a quick word from our sponsor,
as the US Cuba Joint Investigation into this incident continued
(27:41):
with the US staff leaving or leaving specifically for treatment,
and Cuban staff being expelled from the US and so on.
More theories cropped up. For example, what if this was
a weapon operating in the infrasound ranges. Anyone who's stuck
with us for a while will pyric their ears when
(28:03):
they hear infrasound. It's because we've covered this before. We
we talked about it. With regards to Vic Tandy. It's
the man that thought he'd encountered some kind of actual ghost,
like for real, before discovering that there was a fan,
literally a fan, an oscillating fan nearby that was emitting
a sound below the range that he could hear, and
(28:25):
it was triggering all kinds of things in his body, hallucinations, headaches,
just weird feelings. And eventually what Victandy learned was that
there actually was something like a ghost. It was this frequency.
So the effects he was encountering were not just his
(28:47):
mind playing tricks on him. They were his body responding
to an external stimulus. And what's fascinating about this, at
least to me, is that if it's true, if somebody
weaponized this infrasound idea then and if it works the
way that this worked in vict Handy's experience, then someone
(29:08):
literally invented a ghost gun. Yeah, and can you imagine
if you had a large enough whatever you would need
set of speakers. I don't know exactly how large you
have to be to omit that kind of low frequency
sound that far or that loud, but what you could
do to a population in a building or in maybe
an entire city. I'm just picturing like a giant, massive subwaffer,
(29:32):
just a single one. You carry it around like on
a ham trunk. No, no, you'd you would put it
on a jet copter and you just go around the city.
So you're always thinking one step ahead. However, there are
some issues with the idea of infrasound. If infrasound is
the culprit here or the means of transmission, then why
(29:54):
did Handy not experienced severe hearing loss? Is that is that,
you know? The two Matts point is that because the
source of Tandy's experience was just not as large or
perhaps not as optimized for damage, and maybe the frequencies
were a little different, or maybe we're what we're dealing
with in the in the Cuban embassy case, is this
(30:16):
infrasound mixed with the high pitched shone we heard? Oh yeah,
that's right. Because multiple frequencies, we have an audio potpourri.
That's a very important point. Additionally, according to New York Times,
are reported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
that came out in two thousand two noted that the U.
S Military tried to weaponize in for sound, but had
(30:38):
not succeeded because it was so hard to focus the wavelengths.
The primary effective infrasound they found appears to be annoyance.
That's a quote. H It just it's just like silly.
It goes to what Noel was saying about pranks. You know,
is this just a is Is this just the equivalent
(31:01):
of incessantly Facebook poking people? You know, you use it
on the enemy and it keeps them from getting any
work done. See. I like, but I gotta say, I
don't know if I really believe this. I mean, I
hate to say I don't believe a report by the
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, but I think it's fine. Well,
(31:23):
you it feels like you could definitely weaponize this thing.
I can understand the biggest problem being not being able
to focus the wavelengths because maybe you're affecting the people
who are also supposed to be operating whatever you're deploying,
or something like like those giant guns like the Babylon
gun and rockets where they had to the where the
(31:44):
gun was so large that the operators had to go
three hundred yards away, cover their eyes, nose, ears, and
I think basically all their other orifices with cotton and
then would still be bleeding when they launched it. She
So maybe it's maybe it's a situation where they said
they couldn't effectively weaponize it because they couldn't weaponize it
(32:06):
in a way they conformed to the operational constraints like
if it needs to affect somebody with an x amount
of yards and making everyone's anus bleed without making everyone's
anus bleed, and and if you know, like those are considerations,
and right now we don't know what those exact constraints
would be. But this leads us to another possible culprit.
(32:29):
So if infrasound, if we are taking the word of
the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and their second
hand report, when it is second hands, not primary source.
If we're taking their word for an infrasound for some
reason doesn't work out, then what about ultrasound? Okay, So
with infrasound, we're talking about the lowest end of the
(32:52):
spectrum as far as wavelengths go. What about that high
end stuff? So at those really high frequencies they were
talking about, with the really small wavelengths that are measured
in centimeters rather than you know, meters um higher than
twenty thou hurts, which is beyond the range of human hearing,
ultrasound can totally do serious tissue damage if produced with
(33:17):
enough juice. That's key, right, that's why. Okay, So for
anybody in the audience who had kidney stones or knows
somebody in your family who had kidney stones, that's why
one of the treatments that doctors used for kidney stones
is ultrasound. They'll use focus blast of this very high
frequency sound to break kidney stones apart and do small
(33:41):
enough pieces that they can pass through your body. But
luckily it does not affect your boys. You're right, yeah, luckily, Yeah,
we're sure about that, because I still haven't had one. Well,
I don't know, that's my question. I mean it. I
guess it's the focused nature of it. Like if they
shot you directly in the testes with that, maybe it
(34:02):
could have impact. I imagine, Well, yeah, that's that's good.
It just turns it from kidney stones into kidney shards.
Balls aren't built for ultrasound. But yeah, without without being
frightening about it or alarmist, it is, it is absolutely
true that this stuff can do physical damage in this
(34:24):
focus form of damaging kidney stones is only one application.
You know. You also hear about lower versions of this
when someone has an ultrasound during a pregnancy. Right, So,
why again can't they focus it more and and and
raise the power If we're talking about doing you know,
tissue damage, if it's produced with enough energy, why can't
(34:44):
they just use a really really in my day, I mean,
the the ultimate evil that's out to destroy us all,
whoever that may be. Why can't they just use a
giant power source and do the same technology and have
it be focused enough to shoot over long distances and
you know, use it to like assassinate somebody for example,
and it would be undetectable, like like like an invisible bullet. This,
(35:06):
you know, this reminds me of Illumination Global Unlimited and
their fantastic products would like to thank them sponsored the show.
Uh and we assure you that we are required to
say they are in no way related to the Shadowy
Cabal NOL just mentioned it is. It is a question, though,
it's a great question, why can't we Why can't they
(35:27):
use it as a bullet, and their advantages to this
invisible bullet. First off, there wouldn't be a physical artifact
in the dead body of the victim, right, it would
look as though their body were shattered. But the issue
is even though they found researchers found that they could
create beams that were powerful enough in a laboratory so
(35:50):
maybe not mobile to kill a mouse at close range
a fatal sonic weapon. But despite the fact that you
could take the same technology that's used in medical scans
and so on and up up its power level to
the point of causing death, the problem is that it's
(36:12):
almost like DC power. So direct current power had one
primary one big disadvantage was that it dissipated quickly over distances.
So in Edison's original plan for an energy infrastructure, there
would have to be these stations and a relatively small
distance apart from one another repeater pretty much. Yeah, yeah,
(36:33):
And what's happening with this idea with ultrasound is that
it's also losing power pretty quickly over long distances. And
you know the reality is that if you have a
gun that you could go and point at someone, say
Paul finally gets tired of us and decides to kill
us with a sonic weapon, because it's like, I don't know,
(36:55):
you got time on your hands or something, and right then,
how close does he have to be? The other problem
with it, specifically in the case of Havana, is that
humidity really really messes with the effect. Well that's a
dampener no pun intended, but I mean it is. It's
like another material that it has to pass through that
(37:17):
dissipates the sound in the same way we have crap
up on the walls here in this here room that
soaks up sound waves and and keeps the room from
sounding echo e. That's because it's dissipating those sound waves
in a way. And you could use the same stuff
to break up a sound wave or damping it like
and keep it from transmitting from one room to another,
(37:38):
because it's literally stopping it or at least slowing it
down or breaking it up to the point where it's
not going to be as powerful. So for a second,
let's imagine that something like this weapon exists out there
and it's in the hands of somebody in Cuba and
it was being deployed in Who would be doing it
(38:02):
the Cuban government. That's a really interesting question because naturally
the Cuban government is going to deny this stuff, but
some people from the U. S side would be tempted
to agree with them. Former officials from the Obama administration
believe that if there were a weapon in play, Cuba
(38:22):
would definitely not be the person or the organization pulling
the trigger. Really, yeah, you're setting me up, and I
appreciate it. Well, no, I'm I'm. I think it's just
because it's the U. S. Embassy inside Cuba. There have
been tensions there for a long time between the United
States and Cuba, and it seems like if you're attacking them,
(38:44):
as if that's your target, then it would be motivated
for some reason because of those tensions. At least that's
me coming from a complete novice of international affairs side.
You know, I think that's completely reasonable too, that doesn't
seem a far leap to make. According to a foreign
policy advisor for the Obama administration, a guy named Ben Rhodes,
(39:08):
go Ben's this is it's sort of counterintuitive to blame
Cuba for this. Rhodes says, I don't think the Cuban
government is behind it. He was also involved in negotiating
the opening or the approachment between Havana and d C. Well,
(39:30):
that is true, and around this time, we're like human
the United States are going through kind of a reconnecting,
right Yeah, huh first, says Rhodes. These things apparently started
in December. At the same time attacks were starting, the
Cuban government was frantically concluding agreements with US, US being
the Obama administration, signing business deals, in other words, trying
(39:51):
to preserve the relationships. So the notion that at the
same time is doing that, they would initiate something that's
so obviously designed to blow up the relationship doesn't make sense. Ah,
but you know it does make sense. What's that a
splinter group within the government or within the some intelligence
agency that's functioning in the Cuban government or the United
(40:12):
States government, or yeah, an agent of chaos who doesn't
want the relationship to go a jet copter of sorts.
I could totally see that happening somebody, even from the
U S side. This is complete speculation. Um, someone from
the U S side that didn't want the relationship, relationship
to be rekindled, and so they do an attack on
(40:34):
the U. S. Embassy to make it look as though
relations are souring. So this takes us to another question then,
which would be um, Who then would be the hand
that moves the sonic weapon. It could be, as you proposed, Matt,
a splinter group on the U. S side or on
the Cuban side who doesn't want to see the relationship
(40:56):
open or wants to at least maintain his status quo
of isolation on on Cuba's end. Other people will point
the finger at some of the US is long time
recurring boogeman. A similar case was reported in Uzbekistan. A
U S. A I D officer and his wife had
symptoms that closely matched what was happening, what the what
(41:20):
the employees in Cuba said was happening to them, and
this led some media sources to blame Russia and say
that Russia was deploying this. They did it in Uzbekistan,
they're doing it in Cuba, interesting because they're bad. It's like,
that's like the assumption. Well yeah, but there is another
angle though, I guess because Quba and Russia again have
(41:43):
a long standing relationship, and I wonder if there was
anything there. Oh man, I love I love pondering these
things without knowing all the information because it leaves so
many different avenues open to think about. So the other
twist there's Cuba went a step further. They said there's
absolutely no proof that any weapon exists or was deployed,
(42:06):
not just by them, but by anyone. They're saying, look
at what happens, look at what people are reporting. There's
no gun, Yeah, you know what I mean, at least
no large gun. Right into Noel's earlier point, how large
would have to be. Now we have to ask ourselves,
what if there's no weapon, What if there's no spoon
(42:28):
to quote the matrix? What if what if no actual
weapon exists? What what does that even mean? I mean,
you know, skeptics will say that allegations of this kind
of sonic weaponry just don't add up and kind of
defy the laws of nature of science. Yeah, right, Like
(42:48):
just the everything we know about how sound works, how
it travels, like the points you brought up earlier in
no like humidity, which I now feel like a fool.
We were, well, I don't know about the long distance.
I I don't think was why can't we have a
sonic sniper gun that just uses the technology that used
to break up your kidney stones to assassinate someone from
far far away? And um, I realized now that that
(43:09):
is a pipe dream. Maybe not. It just really were
arguing the size of the gun. I guess it's true.
And like you know, and when I say a long distance,
I'm not saying miles, that just mean far enough away
that it could be focused and used unseen. But maybe
there is a way. I don't know. Yeah, I keep backpedaling,
(43:30):
you know, I'm going out there on the limb. What
I'm saying, it's but it's possible. Well, so far we've
kind of been imagining that it's one large weapon that
a military someone would deploy. What if we're talking more
about very tiny maybe not maybe not so tiny, but
small versions that are maybe littered throughout an embassy where
(43:50):
they're able to produce that kind of sound and have
that frequency response. But they're just in the walls somewhere,
or in the ducting system or somewhere where they can
where it's audible, and you can still get hit with
the sound waves, but you wouldn't see it. Similar preps
to the way that the hotel room would be bugged
with cameras, or to get really dark and disturbing about it,
(44:14):
the way in that show ODZ. A lot of times
folks were killed by slowly being fed ground up glass
and their food. Right, So if you have these sonic
devices that are in your office and you go in
there every day and you're constantly getting doses of this stuff,
maybe it wouldn't hit you all at once, but it
would slowly weaken you over time. Maybe there's an aggregate effect,
(44:35):
especially in your sleep. Yeah, but if the noise was
audible to them, how could they sleep? You know what?
There are questions they wouldn't it not be audible though,
because I mean, surely when you get that treatment done,
you know, for kidney stones, you're not hearing a horrible, shrill,
high pitched sound. That's true, you're not. But in this
case we have an example of what it did sound
like that, and they were they did report an audible
(44:57):
shrill sound, so oh yeah, I don't know, but that's
what they heard. Also, so they may have had other
times where they only you know, maybe an iceberg of sorts,
like the audible stuff is what they can see. That's
the iceberg above the water. Audible dot Com is the
leading provider of audiobooks and yeah, if you enter our
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(45:21):
ten percent off a cookie at my house. Really yep.
How's your cookie business going so far? We're just hemorrhaging money.
They're just giving them away. Oh man, well, I am
a little bit offended. Or maybe no cookies exist, just
like maybe no sonic weapons exist in this situation. In fact,
(45:42):
some neurologists have argued that the real source of the
problem is not a weapon and not a sound at all. Instead,
they think it's a sort of mass hysteria. Yeah. This
is according to Mark Hollett, the head of the Human
Motor Control section of the u S National Institute of
(46:03):
Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Would you love to see that
in your email every time you have to send something
out the head of Human Motor Control. That's very that's Yeah,
it's important. It does, and he says, from an objective
point of view, it's more like mass hysteria than anything else.
Mass hysteria is something we've mentioned before. What maybe we'll
(46:27):
talk about Salem witch trials, which was the source of
my ou By the way, I'm not dismissing mass hysteria,
and of course can absolutely be a thing. I was
just trying to play the game. Yeah, and I think
it works. So we know mass hysteria is real. We
know it's dangerous. It's resulted in deaths throughout history, right
oftentimes the deaths of completely innocent people. It describes an
(46:51):
outbreak among groups of people that are partially or holy
psycho somatic, and the that means, without deriving these victims
were placing any blame upon them. That means that their
perceptions or their beliefs of what are happening, their internal
(47:11):
narratives are determining these symptoms that they are encountering, and
they're attributing that to an external source. YEA, And I
wonder throughout the investigation that's being conducted, if they're focusing
on everything like the water supply for that building, because
you're talking about a lot of people who are drinking
the same water, who are using the same facilities, who
(47:32):
are breathing the same air. You know, that's all in
a closed system. So I wonder if you know there
are other extenuating circumstances there. That's a good that's a
good question. We don't know how far the investigation has
gone because they're not completely public about much else other
than the investigation is ongoing, phrase we hear often. Well,
(47:52):
Alex says this is more commonly a thing that affects
smaller groups of people, often in families, But he does
say it's feasible for a large group to be affected
if they're working together closely, especially in a tense and
hostile environment. There you go, and it's probably true they
are seeing the same people every day. They're probably living
(48:12):
in somewhat of a bubble. So that's that's a neurologist
take on it, and it leads us to some conclusions
where we at now. Well, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign
Affairs claimed that it learned of these health issues on
February seventeenth and opened a quote comprehensive priority and urgent
(48:35):
investigation and quote and they formed a committee to carry
out set investigation. And so that's uh, February seventeen, seventeen,
and we know what's been happening since before that. In
sen that's just when they heard about it. And they
also said the ministry had increased security around the American
embassy and all of the diplomatic residences where people working
(48:57):
at the embassy reside. And they additionally said, as as
we have mentioned earlier, there's not a weapon. If there was,
Cuba had nothing to do with it. Why on earth
will we do that? Stop accusing stuff. And according to
a spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs,
(49:17):
since September, the Department of State has been contacted by
nineteen US citizens who are reported experiencing symptoms similar to
those listed in the travel warning after visiting Cuba. So
these are extra other people right who are reporting these symptoms.
At this point, we do not have a conclusive cause.
(49:41):
It's up in the air as to whether we will
ever find a conclusive cause. Two of the big front
runners for this event are going to be mass hysteria
if you listen to some neurologists, sonic weapon if you
listen to some again enough anonymous government officials. You have
(50:02):
to wonder about the timing of this, as Matt said,
you have to wonder about the specifics and how much
happened behind the curtain. But as we know now, something happened.
Something happened. Is there is there a cover up? Is
it just a case of people being misinformed? Do you
(50:25):
have some insider info that you would like to share
with us? If so, we'd love to We'd love to
hear your thoughts. You can find Matt Noel's super producer
Paul and I on Instagram. You can find us on Facebook,
you can find us on Twitter, and we're conspiracy stuff
at most of those but conspiracy stuff show on Instagram.
And uh oh, one last thing before we before we leave,
(50:46):
there is there's a declassified department of the Army. I
guess it's just a report or part of a report
that you can read search bio effects of selected non
lethal weapons and you should find a pdf. There's one
on Wired I know that you can get. It's just
going through a lot of the stuff with microwaves and
(51:08):
radio frequencies and everything that they've tested over the years
to see like what negative effects on the humans and
other animals can occur. It's a huge read. You probably
won't get through all of it, but there is some
meaty stuff in there, just about the possibilities and all
of that social media stuff that we rattled off. That's
all cool, but if you don't feel like reaching out
(51:28):
in that particular way, we've got a perfect solution for you.
You can send us an email. We are conspiracy at
how stuff works dot com.
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