The Havana Syndrome: Sonic Weapon or Mass Psychogenic Illness

Late in 2016, staff at the United States embassy in Havana began reporting something strange. A political officer heard a piercing, directional noise in his home — a grating, high-pitched sound that seemed to come from a specific direction and stopped when he moved. Others described similar experiences: a sudden sensation of pressure in the head, a sound like grinding metal or swarming insects, felt in one part of a room and absent a few feet away. In the weeks and months that followed, embassy personnel reported a lingering constellation of symptoms — headaches, dizziness, nausea, ringing ears, difficulty concentrating, sleep disruption, and in some cases problems with balance and memory that persisted for months. By 2018 the United States had withdrawn most of its embassy staff from Havana, and reports of similar incidents were emerging from other countries.

The phenomenon acquired a name, “Havana Syndrome,” and a menacing explanation: that a foreign adversary, most often assumed to be Russia, had deployed some novel directed-energy weapon against American personnel abroad. Nearly a decade on, that explanation has been neither confirmed nor cleanly dismissed. This is a case that resists the tidy ending, and the most honest thing a folklorist of belief can do with it is take both leading accounts seriously — because the people who fell ill were real, their suffering was real, and the two competing stories about what happened to them each carry genuine weight and genuine gaps.

The people who got sick

Start with what is not in dispute, because it is the anchor for everything else. A substantial number of American diplomats, intelligence officers and their family members reported the sudden onset of real, sometimes disabling symptoms, and many of them had been healthy, capable professionals with no history of the problems they developed. These were not people looking for attention; several were career officers whose conditions damaged or ended their work. Their distress is not the thing in question. Something happened to them, and it left some of them genuinely unwell.

Early medical involvement came through the University of Pennsylvania, where a team examined a group of the affected personnel. Their findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2018 and 2019, described patients who resembled sufferers of concussion — traumatic brain injury — but without any blow to the head to account for it. The phrase “immaculate concussion” entered the coverage. Later brain-imaging work at the National Institutes of Health, published in 2024, complicated even this, finding no consistent evidence of brain injury or structural difference between the affected group and controls, while carefully noting that the absence of a visible lesion does not mean nothing happened. The medical picture, in short, has never resolved into a single clear diagnosis, and reasonable specialists have read the same scans in opposite directions.

The strongest case for a weapon

The steelman for the directed-energy explanation deserves to be laid out at its most persuasive, because it is far from frivolous and serious scientists have advanced it. The leading candidate mechanism is pulsed radiofrequency or microwave energy. There is a real, decades-old, published phenomenon here: the “Frey effect,” named for the American scientist Allan Frey, who demonstrated in the early 1960s that pulsed microwave radiation can be perceived by the human auditory system as clicks or buzzing sounds, apparently by causing tiny thermoelastic expansions in the head that the ear registers as noise. A person standing in a beam of pulsed microwaves can, in principle, “hear” a sound that has no acoustic source in the room — which maps unnervingly well onto the directional, localised noises the Havana witnesses described.

The most authoritative endorsement of a directed-energy mechanism came in December 2020, when a committee of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, chaired by the immunologist David Relman, examined the evidence at the State Department’s request. The committee concluded that “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” was the most plausible explanation for the core symptoms in a subset of cases, judging it more consistent with the acute clinical picture than the alternatives it considered. A separate, largely classified JASON advisory group had earlier raised the possibility as well. Add to this the reported involvement of the CIA and the fact that Russia has a long documented history of research into microwave and acoustic effects on humans, and you have a coherent, technically literate hypothesis: a novel non-lethal weapon, deployed to harass or incapacitate American personnel, whose signature happens to resemble both concussion and a known microwave-hearing effect.

Taken on its own, that case is strong enough that dismissing it as paranoia would be intellectually lazy. It has a plausible physical mechanism, a distinguished scientific committee behind one version of it, a capable and motivated suspect, and a cluster of witnesses whose accounts share specific, unusual features.

Where the weapon story strains

Then comes the hard part, and honesty requires walking through it just as carefully. In March 2023, the US intelligence community released the results of a lengthy, multi-agency investigation into what it now clinically termed “anomalous health incidents.” Its assessment was striking: seven agencies concluded it was “very unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible, whether through a weapon or any other means, with most agencies holding that view at “moderate” to “high” confidence. Investigators had examined thousands of reports across many countries and found no credible evidence of a weapon, no device, no intelligence intercept revealing an adversary programme, and no consistent geographic or technical pattern of the kind an attack campaign should leave.

The physical objections to the weapon hypothesis are substantial. A microwave device capable of producing serious neurological effects at a distance, through walls, precisely enough to target individuals in their homes and hotel rooms across the globe, would be a large, power-hungry, detectable piece of equipment — and despite intense searching, nothing of the kind was ever found near any incident. No adversary is known to possess such a weapon, and the physics of delivering enough energy to injure a brain without also cooking skin and other tissue is genuinely difficult. The reported incidents also spread in a pattern that looks less like a deployed campaign and more like a spreading awareness: once the phenomenon was named and publicised, and once personnel were formally asked to report any unusual symptoms, reports multiplied and appeared in ever more locations, including places with no plausible operational rationale for an attack.

The other honest explanation

The alternative account, favoured by many neurologists and by the eventual weight of the intelligence findings, is uncomfortable to state without sounding dismissive, so it has to be stated with care: much of Havana Syndrome may be a real illness with an ordinary set of causes, amplified and shaped by fear. Under this reading, the initial cluster in Havana might have had various mundane origins — one much-discussed 2019 analysis, published in a bioacoustics context, suggested that some of the recorded “attack sounds” from Cuba matched the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket. Pre-existing conditions, ordinary headaches and vestibular problems, the ambient stress of high-pressure postings, and the effects of intense scrutiny of one’s own body could account for much of the rest.

The crucial concept here is what specialists call functional or psychogenic illness, and it carries a stigma that badly distorts the discussion. To say that symptoms are psychogenic is not to say they are faked, imagined, or a sign of weakness. It means the nervous system is genuinely malfunctioning — producing real dizziness, real pain, real cognitive fog — in response to psychological rather than structural triggers. The neurologist Robert Baloh and others have argued that Havana Syndrome fits the profile of mass psychogenic illness spreading through a community under threat, where the very act of being warned to watch for symptoms of a mysterious attack primes people to notice and attribute ordinary sensations to it. This is a documented, well-studied phenomenon with a long history, and it thrives precisely among conscientious, high-functioning people in stressful, high-stakes environments — which describes embassy personnel exactly.

The reason this explanation is so resisted is worth naming, because it is the human heart of the case. To a diplomat left genuinely unable to work, being told there was no weapon can feel like being told the injury was not real, or worse, that it was self-inflicted. The psychogenic account never claims that, yet that is how it is heard, and the stigma is so heavy that “we were attacked by a Russian ray gun” can feel more dignifying than “your own brain, under sustained fear, made you ill.” The choice between the two stories is not only about physics. It is also about which explanation lets a suffering person keep their sense of themselves intact.

Why the weapon story is so much easier to hold

Here the case joins a much older pattern, and it is the pattern that makes it worth an Unravelled piece at all. A directed-energy weapon is, in a strange way, the more comforting story. It gives the suffering an external, intentional cause. It means the victims were targeted by an enemy rather than betrayed by their own nervous systems, and it means the harm can be blamed, investigated, and perhaps someday punished. Above all it makes a diffuse, ambiguous, medically messy phenomenon legible — it turns a fog of unexplained illness into a clear narrative of attack and defence.

That pull towards an agent, an intention, a designed cause behind frightening events, is one of the most reliable engines of belief. People reach for it because randomness and internal malfunction are far harder to sit with than an enemy with a weapon. The same instinct shapes how the public reads unexplained lights in the sky and unexplained sensations in the body alike, supplying Rendlesham’s witnesses with a spacecraft and Havana’s with a ray gun. And once a threatening explanation is available and officially entertained — as the directed-energy hypothesis genuinely was, by a National Academies committee no less — it becomes almost impossible to unsay, because retracting it sounds like calling the victims liars. The stigma against psychogenic illness and the pull towards an external enemy work together to keep the weapon story alive well past the point where the evidence supports it, much as the fear of admitting an ordinary cause keeps other medical panics circulating long after investigation, as with the anxieties around Havana’s cold-war cousins in mass illness.

Living with the unresolved

The most truthful ending here is not a satisfying one, and pretending otherwise would betray both sets of witnesses. The intelligence community’s considered judgement is that a foreign weapon is very unlikely, and the physical case against such a weapon is strong. But “very unlikely” is not “impossible,” dissenting analysts and clinicians remain unconvinced, some individual cases have never been explained, and a distinguished scientific panel did once find directed energy the most plausible account of the acute symptoms in a subset of patients. It is entirely possible that Havana Syndrome is several different things at once — a small number of genuinely anomalous incidents with an unknown cause, wrapped inside a much larger cloud of ordinary illness, stress and fear-driven attribution that grew as the phenomenon became famous.

What deserves to survive the argument is respect for the people at the centre of it. They reported what they experienced honestly, they suffered for it, and they have spent years being alternately weaponised as proof of a Russian attack and quietly written off as hysterics — neither of which does them justice. The honest position is to hold the discomfort: to accept that real people were really harmed, that the most likely explanation for most of them is not a secret weapon, and that a residue of genuine mystery remains that no one has yet dissolved. Some questions do not close on a verdict. This is one of them, and the discipline it asks of us — to keep two credible, incompatible stories open without forcing either shut — is exactly the discipline that fear, on both sides, keeps trying to take away.