Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowA few years back, employees at the US Embassy in Cuba reported a strange and disquieting 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.
Oh man, you know, we did not know exactly what we're getting into when we started. When we started diving into today's classic episode, you remember this one man Cuba.
Oh boy, do I ever the idea that some sort of future tech, some kind of weapon that we don't really know about in the public sphere is at work causing problems for folks working at the US Embassy in Cuba.
And when we did this episode back in twenty eighteen, there were still a lot of questions that were unanswered, and some questions remain unanswered. Today's special shout out to our pal Jack O'Brien from the Daily Zeitgeist. But we hope you enjoy this one. Folks.
Here we go 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, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Nolan.
They call me Ben. We're joined with our super producer Paul Decint as always, but most importantly, you are you, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. The US military has cooked up some pretty bizarre ideas over the past few decades and longtime listeners you know that Matt Nolan and 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 stuff at the wall and see if it blows it up.
Literally, like the jet copter. Yes, the jet copter where someone finally came together with their friends and said, what if we had a jet that wait for it, guys has three way for guys, and each of those wings has a jet 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?
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 Borg.
Yeah, set your phasers to blind 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. They'll also they also tried, of course, the one of the more infamous ones was they worked on a plan for a bomb that would turn people into homosexuals.
Yep, is that the one that Alex Jones is always talking about turns to all the frogs gay.
He's also maybe he's thinking about environmental contaminant too. I think right.
Hands down my favorite one was a pigeon guided missile. 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 bf Skinner, during around the World War two times, was trying to figure out a way to basically have a 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 made a warhead that was three pigeons sitting inside of warhead, live pigeons that had these rudimentary screens of and that would show what the ground looked like as this missiles flying through the air and the pigeons, if they see the target that they've been trained to attack, they would all, in theory peck at the screen, and if 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, the idea that that redundancy would work. Members of the National Research Defense Committee did give him twenty five grandeah to do this again. Throw it at the wall, see if it blows up. There are 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 going to be an episode where we just keep ridicule on Uncle Sam, because Uncle Sam is not the only government thinking outside of the box when it comes to military hardware and technique. 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 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 Nol has a great lead on information warfare. Maybe it turns out that Matt is super good at delivering poison in unexpected ways.
Yeah, 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.
Wow, because no one would ever see it coming because it moves so slowly. It's almost imperceptible that it's coming at you.
Yeah, yeah, and sure it's I could be doing much damage around the equator, but oh man, but they wanted to try it. And there are numerous other silly examples. We've looked at the assassination attempts for Fidel Castro. In a different show, Nola and I looked at an attempt to kill Winston Churchill via an evil.
Chocolate bar ex bloating chocolate where and when you broke that delightful little line of demarcation to get that perfect chocolate square, it would blow your fingers and face off. Geez.
And there was also a halatosis bomb, which is super interesting because halatosis was primarily conditioned, made up by advertisers.
So it's a bad breath bomb, right.
And halatosis as a condition is not real.
That sounds like more of a prank.
Yeah, I think you just get that by eating regular chocolate and then not brushing your teeth.
Gus, you Americans full ruining? How a great evil inmbio without terrible breath so minty freshness aside. A lot of these techniques and these weapons and this hardware that 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.
Whatever, say that it sounds amazing.
It sounds amazing, 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 in the top levels of intelligence, it can be very difficult to tell what has actually been deployed, what was kicked around and then scrapped, what's actively 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 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.
Yeah, Well, you would hope that you wouldn't know about a stealth helicopter unless it's stealth abilities failed drastically.
Yeah, 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 some level, right, whether it's sales or property or income, 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. 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.
Yeah, stamp up with national security and let's move on the great boogeymanoo.
Right, And now we're at a point where it turns out that just last year we may have learned of another type of weapon, something we knew could exist in theory but hadn't seen in action. This way, here's where it gets crazy already already.
Yeah, So, over the course of two years and six and twenty seventeen, there was some weird stuff going on in Cubas. Specifically, there were US 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 experiencing hearing loss, they were experiencing vertigo, feeling like they were going to fall or were falling, they were having headaches. They were even complaining about cognitive deficiencies, like having problems remembering something you know more than just when you walk through a door and you forget something, which is something we all experience. They're talking about much more severe versions of this, and just so everybody knows, severe hearing loss was the most common complaint, like I cannot hear right now, 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 prime primary complaint that preceded their experience of this vertigo, this hearing loss, this difficulty with recollection, and it's this They heard a distinct, loud, pitched, incredibly annoying and painful sound in unusual places, including their homes.
Shall we punish our listeners with a clip, yes, and ourselves. So the caveat that there are a few limiting factors here. 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 sound comes from the Associated Press. They actually went 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, for supports or from twenty sixteen, so twenty seventeen, the State Department goes public. They pull all the non 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 third, the State Department also began expelling Cuban diplomats. They started with two. Eventually they would expel fifteen in total from the United States.
And it should be noted here that the Cuban government vehemently denies that anything is going on here, like they had any involvement in these health incidents. 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 fans without exception, full stop. Yeah, pretty categorical there, you know.
And although the US officially states they're still investigating the cause of these conditions, government officials from the US side, from Uncle Sam, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have said that they believe someone in Cuba was operating a quote sonic weapon.
So what could the sonic weapon be?
Will tell you after a word from our sponsors, So sonic weapons. You might also hear these called ultrasonic weapons or usws do what it says on the tin. 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 weapons being deployed by police and for the purposes of crowd disposal or corallying. One of the most well known 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 hundred and twenty to one and forty 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 the Ferguson protests.
Sure, yeah, for any protest or something. The idea is that they go, ah, my ears, I'm leaving.
Yeah.
I'm more of a fan of non lethal weapon too.
Which one is that?
The one with Joe Pesci?
Oh okay, all right.
I wonder why they never did a non lethal weapon. That's actually a good idea.
I think I think it'd be kind of dull, Right, nothing happen.
What was the what was the parody of the lethal weapon series?
Naked Gun, Naked.
Gun, Well, Naked Gun police Squad? Yeah, Leslie Nielsen. Wasn't there one called legal weapon or something like that. It doesn't matter.
It might be one of those Hollywood knockoffs.
So we'll get back to it.
We've got top men on the research here in the meantime, you'll hear a lot of 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 it's important that we have that solved.
Yes, So the variations you'll hear, much like the variations of lethal versus loaded weapon, are all going to be new takes on the same concept. You'll hear about sonic grenade, something you could throw that emit. It's 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 wrists, don't do it. We're not minimizing the effects of these because non lethal weapons that term 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 die from your wound, if an infection or something like that, totally you would bleed from getting.
A shot with rock salt, I think right, yes, yeah, depend on distance.
Yeah, well, and 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 differently functioning heart and a circulatory system and everything, so much in the same way, you can imagine, 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 it's called a focus point or a focused area of sound, like a bullet from a gun or maybe a laser is a better description, while others create a sustained field of effect. Despite their names, not all of these weapons are gigantic, big booming, oversized nineteen eighties golden era of hip hop boomboxes. They're operating some of them are operating outside of the range of human hearing, like Nol and Matt were talking about with the clip that they played and what's happening there. It's similar to that so called brown note. Do you guys remember the story of the brown note?
Oh?
Yeah, I think South Park made it famous.
To one that makes you poop, right, Yeah, Yeah.
It's the one you can't hear but makes you poop, yes, which we've 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 real at this point. Yeah, 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 to defer to my colleagues Matt and nol here because you all are audio experts and you have I think you can give 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. So I just want to set that up that I may ask some questions and relatively elementary.
To you all, Okay, no problem, and I will probably defer to Noel. 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 then he will defer to you, Ben, and then we'll defer to you specifically. You listen, So here we go. 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 the sound wave is happening, how large that wave actually.
Is, which translates to volume.
So there are all kinds of things that we're going to be discussing as we get into this, and we're talking about hurt killer hurts and megahurts. 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 to the highest in terms of and then you know as something goes from low frequency to high frequency, they get closer together, so you can see it like on a waveform, a lower sound is going to be is going to have more space in between them than a higher sound is going to have like less space in between And just to jump in, when I say low, I mean low in pitch and high in pitch when I'm talking about volumes. So a lower sound could have a wavelength up to seventeen meters, which would be twenty hurts wow. 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 bombarded by these waves that are coming from a source. So you know, when you imagine as a weapon, it's not like they're attacking your ears, They're attacking your entire corporeal form, right.
Yeah.
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 an incredibly important point. You know, the brown note may sound humorous, but Matt, you're absolutely correct in that this does. It's a body wide effect. 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 basic sound and a concert, you can feel it in your guts and your sternum and stuff, you know.
And that's what sound is, right, vibration. So this idea of taking taking a phenomenon that 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 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. 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 even a supernatural weapon shout out to us, See you next time. But the weapons we're 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 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 cattywampus and start to kind of get that vertigo. Yeah, it makes me think of the character on Arrested Development played by Eliza Minelli who's always got that she's got a case of the dizzas, and she'll be walking around normal and then all of a sudden kind of like well, stumble and then kind of have to pick herself back up. You know, 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 hundred kilo hurts to the three point six mega hurts can cause lung and intestinal damage in mice, so it's beyond the ear. 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, such as brady cardia atrial flutter. Sonic weapons are used in non military applications too.
Yes, there is a ship called the Seaborn Spirit that at one point used a long range acoustic device an l RAD to deter some pirates that were attempting to board the ship and take things from it and perhaps even take the ship.
And they successfully used it, Yeah, they did. 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 you age, as the human body ages, your hearing begins to decay, 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 emit a sound at a pitch only younger ears were capable 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 like I think it's well, yeah, only millennials can hear that.
Oh man, it does remind me of the sonic anti pest devices that exist. You can find them in any hardware store for you know, rodents and insects that emit 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 clean home.
Yeah, and you can actually hear them. You said, so maybe they work on you.
It's not so much hearing is sensing the disturbing. 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 underwater creatures who encounter and 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 a topic for a different show, but because various governments operating submarines don't want to admit that they're destroying this wildlife, right yep. And of course I'm sure there are lot of people say, oh, you're going to put the price of a whales life over national security? Yeah you jerk, to which I say, oh, national security. But overall 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, 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?
Ooh, anyone who's stuck with us for all while will pyroic their ears when they hear infrasound, it's because we've covered this before, we talked about it with regards to Vic Tandy. It's the man that thought he'd encountered some kind of actual ghost 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 it was triggering all kinds of things in his body, hallucinations, headaches, just weird feelings.
And eventually what Vic Tandy learned was that there actually was something like a ghost. It was this frequency. Yes, so the effects he was encountering were not just his 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 Vic Tandy's experience, then someone 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 would have to be to emit 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 subwafer, just a single one. You carry it around like on a hand trunck. No, no, you you'd 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 did Handy not experience severe hearing loss? Is that is that? You know? To Matt's point, is that because the source of Tandy's experience was just not as large or perhaps not as optimized for damage.
Well, maybe the frequencies were a little different, or maybe we're what we're dealing with in the Cuban embassy case, is this infrasound mixed with the high pitched tone we heard. Ah, yeah, that's right, because it's multiple frequencies, we.
Have an audio potpourrie. That's a very important point. Additionally, according to New York Times, a report by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences that came out in two thousand and two noted that the US military tried to weaponize infrasound but had 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. Huh, it's just like silly. It goes to what Noel was saying about pranks. You know, is this just a Is this just the equivalent of incessantly Facebook poking people?
You know, you use it on the enemy and it keeps them from getting any work done. See.
I 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.
Yeah, 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 that, like those giant guns like the Babylon gun and rickets where they had to where the 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.
Geez.
So maybe it's maybe it's situation where they said they couldn't effectively weaponize it because they couldn't weaponize it in a way that conformed to the operational constraints, like if it needs to affect somebody with an x amount of yards without.
Making everyone's anus bleed, without making everyone's anus bleed, 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. So if infrasound, if we are taking the word of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and their secondhand report, which it is secondhand, it's not a primary source. If we're taking their word for it, 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 spectrum as far as wavelengths go. What about that high end stuff?
So at those really high frequencies we were talking about, with the really wavelengths that are measured in centimeters rather than meters. Higher than twenty thousand hertz, which is beyond the range of human hearing, ultrasound can totally do serious tissue damage if produced with 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 use for kidney stones is ultrasound. They'll use focus blasts of this very high frequency sound to break kidney stones apart and do small enough pieces that they can pass through your body.
But luckily it does not affect your boys.
You're right, Yeah, luckily.
Yeah, for sure about that, because I still haven't had one.
Well, I don't know, that's my question. I mean, I guess it's the focused nature of it, Like if they shot you directly in the testes with that, maybe it could have some 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 focus form of damaging kidney stones is only one application.
You know.
You also hear about lower versions of this from someone has an ultrasound during a pregnancy.
Right, So, why again can't they focus it more 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 they just use a really really in by 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 an invisible bullet.
This, you know, this reminds me of Illumination Global Unlimited and their fantastic products. Would like to think that my sponsored the show, and we assure you that we are required to say they are in no way related to the Shadowy Cabal and the we'll just mentioned it is. It is a question, though, it's a great question. Why can't we Why can't they 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 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 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 in a relatively small distance apart from one another, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, 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, you got time on your hands or something.
And he could totally get through that window.
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. Yeah, no pun intended, but I mean it is. It's like another material that it has to pass through that dissipates the sound in the same way we have crap up on the walls in this here room that soaks up sound waves and keeps the room from sounding echoey. That's because it's dissipating the 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, 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 twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. Who would be doing it 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 US side would be tempted to agree with them. Former officials from the Obama administration believe that if there were a weapon in play, Cuba would definitely not be the person or the organization pulling the trigger. Really, yeah, you're setting me up, and I appreciate it.
Oh well, No, I think it's just because it's the US 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, 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.
I think that's completely reasonable too. That doesn't seem far leap to make. According to a foreign policy advisor for the Obama administration, a guy named Ben Rhodes GOPNZ, 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 DC.
Well, that is true, and around this time, we're like, youban 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 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 some intelligence agency that's functioning in the Cuban government or the United States.
Government, or yeah, an agent of chaos who doesn't want the relationship to go a jet copter of sorts.
Ooh, I could totally see that happening. Somebody, even from the US side. This is complete speculation. Sure, someone from the US side that didn't want the relationship, relationship to be rekindled, and so they do an attack on the US embassy to make it look as though relations are souring.
So this takes us to another question then, which would be who then would be the hand that moves the sonic weapon. It could be, as you proposed, Matt, a splinter group on the US side or on the Cuban side who doesn't want to see the relationship open or wants to at least maintain a status quo of isolation on on Cuba's end. Other people will point the finger at some of the US's long time recurring boogeyman. A similar case was reported in Uzbekistan. A USAID officer and his wife had symptoms that closely matched what was happening or what the what 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. Oh like that, that's like the assumption.
Well yeah, but that is another angle though. I guess because Quban Russia again have 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 is. Cuba went a step further. They said there's absolutely no proof that any weapon exists or was deployed, not just by them, but by anyone. They're saying, look at what happened, look at what people are reporting. There's no gun.
Yeah, you know what I mean, at least no large gun.
Right into Knowl'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 to quote the matrix, What if no actual weapon exists? What does that even mean?
Well, 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 just the everything we know about how sound works, how it travels, like the points you brought up earlier.
No, like humidity, which I now feel like a fool, I don't know about the long distance. About. My whole thing was why can't we have us sonic sniper gun that just uses the technology they used to break up your kidney stones to assassinate someone from far, far away. And I realize now that that is a pipe dream.
Maybe not. It just really we're arguing the size of the gun.
I guess it's true. And like you know, when I say a long distance, I'm not saying miles. I just mean far enough away that it could be focused and used unseen. Right, But maybe there is a way. I don't know. Yeah, I keep back pedaling, you know, I'm going out there on the limit. I'm saying 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 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 perhaps to the way that a hotel room would be bugged with it to your cameras wanted.
To get really dark and disturbing about it the way in that show OZ, a lot of times folks were killed by slowly being fed ground up glass and their food. Oh 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, especially in your sleep. Yeah, but if the noise was audible to them, how could they sleep? You know what? There are questions there.
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 shrill sound.
So 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.
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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, 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 Controls of the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Wow.
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, that'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. Maybe we talk about Salem witch trials, which was.
The source of my Ooh. By the way, I'm not dismissing mass hysteria. It of course can absolutely be a thing. I was just trying to play the game.
Yeah, and I think it works. So we know massestaria 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 outbreak among groups of people that are partially or holy psychosomatic, and that means, without deriding these victims or placing any blame upon them, that means that their perceptions or their beliefs of what are happening, their internal narratives are determining these symptoms that they are encountering, and they're attributing that to an external source.
Yeah, 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 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 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. Yeah, the phrase we hear often well, al Ittt 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 larger 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 in somewhat of a bubble. So that's that's a neurologist take on it, and it leads us to some conclusions. Where are 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 investigation and quote and they formed a committee to carry out set investigation.
And so that's February seventeenth, twenty seventeen, and we know what's been happening since before that. In twenty sixteen, 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 at the embassy reside.
And they additionally said as we had mentioned earlier, is not a weapon. If there was, Cuba had nothing to do with it. Why Why on earth will we do that? Stop accusing this stuff? And according to a spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, since September twenty ninth, twenty seventeen, the Department of State has been contacted by nineteen US citizens who are 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. 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, a sonic weapon, if you listen to some again anonymous government and officials. You have 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 have some insider info that you would like to share with us. If so, we'd we'd love to hear your thoughts. You can find Matt Noles, 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 oh. One last thing before we leave 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 radio frequencies and everything that they've tested over the years to see 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 social media. And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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