SONIC WARFARE OR MASS HYSTERIA?
Chirping crickets are another possibility, while mass faintings in Cambodia are blamed on spirits
CUBAN CRISIS
Since the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, US embassy staff (and some Canadians) in Havana have heard ringing, chirping and grinding noises and around 24 have suffered symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, tinnitus, severe headaches, balance problems, brain injury, and hearing and memory loss [ FT359:22, 360:14]. Was all this caused by a deliberate attack by sonic weapons, or a surveillance operation gone horribly wrong, leading to harmful microwave pulses? No infernal machine was identified and the Cubans seemed as puzzled as the US authorities, and offered a joint investigation.
The attacks appeared to end around last August. By December, a panel of Cuban scientists concluded that a cacophony of chirping crickets was to blame; meanwhile, US medical testing had revealed that many embassy workers had developed changes to the white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate, but US officials refused to say whether the changes were found in all 24 patients. Acoustic waves have never been shown to alter the brain’s white matter tracts, reinforcing scepticism that some kind of sonic weapon was involved. Could the sounds have been the by-product of something else that caused damage?
Or was it all a case of mass psychogenic illness due to stress? “From an objective point of view, it’s more like mass hysteria than anything else,” said Mark Hallett, president of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. “American intelligence agencies are the most sophisticated in the world, and they reportedly don’t have a clue as to what’s causing the symptoms,” said Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist, author of a series of books on outbreaks of mass hysteria (and sometime FT contributor). “I will bet my house that there are agents in the intelligence community who have also concluded that this is a psychogenic event – but their analysis is either being repressed or ignored by the Trump administration because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Mass psychogenic illness is by far the most plausible explanation.”
On 9 January, however, State Department Medical Director Dr Charles Rosenfarb told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he ruled out mass hysteria. This explanation is indeed problematic, as most such outbreaks of a “functional disorder” are among people gathered in one place, and symptoms usually subside when victims are disbursed. In this case, several victims were targeted individually by “directional acoustic phenomena” in hotel rooms and private houses, and symptoms persisted months after those affected had left Cuba. And could changes in the brain’s white matter tract possibly be psychosomatic? Maybe… As the report in Psychology Today concluded: “Science has a long history of people seeing what they expect or want to see in order to support their initial suspicions. This is just the latest example.” Guardian, 13 Oct, 7 Dec; Times, 7 Dec 2017; Psychology Today, 10 Jan 2018.
ALL FALL DOWN
On 2 November 2016, Cambodia’s National Social Security Fund (NSSF) took to Facebook to claim that a mass fainting at a Kampong Speu shoe factory in the Bati district of Takéo province was caused by a worker being possessed by a spirit, before later revising the cause to “poor health and imagination”. It initially reported 47 people fainted at the Wing Star Shoes factory, which supplies Asics, but later updated that figure to 139. Norn Sophea, a union rep who was present on the factory floor, said that the workers fainted when a 25-year-old worker named Heng, who was about to leave work with a fever, started screaming for help and her hands began to shake. “Workers saw this and they were frightened and so they fainted one after the other,” said Sophea. “They have been working hard and some have heart problems, so it is easy to get a shock.” Khou Huot, health operational district chief, said 30 workers were treated for exhaustion and headaches with intravenous fluids. The following day, the factory conducted a water blessing to ward off any lingering evil spirits. Phnom Penh Post, 3 Nov 2016.
A year later, more than 100 garment workers from the JD and Toyoshima Company in Takéo’s Bati district fainted a day after the Cambodian Labour Minister warned factory owners they would face legal action if large groups of their staff fainted. On 6 December 2017, 221 workers at the factory had fainted after smelling something similar to ripe guava; the source of the odour could not be identified. Two days later, another 137 workers passed out at the same facility. An NSSF working group investigated the second round of fainting and found ventilation had not been sufficiently improved since the first incident. However, improved ventilation is unlikely to prevent similar outbreaks. For other recent cases of ‘mass hysteria’, see FT360:11. Khmer Times, 11 Dec 2017.