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Nov. 6, 2021 - QAA

01:37:43

Episode 165: Havana Syndrome Spreads & JFK Returns feat Natalie Shure

Directed energy attacks? Sonic beams? Psychogenic illness? We explore the set of symptoms that have become a national security & media obsession generating a tenuous theory about a weapon wielded by a foreign power — Russian, Cuban, or possibly Chinese. We take a look at the media's role and the scientific community's reaction with guest Natalie Shure, a columnist for the New Republic who’s also written for The Nation, Jacobin, The Prospect and Buzzfeed. She’s been covering the phenomenon consistently since it first manifested a few years ago. This episode also contains coverage of the Dallas event at which JFK, JFK Jr, and other celebrities like Robin Williams were expected by a group of gematria-obsessed QAnon believers. Finally, the episode contains the origin story of Jake Rockatansky's Flynn character — and why he sounds a whole lot like Sean Connery. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Natalie Shure: http://twitter.com/nataliesurely Our first QAA records release: 'Hikikomori Lake' by Nick Sena is available to listen for free at http://qaarecords.bandcamp.com (12 original tracks) QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com) & Lake Radio (https://lakeradio.bandcamp.com)

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	What's up QAA listeners?
	The fun games have begun.
	I found a way to connect to the internet.
	I'm sorry boy.
	Welcome, listener, to Chapter 165 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Havana Syndrome episode.
	As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
	On October 12, 2021, the United States Congress finally proved to its constituents that it was capable of caring for the most vulnerable members of society by passing the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks, or Havana, Act.
	Authored by Republican Senators Susan Collins and Marco Rubio, alongside Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Jeanne Shaheen, the act addressed the pressing medical concerns of approximately 200 people, most of them diplomats or CIA agents.
	Warner explained, Every day, American diplomats and intelligence officers around the world put themselves at risk to keep our nation safe.
	In return, we have an obligation to provide ample support when these brave men and women are injured in the line of duty.
	Warner was referencing the so-called Havana Syndrome, a loose collection of symptoms supposedly caused by a Russian or Cuban or maybe even Chinese secret weapon emitting, quote, directed pulsed radio frequency energy.
	Capable of penetrating buildings from a distance to reach victims, many of them in American embassies.
	Sufferers of these invisible attacks describe headaches, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, memory loss, confusion, disorientation, trouble walking, insomnia, sensitivity to sound, ear pain and pressure, tinnitus, and brain abnormalities that include concussion-like symptoms.
	In 2017, after about a year of internal reports starting with a solitary case in the Cuban capital, the CIA and State Department began speaking to the press about Havana Syndrome.
	Most outlets lined up to cover this new secret weapon and its accompanying Cold War mystery, often in surprising lockstep with the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department claims.
	But many scientists and some members of the press are challenging the technological and scientific basis of the theory and how it came to be repeated by the mainstream media and enacted into law by the U.S.
	government.
	Our guest this week is Natalie Scherr, a columnist for The New Republic who's also written for The Nation, Jacobin, The Prospect, and BuzzFeed.
	She's been covering the phenomenon consistently since it first manifested a few years ago.
	And before we speak to her, I've prepared a segment with all the background we need to get a grasp on how Havana Syndrome manifested in the diplomatic and intelligence communities as well as media.
	This episode will also contain some dessert, a story by everyone's favorite Jake Rokitansky, which, as is the tradition, I know nothing about because Jake wrote it late last night and has not put it in the document.
	Um, nonetheless, it's good to see both of you boys and to be back at the helm of a pretty big episode because, before all that, The big story this week, of course, is hundreds of QAnon followers gather in Dallas to await the return of JFK Jr.
	On November 2nd, QAnon followers waited in chilly weather for hours with the hope that JFK Jr.
	or possibly JFK Sr.
	would reveal themselves alive and well.
	Now, JFK Jr.
	famously died in a plane crash in 1999, and JFK Sr.' 's public assassination in 1963 is one of the best-known facts about American history.
	There's footage of it!
	There is footage of him dying in public!
	Yeah!
	Of his graphic footage of his brain splitting open.
	It sucks, and we all had to watch it, but now, like, can we just not do the senior?
	Like, stick to the junior.
	We'll give you multiple juniors if you drop the senior.
	How about that?
	We'll give you three juniors.
	We'd be over 100 if he managed to survive having his brain split open.
	Many of the attendees wore Trump Kennedy 2020 shirts.
	This is based on the hope that JFK Jr.
	would replace Pence for the 2020 presidential ticket, which obviously didn't happen since currently 2021.
	And they wore the shirts anyway, just with no reflection.
	Even though, like, obviously, it's not true.
	Like, wouldn't it be fucking cool, though, if JFK Jr.
	just revealed himself, like, very old, and he was like, I'm running with President Trump, and we're taking down the Deep State?
	It'd be very entertaining.
	A lot of the QAnon followers who are really, really far gone, they operate from a wouldn't-be-cool epistemology.
	They say, wouldn't be cool, ergo, it is true.
	Jake had the laugh of just pure recognition.
	One of the attendees of this event was interviewed on the scene by Dallas Morning News reporter Michael Williams.
	Here's what she had to say.
	I am here because I believe at 1155, JFK Jr.
	will be our new vice president, and President Trump will be our president.
	They will get that from a very much, at the time, on January 9th, the Insurrection Act was signed by President Trump.
	And in doing so, he could return the office, he could hand it over to a former president, and he handed it over to President John F. Kennedy.
	He did not die that day.
	And on my cubicle, if you go out there, you'll see a picture of President Trump and President John F. Kennedy, September 11, 2020, at the Pennsylvania Fields.
	Oh man, that is so awesome.
	She's like, you can go look at the photo right over there, like on my car, I guess.
	And then he's like, yeah, 103.
	And so Trump turned over the presidency to him via the insurrection act.
	Oh man, that is so awesome.
	She's like, "You can go look at the photo right over there, like on my car, I guess?"
	And then he's like, "You're 103."
	And she's like, "That's right."
	And like, it's almost The Office-style editing, the way the camera kind of like shakily leans
	out the window and like zooms in on just like a car in the parking lot.
	She is dressed.
	I mean, it's hard to describe her, but I'm going to take a stab.
	She has a kind of Captain's Navy hat on that has a U.S.
	flag, big stars, blue.
	There's several cues, one on each side.
	Very bedazzled.
	Lots of sequence.
	Totally bedazzled.
	She has a wig combined with some kind of fantasy hair that makes the red, white, and blue, and she's in a full jumpsuit, red, white, and blue, with a giant pearl necklace and Oakley's on.
	A livestream of the event shows a different woman telling a similar story, but she added an extra twist.
	She claims that Trump would be king of the world.
	Come on.
	When John F. Kennedy Sr.
	transfers to Jr., we have two presidents now, John F. Kennedy Sr.
	and Trump.
	And Trump is going to be the king of the world.
	Wow, Trump's going to be the king.
	Trump is the king of the world.
	I'm the king of the world!
	Yeah, it's interesting.
	They all have these bizarre, sort of similar, sort of mythology, pseudo-legal beliefs about how the Insurrection Act works and their specific dates in which the living JFK met with Trump.
	It's not just a throwaway claim.
	It has a lore behind it.
	And it's also independent of QAnon's or whoever posted his Q's attempts at reining it in and literally debunking it.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	So it doesn't matter Q, you have no control anymore.
	These people have taken on, I guess, a power of their own.
	And I suppose that was the plan all along.
	Yeah, they want two presidents and one king of the world.
	Some also in attendance suggested that the big reveal would actually happen at the Rolling Stones concert at the Cotton Bowl later that evening.
	Obviously didn't happen either.
	Mick Jagger just sticking out his big nasty tongue and being like, ow!
	JFK's back!
	So I saw a lot of people online who were like, wait, JFK Jr., I thought he was a Democrat.
	Why do Q it up people like him?
	So I thought I'd take this opportunity to do like a JFK Jr.
	refresher for those who are just joining us.
	Yes.
	Which means a return of the Q voice.
	So the JFK Jr.
	nonsense started with an April 2018 Q drop, which implied that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible for the plane crash that killed him.
	She obviously wasn't.
	That Q drop said this.
	POTUS and JFK Jr.
	Relationship.
	Plane Crash, 1999.
	HRC Senate, 2000.
	The Start.
	Enjoy the Show.
	Cue.
	This cue drop was echoing an older Clinton body count conspiracy theory, which claims that Clinton wanted to get JFK Jr.
	out of the way because he wanted the U.S.
	Senate seat in New York that she eventually won.
	In reality, JFK Jr.
	never publicly announced any plans to run for Senate.
	However, according to JFK Jr.
	biographer Stephen M. Gillian, he did set up an exploratory meeting in March 1999 about whether to run for Senate.
	But Gillian also says that JFK Jr.
	expressed more interest in an executive position, like governor, over a legislative position.
	But all of this is irrelevant because there's no evidence that JFK Jr.' 's plane that was downed in 1999 was crashed due to mechanical failure.
	You can read the National Transportation Safety Border Report, which makes a convincing case that the tragedy was caused by JFK Jr.' 's inexperience as a pilot and dark, hazy flying conditions.
	Some QAnon followers had a deeper interpretation of this Q drop.
	They claimed that it suggested JFK Jr.
	was still alive and was working with President Trump behind the scenes in order to fight the Deep State.
	These beliefs were inflamed in June of 2018 when another mysterious 8th Chan Anon appeared and made a single post.
	This Anon was known just as R. That R post included the line, I strategically staged my own death.
	And it had a photograph of Trump and JFK Jr.
	together.
	And this post helped fuel the JFK Jr.
	live sect.
	Now, Q later disavowed the legitimacy of R and stated very clearly that JFK Jr.
	was not alive in the few Q drops.
	But it was too late.
	The JFK Jr.
	live sect persisted anyway, and they brushed aside any sort of negative Q drops by saying disinformation is necessary.
	So Q's own tool used against it.
	The primary promoter of the idea that JFK Jr.
	might return on November 2nd in Dallas is a QAnon influencer by the name of Michael Brian Protzman, who is also known as negative 48 on Telegram.
	Now, his Telegram channel has over 100,000 followers.
	This is kind of concerning because Protzman is a big advocate of gematria, which is like Jewish numerology.
	But he like all the people online, they apply this weird bastardized version of it.
	Yeah, it's like the Tommy Numbers shit.
	Yes, the Tommy Numbers shit.
	Who, by the way, he streams.
	Prostman streams with Tommy Numbers.
	There you go.
	Yeah.
	So at the scene, Prostman held an award from one of his followers, which calls Prostman the Gematria General.
	And for reasons I don't fully understand, Prostman also wore a button that says, I'm just a dumbass 172.
	Alright.
	It's all very funny.
	I'm just a dumbass.
	I'm just a dumbass.
	172.
	Important part.
	The numbers.
	Come on.
	That's all very funny.
	Slightly less funny is that Protzman has also encouraged his followers to read the classic anti-Semitic propaganda Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
	He's also pushed a lot of other weird anti-Semitic stuff.
	Trombone sound.
	Nah, not great.
	However, JFK Jr.
	and Sr.
	aren't the only resurrected celebrities that the crowd hoped to see that day.
	During a live stream of the event from the Negative 48 channel, it was claimed that late NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt and Robin Williams were spotted.
	Good morning, Vietnam!
	So nobody's been revealed yet?
	Oh, no, not, not, um, not publicly.
	I mean, like, hey, this is Intersection.
	Positive said that dead people would be walking around or you know the term to be looking for people.
	Somebody said yesterday I think they saw Dale Earnhardt.
	We think we saw Robin Williams.
	Thoroughly excited.
	I did that on the live chat.
	He actually shook Positive's hand.
	Came up and shook his hand.
	And he had his wife with him, but I don't know.
	Sorry, I don't know who she was, but he had all the facial features, even though he had a mask on.
	You could tell it was a mask, but his facial features were very much resembled, probably.
	Now is there supposed to be some major revealing today?
	Uh, I would say so.
	Yeah, I would say so.
	Okay, do they think it's just like a Poltergeist-style event where various celebrities are rising from their graves all at once?
	Like, what is this fucking photo of the entire Simpsons cast-ass way to think?
	That's what happens.
	You crawl up from the depths, you break the, you know, the topsoil, and then the graveyard attendant hands you a mask, you know, these are the times.
	These people's minds are just like a single dorm poster sitting in an empty room.
	So, attendees of this event waited for about four hours before a downpour forced most of them to seek shelter.
	So, unfortunately.
	Rained out by the deep state again, man.
	Didn't want to see JFK Jr.
	that badly, apparently.
	Enough to get wet.
	DARPA!
	DARPA, anyone?
	So after the event, followers of Negative 48 went to a post-event group chat on Telegram.
	I listened to hours of this group chat, and it had, I think, like five or six thousand listeners at its peak.
	And I personally heard some things I found disconcerting.
	For example, one man implied on the group chat that people shouldn't be disappointed in the event because he actually did speak with supposedly long dead people in Dallas.
	Has anybody been revealed?
	I'm here and I've seen people that I believe are people that were said to not be here any longer.
	And I talked with them.
	I'm not going to tell what Anybody what their names are, because God knows that, and I know it.
	And I think everybody just needs to trust God.
	Do not trust a man.
	Okay?
	Don't listen to Michael for the reason that you think he's God.
	Listen to him because he's teaching you.
	Another speaker of the group chat echoed that idea, implying that dead celebrities were walking around in disguises.
	This is the time you have to put the body of armor on.
	Okay?
	The enemy's attacking.
	Satan is working non-stop.
	As our vibration rises, he's trying to knock it down.
	For all you people, for the people who are on this call that are chiming in and saying negative things, God is watching everything you are doing.
	Stay positive.
	God already won.
	We won the game.
	I'm going to echo Brian Monkey.
	All I can tell you is this, the people that were in behind the rallies and disguises, Some of those same people we were seeing walking around, okay?
	So, I highly doubt the people that are showing up at rallies in disguises happen to show up in Dallas walking around the same streets we're walking around.
	It's been about close to four years.
	We've all trusted the plan.
	Trust the plan.
	Take a deep breath.
	God's in control.
	It's the best time of our lives and QArmy's about to shock the world.
	It was really interesting, at least in the in the group chat, so the way they talked about negativity or, you know, scoffing as a sin.
	I think this is really interesting because I think it suggests an influence of, I guess, self-help motivational speakers like Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952.
	And there's this idea that negative thinking is sinful.
	You should always be positive, always be optimistic, all the time, even when it's about something as ludicrous as this.
	Radical positivity.
	I bet you don't care much for it.
	Another participant in the group chat lamented that she couldn't celebrate this QAnon stuff with her husband because he wasn't on board.
	I'm so glad I've got y'all to talk to and listen to because I'm in a house with my husband who loves Trump,
	but he believes none of this is happening.
	And I can't experience the joy with my family.
	-Well, her husband really isn't getting the most out of Trump, then.
	I mean, if you just like him as a guy, it's not nearly as fun as believing that he's going to be the king of the world with a dead president.
	Still another participant in the chat reasoned that the big reveal could only happen after the emergency broadcasting system is used to send a message from Trump that the mainstream media has been destroyed.
	Anybody ever think that maybe JFK Jr.
	and JFK and President Trump wouldn't make their debut or appearance after the EBS?
	When the media is finally fixed and taken over so that everybody, like the whole world, would be able to participate.
	I mean, solid reasoning.
	The time is not yet right.
	The environment is not yet right.
	We must await a little longer for JFK Jr.
	and Senior's return.
	I didn't think they would start roping in Senior.
	I thought that that was a bridge too far for even the most delusional QAnon followers, but apparently I was naive.
	Look, if you believe that somebody can come back from the dead or, you know, that they've lived this long in secrecy, it's not that much more of a stretch to be like, 104?
	That's the prime of his life.
	One day, the exact meteorological conditions that caused the downing of JFK Jr.' 's plane are going to reappear in the same place, and his plane will come flying out of them.
	The lack of a big reveal was a test of faith.
	Yes, I feel like today is a big last test of faith and loyalty.
	And I think that what we're learning is a lot of people are looking to flesh for answers.
	And we all do that.
	But at the same time, we need to tap in more by praying more.
	And that's where our discernment lies is in our God given intuition.
	And we just got to remember God's timing is perfect.
	If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.
	And you don't want to be a plastic patriot, right?
	A true patriot never waivers.
	God has already won.
	We know this.
	This is a test to see if you're truthful, faithful, and loyal.
	So again, to suggest that maybe there's this whole JFK Jr.
	and senior stuff, there's no substance to it.
	To suggest that you've been sold a bill of goods.
	To suggest that this whole story is a huge fib that you just heard online.
	That's sinful.
	That's failing the test.
	That's failing the group.
	That's failing to be a good patriot.
	They've equated believing in absolute, absurd, reality-defying nonsense with virtue.
	It was born as a whisper among American embassy workers in Cuba.
	They would come to call it the thing and later immaculate concussion before settling on the more medical sounding Havana syndrome.
	It first appeared in late 2016 between Trump's November election win and his January inauguration.
	Here's from a ProPublica article describing the alleged first occurrence.
	It was a cool night for Havana, with the temperature falling into the mid-70s, and the diplomat and his family were feeling very good about their assignment to Cuba.
	They were still settling into their new home, a comfortable Spanish-style house in the lush enclave that had been called El Country Club before wealthy families abandoned it in the early years of the revolution.
	We were just thrilled to be there, the diplomat recalled.
	The music, the rum, the cigars, the people!
	And a very important moment for diplomacy.
	Eight months earlier, in March of 2016, President Barack Obama had swept into town to commemorate the two countries' historic rapprochement, vowing to bury, quote, the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.
	Now, weeks after the election of Donald Trump, that entente was suddenly doubtful.
	Fidel Castro had just died, opening a new chapter in the Cuban saga.
	The diplomat could hardly have imagined a more fascinating time to arrive.
	As the sun slid into the Florida Straits on that late November evening, the diplomat folded back the living room doors that opened onto the family's new tropical garden.
	The warm night air poured in, along with an almost overpowering din.
	It was annoying to the point where you had to go in the house and close all the windows and doors and turn up the TV, he recalled.
	But I never particularly worried about it.
	I figured, I'm in a strange country and the insects here make loud noises.
	A few nights later, the diplomat and his wife invited over the family of another American embassy official who lived next door.
	Around dusk, as they chatted on the patio, the same deafening sound rose from their yard again.
	I'm pretty sure those are cicadas.
	The first diplomat said, Those are not cicadas, his neighbor insisted.
	Cicadas don't sound like that.
	It's too mechanical sounding.
	The colleague had been hearing the same noises at home, sometimes for an hour or more at a stretch.
	After he complained to the embassy housing office, a couple of Cuban maintenance workers were dispatched to look around.
	They checked for electrical problems and scanned the yard for strange insects, but they left without finding anything out of place.
	In February, the nightly racket finally began to fade.
	It went away altogether.
	It was not until a Friday in late March that the diplomat realized he might be facing something more dangerous than bugs.
	At work that day, an embassy colleague with whom he was friendly took him aside and said he was leaving Cuba right away.
	A fit-looking man in his 30s, the colleague said he had just been in Miami, where medical specialists found he had a series of problems, including a serious hearing loss.
	In late December, he said, he had been struck by a strange, disturbing phenomenon.
	A powerful beam of high-pitched sound that seemed to be pointed right at him.
	The following Monday, the diplomat's friend played him a recording of the noise.
	It sounded a lot like what the diplomat had heard in his backyard.
	Gotta admit, that's pretty spooky.
	It's like the opening scene of a horror movie.
	Yeah, it really is.
	I mean, I'm reading this, I'm like, wait, did I make this up?
	Coverage of these early days is sparse, and articles by ProPublica, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair contradict one another.
	For example, Vanity Fair later quotes the ProPublica piece, claiming that the original diplomat who heard the sounds was Patient Zero, despite the fact that by his own account, neither he nor his neighbor had exhibited any signs of illness or injury.
	The New Yorker, however, names a different person as Patient Zero.
	On December 30th, 2016, Patient Zero in the Cuba crisis visited the Embassy Health Office.
	The patient, a CIA officer who was operating under diplomatic cover, told a nurse that he had experienced strange sensations of sound and pressure while in his home, followed by painful headaches and dizziness.
	Officials described the man as an experienced spy who, like his colleagues, was trained to recognize signs of counterintelligence operations.
	Since arriving in Havana, He had been subjected to constant surveillance, intrusions into his home, and obvious tampering with his belongings.
	These actions were annoying but not unexpected.
	Cuban intelligence knew where all the U.S.
	diplomats lived and watched them closely to try to discern who worked for the CIA or with dissidents.
	It's unclear whether the second supposed Patient Zero, the CIA agent posing as a diplomat, was the same person who recorded the sound and played it for the other diplomat mentioned at the top of the ProPublica story, but it kind of seems likely.
	Around this time, the recording also made its way into the hands of the Associated Press.
	Talk of the thing soon spread through the whisper network of isolated, tight-knit American embassy workers in Havana.
	Although the ProPublica article paints a rosy picture of the life of an American diplomat in Cuba at the time, it actually seemed like an extremely tenuous and stressful situation.
	A new president was taking office, one that aimed to, in his own words, quote, make Marco Rubio happy by reversing Obama's rapprochement.
	This threatened the legitimacy of the supposedly friendly delegation.
	What's more, it is true that Cuban intelligence habitually spied on U.S.
	diplomats at the time, but for good reason.
	Many of them were secretly CIA agents.
	For example, it was not uncommon for undercover agents and diplomats alike to discover traces of intrusions into their homes and other evidence of being surveilled.
	Despite Obama's softening stance over the course of his mandate, the United States has a very long and storied history of attempting to enact regime change in Cuba through overt violence, astroturf dissident movements, and CIA fronts parading as foreign aid organizations.
	Cuba remains to this day under the yoke of a US-led embargo designed to disrupt the country's infrastructure.
	I recommend a very good podcast called Blowback.
	The second season does a great job chronicling US interventionism in Cuba over the decades.
	It's hard to study all of the related history and fault the Cubans for being antagonistic or at least suspicious of the CIA, an agency dedicated to dismantling the Cuban revolution, As well as any faintly left-wing political movements across South and Central America.
	All things considered, being stationed in Cuba in late 2016 as either an American diplomat or a spy actually seems like a pretty stressful situation.
	Now, before we move on, we need to take a look at a crucial piece of evidence from these early days.
	The recording made by one of the supposed victims, who is depicted by the New Yorker as a CIA agent posing as a diplomat and by ProPublica as a quote, fit-looking man in his 30s.
	Here's the related segment run by the Associated Press on October 13th, 2017.
	And I apologize in advance for how annoying the actual sound is.
	I have edited out two other occurrences of the sound that they randomly edited in for no reason.
	Once you've heard it once, you're gonna be happy not to hear it again.
	The recording gives us the first tangible sense of what it was like for these American government
	workers in Havana who were hearing these unexplained sounds in their residences
	and later developed physical symptoms.
	Americans who heard these sounds in Havana have described slightly different sounds,
	and even in some of the recordings that the AP has reviewed, there are slight variations.
	However, this high-pitched cricket sound seems to appear in all of them.
	The U.S.
	Embassy in Havana has played these recordings for Americans who are working there so they know what to listen to.
	These recordings have also been reviewed by people who heard the sounds firsthand in Cuba, and they confirm that the recordings are generally consistent with what they heard.
	We still don't know what is causing the sound, and the recordings don't appear to have significantly furthered the investigation.
	Even with the recordings being analyzed, the U.S.
	government still says it has been unable to determine what is causing the sound.
	It's possible that what we're hearing on the recording is actually only part of the picture.
	Traditional recording devices are only able to pick up certain types of frequencies, such as the ones that the human ear can hear.
	It's possible there are additional frequencies, possibly those too low or too high to be picked up, that are also happening when these attacks occur.
	Oh, I feel sick!
	My memory, where am I?
	Who is this bearded man next to me?
	At this point, multiple major outlets were outright calling the incidents attacks, seemingly following the lead of their sources, agents of the CIA and State Department.
	Early hypotheses in both the media and government circles focused on the term sonic attack.
	In the same articles validating these narratives, that a secret weapon existed, was being used, and was the cause of Havana Syndrome, which in turn was a distinctive illness, mainstream journalists admitted that the wide variance of reported experiences and symptoms undercut the idea that they stem from a single source, much less a secret weapon.
	Unsurprisingly, in 2019, the New York Times ran a story essentially debunking the recordings, entitled, The Sounds That Haunted U.S.
	Diplomats in Cuba?
	Lovelorn Crickets, Scientists Say.
	It detailed the findings of Alexander Stubbs of the University of California in Berkeley and Fernando Montealegrezi of the University of Lincoln in England, who studied the recording and compared them to field recordings of North American insects stored in an online database of the University of Florida.
	The scientists said that the sound produced by the Indy's short-tailed cricket, quote, matched in nuanced detail the associated press recording in duration, pulse repetition rate, power spectrum, pulse rate stability, and oscillations per pulse.
	The feeling of being followed from room to room, unable to escape the sound, is actually consistent with the way sound bounces off walls and other hard surfaces indoors.
	One of the two scientists had experience recording Indian short-tail cricket in Costa Rica and explained that, quote, they're incredibly loud.
	You can hear them from inside a diesel truck going 40 miles an hour on the highway.
	Or maybe the enemies of America are using the very irritating Caribbean crickets to attack Americans.
	Yeah, what they do is they put the crickets in a jar, and then they shake the jar and throw it like a hand grenade.
	Yeah.
	Unfortunately, I think it's like a mating call.
	So I think they're actually just, you have to get them horny first.
	So they probably got a bunch of normal crickets that make cool sounds.
	They show the crickets cricket pornography.
	Then they release them into the diplomat's offices.
	And they immediately tried to earfuck the diplomats.
	And thus, Havana Syndrome.
	Yeah, they take the crickets, they put them in a jar, they make them watch Cruel Intentions, and then... But the cricket edition, where all actors are replaced by crickets.
	The cricket version, which was straight to DVD, came out a couple years later.
	Just a tiny cricket, like, undoing a cross around its neck and snorting coke.
	And then they just, yeah, and then they just fucking throw the jar and... Boom!
	It's an incredible weapon, really.
	I mean, it would take a Cuban or a Russian to come up with something this devious.
	Huge cricket orgy.
	In the big picture, though, the article barely made a dent.
	And instead of dying down, by 2021, we'd be hearing new and very different theories about the supposed secret weapon that caused Havana Syndrome.
	Ones that ditched the sonic attack theory and shifted blame from the Cubans to the Russians.
	The Investigations When Marco Rubio got wind of what was happening in 2017, he immediately saw an opportunity to attack Obama's strategy of loosening up on the Cubans.
	Rubio wanted the Trump administration to return to a more aggressive stance, and he saw Havana Syndrome as the opportunity to get that done.
	Multiple investigations opened, one by the CIA and the State Department, another by the FBI, and a third by the Cubans themselves, who were not happy with being blamed for the incident and seemed eager to maintain the incremental progress towards reconciliation they had achieved under Obama.
	None of the three investigations yielded concrete evidence of a weapon, much less evidence that might connect all the differing symptoms to specific attacks by a foreign power.
	Rubio took the lack of results from the investigations as more proof.
	Quote, The harder it is to figure this out, the more it lends credence to the fact that it was something that was directed, Rubio said.
	Havana is one of the most heavily surveilled cities on the planet.
	There is no way the Cubans don't know who did it, if they didn't do it themselves.
	Johanna Tablada, the Deputy Director General of the U.S.
	Division at the Cuban Foreign Ministry, answered him in no uncertain terms.
	Despite these protestations, both President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson blamed the Cuban government for the attacks and claimed that they were doing it with the help of a hostile foreign actor.
	The most popular theory?
	The Russians.
	Unfortunately, the FBI report had concluded that there was no evidence of a sonic attack, and their behavioral analysis unit assessed the victims based on their medical records and accounts, concluding that they were suffering from a mass psychogenic illness.
	In other words, mass hysteria.
	This pissed everybody off, including the CIA and the State Department, but especially the victims, who felt like their symptoms were being dismissed.
	In March of 2018, the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, published a study commissioned by the federal government.
	Here was the summary of the findings and their meaning.
	In this case series of 21 individuals exposed to directional, audible, and sensory phenomena, a constellation of acute and persistent signs and symptoms were identified in the absence of an associated history of blunt head trauma.
	Following exposure, patients experienced cognitive, vestibular, and oculomotor dysfunction along with auditory symptoms, sleep abnormalities, and headache.
	The unique circumstances of these patients and the consistency of the clinical manifestations raise concern for a novel mechanism of a possible acquired brain injury from a directional exposure of undetermined etiology.
	The use of the words directional exposure here are crucial.
	They would come to form the backbone of the latest theory spread by enthusiastic mainstream journalists, that Havana Syndrome wasn't caused by sonic blasts, but rather, quote, directed pulsed radio frequency energy.
	The JAMA study was roundly criticized by the scientific community.
	The chief editor of Cortex, a science magazine, lambasted it, and 50 neuroscientists and physicists from around the world came together to write an open letter in protest, which was published in The Guardian.
	It read, scientists and physicists, we have no reason to dispute
	that U.S. diplomats living in Cuba heard loud noises or that they reported feeling ill
	afterwards.
	Some U.S. politicians have seized on these reports to construct conspiracy theories in
	which they imagine a mysterious disease-causing sound ray gun, something that isn't possible
	with today's technology.
	These same politicians have used their positions of authority to present their speculations
	to a credulous public as though they are fact.
	The pronouncements, in turn, have led to international confrontation and hysteria, resulting in the removal and expulsion of diplomats and travel advisories.
	Now, an apparently analogous incident has been reported in China.
	A preliminary communication from the University of Pennsylvania with U.S.
	government support, published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, has been used to buttress this putative, acoustic attack idea with science.
	In fact, that work is ...deeply flawed, and does nothing to support the attack theory.
	We thus applaud the recent paper by Sergio de la Sala and Robert McIntosh for its thoughtful criticisms of the JAMA report, and praise the effort described in The Guardian to engage in an international scientific collaboration to study any connection between the illness and sound.
	Science works best this way, when qualified people can evaluate evidence without political pressure to draw poorly founded conclusions.
	We hope that sober and calmer heads will prevail in de-escalating this frenzy, avoiding a chill in both diplomatic relations and scientific collaboration between the U.S.
	and Cuba.
	It was also revealed that another scientist, Robert Ballot from the Department of Neurology at the University of California, had peer-reviewed the JAMA study, judging that it should not be published.
	But they had ignored his recommendations and moved forward anyway.
	He would go on to write a very persuasive piece in October 2019 with another scientist, Robert Bartholomew, for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, entitled Challenging the Diagnosis of Havana Syndrome as a Novel Clinical Entity, which made the argument that the symptoms were probably caused by sociogenic illness.
	Far from cold contempt for the people suffering symptoms, the two scientists instead drew parallels to post-traumatic stress disorder, arguing that the Cold War was just a new type of war, One just as steeped in fear and paranoia, and just as capable of causing PTSD.
	Balo went on to write an article for Yahoo News in 2020 entitled "Havana Syndrome Fits
	the Pattern of Psychosomatic Illness, but that doesn't mean the symptoms aren't real."
	Here's from the article.
	When news of these events broke, I was baffled.
	But after reading descriptions of the patient's symptoms and test results, I began to doubt that some mysterious weapon was the cause.
	I have seen patients with the same symptoms as the embassy employees on a regular basis in my dizziness clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles.
	Most have psychosomatic symptoms, meaning the symptoms are real but arise from stress or emotional causes, not external ones.
	With a little reassurance and some treatments to lessen their symptoms, they get better.
	The available data on Havana syndrome matches closely with mass psychogenic illness, more commonly known as mass hysteria.
	So what is really happening with so-called Havana Syndrome?
	In late December 2016, an otherwise healthy undercover agent in his 30s arrived at the clinic of the U.S.
	Embassy in Cuba, complaining of headaches, difficulty hearing, and acute pain in his ear.
	The symptoms themselves were not alarming, but the agent reported that they developed after he heard a beam of sound that, quote, seemed to have been directed at his home.
	As word of the presumed attack spread, other people in the embassy community reported similar experiences.
	A former CIA officer who was in Cuba at the time later noted that the first patient, quote, was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and to connect the dots.
	No physician has found a medical cause for the symptoms, and after five years of extensive searching, no evidence of a weapon has been found.
	The story of Havana Syndrome looks to me like a textbook case of mass psychogenic illness.
	It started from a single undercover agent in Cuba, a person in what I imagine is a very stressful situation.
	This person had real symptoms, but blamed them on something mysterious, the strange sound he heard.
	He then told his colleagues at the embassy, and the idea spread.
	With the help of the media and medical community, the idea solidified and spread around the world.
	It checks all the boxes.
	Well, not as sensational as the idea of a new secret weapon, mass psychogenic illness has historical precedence and can explain the wide variety of symptoms, lack of brain or ear damage, and the subsequent spread around the world.
	But, as all endeavors undertaken by the Travis Fuse of this world, Ballot and his colleagues in the scientific community would be thoroughly ignored.
	That's the problem.
	That's the problem with skepticism.
	It offers a shittier story.
	The best story always wins the battle of narratives, not the person who says, actually, the exciting story is shit.
	Oh, having read multiple articles, that story at the top was just like the tip of just dozens of stories like these recounted in a very cool, Tom Clancy way by writers for prestigious journalistic outlets.
	It is very enticing.
	I'm not going to lie, boys.
	I got Havana-pilled a little bit through this.
	I was like, OK.
	What if they did have a weapon?
	Like, it's fun speculation!
	The Thing Goes Viral Tonight, U.S.
	officials telling NBC News as many as 200 Americans have now reported possible cases of that so-called Havana syndrome.
	Mysterious neurological symptoms, sometimes brain damage, first reported by diplomats at the U.S.
	Embassy in Havana in 2016, then appearing in Russia and China.
	This year, two dozen new cases in Vienna, another in Berlin.
	U.S.
	officials say potential victims on every continent but Antarctica.
	We are investigating and reviewing reports of incidents from all around the world.
	Including personnel from the State Department, CIA, and Pentagon, but no proof of the cause.
	In 2018, NBC News reported U.S.
	intelligence officials suspected Russia.
	Russia denies it.
	But Mark Polymeropoulos told me he had to quit the CIA because of symptoms that started in Moscow.
	I couldn't stand up.
	I was falling over.
	I had incredible sense of nausea and ringing in my ears.
	I was frankly terrified.
	We sat down exclusively with Cuban investigators in 2017 who denied blame.
	Cuba doesn't possess this technology.
	Cuba has never produced these types of weapons.
	While searching for the cause, the Biden administration is working on devices to protect personnel, as it's considering sending diplomats back to Havana for the first time since the attack started.
	Hey Jack, we're developing a force field.
	You put it right outside your apartment and it's gonna keep you safe from the noises.
	You'll notice that this NBC segment contained a map of the world with random blinking hacker numbers scrolling down it, which is just so subtle when you're, you know, trying to present Tom Clancy's The News.
	And just as the scientists were putting holes in the drywall from being ignored, Havana Syndrome came home to Washington DC.
	The New Yorker, which has been a steady purveyor of dramatically fun-to-read Havana Syndrome narratives, described the story in chilling detail.
	During the final weeks of the Trump administration, a senior official on the National Security Council sat at his desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office building across from the West Wing on the White House grounds.
	It was mid-November, and he had recently returned from a work trip abroad.
	At the end of the day, he left the building and headed toward his car.
	Which was parked a few hundred yards away along the ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument.
	As he walked, he began to hear a ringing in his ears.
	His body went numb, and he had trouble controlling the movement of his legs and his fingers.
	Trying to speak to a passerby, he had difficulty forming words.
	"It came on very suddenly," the official recalled later, while describing the experience to a colleague.
	"In a matter of about seven minutes, I went from feeling completely fine to thinking,
	'Oh, something is not right,' to being very, very worried and actually thinking I was going to die."
	He fell to the ground before he reached his car and realized that he was in no condition to drive.
	Instead, he made his way to Constitution Avenue, where he hoped to hail a taxi.
	He managed to open the Lyft app on his phone in order to track her.
	[laughter]
	When he arrived at the emergency room, the official thought, "I'm probably not walking out of here."
	He approached the reception desk.
	Are you on drugs?
	A doctor asked him.
	The official shook his head.
	He was led to an examination room.
	Hospital staff found his White House identification card in his pocket and three cell phones, one of which they used to call his wife.
	They thought he might be having a stroke, but an MRI ruled it out.
	Blood tests also turned up nothing unusual.
	The official, who was in his mid-30s, had no pre-existing conditions.
	The doctors were at a loss, but told him they suspected that he had suffered a quote, massive migraine with aura.
	It took about two hours for his speech to begin to return.
	When he checked out of the hospital the next day, he still had a pounding headache, but was soon able to go back to work.
	Several days later, a colleague called him to discuss suspected cases of the Havana Syndrome, a mysterious ailment that had first affected dozens of U.S.
	officials in Cuba, and which now appeared to be spreading.
	The NSC official didn't think he was suffering from Havana Syndrome.
	It seemed outlandish that someone would be struck while on the grounds of the White House.
	But, as his colleague described some of the more severe cases that had been reported, it occurred to the official that this might be his problem.
	You can see how there's this kind of suggestion element, where every time it's like, oh yeah, that might be what happened to me.
	As people get told about these cases, and they're playing the sound in the news, and they're convening meetings where they're saying, you gotta look out for this, there might be a new secret weapon.
	And so you have people experiencing awful symptoms, but then you have this moment where there's like almost like a cold reading, you know?
	Where they're like... Right.
	Yeah.
	Especially when, like, the only other available explanation is that I'm cracking under the stress of a very difficult and strange situation.
	So it's either I, myself, I don't have quite the best psychological profile to live up to the best job that I could possibly do, or the enemies of America are targeting me with ray guns.
	And between those two options, I can understand why the latter would be more appealing.
	And I can tell you guys and the listeners, as somebody with lots of health anxieties, if something is feeling out of the ordinary, I am constantly looking for some, like, external explanation that hopefully doesn't have to do with, like, an actual illness with me.
	In another story, you know, that was, I thought, quite telling of a person stationed in Cuba, she actually, like you said, Travis, hid it from her superiors because she was worried they would send her home and that she, you know, would be considered, like, not up to the job.
	So it seems like the internal culture also contributed a lot to these people letting these symptoms get worse before they reach out for help.
	The media went wild.
	This was outrageous.
	The hidden enemy was growing bolder, now willing to strike on domestic soil at any time.
	Here's some coverage from CNN, and you'll notice the Ubisoft-style visuals with sound effects that really enhance the map scenes.
	It's called Havana Syndrome, for where the strange, debilitating attacks against U.S.
	personnel were first noticed.
	Now, sources telling CNN about at least two more on American soil.
	Similar, mysterious incidents, including one late last year, right near the White House.
	Thank you for your attention on this issue.
	It's critically important.
	The country's top intelligence official today saying she is focused on the attacks believed to be the result of directed microwaves.
	The Pentagon is also investigating.
	Multiple sources telling CNN that defense officials Briefed Congress earlier this month, telling lawmakers that the White House incident in November happened near the grassy oval area known as the Ellipse, just south of the White House.
	An official from the National Security Council was sickened.
	Another incident, first reported by GQ, happened across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia in 2019, also seemingly directed at another White House staffer.
	Similar attacks have struck U.S.
	diplomats and CIA officials not just in Cuba, but China and Russia as well, including Mark Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA officer who says he was hit with an attack while visiting the Russian capital in 2017.
	I woke up in the middle of the night.
	With an incredible case of vertigo.
	The room was spinning.
	I wanted to throw up.
	Paula Maropolos served in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
	Because of the Moscow attack, he was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and had to retire from the CIA.
	I've had a headache every day since that night in Moscow.
	It's never gone away day and night.
	A study this year by the National Academy of Sciences found the most likely cause of the symptoms was directed pulsed radio frequency energy.
	Symptoms include ear popping, vertigo, pounding headaches, and nausea.
	Alongside the Pentagon, the State Department and CIA have also launched investigations.
	I will make it an extraordinarily high priority to get to the bottom of who's responsible for the attacks.
	Very straight.
	I can see what you're saying about the graphics.
	I felt like I was playing a first-person shooter deciding where to deploy, you know, because there was this big world map and it was just, you know, just little graphics.
	I was zooming in and out.
	It was very well done, I mean.
	Yeah, I counted no less than three loading screens from The Division.
	And you'll notice, of course, they say attacks.
	They, you know, repeat the basically debunked claim, you know, of like the source of it.
	And so these are assumptions that are basically like four assumptions away from the first one that we have to find out, which is we haven't yet, of course.
	Is Havana Syndrome an actual syndrome?
	Does it fit the profile of an actual syndrome?
	That's the first thing.
	Then the second one is, if it is a syndrome, it is caused then by something.
	That's the second thing we have to figure out.
	Then the third is, that thing is a secret weapon by a foreign government.
	The last is, they're using it on our diplomats.
	Which is like, I'm sorry, but that, I mean, you know how the scientific method works.
	That's a lot of bottlenecks.
	You're right.
	That's a lot of assumptions you have to go to reach that conclusion.
	It's a lot of unproven assumptions.
	I got to say, but where it kind of like loses me a bit and why I tend to lean towards the skeptical reading is that I don't believe that the United States would be baffled by a secret weapon.
	I think that if a weapon ever attacks someone, be like, oh yeah, we made like 50 of those in like DARPA or something.
	Yeah, in fact, they bought it from us.
	They bought it from us 10 years ago.
	Also, it's like, as you read the symptoms, I'm like reading, I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I'm like, a panic attack.
	It's like, these are all very similar symptoms and I wonder if, you know, CIA, you know, you're under a lot of pressure, who knows?
	I mean, it is fascinating to me because I moved to Bermuda, where there is a whistling frog in the trees that sounds like a cricket, very high-pitched.
	And it is deafening.
	It can be deafening.
	It was hard to get used to.
	And also, I started getting migraines here that I'd never had before, where I had to wear ice in the back of my head and stuff like that.
	And you know here and there I was having a sip and I was also feeling pretty bad from the day after those sips and so multiple times here I have heard ringing noises and shit like I you know and I could very easily right now like match those symptoms to Havana Syndrome you know so I guess I'm coming out as a Havana Syndrome victim.
	There is a secret weapon and there is a secret villain but it is myself.
	I am holding a six-pack of IPAs outdoors and I am Beaming them into my body.
	laughter Oh no, oh no, careful Julian, there's another secret weapon
	in there.
	It looks like a small dried plant rolled into some sort of device.
	Okay, things continue to snowball from there.
	Politico in October of 2021 published an article entitled, US Investigators Increasingly Confident Directed Energy Attacks Behind Havana Syndrome.
	In it, Marco Rubio was quoted as saying, "Hopefully we'll make some headway because it's a problem
	that's escalating. This is not something that's happened in the past. It's something that's
	happened and is ongoing." Here's more from that article.
	Now, Politico first reported in May that U.S.
	officials believed Russia's elite spy unit, the GRU, was behind the events.
	While CIA Director William Burns and lawmakers briefed on the matter have publicly referred to the incidents as attacks, some officials remain skeptical of the prevailing theory, and some prominent neurologists have described that explanation as implausible.
	But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who are receiving weekly updates from the Intelligence Committee on the status of the investigation, said the latest information they've received has disproved the skeptics.
	And in public statements, those lawmakers are increasingly referring to the incidents as directed energy attacks.
	I think that's quackery, Rubio said, of those who've argued that the symptoms are psychosomatic.
	I'd invite them to explain that to the now dozens of people who have suffered documented brain injuries that in many cases have made them incapable of ever working again.
	That wasn't entirely wrong.
	Their symptoms had caused some agents to publicly retire from the State Department and CIA.
	Not to mention the fact that Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo actually expelled Cuban diplomats and dismantled the Cuban embassy in Havana, including the CIA office, once openly housed on the third floor.
	Whatever presence the CIA planned to have in Cuba after Obama-era diplomacy entered rigor mortis, it wouldn't involve a healthy and visible diplomatic cover.
	Biden's new director of the CIA, William Joseph Burns, has also made his opinion clear.
	He spoke publicly about Havana syndrome as a real threat and, according to Politico,
	"tapped an officer who aided the Osama bin Laden manhunt to lead the agency's investigation."
	Theories about directed pulsed radio frequency energy have led a State Department source to
	tell the ever-helpful New Yorker that "scientists at a military laboratory are planning to expose
	primates to pulsed microwave radiation and then studying their brains."
	So I just wanted to let you guys know that monkeys will suffer, so I suppose not all is lost.
	Well, thank you for that reassurance.
	Victims of Havana Syndrome For years, those who experienced symptoms they associated with Havana Syndrome had complained about being ignored by the Pentagon.
	This came to a head just recently in September 2021, when Secretary of State Anthony Blinken held a call with diplomats and agents affected.
	One of them is quoted by NBC as stating, The participants also lamented the shift of language from some officials who had stopped calling the events targeted attacks and began using a more vague term, unexplained health incidents, or UHIs, which is like a health version of a UFO, basically.
	We do not know.
	One diplomat explained, "It's those sorts of sickening statements that perpetuate this disbelief.
	We get it, it's classified information. But if you're seeing stuff, don't act like it's nothing.
	Don't call it freaking UHI's. Don't talk about our stress levels."
	I don't know.
	You sound kind of stressed, bro.
	Others have been even more direct in their assessment of the situation.
	Mark Lenzi, a diplomatic security officer who experienced symptoms beginning in 2018
	in Guangzhou, China, accused the government of attempting to "deny and cover up inconvenient
	scientific and medical facts."
	He explained to the New York Times in 2020 that he was angrier at his own government
	than the government that supposedly injured him.
	"My government looked the other way when they knew I and my family were injured.
	This report is just the beginning and when the American people know the full extent of
	this administration's cover-up of the radio frequency attacks in China in particular,
	they will be outraged."
	So we have straight up like government workers going like full on, you know, accusing the
	administration of a cover-up, which is kind of fascinating.
	With pressure mounting from Congress and the Senate, and the media often describing the events as attacks, those who experienced the symptoms were still met with skepticism by a lot of their colleagues.
	A senior State Department official told NBC, "That's certainly not the case with the
	Secretary and the senior leadership.
	Everyone is taking it seriously as a real issue that is affecting people who are experiencing
	real symptoms."
	Here's from the NBC article.
	Aiming to defuse the skepticism, multiple U.S. agencies, including the State Department
	and the Pentagon, have encouraged their employees to report any incidents of concern or symptoms
	to be evaluated.
	Last month, the officer of the Director of National Intelligence issued a rare public
	statement describing the stepped-up investigation as a "top priority" and vowing to support
	those affected to ensure they are believed, heard, and respected.
	As I mentioned at the top of the episode, both houses passed the Havana bill just last month, on October 21st, 2021.
	A few months prior, Vice President Harris had delayed a planned diplomatic trip to Vietnam for three hours due to fears about a, quote, recent possible anomalous health incident in Hanoi that the Associated Press linked to Havana syndrome.
	The FBI have also reopened their investigation, which is not surprising, since those who experienced the symptoms had long asked the government to publicly refute the original FBI investigation, which had concluded that the entire thing was most likely a case of mass psychogenic illness.
	Scientists concerned with the government and media narratives have continued to speak out about the Havana Syndrome, which they believe is not a novel clinical entity.
	In 2020, four scientists, including the aforementioned Robert Balow and Robert Bartholomew, published a book entitled Havana Syndrome, Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria.
	They believed the victims were telling the truth, but refuted the idea that the symptoms validated the broader conclusion.
	In this book, we conclude that the mysterious new illness that has baffled doctors and government officials is part of a series of outbreaks dating back to ancient times.
	Mass Psychogenic Illness.
	While there is no underlying disease, the symptoms are real and distressing.
	Imagine being told you had just eaten rat poison.
	You might suddenly experience stomach pain, develop breathing problems, and vomit.
	Yet there is no underlying medical problem, only an idea.
	Psychogenic illness works in a similar way and is driven by suggestion and belief.
	You may be thinking, this is absurd.
	Mass psychogenic illness cannot cause concussion-like symptoms and brain abnormalities.
	Not true.
	Victims commonly experience neurological complaints, abnormalities, and brain function that often mimic concussion-like symptoms.
	This is very different from claiming there was brain damage.
	Reports that were leaked to the media prior to the publication of the 2018 JAMA study, claiming that many of the affected diplomats were suffering from mysterious white matter tract changes to their brains, turned out to be false.
	When the Magnetic Resonance Imaging MRI results were released, a few had minor changes to their white matter tracts, but this would not be unusual for any group of normal subjects of that sample size.
	There's a big difference between claiming that there were brain abnormalities and asserting that there was brain damage.
	Mass psychogenic illness, also called mass hysteria, is one of the most fascinating and misunderstood conditions in all of medicine.
	Many physicians prefer the former term because of the negative connotations associated with hysteria, which was initially thought to result from a, quote, wandering uterus and to only affect women.
	Both terms are used throughout the book for historical continuity, as only in recent times has mass psychogenic illness been preferred.
	We do so with the understanding that it refers to a psychophysiological, mind-body, illness that is equivalent to conversion disorder and somatic symptom disorder, affecting both men and women.
	Mass hysteria involves the rapid spread of illness symptoms within a cohesive group and has no organic basis.
	We will show that every key feature of the Havana illness has direct parallels with psychogenic illness, even down to the role of insects in triggering cases.
	Bugs have been instrumental in the propagation of several episodes.
	There are hundreds of examples involving phantom assailants.
	There have been several recent cases where assailants were believed to have been agents acting on behalf of a hostile foreign power, again mirroring the events in Cuba.
	In short, the, quote, Sonic Attack Saga contains all of the elements of social contagion.
	New technologies have been fertile ground for the changing form of psychogenic outbreaks as episodes are driven by anxieties and prevailing fears.
	Soon after the invention of the radio, many people believed that the invisible waves were making them sick.
	When computer terminals became widespread in the early 1980s, some people were convinced that they were causing birth defects and miscarriages.
	More recently, fears that mobile phones and Wi-Fi would cause a spike in the number of brain tumors have not materialized.
	Contrasting this skepticism, Politico published a piece in May of 2021 with the title, It's an Act of War!
	Trump's Acting Pentagon Chief Urges Biden to Tackle Directed Energy Attacks.
	In the piece, Defense Secretary Christopher Miller details interacting with a single supposed victim of the attacks.
	Miller established an effort to investigate the incidents late last year.
	Shortly after he assumed the role of Acting Defense Secretary in November, he met a Defense Department official who was seeking medical treatment for a mysterious attack that left him temporarily incapacitated.
	As soon as the official described his symptoms, Miller knew right away that they had been caused by a directed energy weapon.
	He wasn't a histronic type person, so when he described the attack, it was like, yeah, you got hit with this weapon, Miller said.
	There was no way to deny it.
	CNN first reported the interaction between the two.
	The goal of the effort was, quote, to create a bureaucratic momentum to get the interagency to take this more seriously, Miller said.
	Now, Miller said he is gratified to see that the Biden team is keeping it in focus.
	The CIA recently launched a task force of its own to look into the issue.
	And CIA Director William Burns told Senators during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee that getting to the bottom of the Havana attacks was a top priority.
	In a statement on Friday, Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the Chair and Vice Chair of the Intelligence Committee, said they welcomed Burns' quote, renewed focus on the matter and said they will continue to investigate.
	This pattern of attacking our fellow citizens serving our government appears to be increasing To get to the real bottom of this, we're speaking with Natalie Scherr, a columnist for The New Republic who's also written for The Nation, Jacobin, The Prospect, and BuzzFeed.
	She recently wrote an article entitled, With Havana Syndrome, Washington is Repeating Colin Powell's Worst Mistake, referring to the supposed evidence he presented to the United Nations Security Council in 2003 that was used as a justification for invading Iraq.
	Welcome to the show, Natalie!
	Thank you so much for having me.
	Yeah, it's a real pleasure.
	You've been kind of paying attention to this for a few years now and writing about it, and you seem just as fascinated as I've been, you know, kind of digging into it these last days.
	It's very, very interesting, but not for the reasons that a lot of people think it is.
	We're excited to get into it.
	So first off, you know, I really like this kind of comparison that you made in your article.
	Could you kind of explain why you chose this central comparison?
	Yeah, so I wrote this article right after Colin Powell died.
	And there was a lot of debate happening in the media and on social media about how to think about Colin Powell's legacy, particularly when it comes to the role that he played coming into the Iraq War.
	So he very famously gave a speech at the UN.
	That laid out the case for going to war based on a completely phony pretext, right?
	Based on the idea that Iraq was actively developing and hoarding weapons of mass destruction, formed the core of the pretext for why we needed to have a preemptive war.
	That ended up being completely bogus.
	And I think that we can agree that The Iraq War and everything that came after it was just an utterly abysmal failure.
	Morally, strategically, just a horrifically regrettable thing that we shouldn't have done.
	And so I thought that it had a lot of salience when it comes to Havana Syndrome.
	I think that, you know, a lot of people might laugh at the story that there are these invisible directed energy weapons, and I think that when you really break it down it is laughable, but I think it can also be really dangerous.
	Implicit in the idea that there are directed energy weapons is the idea that someone is wielding them, and someone is, you know, out there trying to hurt Americans serving their government.
	And if enough people believe that, I think that there will be a lot of political pressure for response.
	So I want to think about it along these lines, that this isn't just innocuous.
	I think it's very important that we get this story right, and a lot of people are really failing to do that.
	So you fear that this might be used as a Cassius Belli or a kind of like reason for war against Russia or Cuba or any kind of other Cold War, perceived Cold War foe?
	Yeah, I don't want to overstate the extent to which it's been used as a potential pretext for war with Russia or China or any of the other states floated as being potentially responsible for this.
	It's certainly not as direct as the case was with WMDs in Iraq, but you do see a lot of people starting to agitate for things.
	There are a lot of anonymous intelligence community sources In a bunch of different reports saying that there should be a response, we should do something.
	Mark Polymeropoulos, who's one of the most high profile, self-identified victims of Havana Syndrome, who I think we'll talk about, he's written a blog post arguing that we should start beefing up NATO presence.
	Along the Russian border, things like that.
	So I think that you can definitely see a lot of people starting to bring up concerns like this.
	And those things lead to other things, not to put it glibly, but any movement, any tension along these lines, I think can have really catastrophic consequences down the line.
	Yeah, I think we should at least discover the proton packs that are shooting the microwave rays before we start World War III.
	Yes.
	Actually, I do want to talk about Mark Polymeropoulos because he popped up in two of the clips that we've played earlier in the episode.
	So, you know, what's the deal with him and kind of his story?
	And, you know, it is also quite rare for a CIA agent or ex-CIA agent to go public with this kind of stuff and have his name up there.
	So what do you think of the whole thing?
	So Mark Polymeropoulos is by far the most high-profile quote-unquote victim of Havana Syndrome.
	He was very high up in the CIA.
	I believe he was, you know, deputy officer in charge of clandestine operations in Eurasia, so mostly dealing with, you know, covert Russia operations.
	And he claims that in December of 2017, while he was staying at a hotel in Moscow, he got hit by what he now believes is a directed energy weapon.
	He basically describes, you know, feelings of dizziness, vertigo in the middle of the night, extreme headaches, some general malaise, some fatigue, some brain fog, things like that.
	You know, based on what he says, symptoms have improved by now.
	This was already almost four years ago that he says that he experienced symptom onset.
	He now still says that he has headaches, definitely seems to have had chronic migraines at some point.
	Eventually left the CIA over this a few months after it happened, I believe, and then really had a lot of difficulty getting into Walter Reed Medical Center to get treated for what he believed was a traumatic brain injury caused by, you know, unknown weapons.
	I guess it's over the course of his argument and the fallout with the CIA, him really agitating to get this treatment, that he decided to go public.
	So we first brought his story to Julia Ioffe at the GQ magazine when she was still there, and has also done interviews with a ton of other outlets since then, New York Times and PR.
	He's really been all over.
	He's been on television and podcasts.
	He's talked about this a lot and has really become a prominent, I guess, advocate for the idea that this is a syndrome that was directly caused by a hostile foreign attack.
	He's very confident that it was Russia.
	And, you know, he's been very out in front of, you know, getting people medical care at Walter Reed, agitating for the passage of the Havana Act.
	That's paid for the health care for some of these people.
	So he's definitely been out in front of this story for quite a long time.
	So Mark Palomaropoulos has been very emphatic this whole time that his symptoms and his colleague's symptoms are absolutely the result of a directed energy attack and couldn't possibly be related to mental health.
	Recently, a writer named Philip Bump at the Washington Post wrote a piece suggesting that a lot of the symptoms sounded like those of panic attacks or generalized anxiety disorder.
	Mark Palameropoulos responded with, you know, I've served in war zones.
	Panic isn't in my DNA.
	But the fact is, he's done a lot of podcasts recently because he just wrote a book about his time in the CIA.
	And he's written and spoken very openly about having PTSD from his time in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	So, you know, no judgment.
	It sounds like he did go through a lot.
	But that is a mental health diagnosis.
	So it's frustrating to hear him and other people stigmatize the idea that these symptoms could be, in some cases, mental health related.
	That doesn't make them any less worthy than being targeted by a weapon.
	Yeah.
	And I think that, you know, that's an interesting context here.
	I was surprised that, you know, this other guy, Lentz, who came forward, you know, he's talking about a situation in China and he is openly saying there is a cover-up and it will blow your mind, you know, when the information comes out.
	So, you know, you have these two sides where you're like, take care of people who have symptoms because, you know, if this is a psychogenic illness, it deserves treatment just as much as any other.
	And then this other thing of saying, well, it's a weapon by a foreign government, and actually we need to respond in a geopolitical way.
	Those two things, hopefully, we can separate over the course of this interview, and hopefully this episode has shown that there's a chasm there.
	Like, these are two very different claims.
	Like, that the government fails to provide help for people who experience symptoms like the ones these people are experiencing in the field, that is undoubtedly, you know, a story that is not new.
	It's what they do with a lot of soldiers and a lot of representatives, you know, at lower levels who are just kind of day in day out, you know, putting in their hours or whatever.
	But yeah, so then let's take this other side where we're talking about microwave weapons or directed frequency or sonic attacks, like it's changed names at least twice over the course of its mutation.
	And I just wanted to kind of ask you what you think of how the mainstream media has carried Essentially every iteration of the theory.
	Just point-blank carried it, often with completely anonymous sources that are, you know, represent either the CIA or the State Department.
	That's a big question.
	And so I think that for me, the answer to that question starts with how on earth did they get to directed energy weapons in the first place or weapons at all in the first place?
	So I think, you know, for starters, what you're saying about separating the symptoms and the illness from It seems very clear to me that, you know, the vast majority of these people are suffering severely.
	They're describing symptoms that are very debilitating.
	They're also describing symptoms that are pretty common, you know, Mark Polymeropoulos experiencing Dizziness, chronic migraines, other people experiencing fatigue, brain fog.
	I don't know if you've ever experienced things like that.
	They can be really awful.
	They can really upend your life.
	I'm sure, you know, if you don't have experience, you know someone who has had their life upended by symptoms like that.
	They're sadly very common.
	I think something like, you know, up to up to 30% of the population is experiencing Those symptoms or some one of those symptoms at any given time or throughout their lifetimes so all of that said the fact that You'd have a certain number of people in at times high stress jobs Experiencing symptoms like that is not particularly Surprising and it does mean that they need support and health care.
	It may very well mean that they are Can't work anymore, that they need to take a leave of absence, things like that.
	What I think is very unreasonable is settling on the idea that something must have happened to them, that a hostile actor must have targeted them in some way, and that that's the only way to explain It seems to me that the reason that the weapons theory came in so early is because early on, the first few cases in Havana, several patients described hearing a noise around the onset of symptoms.
	Not necessarily at the same time.
	Sometimes separated by hours or even days, but they described hearing a noise.
	And so this got people thinking, could this be sonic weapons?
	Could this be some sort of device?
	Now, very famously, I'm sure you've heard, sometime later, one of the self-identified patients recorded the sound that she heard, submitted it to the State Department, it ended up being a species of crickets
	that is, you know, near Havana and their mating call bouncing off of walls was very
	loud, is a very spooky sound.
	Anyway, so the fact that people heard sounds, I think, got people thinking, "Sonic weapon,
	sonic weapon," which is the first thing that this was described as in, you know, internal
	investigations and in the media.
	The Sonic Weapon theory fell apart relatively quickly.
	Within a few months, I think just anyone with any specialization of, you know, sonic waves, it just wasn't plausible for sonic waves to cause I mean, unimaginably loud.
	It would affect a massive number of people, not just one person.
	weren't being something that's loud enough to cause brain damage that results in chronic
	illness would just be unimaginably loud.
	It would affect a massive number of people, not just one person.
	You can't target it within a room or a home, etc.
	But I think that the theory that they had fallen into early on, the weapons, and the
	fact that people had heard a sound, they basically wanted to keep that.
	So, microwave weapons, that allowed them to keep the fact that people heard a sound because of something called the Fry Effect.
	Which is, forgive me, I'm not great on the specific science, but exposure to microwaves in certain contexts can cause a clicking sound.
	It can cause a strange sound in your ear, something that you hear That's not really there.
	So I think that, you know, some people seized on that, or jumped on that idea to say, aha, the sound, you know, it was not a red herring.
	People who heard the sound along with symptom onset really were being attacked by weapons.
	Now, an engineer who's done foundational research into the Fry Effect has said that this isn't plausible.
	That to hear the sound associated with the Fry Effect at all, you'd have to be in a basically silent room and you'd hear something very, very quiet.
	So it really doesn't comport with the descriptions of the sound.
	And by now, there have been so many cases of Havana Syndrome across the world that were not associated with sounds.
	That, you know, you don't really have to keep the sound part in.
	But, you know, to answer your question of how the media has responded to and, you know, run with this story all along, I think that it's been incredibly credulous.
	I think that it's, for the most part, taken for granted, the idea that these symptoms I think it's really important to note that these people were mostly national security reporters, the people who have really jumped on this story the most.
	something like this, that all of a sudden someone suffering chronic illness symptoms
	must have been the victim of something.
	I think it's really important to note that these people were mostly national security
	reporters, the people who have really jumped on this story the most.
	They weren't people who write about health and health care.
	In fact, one of the most skeptical reporters about this, Dan Hurley with the New York Times,
	he is someone who writes about functional illness.
	And, you know, I think he looked at it from a health point of view and was a lot more skeptical.
	But yeah, the national security reporters, I think, think they have the scoop of a century and they are just running with it and embarrassing themselves.
	And so, you know, on the other side of this, we have, you know, a good amount of scientists that have embraced psychogenic illness as a probable cause of the symptoms, but it doesn't seem to me like that's making much of a splash with the mainstream reporting.
	Yeah, I think it's frustrating because I think that there have been a lot of very solidly done robust reports basically pointing towards sociogenic illness.
	You had that in, you know, ProPublica, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, all did long Well-researched, well-reported pieces coming to this conclusion.
	Robert Bartholomew and Robert Ballot have co-written a book making that argument.
	I think that there's, you know, a lot of people making this argument very well.
	I don't think that there's much cross-pollination between those people and between the, you know, national security blob, who, you know, writes and reports on this stuff and tends to have a cadre of very specific sources, who really wants to write about spycraft, and about, you know, international conflict and foreign policy from, I think, a very jingoistic point of view.
	And I think that, you know, another undercurrent of all of this, I think, you know, obviously the fact that I'm skeptical that Havana Syndrome was caused by weapons has, you know, that conclusion is rooted in plenty of things.
	But I think one of the things is a healthy skepticism of US foreign policy and its history and how it's been used.
	I mean, that's that's certainly part of it.
	And I think that people who report on those topics, national security reporters tend not to have that skepticism.
	And I think that that's really, really reflected by this story.
	You know, one of the things I've also noticed is the role of senators and congresspeople coming together from across the aisles to really support this, pass the act and all this stuff.
	So, you know, what is the role that they play in this and how do they interact with this, you know, NATSEC group and as well as, you know, the State Department itself?
	I think that one thing that's important to note, at least in my observation, how this story's played out for so many years, I don't think that there's necessarily a ton of consensus within the agencies themselves or within Congress.
	I think it's, you know, probably an individual basis.
	And to some degree, the fact that they haven't moved more on this issue over the past five years, I think suggests that There isn't total internal agreement about what's going on here.
	There's certainly a lot of reporting about debates within the agency.
	And I think that those things have been reflected politically as well.
	So I think that when this first happened, when there was first discussion of sonic weapons
	in early 2017 in Cuba, people like Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida who's just vehemently
	anti-Cuba, really jumped on it right away, did a lot of saber rattling.
	Another person that's been very into this is Jean Sheehan, who is very much into, she's
	a centrist senator who's very into national security issues.
	Tim Kaine, same deal.
	I think that the Congress people who are most interested in this are using it as a pretext to look tough on America's enemies to, you know, support our heroes overseas, our national security community, etc.
	You know, I think that they are definitely doing political performance.
	I think that people within the CIA and State Department who are absolutely convinced that these are attacks are probably motivated by a few things.
	I think in some cases, their friends and colleagues are some of the ones that have claimed to be attacked, which, you know, makes them More likely to side with those people.
	I think that a lot of these people already think the worst of Russia, are already trained to be looking for threats constantly, are already probably trained to, in some cases, if not act on, build information on shoddy intelligence. I think that we can say
	that that's something that we know happens a lot in the government. And I think that there are
	also probably a lot of people in government and in these agencies who think that this is
	a sociogenic illness, and who don't necessarily buy those explanations. But I
	think that there's a big enthusiasm gap between those people, right?
	Like the people who are making it their thing to suss out America's enemies and defend our heroes who have been attacked by these weapons and, you know, pass Co-sponsor and pass the Havana Act and blah, blah, blah.
	Those people care a lot more about making this their issue than someone who's quietly kind of looking over the evidence and thinking, I think that this might be bullshit.
	You know, I think that that person just doesn't care as much.
	And so there aren't as many people pushing back against this from official channels publicly.
	You know, I think when there were more during the Trump administration, I think that part of why there's been a swing is politically in the Biden administration.
	I think a lot of people are eager to say, you know, the Trump administration didn't take America's security seriously, but we do.
	Look at us.
	Despite the fact that, yeah, the Obama rapprochement should hopefully be something Biden supports because it was, you know, a long-term strategy towards Cuba that was disrupted by the arrival of Trump right around the time where Havana Syndrome started.
	I mean, you know, it's... You know what?
	Let's do the big question.
	Would you say it's fair to call this a conspiracy theory?
	Um, I mean, I think, I think that conspiracy theory is fair.
	I think that it's maybe believed by people that we wouldn't necessarily associate with conspiracy theories.
	I think that when I think about a classic conspiracy theory, I think about You know, goofballs and tinfoil hats on Reddit.
	I think about, you know, nobody's just googling deep into the depths of the earth and becoming convinced that they've become experts on things, blah, blah, blah.
	I think that the dynamic here is totally different.
	I think that, you know, if anything, higher status Professional class types who are, you know, closer to government and power are the ones who are most taken in and most duped by this.
	And that makes it sociologically interesting, but I don't think that makes it not a conspiracy theory.
	Thanks so much for all of this, Natalie, and for your continued work on this.
	Where can people follow you and find it?
	Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at NatalieShirley.
	S-U-R-E-L-Y.
	Yeah, and that's Natalie with N-A-T-A-L-I-E.
	Yes.
	Thanks for coming on the show, Natalie.
	Alright, thanks so much for having me.
	Havana Flynn.
	A Very Flynn Origin Story.
	A pristine Ethernet cord hugged the molding of an Art Deco high-rise apartment complex.
	It snaked around old leather chairs and stacks of ancient books.
	The cable was cleanly mounted to the back of an old cherry wood desk, where the plug was nestled deeply in the port of the rear of an Alienware R-17.
	A tasteful amount of windows lay open on the desktop.
	In the background, an official-looking seal.
	Defense Intelligence Agency.
	On the screen was an archaic looking website bathed in a color that could only be described as stained napkin.
	In the center of the website, a blinking cursor.
	Two hands with clean fingernails and perfectly tailored shirt cuffs made a couple quick keystrokes.
	The cursor highlighted sentences in a word document and copied them into the blank message board form.
	They read, HRC extradition already in motion.
	Effective yesterday, with several countries in case of cross-border run.
	Passport approved to be flagged.
	Effective 10.30 at 12.01 a.m.
	Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the U.S.
	to occur.
	U.S.
	Marines will conduct the operation while National Guard activated.
	Proof check.
	Locate a National Guard member and ask if activated for duty 10.30 across most major cities.
	The cursor hovered over the post button and paused.
	The pair of hands gently lifted off the glowing mechanical keyboard and reached for a nearby telephone.
	With one fluid motion, a hand lifted the phone off its receiver and dialed a number.
	The mysterious man spoke into the phone.
	Stone!
	It's Flynn.
	Everything has been prepared.
	I have the drops edited and ready to roll out.
	Bannon has nearly finished prepping the soldiers, and I'm staring at, with my baby blues, enough evidence to put Hillary Clinton behind bars for a century.
	Yes, I'm well aware she's immortal, sir.
	Generations after generations will dedicate their lives to making sure she never roams free again.
	Yes, sir.
	Operation 17 is a go.
	Flynn placed the phone gently back on its receiver.
	He swiftly maneuvered the mouse over the post button and clicked.
	The message appeared amongst a slew of other posts, slowly populating the page.
	All of a sudden, a piercing pain gripped Flynn's frontal lobe.
	He stumbled backwards, holding his hands to his head, crying out in pain.
	Flynn collapsed to the floor, doubled over.
	His stomach was in knots.
	His bowels emptied into his drawers.
	His vision blurred.
	It was over as quickly as it began.
	Flynn shakily climbed to his feet, muttering softly to himself, What the hell is going on here?
	His voice was different.
	Flynn grasped at his throat, unnerved by the rough Scottish drawl that now occupied his vocal cords.
	He glanced over at a whiteboard with numbers and equations written across it.
	For the life of him, Flynn couldn't comprehend a single line of arithmetic on the board.
	He rushed over to it, grabbed a felt marker and scribbled out a couple letters.
	Even his handwriting had changed.
	Compared to the other writings, Flynn's penmanship was shaky and filled with grammatical errors.
	Something was wrong.
	Flynn knew he had to get the word out to Stone, Bannon, and five other high-level current and former military leaders.
	There was an important operation he was supposed to be in charge of, but like a bad dream, the more he tried to remember the details, the further they slipped away.
	Flynn stumbled over to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and placed a carton of milk to his temple.
	Hello, Doctor.
	I'm afraid I've fallen ill.
	You must notify the DIA at once!
	Flynn unscrewed the cap to the milk and poured it on the floor.
	Stressed, he reached for one of the felt-tip markers, put it to his lips, and lit the end with a match.
	laughter Flynn puffed slowly on the markers.
	Ha ha!
	Flynn puffed slowly on the marker as purple-colored ink dribbled down his lips and chin.
	His eyes zeroed in on the strange glowing contraption seated on the desk in the center of the living room.
	He marched over to the computer, staring at it in total disbelief.
	Flynn sat down in front of the screen.
	The interface was completely foreign to him.
	He attempted to manipulate the mouse, but quickly became frightened of the speed at which the cursor glided across the screen.
	This was obviously some sort of device from the future.
	And Flynn knew better than to try to figure out its complex mechanics himself.
	And then, a lightbulb went off.
	The Dell!
	Flynn quickly trotted over to the closet, walking straight into three separate doors and a plant in the process.
	Bruised with clumps of soil dotting his face, Flynn reached into the closet and pulled away a large tarp beneath it.
	was an ancient-looking Dell.
	Its casing had browned, its screen tiny and smudged.
	Now we're talking!
	exclaimed an excited Flynn.
	He heaved the old computer over to the desk and set it down with a large thud.
	Flynn quickly worked the cords and plugs, securing a nearby outlet.
	He held his breath as he disconnected the Ethernet cable from the more advanced machine and plugged it into the dusty port on the back of the old Dell.
	Flynn crossed his fingers as he pushed the large power button on the front of the machine.
	The computer sputtered to life and began to install Windows Service Pack 2, the latest version!
	Flynn cried with delight.
	Soon, the screen was dotted with 20 Netscape browser windows, many of them loading very slowly as Flynn desperately wondered just exactly what he was supposed to be doing here.
	He roamed aimlessly through dozens of America online chat rooms, trying to make contact with another operative, anyone who might be able to help him remember his mission.
	Alas, the only people interested in talking to him were depraved sexual freaks, hell-bent on telling him their age, gender, and location.
	Normally, Flynn was uninterested in such personalities.
	He was a devout Christian and a faithful husband.
	But now, in this strange agitated state, Flynn felt compelled to have long,
	explicit conversations with the people he encountered in the chat rooms.
	What the hell was going on?
	Flynn felt a wave of relief as he heard a set of familiar keys jingle
	and the door to his flat opened.
	It was Michael Jr.
	shouted Flynn, standing and embracing his son in a surprise embrace.
	I never thought I'd say this, but I've missed you, boy.
	Flynn Jr.
	looked confused.
	My boy, something strange is going on in this flat.
	I was on the verge of completing some important research, and then it appears as if I somehow traveled through time.
	Mike Jr.
	seemed skeptical.
	Dad, I literally left like 15 minutes ago to pick us up a couple of sandwiches from Jersey Mike's.
	He held up the bag.
	Sure enough, two large sandwiches, the oil blend seeping through the paper, were stacked on top of one another.
	Ha ha ha ha ha ha!
	which is I fished the old Del out from under the top of the closet.
	She's beautiful, boy.
	Mike Jr.
	furrowed his brow.
	Why are you talking like that?
	So is QAnon still a go?
	Flynn Sr.' 's eyes lit up.
	He remembered.
	Tears welled up in the bottom of his eyelids.
	That's it, boy.
	You've saved us all.
	Flynn ran over to the old computer and opened a fresh browser.
	He typed in five simple letters.
	Q-A-N-O-N.
	The screen was flooded with message board discussions.
	Flynn tried to make sense of it.
	He spoke over his shoulder to his son.
	It appears that someone calling themselves QAnon is disseminating highly classified information.
	Information that could change the course of history.
	Now Mike Jr.
	was really confused.
	Dad, no, no, you're, you're QAnon, remember?
	You've been, you've been planning these drops for, like, for months.
	Flynn shook his head.
	Impossible, boy.
	The sheer number of questions alone is staggering.
	No, these communications are far too advanced for even my military knowledge.
	Mike Jr.
	squinted and looked at the screen a little closer.
	Maybe you're onto something.
	The father and son sat in front of the dimly lit screen for 72 hours, baking and rebaking the drops.
	Flynn poured through hundreds of emails flooding his account.
	Memes and strange prayers, messages of support and love.
	Mike Jr.
	grew a little wary when an anonymous correspondent seemed to send Flynn a satanic prayer, but his father brushed it off, insisting that this was merely a friendly operative speaking to him in code.
	As the sun rose on the third day, Flynn believed he had finally deciphered the details of his mission.
	He would build an army of posters and provide support to whoever this mysterious operative was.
	Flynn hugged his boy before Mike Jr.
	headed out the door to go to work.
	He couldn't afford to call in sick for the third day in a row.
	Plus, with the cascade of new information, Flynn hoped the resources at the university could aid in their investigation.
	Alone in the apartment, Michael Flynn continued to go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, all the while scribbling everything he could into a small leather-bound journal.
	Blood sacrifices.
	Human trafficking.
	Mud fossils.
	When the old Dell finally lost power and its screen turned black.
	Flynn knew it was time to leave the digital battlefield and set out into the real world.
	He leaned over and gently kissed the top of the old dusty rig and thanked it for its service.
	Flynn tucked his journal into an old briefcase and fetched his tweed overcoat from the closet.
	Across the street, in a vacant apartment, a small group of men wearing tactical gear and earpieces threw their headsets off in disgust.
	It didn't work, one of them said.
	He's too stupid, lamented another.
	A man standing next to a large, mounted radio frequency emitter aimed directly at Michael Flynn's apartment shook his head in defeat and powered down the device.
	A woman spoke up from the back of the empty room.
	Her face was cloaked in shadow, but by her silhouette, one could make out the pantsuit and shoulder-length hair.
	I guess we have to do it the old-fashioned way.
	Drone the son of a bitch.
	Everyone in the room chuckled.
	One of the men opened a military briefcase and hovered his finger over a large red button.
	I'm only joking, of course.
	I'm joking.
	Bring him in.
	The technician closed the briefcase, disappointed.
	The soldiers then flooded out of the room in formation, their weapons at the ready.
	The room was now left with only two occupants.
	The woman and a taller, aging man.
	He put his hand gently around her shoulders.
	Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit.
	That ray gun is about as useful as a trap door in a canoe.
	Are you sure this is a good idea?
	He's gonna be madder than a wet hen when they bring him in.
	The woman relaxed a little and placed her arms around the man's broad shoulders.
	Well, you know what they say about a wet hen.
	Easier to pluck.
	Prep the plane.
	We're going to Turkey.
	To be continued.
	Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
	You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
	If you are already a subscriber, thank you so much.
	It helps us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
	You can also go check out the first release on QAA Records, which is up at qaarecords.bandcamp.com.
	It's called Hikikomori Lake.
	It's 12 original tracks by Nick Sena, and you can listen to it as much as you want there.
	And if you want it in high-resolution files, you can also pay $5 and download the whole thing for yourself.
	We're really proud of it, and hopefully you'll hear more about the music and potentially Playing it live, hopefully in a day where I'm back in the country, boys.
	I miss you so much, and also that we may partake in a tour, a tour of performances for other people.
	For everything else, there's the website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
	Listener, until next week, may Havana bless you and keep you.
	It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
	And now, today's Auto-Q.
	Uh-oh.
	Oh!
	He's trying to put this on his head!
	Oh, there it is!
	The sun-made raisin bread!
	He's got a sun-made raisin head is what he's got!
	Raisin bread jokes, folks.
	He's got a raisin head.
	It's incredible how you were able to position that perfectly.
	You look like a raisin bread unicorn right now.
	This is serious stuff.
	Usually I wear a tinfoil hat.
	Actually, in the book it says a raisin bread hat works almost as good as tinfoil.
	Wow.
	It stops the Havana Syndrome.
	Tripoli told me that.
	No, I've heard about that.
	You know what the Havana Syndrome is, right?
	Yeah, it's crazy.
	Our government's so fucking pussy the leftists are on the run.
	They think that other people are microwaving them.
	They don't understand that the aircraft have such powerful secret communication devices that are beyond like 10G that it's frying them.
	It's their devices frying them.
	We're sick of 10G!
	We're tired of ditching!
	They're up in the airplanes!
	Everybody's wondering why!
	on Air Force One, it'll shoot right through the planet, communicate with submarines.
	It'll shoot right through the planet!
	It's not good for you.
	And they're all vomiting, wondering why, 'cause you're-- - Everybody's wondering why!
	You're fucking yourself with fucking radiation!
	You don't want to be in the government!
	It's the radiation!
	(audience cheers)
	I gotta go!
	My babysitter's leaving!
	I'll see you next time!
	And there goes Alex Jones, everybody!
	That was William Montgomery!
	That's tonight's show, everybody!

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