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The mystery surrounding Havana Syndrome has not been unraveled yet. But if you were to speak with anyone inside the intelligence community with overseas operations they would almost certainly convince you that it is real with anecdotal proof.
Even still, there remain skeptics. And one such skeptic sought to debunk the existence of Havana Syndrome by building a top secret homemade weapon in Norway only to inadvertently suffer symptoms characteristic of Havana Syndrome.
How Did A Norwegian Scientist Give Themselves Havana Syndrome?
The first instance of Havana Syndrome was back in 2016, in Havana, Cuba. Employees at the U.S. Embassy there started reporting similar symptoms en masse, including headaches, dizziness, hearing high-pitched sounds, balance issues, cognitive decline, and more.
Since 2016, there have been many such instances around the globe of this happening to members of the U.S. intelligence community.
Thus far, an actual weapon has not been identified being used on intelligence officials, that we know of, and there skeptics still abound about the validity of Havana Syndrome. And that’s where a Norwegian researcher enters the picture.
According to an article in the Washington Post yesterday, a Norwegian scientist working on a top secret project to debunk the existence of Havana Syndrome built a weapon “emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy” and inadvertently ended up suffering from the same symptoms correlated with Havana Syndrome.
Why is this news?
Interestingly, this all happened back in 2024. According to WaPo, “the secret test in Norway has not been previously reported. The Norwegian government told the CIA about the results, two of the people said, prompting at least two visits in 2024 to Norway by Pentagon and White House officials.”
Somehow, this has not proven to be enough evidence of a weapon capable of producing Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs), at least not for the U.S. Government to officially acknowledge the existence of Havana Syndrome.
Speaking with WaPo on the condition of anonymity, insiders claimed that “the test say it does not prove AHIs are the work of a foreign adversary wielding a secret weapon similar to the prototype tested in Norway. One of them noted that the effects suffered by the Norwegian researcher, whose identity was not disclosed by the people familiar, were not exactly the same as in a ‘classic’ AHI case.”
Let me also add that there was a time, many years ago, when I was skeptical myself about Havana Syndrome. I’d listened to a Stuff You Should Know podcast episode on H.S. and at the time, the most plausible explanation for it all was ‘mass hysteria’ which is an observable phenomenon. But in subsequent years, alleged attack after attack and consequent symptoms, have led me to wholeheartedly believed in the existence of weapons capable of producing these symptoms.
With overwhelming evidence out there and one Norwegian scientist accidentally attacking himself, what’s the hold up investigating this?