It's nonsense but here we are with an idiot POTUS that believes this kind of crap, and in addition they are looking for an excuse to demonize Cuba anyway because ... Obama, brown people.

Come on, you really can’t expect decent US American diplomats to enjoy staying in a third-world hellhole like Cuba!

World Bank: Cuba Has the Best Education System in Latin America and the Caribbean
Cuba’s Academic Advantage: Why Students in Cuba Do Better in School
Level of educational achievement (wikipedia)

It's about time for this comparison:

Why doesn't somebody call Hans Blix?!

Do 'Sonic Weapons' Adequately Explain 'Health Attacks' on Diplomats in Cuba? (snopes.com, Sep. 25, 2017)

I'm glad Snopes addressed it. And I'm confident they got it right as I noted above. This kind of false belief is common and has many common features involved like people's symptoms are inconsistent and there is a focus of the CT like an employer or in this case the Cuban government.

You mean to tell me sonic attacks are NOT the cause of Morgellons ? :D

What is your point?
That the symptoms suffered by US diplmats still might be caused by aliens?
or that the POTUS, Commander in Chief Donald Trump, suffers from Munchausen by proxy?
I look forward to the article in Psycology Today. :)

We should probably also consider that the whole thing might be caused by something far more sinister than sonic attacks:

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE

By the way, in the trailer for the Cuban film Juan de los Muertos (Wikipedia) // Juan of the Dead (Wikipedia), you can see the building of the US embassy in Havana (when the movie was made: the US Interest Section) in the background, behind the attacking 'dissidents', from 0:36 to 0:38. :)

More Cuban diplomats expelled after alleged attacks on US diplomats:
Cuba has very qualified medical doctors, so why not let them take a look at the US diplomats and interview their US doctors? Cuba let the FBI investigate in Havana …

I don't want to have to don the tinfoil hat, but this increasingly sounds like a manufactured crisis in order to dismantle diplomatic relationships with Cuba and erase yet another Obama accomplishment :(

It sounds like a 60's fantasy, undisclosed "weapons" targeting US diplomats and IMO it's even more ridiculous when Cuban diplomats are being expelled for not doing enough to stop an "attack" where it's not clear that an attack happened and no-one can say who is suspected of the attack and how they might have carried it out.

You aren't wearing a tinfoil hat to come to the more reasonable conclusion. The hatters LOVE this story!
A couple days ago the AP news was that the first 'diplomats' affected, just days after Trumps election, were intelligence officers... aka SPIES! It seems several sources were willing to confirm this to reporters. Adding legs to the 'attack' story?

But I don't believe it was manufactured from the start. They took it, fed it, and grew it to ridiculous proportions.

If you have ever watched young children play and one of them falls or scrapes a knee, there is a moment where they look up to gauge the adult reaction. Stay calm and the kid isn't likely to cry. They stop for a few seconds and go on playing. Rush in and make a big deal and not only will the fallen kid cry, but the other kids get worried and upset as well!

From the AP news story:
No wonder that

And by now, every hypochondriac who ever stayed at the Hotel Capri in Havana appears to have scraped a knee:
My guess is that they were 'harmed' by the exact same 'attacks' …


Aggression against U.S. diplomats in Havana: Unfounded and implausible (Oct. 5), from the Cuban newspaper Granma, which Breitbart calls ”communist propaganda outlet Granma”.

Also from Granma: Declaración del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (Oct. 3)

New York Times, Oct. 5:

According to this recent article in Wired, there are objective ways of diagnosing impaired hearing:
The rest of the article hypothesizes that a combination of chemicals (ototoxicity) and sonics might have caused the symptoms suffered by the U.S. spies in Cuba.

Quite interesting divergent developments about this affair since yesterday.

On the one hand, the Guardian published an article relying upon "[s]enior neurologists " to push a "mass hysteria" explanatory hypothesis (BTW, "mass hysteria" has been relabeled mass psychogenic illness since the nineties).

On the other hand, Associated Press has put online what they claimed to be the first public audio of the sound allegedly broadcast to the affected persons in Cuba:

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

I AGREE

Obviously, major news medias then analyzed this audio file, like in making a specter analysis. And cautiously commented about it, a worthy example being an NBC article: "Listen to What Americans Heard in Mysterious Cuba Sound ‘Incidents’".

Well, I've made with Audacity a sound specter of the AP file:
https://media.joomeo.com/large/59e0fffc6fb9a.jpg

Out of the obvious 50-240 Hz AC hum/noise background parasitizing the recording device (I've a lot of it on my own records :(), what's curious is around the 7000 Hz peak. I'll focus on it if you're interested.

An old modem?! (youtube)
Also on iflscience.com.
The AP News story
Yes, please focus! And let us know if it encourages us to commit ritual satanic abuse if you play it backwards! :)

Just as I suspected - bad fluorescent light ballasts!

What was this audio recorded with? How much of the spectrum was lost?

This is so stupid. Any of us who have been at this site long enough have seen this phenomenon before in the paranormal section. It's called bullcrap.

A cellphone.

Kausik Sarkar, an acoustics expert and engineering professor at George Washington University said...


http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/13/politi...ons/index.html

That's the way to do it! That's how a true pro would tackle it! You go to a convention of UFO abductees and instead of asking them what their alleged abductors looked like, you show them a photo of a Grey one from Close Encounters:

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I AGREE

and ask them: "Is this what your abductors looked like?!"

Forgive me, but I have an immensely difficult time believing this is inadvertent leaking sound from radio equipment, or some badly-installed air conditioning unit.

Me too! But I have an even harder time believing that this is the emission of a super-sonic weapon (or even listening device) targeted at U.S. diplomats in order to make them deaf (or inadvertently rendering them so).

A tone at 8k is very directional, very hearable, and won't penetrate most solid walls.

There may have been other elements to the sound, but if that 8k was there, all you had to do was locate the sound by ear and say wtf, maybe put in some foam earplugs, go to a different room or leave the building. I do that kind of thing all the time in response to noise.

I don't get it.

Could you sleep through some "sonic attack" that was damaging your hearing?

It seems too weird to be true, but maybe.

Restoring more normal relations with Cuba is a good thing. A friend of mine who lives in the Bay area went on a vacation to Cuba a few months ago with a tour group. Said it was a good deal, and he'd recommend it to anyone. I've got the same question.
Given some of the third world places my sister lived when she worked for the State Department ... yes, I do. :p

Quite obviously it could not have been supersonic if embassy personnel were able to hear and record the sound using traditional devices.

There are; the original AP report said that this published bit was an excerpt - that according to the State Department investigators there were several recordings, that featured multi-tonal sounds with characteristics that differed from recording to recording, but that all of them had this particular element in common.

Some embassy personnel - if this is a real, actual recording of the alleged attacks. Others didn't hear (or record) a thing.

New audio adds to mystery of attacks on US diplomats (CNN, Oct. 14, 2017)

OK, I did exactly that, to focus, in focusing on a shorter, more accurately representative sample of 2.31 seconds of duration:
https://media.joomeo.com/large/59e7fc8ca6576.jpg


Then in magnifying the "size" [Taille] of the frequency spectrum from 1024 to 65536 [changing Audacity's language from French to English on the fly had a funny effect, which disappeared after a restart], which gave the following spectrum [screencapped]:

https://media.joomeo.com/large/59e7ee767ef50.jpg



Lots of well defined peaks and harmonics in what appeared as an undifferentiated mound at low "sizes". Both 40Hz and 50Hz AC peaks and their harmonics (until ~240Hz) are present. And also 15, 17, 25, and 30Hz peaks (all those ± 2Hz).

The mound morphed into a fancy fractal.

It seems weird there could be an invisible dragon in my garage, but maybe. :rolleyes:

Oh for pity's sake!

It's not like we don't understand the physics of sound, infra or not. Some reporters are so gullible.

These recordings are akin to videos of ghosts and moving lights in the sky. :rolleyes:

There you go, some sanity in the thread. (Not saying there aren't other sane posts.)

Edited by Agatha:

Edited to remove personalisation

I have a covert recording of what happened to those US diplomats.

The audio signal is at 1:15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wwQpACwcoM

We can see typical Cuban technology apparently dating from the 1960's.

ETA
A paper reviewing the issue here.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5528197/

Wherever all the "infrasound" and "ghost" absurdity came from I don't know; I wasn't aware that anyone anywhere was proposing that. But as for this noise - which is obviously a quite real thing - it really sounds to me like it does have a similar character to other noises produced by devices that are designed intentionally to irritate; i.e for crowd control, or by commercial ships to repel attackers and protesters, that kind of thing.

Let's assume for the moment that it's not. What might it be then instead?

With respect to dann, it doesn't sound like any modem I've ever personally heard or have been able to find a sample of online. I suppose it's possible it might be some other kind of digital data mode. I'm familiar with some of these and have been trying to match it, but it just doesn't sound quite like any I personally know about - closest it comes is maybe PSK31 - but it doesn't seem to contain any of the "inflection" that common digital modes have. Plus you run into the problem that you actually need an HF receiver to pick them up and turn them into audible sound; it's not like someone would be "accidentally" physically hearing a PSK31 or RTTY signal because of a chance building arrangement or a badly made speaker component picking it up and resonating.

No, we don't know that. There is no consistent 'noise' that has been detected. There's a mish-mash from nothing to some static or whining that for all we know came from the recording devices.

We agree. I simply lean toward the Trump admin. exaggerating this, as opposed to the mass hysteria explanation.

According to the AP, the specific sound that's been published occurred in several different recordings.

I have no idea what that signifies! Most of it seems to be way beyond the range of human hearing, so what would be the point of it? To annoy dolphins or scare away bats?!

50 years ago ghosts were used as an excuse to escalate a war in Southeast Asia:
Gulf of Tonkin incident
Tonkin Gulf Ghost
Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War