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The State Department has not provided further details about the medical condition of the affected staffers. But government officials have suggested anonymously that the diplomats may have been assaulted with some sort of sonic weapon.
Experts in acoustics, however, say that's a theory more appropriate to a James Bond movie.
Sound can cause discomfort and even serious harm, and researchers have explored the idea of sonic weaponry for years. But scientists doubt a hidden ultrasound weapon can explain what happened in Cuba.
"I'd say it's fairly implausible," said Jürgen Altmann, a physicist at the Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany and an expert on acoustics.
Once again, the New York Times gets it wrong. James Bond is not the movie genre they're looking for.
mrpg also brings us this less-critical AP report, What Americans Heard in Cuba Attacks: The Sound.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19 2017, @01:35PM
if the the "experts" had some biology background.
It is actually a fairly common thing that certain electronic components fail and emit high decible high frequency noises. Happens a lot in certain expansion cards for computers. I had a fridge that went that way once. It is pretty excrutiating to have that noise around all the time.
It isn't the tone that your measuring, which is why the "acoustic" expert isn't the guy to talk to. It is the the guy measuring human responses that matters.
I totally expected that there would be a very public move to retract this. There is a whole industry in electronic harassment equipment, and we do have some stuff in our military inventory that is unclassified that is in this realm.
My expectation is that there is a lot of it that is still classified, and in all probability a lot of it is being used against select members of the domestic population at any given moment. Which is why there is so much disinformation about this stuff. And why there will be a retraction.
If you don't believe that the fed does evil shit to its own citizens covertly, you should watch the Discovery miniseries on the unibomber. The CIA took a 16 year old insecure boy, and turned him into a domestic terrorist, just to see if they could. It's all been declassified at this point.
It is less important what happens to our diplomats, than making sure what our government is doing to its own population, remains a secret. I'm sure some guys in a sat control station somewhere shit a brick when our guys in Havana starting bitching about this. We've probably been doing it to the Cubans for decades.
Who knows, maybe we just missed?