U.S. Embassy Victims in Cuba Have Brain Abnormalities
“Medical testing has revealed the embassy workers developed changes to the white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate.”
The attacks on American officials at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, keeps getting stranger and stranger. The latest information revealed that doctors have found brain abnormalities in the victims. From The Associated Press:
It’s the most specific finding to date about physical damage, showing that whatever it was that harmed the Americans, it led to perceptible changes in their brains. The finding is also one of several factors fueling growing skepticism that some kind of sonic weapon was involved.
Medical testing has revealed the embassy workers developed changes to the white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate, several U.S. officials said, describing a growing consensus held by university and government physicians researching the attacks. White matter acts like information highways between brain cells.
Some of the victims woke up in the middle of the night and heard “disembodied chirping in the room, or a strange, low hum, or the sound of scraping metal.” Others described how “they felt a phantom flutter of air pass by as they listened.” There are some victims that did not notice anything.
But the victims felt the effects of these noises or non-noises 24 hours later. These symptoms included nausea, loss of hearing or sight, headaches, vertigo, and dizziness. Symptoms appeared to have gone away once the victims came back to America. At first officials and doctors believed a sonic weapon caused the issues. Now they don’t know.
The officials did not say if the doctors found these changes in all of the victims. Elisa Konofagou, a Columbia University biomedical engineering professor, told the AP that “accoustic waves have never been shown to alter the brain’s white matter tracts” and she “would be very surprised” if that is the cause of the abnormalities.
From The Washington Post:
“Physicians are treating the symptoms like a new, never-seen-before illness,” the AP wrote, and expect to monitor the victims for the rest of their lives, although most have fully recovered from their symptoms by now.
The physicians are working with FBI agents and intelligence agencies as they look for a source, and U.S. officials have not backed down from their accusations against the Cuban government, which denies any involvement despite a history of animosity between the two countries.
In October, experts provided the mysterious noise to the Ap. It’s high pitched, almost like nails on a chalkboard. They do not know what kind of mechanism produced this sound or who developed it. Those who heard a sound heard the same thing:
Yet the AP has reviewed several recordings from Havana taken under different circumstances, and all have variations of the same high-pitched sound. Individuals who have heard the noise in Havana confirm the recordings are generally consistent with what they heard.
“That’s the sound,” one of them said.
The recording being released by the AP has been digitally enhanced to increase volume and reduce background noise, but has not been otherwise altered.
The sound seemed to manifest in pulses of varying lengths — seven seconds, 12 seconds, two seconds — with some sustained periods of several minutes or more. Then there would be silence for a second, or 13 seconds, or four seconds, before the sound abruptly started again.
As the number of affected have risen, the State Department had no choice but to take action to protect our people. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson decided in late September to bring home all non-essential personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Havana, thus cutting the staff by 60% and halt citizen travel to the island.
A few days later, Tillerson decided to expel 15 diplomats from the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C. He stated:
On October 3, the Department of State informed the Government of Cuba that it was ordering the departure of 15 of its officials from its embassy in Washington, D.C. The decision was made due to Cuba’s failure to take appropriate steps to protect our diplomats in accordance with its obligations under the Vienna Convention. This order will ensure equity in our respective diplomatic operations.
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Comments
This is no joke. Previously, something like this happen from high powered microwaves focused at US embassies. This time it could be a different mechanism, but it’s clearly no accidents and no coincidence.
One hint is that they sometimes hit Canadians, well presumably Americans are the actual target. This could indicate that second string intelligence agencies are involved rather than the sponsoring entities best people, or that it is a semi official operation done through layers of intermediaries for deniability, Or it may simply be that English-speaking people who look about like Americans got swept up in it.
Also the white matter track injuries can manifest like MS. It would be interesting to see some of the imaging…. FLAIR, diffusion weighted and Diffusion Tensor Imaging. Is the sonic signature a by-product of say… microwave?
This story is devoid of fact. Maybe, could, possibly… Medical reports from nobody. There is the inference from a dubious source who is not associated at all with the embassy personnel or anything material to the investigation or any knowledge to the relevant actual assault on US diplomatic personnel by the Cuban government, but the mere fact that someone posits the idea that:
“But acoustic waves have never been shown to alter the brain’s white matter tracts, said Elisa Konofagou, a biomedical engineering professor at Columbia University who is not involved in the government’s investigation.”
There is nothing tangible. I was born, raised and worked my butt off in NYC for most of my life, but for this story, consider me from Missouri.
More needs to be said, but I just find this absurd. Quote without context…
Really don’t understand why Trump didn’t pull all diplomatic ties with Cuba, and to see something like this implying that granted more advanced technology than we used against Noriega in Panama which the USA has ready for battlefield can produce these permanent physical damages which I have never heard of just seems a bit too much to take without reference.
Excuse me, but it’s from the Washington Post, and they would never, ever publish a story devoid of fact.
Google “hyperacusus,” and then thank God you dont have it.
This is an act of war by cuba. We should respond in kind.
whatever is attacking our personnel I think that we should rethink and redo our Cuban relationship.
Since Smoking is not conducive to better health, as well as sugar – what does Cuba export to the USA ?
we also need to rethink our hosting the UN and like China build an Island for the UN to conduct it’s anti American and anti Israel objectionable objectives.
we also need to stop sending our troops as UN storm troopers.
I think it’s very odd that these “attacks” began during the Obama administration. Why would Cuba attack workers of the administration that re-established diplomatic ties with its government? It’s entirely counter-intuitive that Cuba would do something so potentially damaging just when it is on the cusp of realizing great economic benefit as a result of the Obama admin’s actions.
I’ll take a wild guess at a possible source of EM radiation. Since we’re not privy to internal investigation documents.
All embassy staff pass through metal detection pylons. There is a possibility, however remote, that entryway metal detection equipment was tampered with to emit non audible radio frequencies.
Only a wild, improbable guess.
Radio emissions are always non-audible – they’re electromagnetic in nature (photons), not pressure waves in air (sound). The only possible way electromagnetic waves can become audible is by differential heating of the bones of the inner ear (by microwaves), causing the bones to vibrate, which is reported to the brain by nerves, and the brain interprets as “sound.” Such (perceived) sounds, however, cannot be recorded by sound recording devices, because there are no actual sounds (pressure waves in air) for the devices to record.
“disembodied chirping in the room, or a strange, low hum, or the sound of scraping metal.” Others described how “they felt a phantom flutter of air pass by as they listened.”
Now they know what people who live in the midst of Industrial Wind Turbine Farms experience. I’ve heard all of these sounds myself, when working near (or under) them.
And why non-lease holders end up selling their homes at a loss or just walk away from them.
Would drive a person bonkers
Although louder than I usually hear it, this is the type of sound I would often here from some electronics, especially CRT as they degraded with age. It’s possible that those who heard the sound are more sensitive to the higher frequencies and heard it as their electronics were being affected by some outside source.