60 Minutes Havana Syndrome report finds U.S. government tested energy weapon | Hacker News Reader

60 Minutes Havana Syndrome report finds U.S. government tested energy weapon

cbsnews.com

101 pointsjonas2145 comments

For the benefit of people who read only the headline and not the article:

The story here is that the US government captured Russia's energy weapon, which Russia has been using against US personnel for a decade, and tested it to determine what it does (it causes brain damage). This story does _not_ claim that the US has developed a weapon like this themselves.

It does claim the US went to great lengths to dismiss the victims for a decade, while being in possession of the device. That raises the question of what incentives the US would have to deny its existence. To me, that was the story.

It doesn’t say they had it in their possession for the last decade. It says they tested it for about a year. Not clear when they would have gotten it.

2024.

source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-tested-device-that-...

To me the question is actually, what changed to make them release the story now? Biden’s been out of office for a while now… it wasn’t anything his admin did. They could’ve continued gagging the victims, claiming it’s psychosomatic, and most of us would keep on believing that, because Occam’s razor.

Lots of similar reports came out during the Maduro raid. Same symptoms. Seems we demonstrated the capabilities we were hiding. OSINT experts already put the pieces together a month ago. So did our adversaries. Cat’s out of the bag, so no sense continuing to gaslight our wounded veterans.

We probably put this fucking thing in a plane instead of a backpack. Everything’s bigger in the USA, of course.

It's like cracking the Enigma during WWII. If you let the enemy know you've cracked it, and do the obvious thing and save the lives immediately in front of you, in the long run, more people are going to die. So pretending that there are just some crazy people working in Cuba for as long as they can is better than "holy shit, Russia has an invisible weapon that turns people crazy".

This summary differs from CBS content.

It does claim the US went to great lengths to dismiss the victims for a decade. In 2024 it obtained a single device, started testing it on animals and achieved similar effects as experienced by the victims. The victims were then invited to the White House.

The effects aren't too far off from reports of the maduro raid, though my understanding is that the US just used a standard LRAD

The US has developed microwave weapons and you should assume that any opposing force's weapon when discovered will be copied and iterated upon

The schizophrenics are getting more reasonable by the day. They ARE listening through your phone. There might actually be a government vehicle following you without identification with intent to abduct (ICE), and now they might actually be tormenting you with invisible energy beams.

A common hallucination and delusion is that someone is beaming thoughts into the afflicted's head, causing some to believe that there are "voice to skull" devices deployed to torment them.

Well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

If its a CIA related conspiracy its easier to believe than not to. That agency has always managed to be up to no good.

Wasn't this something Nine Inch Nails tried at a concert during their ARG for Year Zero? They wanted to beam messages to specific audience members'. It just didn't work well.

Relevant Wired: https://www.wired.com/2008/05/army-removes-pa/

James C. Lin work is even more compelling https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9366412 NASA deciphered thoughts back in 2003 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20030018896 and DARPA budget of 2008 mentions "silent talk" https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fiscal_Year_2010_DAR... FMCW radars used to recognize your emotions https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1049...

I mean 2026 was the year the conspiracy theorists won. Like every unhinged theory he heard in the past about the ruling elite came true.

I am curious whether wearing a tin foil hat would prevent this attack.

no, tin foil hat would not prevent such attack. and shielding has to be grounded too

they are listening to your thoughts too while nerds think data center boom is all about AGI or at least better AI porn. no, it's about scaling up surveillance

You’re hearing about more by the day.

That’s the only change.

I've read reports about Havana Syndrome before and remain thoroughly unconvinced. The locations vary wildly, the symptoms vary wildly and can be explained by normal medical phenomena in a way Occam would find more agreeable.

Look at their 'smoking gun' evidence here:

>He tracked down an email, what he considers a receipt, for services provided to the Russian government by a member of Unit 29155 for "potential capabilities of non-lethal acoustic weapons."

Acoustic crowd control weapons are not mysterious, there are people on YouTube building and testing them! American companies will sell them to any oppressive government around the world (I believe the ones used against Serbian protestors were American). Yet this description contradicts speculation about microwaves just a bit further down in the article.

Yup. There's no hard evidence and so it still comes off as mass psychosis / psychosomatic / placebo effect with wildly-varying "symptoms". Surely, there would be some sizable "weapon" consuming massive amounts of energy nearby that would be visible and captured on video if it were true.

article explains that it is not sizable

I have been a skeptic of this until now. The explanation given by the researcher interviewed seems more than plausible to me.

It’s not the typical misunderstanding of non-ionizing radiation. The variable symptoms make a lot of sense, given that the weapon is basically just causing random electrical “failures” in the body. This was not a precision op. They saturated a location with this engineered interference signal, with the goal of maiming the target. No regard to whether their families and children would be collateral damage. It’s a war crime on multiple levels, on our soil. Then we presumably went and did the same thing during the Maduro raid at scale.

Just what we needed in 2026, more man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.

According to the interview, this was a pulsed microwave weapon, not acoustic.

The report claims a single weapon of the kind was acquired in 2024 and tested on animals resulting in similar damage.

according to James C. Lin: "A high-power microwave pulse-generated acoustic pressure wave initiated in the brain and reverberating inside the head could bolster the initial pressure, causing injury of brain matter. Thus, it is conceivable that the microwave auditory effect or the microwave pulse-induced pressure shock wave inside the head could become a potentially lethal or nonlethal weapon against animals and humans." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9366412

I wonder to what extent propaganda played a role in disbelieving their claims. US propaganda is very strong on the US being the best, having the most advanced technology, and that nations like Russia and China are inferior to us. So it's totally plausible to me that agents in the CIA would fall for that same propaganda: this technology doesn't exist, because, if it did, we would have invented it.

Propaganda can galvanize, but propaganda can also lull.

There is a plausible explanation for the reluctance of the US government to admit the authenticity of Havana Syndrome: the US military may have developed its own energy weapon that causes similar injuries and symptoms.

What is the evidence to support such a hypothesis? President Trump himself recently revealed the existence of a new secret energy weapon that was used to disable Nicolás Maduro's security team during the raid to capture the Venezuelan president [1].

According to one of Maduro's guards quoted by the New York Post: “At one point, they launched something; I don’t know how to describe it. It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside,” the witness said. "We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move. We couldn’t even stand up after that sonic weapon — or whatever it was."

[1] https://nypost.com/2026/01/24/us-news/trump-reveals-to-the-p...

If the weapon exists, there is nothing to gain strategically and a potential upper hand to lose if the government were to reveal their knowledge or possession of it.

Is this Trump's "discombobulator"?

Yes.

Was the the "Russian criminal network" the Chabad network?

If the Russians have such weapons, then we obviously have far more advanced versions.

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