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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

Note: “We were right” here means “it’s a real thing,” but the article has almost nothing concrete to offer about what actually is going on or who is responsible.

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There has been some recent reporting that has made "Havana syndrome is a real thing" look more plausible:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/14/...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/13/politics/havana-syndrome-...

Russia developed a less lethal directed energy weapon which is essentially a microwave oven radio signal switched off and on very quickly (likely something like a GHz signal with a highly directional antenna being switched at kHz)

Eyewitness reports at the Maduro kidnapping raid and a recent leak in the last few days regarding the US purchasing such a weapon from Russia and testing it at least on animals tie all of this together.

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

Someone with Russia-or-better state power developed the tech,

and you can source a working one through Russia,

I believe were the findings.

Exactly, the definitive claim in the headline is not at all supported by the article.

> Pentagon bought device through undercover operation some investigators suspect is linked to Havana Syndrome

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/13/politics/havana-syndrome-devi...

I think that if you offer Russian criminals millions of dollars for a mysterious device which could possibly cause Havana syndrome, you're certain to get a mysterious device.

This is confirmation bias with the side step of giving a ton of money to Russian criminals.

According to those reports, the US military tested it for more than a year on animals, and found that they suffered similar patterns of brain damage. They didn't just get a device and say "wow, this looks like a bunch of very suspicious electronics, too bad we can't turn it on!"

Naturally the testing claims from insiders could be specious. But once you go down the road of distrusting stories told by spooks, so could the purchase of a weapon in the first place. The CIA might not even be a real thing.

No, I'm sure they tested it, and I'm sure they found "similar patterns".

I'm also quite sure that the kind of person who would say "come on guys, this is just a RF noise machine, if they had used this in Havana we would have known ages ago" would not be trusted to work on such an important and serious investigation.

I'm not positing any more dysfunction than I see on the outside all the time. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former PM of Norway, doctor, and one time head of the WHO, was convinced she had RF-hypersensitivity.

One of my mantras is that powerful people believe all the stupid things regular people believe, they just tend to act differently on their beliefs.

These are not subtle effects. You either have an energy weapon that does visible damage to people and things, or it doesn't. Yes, incompetence is possible. You should not jump to "I mistake a candle for a burning skyscraper" levels of incompetence as your main model for a project that lasts a year and is extremely high-priority.

The rationale for rejecting the syndrome was the reported scientific consensus of the impossibility of such a device being smaller than a large truck. The revelation that such a device is possible, exists, works and is full of Russian parts seemed to change things. Further, the coincidental appearance of Russian agents on video within operational radius of incidents wearing backpacks sized to contain the device raises some questions.

Exactly what kind of device was it that had to be on the scale of a small truck but now can fit in a backpack? What kind of radiation did it emit?

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