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Comment by rozab | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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 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

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

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