Science Vs - Havana Syndrome: Did a Secret Weapon Fry Diplomats' Brains?

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Back in 2016, U.S. Embassy workers in Cuba were struck by a mysterious noise, followed by symptoms like headaches, dizziness and memory problems. This sent the U.S. scrambling to try to find the culprit. Could it have been an ear-piercing sonic weapon? Or something even sneakier — a device that could beam microwaves into your brain?? We speak to journalist Tim Golden, Prof. Douglas Smith, Prof. Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, Dr. Mitchell Joseph Valdés-Sosa, Prof. Chris Collins, and Prof. Alan Carson.  Our instagram is: science_vs Check out the transcript here: https://bit.ly/2Pf3jan Apply to the Science Vs internship! https://jobs.lever.co/spotify/4fd5b230-4bf5-463e-ac64-e13f369f1b1e This episode was produced by Nick DelRose and Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Taylor White. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Translation help by Kristin Torres. A huge thanks to the researchers who helped us out for this episode -- we spoke to around two dozen experts to get their thoughts on many different parts of this -- from the brain studies to the possibility of microwave weapons. Many of them just wanted to talk on background - but thank you so much for your time. And special thanks to Ayo Oti, Navani Otero, Andrea B. Scott, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against futuristic weapons. Today, we're cracking open the case of a mysterious illness. It hit U.S. government officials in Havana, Cuba, several years ago. And since then, things have gotten weirder and weirder. Victims have reported damage to their hearing, vision, balance, and memory. The cause, unknown. It's not going to end.

We're going to see more of these kinds of attacks in the future, and we need to be prepared for them. There could be folks out there that know what happened. This is so shocking and disturbing. Let's set the scene. It's 2016. Government officials from the U.S. are working in Cuba. And before they even get there, they're warned that it's going to be a little hostile. They're told, you know, you don't have any privacy. You're going to be listened to. Your phones are going to be tapped. You're going to be listened to. Your phones are going to be tapped.

You're going to be followed on the street. This is Tim Golden, editor-at-large for ProPublica. Tim and a colleague tried to work out how this mystery started. Initially, it was all very murky, and it was unclear what was going on. They dug into this, talking to more than three dozen officials and poring through confidential government documents. And Tim told us that patient Zero was a young CIA officer...

Who had been a fairly athletic guy... ..who in December 2016 wakes up one night because he hears this loud piercing sound in one ear. And it seems to be following him around the room. He feels unstable, nauseated, and soon after, he said he couldn't think properly. Just over a month later, two other CIA officers say the same thing happens to them.

Hearing a kind of a sharp sound that was a kind of a metallic sound. And then they had had headaches and dizziness and other symptoms that had followed that and being sort of shaken by this. These CIA officers were sent back to the U.S. to get checked out, and a doctor said that they'd sustained serious injuries. When the top guy at the embassy heard this in late March,

Tim says he called a staff-wide meeting to tell people what they knew. You know, everybody had to leave their cell phones outside and go into what's called a SCIF, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. So, you know, a secure windowless room. He said that some people might have been attacked, described the loud sound, the weird symptoms, and told diplomats that if they thought they were getting hit,

they should move away from windows. At the time, the U.S. government's best guess about what was going on was that this was some kind of sonic device that did it. But they really didn't know what this was. And most of what they said was, if anybody has been exposed, if anybody thinks that they have been exposed, you know, please let us know. What did the people at the embassy tell you about how they felt after this meeting? I think some people were very worried. I think some people were just completely freaked out. And I think they were more worried because they were told that this was all highly secret and sensitive and they weren't allowed to inform their families.

After this meeting, more and more people came forward, saying they got sick after experiencing some kind of attack. And it was happening under all sorts of circumstances. Right? You had people who were in their homes, behind walls. You had people who were in hotel rooms with big windows in the rooms. You had people who may have even been on the street in certain circumstances. Right away, this had huge political consequences. The US government quickly said that Cuba was responsible for what had happened. And the Trump administration pulled a bunch of people out of the embassy at Havana.

All in all, the CDC said that possibly 46 Americans were affected in Cuba. Some who still haven't fully recovered. Canadians in Cuba also said this happened to them. And a declassified government document says there are now reports of this going on in China and Uzbekistan. This was just a very weird, mysterious thing. There's just not a lot of situations in which the power of the American national security community

is focused in on a problem, and it really just gets nowhere in trying to figure out, OK, well, what did this? The US government was kind of freaking out because it seemed like they were getting attacked by a new kind of weapon here. At first, the culprit was some kind of sonic weapon, a special sound that damaged people's brains.

And then, late last year, a new idea got a lot of attention, that this was some kind of high-powered microwave weapon. But something else has been floating around from day one, that perhaps there was never any weapon at all here, that these symptoms are so vague and weird, that maybe this is all a case of mass hysteria. So today, we're going to try to get to the bottom of all this, looking at the science, to figure out what really happened down in Cuba.

When it comes to these so-called attacks, there's a lot of the cause unknown. But then there's science. Science Versus is coming up just after the break. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything.

That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why.

New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology, and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. We just heard that starting in 2016,

all these people fell mysteriously ill after hearing a strange noise in Havana, Cuba. And the US government started scrambling to figure out what was going on. Were these diplomats really under attack? To help them out, they fired off an email to Professor Douglas Smith. It just said, so we're looking for some expert to, you know, weigh in on this. And I thought, this is a scam. You know, it was so weird.

You know, you get a lot of people self-identifying as somebody from a government or whatever. And you're like, come on, you know. But this was so weird. You know, you get a lot of people self-identifying as somebody from a government or whatever, and you're like, come on, you know. But this was no scam. The government was reaching out to Doug because he studies brain injuries at the University of Pennsylvania. And they wanted him to get a bunch of specialists together to take a look at these patients to help figure out what was going on here. Like, did these patients have actual brain injuries? You know, is there really something there?

Could it be just psychological? Or was there something real? And, you know, so I assembled a team. He brings together nerds who treat brain injuries and study brain images. And then two dozen patients who had been in Cuba made their way to the University of Pennsylvania to see Doug and the team. And they get to work, examining the patients. And right away, Doug notices something coming up again and again. The sound. Most of his patients heard it too. Some described kind of a hearing a low metallic kind of tone or scraping noises. Some was kind of a trilling kind of a hearing, a low metallic kind of tone or scraping noises.

Some was kind of a trilling kind of insect-y sound or just kind of this buffeting sound, like if you drive with the back window open down the highway, that kind of that... He also noticed that a lot of the patients had problems with their balance, hearing. They got headaches or had trouble sleeping. But the big thing that really bothered

these patients was that they just couldn't think as clearly as they used to. It was like their concentration and memory was just shot. They noticed that they really weren't being able to do their jobs and they just felt kind of, you know, devastated by the end of each day. So, for example, trying to get your suitcase packed and just trying to figure out, well, what do I put first or where do I have to go for this? Or, you know, just this utter confusion of doing a simple task was really unnerving for some of these folks. You know, just like, you know, you start to get angry yourself. This is a simple thing. You know, why can't I do even the simple thing? And to help get to the bottom of what might have caused this, they put the patients through some tests.

So, for example, one test that Doug told us about looks at the patient's eye movements. It's called convergence. So, base convergence is just when your eyes kind of go cross-eyed. If I put my finger straight up in the air and kind of moved it towards your nose, your eyes have to converge. They have to kind of move together like a cross-eyed look.

Doug says most people can move their eyes like this pretty easily, but half the patients struggle to do this. Like eventually their eyes broke away and stopped tracking the finger. And to Doug, the eyes tripping up like this, it suggests that there's something haywire going on in the brain.

He says, think about it like this. For your neurons to work, they have to fire at each other in this fast, coordinated way. Like they're in a relay race and passing around a baton. But for these patients? All the timing is wrong, and you end up having the baton drop someplace, which we see in the way the eyes just can't converge anymore.

As Doug ran more and more tests on these patients, he realized something very weird. The symptoms they were having. He'd seen them before. In people with concussions. And Doug would know, because concussions are sort of his beat. He's on the scientific advisory board for the NFL. But, of course, unlike footballers,

these patients weren't spending all day bashing their heads on the field. We didn't have that history of the head impact, and yet they're describing neurological symptoms that were pretty intriguing. Actually, some patients called it immaculate concussion. Immaculate concussion, because they weren't hit on the head. Concussion without the concussion, right. After all of Doug's team saw the patients, they came together to talk about what they found. It was in a small conference room. We're kind of jammed in. I got a little catering. And I said, all right, what do people think? Just one person just piped up and he said, I don't know for the rest of you,

but I really think this is real. This is absolutely real. They have real neurological symptoms. And then one by one, everybody else agreed and independently, they all came to the same conclusion unanimously that this was real. And Doug would keep probing these patients, later doing sophisticated scans of their brains to see what was going on in there.

And yeah, he found that there were differences between the brains of healthy folks and these patients. And for Doug, these scans all back up that something was wrong here. There really was something there. But as far as a smoking gun, this doesn't tell us what caused it. Just that something did. But as far as a smoking gun, this doesn't tell us what caused it. Just that something did. Something did. So, something happened to these people. But what? Everything pointed to that sound.

The thing that these patients said they heard right before getting sick. Both scientists and the media zeroed in on it. These mysterious sonic attacks. Sonic attacks. Sonic attacks. Sonic weapon. As the media hype is reaching fever pitch, in October of 2017, the Associated Press gets sent a recording of a sound that some embassy workers say was what hurt their brain in Cuba. It was published online and we're going to play that sound here. of a sound that some embassy workers say was what hurt their brain in Cuba.

It was published online, and we're going to play that sound here. Be careful, though. This recording isn't the most pleasant. Here it is. So what is that sound? Well, once it came out, scientists from around the world pored over it to see what it could be. And one of those scientists was Professor Fernando Montalegre Zapata. He took the recording to his lab, analysed it really closely

and compared it to some other sounds he had on file. And then he got a match, finding what he thought was the heinous culprit. That recording that the AP agency published is a cricket. This is Fernando. He's an entomologist at the University of Lincoln in the UK. It's a cricket. I am 100% sure that it's a cricket. Fernando studies insects and normally he doesn't touch politics. But he felt the need to chirp up here, saying people were too quick to conjure up some scary villain.

Because for Fernando, hearing this sound, it was more like hearing from an old friend. I remember I was probably 12 years old and I have been always fascinated with this cricket song. So one day, little Fernando scooped up a cricket from his backyard and plopped it into a little jar in his bedroom. Later that night, he fell asleep next to his new pet. That was until two or three in the morning when he was rudely awakened. It was just so loud and I said, what the hell is going on here? And when I realized

that the sound was coming from the little jar, oh, you are the one who's singing. Oh, and I just took the animal and put it outside and still still outside, I could hear it really loud. Crickets make this sound by rubbing their little wings together to call to their mates. And Fernando says that he can really understand why people wouldn't recognize this noise as a cricket, particularly if you're not familiar with these insects. And that's because they make a surprising amount of noise,

particularly if they're singing indoors, and then that sound is going to bounce around and get even louder. The wings are already resonating and they're very loud. And if they are in a room, just... Fernando's just picked up a toilet paper roll. Singing from here. Yeah, it will be even louder, yeah. And this can cause you nightmares, believe me.

Fernando took some recordings that he had of crickets and played them over a loudspeaker inside a room so he could capture the echoes. Here's what it sounds like. And here's the AP recording. Pretty bloody close. And Fernando says any minor differences could be because he doesn't know exactly where this was recorded, so it might have echoed differently.

And there are other researchers who agree that that recording, it's of a cricket. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that what happened in Cuba wasn't a sonic attack. It's possible that whoever sent that recording to the Associated Press got confused. But there are a couple of very good reasons to think that there was no sonic weapon here. Number one, for a noise to hurt people from outside their home, it has to be a big noise. I mean, really, really loud. We talked to Dr. Mitchell Valdez-Sosa about this.

He's a neuroscientist heading Cuba's committee to try to find out what happened here. They would have taken the noise that a jet engine produces right immediately outside to have reached the levels that a jet engine produces right immediately outside to have reached the levels that could damage the hearing. Wow. It's literally like when you go to a rock concert and if you're up the front and the music is too loud, that's the effect we're talking about here. Yes, exactly. And Mitchell says if you were blasting weird noises around Havana, lots of other people would hear it. He says the researchers in Cuba talked to a bunch of people,

those who worked at the embassy or lived near the diplomats who got sick. And no Cuban reported anything strange. And Cuba is a very porous society, you know. There's a lot of gossip and, you know, grapevine. And anything that happens, any place in Havana, in less than 15 minutes, the rest of Havana knows about it.

Nobody saw nothing. Or heard anything. Or heard anything strange. So this, this is simply absurd. And other scientists agree here, including our concussion researcher, Doug. He also told us that other kinds of sounds, like ultrasound or infrasound, don't make sense either. We don't know of anything that from a sonic source, a sound source,

that can cause damage to the brain that might explain the symptoms. So, after countless news reports and hot takes about sonic attacks, we started hearing less and less about them. It kind of fell by the wayside, much like a ratty scrunchie in the 2000s. And so, by early last year, the case of the immaculate concussion had gone cold. That was until just a few months ago, when a group of scientists published a report for the very prestigious National Academy of Sciences. They looked at all kinds of explanations for what might have caused this,

from insecticides to viruses, and said that the most likely thing that happened was that perhaps these people were hit with something that's never been seen on the battlefield before, a new kind of device. And that's coming out just after the break. Welcome back. We just learned that these so-called sonic attacks in Havana, they probably weren't sonic. That is, it's very unlikely that some weird sound was blasted into the ears of these diplomats. But now we have new information about what this weapon might actually be.

You see, late last year, the National Academy of Sciences put out a report. A group of 19 scientists got together and they said that the most likely culprit here had nothing to do with sound, but instead was a high-powered device that uses microwaves to pummel the brain. And this idea of beaming microwaves onto embassy workers, it actually isn't new. It's kind of retro. Starting in the 1950s, the Soviet Union shot microwaves into the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and they did this over more than two decades. The U.S. military didn't think it made anyone sick back then, but in the decades since, the Russians have kept researching this. There are published papers showing that they're clearly studying what souped-up, ultra-powerful microwaves can do.

And scientists even talked about their work in a news report on Russian telly. Because of all this, people have even suggested that Russia might have had a hand in these attacks. So, is it possible that a device using high-powered microwaves could be behind what happened in Cuba? To find out, we're talking to Chris Collins, a professor of radiology at New York University. And before we got to talking about the mysterious world of microwave weapons, Chris had some very important advice for me that has nothing to do with weapons.

This is something you must do. Hot Krispy Kreme donuts. They, you know, they have this neon sign. Neon sign says hot donuts now. And you get these hot donuts, they like melt in your mouth. It's mind altering. Oh my gosh. You have to have them while they're hot.

They're better than like if you just shoved them in the microwave, right? Yeah. I've never done that. But we didn't call up Chris to talk about donuts. We called him to help us figure out this microwave weapon thing. Okay, so microwaves, whether they're in your kitchen appliances or perhaps a military grade weapon, are a type of electromagnetic energy. And they're actually used in lots of tools around us. We also beam microwaves at cars with a police radar gun. The policeman can be

quarter of a mile away and can tell how fast your particular car is going because there's this beam of microwave energy. The gun sends out an invisible wave, a microwave, through the air to your car. These waves hit your car and the energy bounces back to the gun, letting the cop know how fast you're driving. And Chris told us that a microwave weapon could be a suspect here for a couple of key reasons. So unlike blasting sound from a speaker, which other people would hear, microwaves can be beamed out from a device and then aimed at something very specific, whether it's a car or someone's head.

But there's another cooler reason to point the finger at microwaves. And that's because this could explain why some of the diplomats reported hearing those weird sounds. So we've basically knocked out the possibility that these noises came from someone blasting sounds at them. But what if, instead, the weapons somehow made them hear noises inside their head? Noises that no-one else could hear.

Because that's something that microwave beams can do. It's known as the Frey effect because back in the 1960s, a scientist called Alan Frey realised that if he beamed microwaves at someone's head from several hundred feet away and then flicked the beam on and off at a particular rate, sort of pulsing it, the person would hear sounds. And so people will do a single pulse, which would just result in a click.

We spoke to two academics who did this to themselves and one said it sounded a bit like clanking keys together underwater. And you can hear this because the pulsing microwave beam makes some tissue in your brain a tiny tiny bit hotter and then it cools back down. And this all happens so fast that it creates a wave of pressure that travels inside your head to your inner ear. And that expansion and contraction causes a vibration. And when you say vibrations, vibrations in the tissue,

the brain tissue is literally like moving just a little. Yes, yes, you can say that. Like a slice of brain that's like... Little, you know, little waves traveling through the tissue, if you will. It's a bit like if you tap a really large piece of jello on one side, you can see the jiggles traveling through it. Well, that jiggling rattles the little hair cells in your ears, and that will send a message back to your brain, which is interpreted as if you just heard a click. And you can get fancier than a click. If you start playing about with how you switch on

and off the microwave beams, you can make people hear different things, like even a musical note. If you were to turn it on and off at, say, 262 times a second, you would actually be able to hear middle C. And a middle C, just to remind us, if you could sing that. Middle C? Yeah, well, without picking up my guitar, I would be, I'm going to say it's a round. We checked and Chris is pretty much bang on with his middle C. No guitar needed. Anyway, what all this tells us is that if you had the right machine that could emit microwaves just so, you could point it at someone and make them hear something very weird. And Chris says, yeah, if you don't know what's going on here, that might be very creepy. Just suppose that you heard a sound and

you could move and get away from it. I mean, you would definitely remember that. You can imagine being traumatized by it. So a microwave weapon is suspected exactly because of that. So microwaves, they are ticking some boxes here. You could make someone hear a sound that others around you can't hear. But before we pack up and have our coffee and doughnuts, Chris says that much like a doughnut, this microwave theory has one big hole in it, and it starts here. Experiments have shown that these sounds that you hear

through the fray effect, the clicks and the buzzers, they're really faint. One academic said that he could barely hear it in a silent room. It would be very quiet, OK? It would be very quiet. But these patients talk about a very loud sound and a very, it's a sustained sound. Diplomats in Cuba could hear the sounds easily above the traffic and above of Havana. And Chris says that to get those sounds that loud in your head, if you were to use microwaves, you'd have to crank the power way up. Yes, exactly that. You're cranking up the power. So yeah, to get from something that's barely audible to something that's very loud, even painfully loud,

you really are increasing the power a million times higher, certainly hundreds of thousands of times. And just like zapping a donut for too long in the microwave, if you start cranking up the power here, things do not look good. And you would definitely fry somebody's brain before you could cause a loud, sustained sound with a microwave weapon. Oh, wow. Fry their brain. Like they would see like a singed burn patch.

Yeah. I mean, you'd fry the skin too. So to put this into perspective, I mean, you don't even, you know, these patients don't even complain about a warming sensation, let alone being instantly fried. None of the diplomats reported feeling even a little bit warm on their face. And for Chris, this is a big problem with the microwave idea. In fact, he's just about ready to pop it in the bin. But there's one thing stopping him. Chris told us that the vast majority of research into microwaves and what they can do to us is about safety.

Nerds like Chris aren't trying to design a weapon that could hurt people. Have we explored all possibilities? And the answer is, well, no. If you had more nefarious intent, you probably wouldn't be publishing in the same journals that the rest of us are, and you probably wouldn't publish at all. Basically, Chris is like, who knows what secret military scientists are cooking up?

So this is getting very hypothetical, okay? And I don't, it's really hard to imagine how that could be done. Other academics have pointed to other problems with this microwave idea. Like, really powerful microwaves can screw with nearby electronics, crashing phones and computers. And this is actually the kind of thing that the Soviets said they were doing decades ago, targeting electronics and not brains. And the US military is in this game too. These days, they're pouring money into high-powered microwave weapons for this very thing, seeing if they can knock out drones or even mess up power grids. But in Havana, no one reported anything like this.

It seemed like phones and computers were working just fine. As for that NAS report, we reached out to a bunch of scientists who worked on it, and they wouldn't talk to us. So given that a newfangled microwave weapon seems pretty unlikely here, what did happen to these people in Cuba? Well, throughout all of this, a couple of big things have kept tickling our brains. One is that not everyone who got sick reported hearing a weird noise. And then there were the symptoms. While you could kind of cluster some people's symptoms into the same sort of stuff, headaches, dizziness,

looking at all of the patients, there was no single thing that all of them had. And it's these facts that are leading some researchers to wonder, well, perhaps a weapon didn't hurt all these people. Perhaps there's something psychological going on. Now, the reason that this was poo-pooed from the beginning was because scientists said they found real objective injuries in these patients, things they said they could measure.

So there was this idea that, well then, this can't be psychological. Our language likes things to be one or other. Well then, this can't be psychological. Our language likes things to be one or other. You know, we want it to be a brain thing or a psychological thing, but it's not how the brain works. This is Alan Carson, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Edinburgh. My understanding is that there were a group of people who felt undoubtedly ill, but there were also a group of doctors who felt if the patient feels undoubtedly ill,

then it can't be psychological because that's not real. I don't think it's the right paradigm. Alan's work and many others are showing that things can start psychological and then very quickly manifest into these real physical symptoms. At the same token, physical things can become psychological. So here's how this whole thing in Havana might have played out. Let's say one of those CIA agents who first reported their symptoms was never attacked by a weapon, but instead was hit with a nasty bout of vertigo. It can actually come on quite suddenly,

sometimes for no known reason, and it's pretty common. You know, I've had it myself. You just roll over in bed one night and it feels like somebody's picked you up and thrown you over. It's utterly terrifying. And that's even if you know what it is. And if you've got no idea, it's a truly bizarre experience. All right. So let's say you've just arrived in Cuba. You roll out of bed, totally off balance and feeling dizzy. You've been told that this trip to Cuba is going to be hostile. People are going to follow you around. And so you don't think, oh crap, I just got vertigo. But instead your first thought is, I'm getting attacked. In the same way as if I'm lying watching telly tonight and I get a twinge

across my chest, I'll probably think I've just stretched for my cup of tea wrong. But if one of my closest friends of my age has just died of a heart attack. I'm going to approach that in a differential way. Now you're super worried about this. And that anxiety can bring on all these other symptoms. Symptoms that could potentially turn up in eye tests or brain scans. And it sort of snowballs. And then there's that big staff meeting where people were told there might be some scary

sonic device around. And so perhaps this all starts happening to more and more people. And talking to some of the experts, it's a bit like diplomats, CIA agents, important men wouldn't be affected by something like this. It's completely spurious to suggest they wouldn't be affected by something like this? It's completely spurious to suggest they wouldn't. It's only human and natural that you would. And until people have a more grown-up view of what brain is and what psychological means, you're always going to have problems getting a sensible answer. Now, Alan doesn't think he has the answer here.

He's just watched this, what happened in Havana story, play out in the press and scientific circles and keep seeing this mistake, either it's real or it's psychological, when it so easily could have been both. So, what do we think happened in Cuba? Well, while we were researching this, we really flipped and flopped trying to work out what started it all. And you know, some researchers like Doug are still

convinced that there's something else going on here. This wasn't triggered by something psychological. For us though, it comes down to this question of whether there's this brand new weapon that no one has publicly seen and we don't even really know how it would work. Or whether the main thing going on here is this very well-known phenomenon where our brain makes us sick. So for now, that's where we're leaning. But who knows? Maybe Vladimir Putin is listening to this episode with a knowing grin and a very, very warm donut in his hand. That's Science Versus. Hello. Hello. Nick Delrose, producer at Science Versus.

How many citations in this week's episode? There are 152 citations. 152. How did we get there? We read a lot of papers, spoke to a lot of people. And if people want to see these citations, where should they go? They can go to our show notes and follow the link to the transcript. And another thing that we want to tell our listeners about today is that we are hiring for a new Science Vs Intern.

And you, Nick, used to be our intern. Oh, yeah. Yes, remember that? Oh, yeah. Do you have anything you want to tell our listeners who might want to apply for said internship? Oh, you should definitely apply. Come nerd out with us.

Yay, do it. Do it. We're going to put a link also in the show notes. Seems appropriate. Do we have anything fun on Instagram today? Today I have the video of a cricket chirping in slow motion. Oh. Oh, you're looking now.

Oh, it's cool. You see the wings slowly rubbing up against each other. All right. So if you want to see that, go check out our Instagram, science underscore VS. There we go. Thanks. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. A couple of quick things I want to shout out. The first is if you want to help us here at Science Versus, the best way you can do that is listen to the show on Spotify. It's free. You can just download the app and then follow us. That would be great to the show on Spotify. It's free. You can just download the app and then follow us. That would be great. So listen on Spotify. Another thing, if you want to know more

about this topic of what happened in Havana, the fellas over at Stuff You Should Know just tackled this too, and it's a great episode. So go check it out. All right. Finally, a big thanks to Flora Lichtman from the very, very wonderful show, Every Little Thing. Flora gave us the idea to do this episode back in the before times, and we've been following it ever since. So thank you so much, Flora, and her podcast is Every Little Thing. Go check that out too. This episode was produced by Nick Delrose and me, Wendy Zuckerman,

with help from Meryl Horne, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Taylor White. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Marcus Begala, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Translation help by Kristen Torres. A huge thanks to all of the researchers

who helped us out for this episode. We spoke to around two dozen experts to get their thoughts on many different parts of this, from the brain studies to the possibility of microwave weapons. A lot of them only wanted to talk to us on background, but we're just so grateful for your time. So thank you so much.

Also, a special thanks to Ayo Otti, Navani Otero, Andrea B. Scott, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll back you next time.