Sunday, January 13, 2019

Noise Microwave "Attack" On US Embassy Workers in Cuba Was Just Male Courtship Sounds of the Indies Short-Tailed Cricket

US Embassy in Cuba
In November 2016, American diplomats in Cuba complained of persistent, high-pitched sounds followed by a range of symptoms, including headaches, nausea and hearing loss.

Exams of nearly two dozen of them eventually revealed signs of concussions or other brain injuries, and speculation about the cause turned to weapons that blast sound or microwaves.


On Friday, two scientists presented evidence that those sounds were not so mysterious after all. They were made by crickets, the researchers concluded, according to The New York Times.

Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley, and Fernando Montealegre-Z of the University of Lincoln in England studied a recording of the sounds made by diplomats and published by The Associated Press.

“There’s plenty of debate in the medical community over what, if any, physical damage there is to these individuals,” said Stubbs in a phone interview. “All I can say fairly definitively is that the A.P.-released recording is of a cricket, and we think we know what species it is.”

Stubbs presented the results of the analysis at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. He and Dr. Montealegre-Z also posted an early version of their study online. They plan to submit the paper to a scientific journal in the next few days.

When Stubbs first heard the recording, he was reminded of insects he came across while doing field work in the Caribbean. When he and Montealegre-Z downloaded the sound file, they found that its acoustic patterns — such as the rate of pulses and the strongest frequencies — were very similar to the songs of certain kinds of insects.

Male singing insects produce regular patterns during courtship. Females are attracted to certain males based on their songs, which has led to the evolution of different songs in different species.

They found a striking resemblance to the recording and one species in particular: the Indies short-tailed cricket.

 The New York Times, always on the lookout for attacks against the U.S. by foreign elements, reported this in September:
During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control...
Now, doctors and scientists say such unconventional weapons may have caused the baffling symptoms and ailments that, starting in late 2016, hit more than three dozen American diplomats and family members in Cuba and China. The Cuban incidents resulted in a diplomatic rupture between Havana and Washington...
The medical team that examined 21 affected diplomats from Cuba made no mention of microwaves in its detailed report published in JAMA in March. But Douglas H. Smith, the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a recent interview that microwaves were now considered a main suspect and that the team was increasingly sure the diplomats had suffered brain injury.
Strikes with microwaves, some experts now argue, more plausibly explain reports of painful sounds, ills and traumas than do other possible culprits — sonic attacks, viral infections and contagious anxiety...
Members of Jason, a secretive group of elite scientists that helps the federal government assess new threats to national security, say it has been scrutinizing the diplomatic mystery this summer and weighing possible explanations, including microwaves.
-RW 

5 comments:

  1. Had the US invaded Cuba over this alleged attack on diplomats, would the media have even reported it or the anti-war movement protested it? No, all we would have heard is crickets...

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    1. Ah, I see what you did there...haha

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    2. This is a comment where I wish we had a "thumbs up" option. I'll give you two. Hilarious.

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  2. Wasn’t the microwave oven a Soviet weapon disguised as an American consumer product designed to slowly induce paranoia so that over the years Americans, especially among the political elite because they drink gobs of coffee, would begin to distrust each other?

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  3. Ingenious that they are masking their sonic weapons as male courtship sounds of Indies short-tailed crickets.

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