Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

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I was a little skeptical at first, too, and I saw the same report, but at this point I'd bet serious money that the majority of cases are real and not psychosomatic. The psychological explanations have increasingly had less support over the past few years.

It's definitely quite bizarre that there are now at least 3 reports of it happening in the DC area. In one case, someone's dog was also reported as simultaneously being affected. There were also unrelated reports of another dog being affected (vomiting blood, among other things) in a hotel overseas. In both cases, humans and adults were simultaneously affected, and the symptoms both were experiencing wouldn't make sense if it were just a dog reacting to their owner's anxiety.

I have no idea if it's microwaves, and I'm not quite sure if the DC attacks are real, but I think there likely are some sort of deliberate attacks occurring against US diplomats and spies. Maybe a collection method that's inadvertently causing harm, at least.

Here's an interesting article on it: https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-micro.... I wouldn't be surprised if some of the cases are psychogenic (someone hears about it and then thinks they have it, etc.), but I suspect the majority are real.

>It's definitely quite bizarre that there are now at least 3 reports of it happening in the DC area

No it's not. DC is one of the most paranoid areas around, a significant portion of the population constantly thinks someone is out to get them. Three of those people now have symptoms without a clear medical cause.

>wouldn't make sense if it were just a dog reacting to their owner's anxiety

But it would make sense that the sick, stressed owner accidentally fed the dog something bad, or accidentally kicked the dog without realizing it, or forgot to feed the dog forcing it to eat something bad.

As for Polymeropoulos, he felt sick, completely got over it, then started worrying that the illness may have been the Havana syndrome. Only then did the more serious ailments occur.

I definitely acknowledge the DC cases are the ones that are most likely to be psychogenic. I just found it interesting that different dogs were allegedly affected both there and overseas. And as for Polymeropoulos in particular, I'm not sure.

Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that “a significant portion of the DC population constantly thinks someone is out to get them”? Admittedly anecdotal but I live in DC and I wouldn’t characterize myself or anyone I know in the area that way

> Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that “a significant portion of the DC population constantly thinks someone is out to get them”?

Not OP, but I'd point to people working in Fort Meade and Langley who are paranoid by trade.

Being the center of political and military power means a lot of people have to constantly worry that their political and geopolitical enemies are trying to get one over on them. I'm not saying they're like Dale Gribble, but a certain part of them is professionally paranoid.

Sure. While there is a higher concentration of those type of people in DC than elsewhere, that is not the same thing as the DC population.

We disagree on what constitutes a "significant portion of the population" means then. Even at 1% of the population fitting that description would be ~50,000 people, meaning 3 of them with weird symptoms would not be surprising.

Your account only make the whole thing to be made out of thin air. There are numerous conditions that will make some people or animals to feel bad/vomit. The fact that there are only 3 in the DC area means nothing, go to any large city and you'll find multiple people with similar symptoms from different causes.

Please read the GQ article I linked above if you haven't (https://www.gq.com/story/cia-investigation-and-russian-micro...). I understand if you're still skeptical after reading it, but it'd be helpful if we could be working off of the same information so that we won't need to use any contrived example scenarios.

But I definitely acknowledge the DC cases are the ones that are most likely to be psychogenic. I just found it interesting that different dogs were allegedly affected both there and overseas.

>I just found it interesting that different dogs were allegedly affected both there and overseas.

Affected in completely different ways, with no symptoms in common. That's terrible evidence, yet it seems to be the primary reason you went from skeptical to convinced.

It isn't, at all. It's just one of many little details. I wrote more in some other comments in this thread. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27190430

And, again, I'm more skeptical of the DC cases than the overseas one, and I think it's likely that a decent percentage of the cases are psychogenic.

Here are the dog references, for anyone else curious:

(Alleged Virginia attack)

>Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.

(Alleged China attack)

>Meanwhile, the roster of victims was growing ever longer. In June 2018, the U.S. State Department evacuated nearly a dozen people from Guangzhou, China, where American diplomats and trade representatives reported feeling symptoms eerily similar to those their colleagues had experienced in Cuba. One victim, Catherine Werner, said that her symptoms began in late 2017, just as Polymeropoulos’s had: a splitting headache, nausea, loss of balance. When her mother went to Guangzhou to help her, she, too, fell ill. Even Werner’s dogs were affected, her mother told NBC News. They began vomiting blood and avoiding the room where Werner and her mother heard the sounds and felt the symptoms start.

These two scenarios definitely did not adjust my confidence about any of this. The reported symptoms are indeed different. I just think it's interesting. It absolutely could be a red herring.

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