“Havana Syndrome” among American diplomats in Cuba caused the chirping of crickets

BuzzFeed indeed reported on a declassified report by JASON, a group of advisers to the American government, where made next output:

“We believe the recorded sounds are of mechanical or biological origin, not electronic. The most likely source is the West Indian short-tailed cricket. “

But there is nothing fundamentally new in this information. January 2019 The New York Times reported about the study of biologists Alexander Stubbs and Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, who pointed to the same cricket Anurogryllus celerinictus. At the same time, the scientists noted: their version does not mean that there was no attack on American diplomats in Havana, but that the recorded sound was not associated with the attack.

In the plot of “Vesti”, as, indeed, in the publication BuzzFeed, it is not said that there is another study that explains the nature of the sounds recorded in Havana in a completely different way. University of Michigan professor Kevin Fu in May 2018 suggestedthat the source of the sound could be intermodulation distortion as a result of the interaction of several inaudible ultrasonic signals, likely from defective or misplaced Cuban surveillance equipment.

“Havana syndrome” refers to a set of neurological symptoms discovered in 2016 in employees of the US and Canadian diplomatic missions in Havana. Symptoms included dizziness, headaches, nausea, and hearing problems. In 2018, similar symptoms were found in employees of the American consulate in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. Former CIA officer Mark Polymeropoulos claimed to have experienced the same symptoms after a trip to Moscow in 2017. Cases of “Havana syndrome” were also recorded in Colombia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Georgia, Germany, Austria, Australia, Taiwan. In most of these cases, there are no reports of sound effects. Short-tailed crickets are found only in South America and the Caribbean.

The JASON report is not the only study commissioned by the US government on the causes of the syndrome. A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Evaluation of Diseases of US Government Officials and Their Families in Foreign Embassies,” published in December 2020, states that the most plausible mechanism for explaining these cases is appears to directed pulsed radio frequency energy.

University of San Diego professor Beatrice Colomb, who studied cases of a mysterious disease in Guangzhou, considersthat its cause is the effect of microwaves. According to her, family members of employees of the consulate in Guangzhou determined the presence of high levels of radiation using freely sold devices, and the results were such that “the arrows went off scale.” In January 2018, she reported this to the State Department, but then he forbade the disclosure of the measurement data.

According to the BBC, American diplomats have similar symptoms. were noted long before the Havana incident, but the State Department is hiding the problem. Lawyer Mark Zayd, representing the employee who was injured back in 1996, claims that the State Department has known about the problem since the late 1960s. The lawyer explains the silence on this matter by two versions: either the State Department does not want to admit its mistakes made over the years, which would cause numerous lawsuits, or the United States itself is developing microwave weapons and does not want to draw attention to the problem.

Thus, if the sound originally mistaken for an acoustic attack really came from insects, this does not mean that the “Havana syndrome”, as Vesti claims, turned out to be just the chirping of crickets. The only logical conclusion looks like this: if these are crickets, then the sounds recorded in Havana are not associated with the symptoms of the “Havana syndrome”.