Since 2016, American and Canadian diplomats at an embassy in Havana, Cuba and US consulates and elsewhere have suffered neurological problems thought to have been caused by a mysterious directed energy weapon. According to several scientists and others who would know, multiple countries, including the US, have developed microwave weapons that could cause the brain injuries now known as "Havana Syndrome." In fact, the US company WaveBand Corporation prototyped such a device for the US Marines in 2004. According to The Guardian, scientists "with knowledge of the project" said that the ethics preventing human testing led to the project's cancellation. From The Guardian:
"The state of that science has for the most part been, if not abandoned, pretty much left fallow in the United States – but it has not been fallow elsewhere," said James Giordano, professor of neurology and ethics at Georgetown University Medical Center.
Giordano, who is also senior fellow in biotechnology, biosecurity and ethics at the US Naval War College, was brought in as adviser by the government in late 2016 after about two dozen US diplomats began falling sick in Havana. He later took part in an assessment for US Special Forces Command on which countries were developing the technology and what they had achieved.
"It became clear that some of the work that was conducted in the former Soviet Union was taken up again by Russia and its satellite proxies," Giordano said, adding that China had also developed directed energy devices to test the structure of various materials, with technology which could be adapted to weapons. A second major wave of brain injuries among US diplomats and intelligence officers took place in China in 2018.
Giordano is restricted from giving details on which country had developed what kind of device but he said the new weapons used microwave frequencies, able to disrupt brain function without any burning sensation.
"This was important – and rather frightening – to us, because it represented a state of advancement and sophistication of these types of instruments that heretofore had not been thought to be accomplished," he said.
image: transformation of US State Department photo
