Hi, Reddit! I’m Dan Vergano, an editor at Scientific American. For the last seven years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time reporting on Havana Syndrome, including finding public records hidden by the government and even visiting Cuba to investigate. Initial reports in 2017 blamed a “sonic weapon” attack for the syndrome, tied to high-pitched metallic noises reported by victims, then microwaves and finally pulsed microwaves. This last one was deemed the most plausible explanation in a 2020 NASEM report.
However I reported real skepticism about this explanation among health physicists, and uncovered emails showing discord among the researchers investigating the injuries, a buried CDC report casting doubt on its ever being solved, and finally a classified State Department report, kept from the NASEM panel, that blamed the noises on crickets and casting doubt on an electromagic effect explaining the injuries.
Last year, an Intelligence Community report emerged assessing the injuries as unlikely to have resulted from deliberate attacks, seeing them as more likely reflecting past injuries, stress and “social factors”, the role of group psychology in spreading maladies in high-pressure, enclosed social settings. Supporting this, NIH studies were released Monday showing that people with syndrome’s symptoms lack any sign of medical injuries or the brain damage suggested in some initial studies.

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