Stuff You Should Know - Havana Syndrome: ¿Qué Diablos?

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

In 2016, diplomats at the American embassy in Cuba began suffering weird neurological symptoms after hearing strange noises. Some say it was a sonic attack using a secret weapon, but the Havana Syndrome remains a baffling scientific mystery to this day. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jason Flom, and you're Maggie Freeling. Hey, Jason. Every day we learn about another person who shouldn't be in prison. 58 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. So glad you're home. If you want to be part of this work, listen to Wrongful Conviction. The podcast where we hand the mic to innocent people to hear their stories. How do you send someone innocent to prison?

Listen to new episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling and Jason Flom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up? This your boy, Jerry Clark, and I am the host of Storytime with Legendary Jerry Podcast. For the last 30 years, I've worked with some of your favorite artists like Outkast, Killer Mike, Jeezy, Akon, Jermaine Dupri, and so many, many more. Storytime with Legendary Jerry is an ode to the South. Southern rap has had the game on lock for years, and now I'm telling you legendary stories of how we did it. Listen to Storytime with Legendary Jerry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And I think Dave's around somewhere sitting in for Jerry, who's – can we say where Jerry is, Chuck? I don't think we can yet, but it's pretty cool. Okay. Yeah, Jerry's on a cool field trip. That's for, that's Nunya.

Okay. You ever say that when you were little? No, I had it said to me a lot, but I never had occasion to say it. Nunya business? Right. By the way, this is stuff you should know for those of you like say it. Yes. The anticipation. So, Chuck, speaking of anticipation, we're talking today about one of the greatest medical mysteries that has hit the world, at the very least, the United States in a really

long time. It's a little something that's been flying under the radar and really flew under the radar for a while, but there's probably a lot of people out there who haven't heard of this, something called Havana syndrome. And Havana syndrome is, we should say at the outset, there's not going to be any resolution to this episode. I know. It's deeply. I thought I was missing some pages. Yeah, it's really dissatisfying, the whole thing.

It is. We don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is. And really, honestly, the theories are not great. There's no one theory where you're like, of course that's it. Everybody else is being ridiculous. Yeah. So, in one way, it's kind of interesting in that we get to cover a lot of stuff.

But in another way, it's, again, deeply unsatisfying. But the whole thing of Havana syndrome, it all begins in, I believe, the end of 2016, around December of 2016. Just like a year after the United States had opened its embassy again in Cuba after decades of this kind of chilly, cold war, like pretending one another isn't there relationship. Just a year after that, there was a station agent, a CIA station agent in Havana who started complaining of some really weird symptoms after hearing a really weird noise. And that kicked this whole mess off. Yeah, this is worth reading, I think, from The Guardian in 2017. And I don't think this is the first one, but they were all very similar, the people who were affected by this mystery. It says this, the blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet and there was silence.

He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. And, you know, that doesn't really describe much, but when you talk to some of the people who, and we did personally talk to all of these people. Right. We were given special clearance for this. There were weird symptoms, ear pain, tinnitus, headaches, hearing loss, vertigo, dizziness, nausea, disorientation, blurred vision, nosebleed, fatigue. Sometimes the symptoms were sort of temporary and not too bad with some of the people.

Sometimes it was really bad. And some people ended up retiring and saying, this is it. I'm out of here. Yeah, some people went on to be diagnosed with swelling of the brain, with a concussion. Some people suffered what seems to be permanent hearing loss. And all of this was localized just in the Havana bureau of the American embassy to Cuba in Havana. Like, that's it. So there was suddenly this weird onslaught of symptoms. I think as many as 90 people came down with this, what came to be called

Havana syndrome. Some of them said, I heard a weird noise, and then all of a sudden I had vertigo. Other people didn't hear anything. They just all of a sudden couldn't concentrate any longer. And it was this, the symptoms all seemed to, nobody said I had a fever or my legs started swelling. It all seemed to be kind of clustered around your hearing, your ears, your nose, your throat kind of thing, but without the throat and without the nose, mainly just your ears and your brain. They seemed to be a cluster of neurological symptoms that no one had any idea what was going on. Yeah. So, you know, of course, the U.S. is going to investigate something like this. And we'll get

into there were a couple of pretty deep, well, as deep as you can get in this case, investigations. But the very first thing that happened was the FBI was like, hey, this is some sort of acoustic attack. Some sort of sound waves are being used. Let's get in there and at least check out the locations, check out everything around where these people are living, where they're staying. And they found nothing.

They came up really pretty much empty. And we should also point out this was, I think a few Canadian diplomats too. It wasn't entirely U.S. Right. But for the most part, it was U.S. And it seemed to be concentrated in the homes of the diplomats. And by diplomats, we're including CIA agents who weren't known. They weren't like, hey, I'm the CIA agent here.

They were posing as diplomats. So the diplomats, they're included. Michael Keaton. Well, who was he posing as diplomats. So the diplomats, they're included. Michael Keaton. Well, who was he posing as? Michael Keaton in, what was it? Out of Sight. Oh, I still haven't seen that. He's an FBI guy, and he showed up with a big T-shirt that said FBI.

And Dennis Farina had that great joke. He says, you got another one that says undercover? Yeah, nice. I love that guy. He was the best. R.I.P. Who else by Dennis Farina could follow up

after Jerry Orbach? Nobody. And he did it. He did it with class. He brought his own character. Just amazing stuff. And I was about to say, I didn't see any of that show,

but I was about to say, except he was no singer like Jerry Orbach, but we might be wrong again. We could be. I really walked past that one, I guess. So the diplomats seemed to be affected at their houses, and then there were two hotels in Havana that these symptoms started their onset on. So, again, that was basically like the first investigation the FBI conducted. It was just like, I don't know. But clearly, it was an attack. You know, it's localized to diplomats and their families. It's in Havana. It's not happening anywhere else for now. So, it was some sort of attack. We just don't know what it was.

That was the first investigation. And so the State Department said, let's dig a little deeper. Yeah. I mean, they kind of kept it quiet for a little while. I think the media eventually got wind of what they were calling a sonic attack. And then the former presidential administration, as things were starting to, I guess, thaw a little bit, said, you know what, you guys are out of here, and kicked out two Cuban diplomats, kind of as payback, basically, when Cuba the whole time was going, we didn't do this, we don't know what you're talking about. And as we'll see later, they supposedly even investigated and tried to help investigate. Yeah, yeah. That was one of the longstanding things the Cubans have said basically from the outset is twofold. One, they had nothing to do with it, knew nothing about it,

and that they would take something like that very seriously. And then two, they seem to suspect that this eventually snowballed into an easy way to cut ties again with Cuba, that that was kind of something that was driving this narrative as well. Part of the problem also is, you know, like you said, the State Department was keeping this secret, not just from the American public. Congress hadn't even heard about this. And everyone found out about the same time that when the media started reporting on it, Congress found out about it. And apparently Marco Rubio latched onto this because he's of Cuban ancestry. I'm not sure if he is or his parents are from Cuba, but he hates the Castro regime. And so this was a big thing for him to kind of clomp onto and really kind of enrage his base, the Cuban expatriate community in Miami, in South Florida. And he, out of the gate, I think even released a press release referring to this as a sonic attack.

Like really kind of taking whatever the FBI had surmised and just basically saying, this is what happened. We just haven't figured out how. But it was an attack. saying, this is what happened. We just haven't figured out how, but it was an attack. And that really set the paradigm moving forward for basically everybody except for, thankfully, large swaths of the scientific community. Yeah. So, they commissioned the National Academy of Science to undergo an investigation in 2019. And even by that time, people that understood things like acoustic or possible acoustic attacks or just acoustics basically said, this wasn't some kind of a sonic attack. It is possible that you can focus a sound beam to an area, but you would have to

truck in some equipment that's so big the FBI would have found it. And even if they managed to do that and get away with it, there were so many different symptoms going on with these people. It can't all be explained away by an acoustic attack. And let's say that even happened. It definitely wouldn't cause brain damage. Like the worst acoustic attack wouldn't cause somebody brain damage. No, so really there's two ways. Because here's the other thing.

People said they heard a weird sound or whatever, but it wasn't necessarily some, like they were clearly being attacked by the sound. That wasn't what they reported. They just, some of them said, I heard a weird sound first, and then all of a sudden I had these weird symptoms. That's, you know, what gave rise to the sonic attack theory.

But there's basically two ways to attack people with sound, especially sound they can't hear. It's either below our threshold of hearing, which is infrasound. What? Uh-huh. What? I was trying to make a Yoko Ono joke, but... Right, that's the third route. She combines the two. It's astounding. Infrasound is below our threshold, below 20 hertz, right? And you actually can cause things like vertigo in somebody or vomiting, loss of bowel control if you hit somebody with a loud enough infrasound blast.

But like you said. Poop their pants? Yeah. You can make someone poop their pants with infrasound. But you would have to basically, like you said, truck in just this huge rack of subwoofers and shoot it right at somebody to make them lose control of their bowels. Like, it would be very obvious that this is being done. Yeah. You can't use that as an excuse moving forward anyway. Oh, I still will.

Okay. Ultrasound above our threshold of hearing or 20 kilohertz and above. There is stuff on the market that you can actually, you know, direct at somebody a beam of ultrasound and, you know, hurt their hearing. But you're not going to cause vertigo or anything like that. And to really like cause major symptoms or something approaching a concussion or traumatic brain injury, which some of these people were diagnosed with. There was a scientist who said, I think his name was Joseph Pompei, he's a psychoacoustics expert, which is awesome.

He said that you would basically have to dip your head in a pool lined with ultrasonic transducers to get, like, actual brain damage from that. So that didn't happen to anybody. So, again, they said sonic attack, but it must have been some sort of exotic weapon that even the CIA isn't aware of. All right. I think good time for a break, yes? I agree. Go stick our head in a break. Yes. I agree. Go stick our head in a pool of ultrasonic transducers. Yeah, I can't wait to see what happens. I'm going to poop my pants.

All right. Great. I'm Jason Flom and you're Maggie Freeling. Hey, Jason. Every day we learn about another person who shouldn't be in prison. 58 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. So glad you're home. If you want to be part of this work, listen to Wrongful Conviction.

The podcast where we hand the mic to innocent people to hear their stories. How do you send someone innocent to prison? to hear their stories. How do you send someone innocent to prison? Listen to new episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling and Jason Flom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This second season of El Flow is here.

Available como a ti te guste, in both English and Spanish. This season, we dive deeper into the vibrant world of reggaeton, featuring interviews with both reggaeton legends and exciting new talents. He's the undisputed king of reggaeton, no doubt. And he's been cited as an inspiration

by multiple Latin stars, including J Balvin, Bad Bunny, Osuna, Auntie Natasha. Explore the evolution of this dynamic genre and what makes it resonate globally. How you consume reggaeton, how you share and distribute reggaeton, those are all an important part of the story. It's the way that the people are experiencing reggaeton along with the musicians. Listen to El Flow as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, Chuck, so you said that the State Department's sick, the National Academy of Science is on the Savannah Syndrome thing, right? Yeah, like everyone at this point is saying, it's not a sonic attack. So they started focusing on potential viral attack, pesticide poisoning, because this is when Zika was a thing and Zika fumigation was going on. Either microwaves, which is interesting. And then our favorite, frankly, one of our favorite topics is mass hysteria. Yeah, we did. We talked about it twice, at least.

We did a short stuff on Gloria Ramirez. Remember her? And then we also did a full-length episode, some really interesting cases of mass hysteria from 2016. Yeah, so put a pin in that. NAS is doing their study. They were, you know, they were sort of behind the eight ball a little bit because by this point, things had already progressed. You know, they were at a disadvantage in a lot of ways. This was after the fact. They didn't know, like these doctors they were at a disadvantage in a lot of ways. This was after the fact. They didn't know, like these doctors who were treating these people, they didn't know they were investigating a mystery. They were treating people for a medical issue. So, your approach to

a situation like that is a lot different if you're not investigating, like no one is back there saying, hey, find out what weird thing happened to these people. They were just, like, treating tinnitus and nausea and stuff like that. Yeah, there seems to be a really big ball drop on the part of the State Department. A lot of ball dropping here. Yeah. In particular, the Cuban Bureau or Havana Bureau, there wasn't anybody at the top saying, hey, there's something clearly going on here. All of these people, when you go to this one particular doctor and have the doctor, this one medical center, somebody looking at, you know, looking for all these symptoms and documenting this, they were just being treated individually. Finally, at one point, they did kind of bring everybody together and have a meeting.

But before that, there was just a lot of treatment going on and it wasn't being documented properly. So the NAS, just right out of the gate, was like, this is what we're working with, for real? Yeah. I mean, they didn't even have stuff like original blood samples for when these people got sick. There was a lot of time that passed. So they really had no way to tell anything. They had incomplete data to begin with. And then, of course, you're dealing with Cuba. So you're not getting – I mean, you know, they're investigating some stuff. But it's not like if this happened to Canada and we were really sharing information like that. Well, from what I read, the Cubans are saying, like, we were totally willing to collaborate.

The State Department refused to let the NAS talk to us. Yeah, I believe it. They couldn't accept our data. They couldn't – yeah, I guess the Cubans had conducted neighborhood surveys, had done its own investigation, and the NAS was barred from using any of that data. And then one other thing that hamstrung them right out of the gate was the medical files. These are medical files of diplomats and in some cases CIA agents. So not only is there like HIPAA stuff going on, like HIPAA protection so their things have to be redacted. There's like national security stuff too.

And, you know, like the State Department is very, you know, redaction happy when it comes to stuff like that. So, they were basically handed medical files that hid huge black bars everywhere over possibly important information. So, you put all this stuff together and the National Academy of Sciences cannot possibly arrive at a clear picture of the problem, the symptoms, what happened when, who was near whom at what point. And so they can't possibly map, produce an epidemiological map. So whatever they come up with is going to be flawed. And they realized this from the get-go. Yeah. So what they ended up coming up with, the NAS said, you know what, it was a directed pulsed radio frequency energy. And we think that's the most likely cause. A couple of key words there, directed and pulsed means someone did this. It was a very specific, intentional attack. attack. It wasn't just some random thing that happened because of microwaves or cell phone towers or anything like that. It was a purposeful thing.

And they said, you know, one of the reasons that we think it might be this is this thing called the Fry effect. F-R-E-Y. Nothing to do with the deceased former eagle, Glenn Fry. The H is O. The what? The H is O. The what? The heat is on. I've told you about this before. There's a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Ben Stiller.

I don't remember this. He sees Glenn Frey, who's actually Will Ferrell, our colleague and co-worker, as Glenn Frey at a club. And he's like, I'm going to go, I'm going to seduce Glenn Fry to like his friends. And he goes over and he actually is successful, but to his own detriment because Glenn Fry makes him eat out of a dog bowl and keeps him on a

chain and there's this wild like just crazy sex that's going on and the guy like really regrets having seduced Glenn Fry. But it's, they refer to the heat is on as the H is O. It's really great. I don't think you've ever said that before.

I have. That's good stuff. It is impossible that I have not mentioned it before. So when the words Glenn Frey are uttered, that's the first thing you think of? Yes. Pretty much. Every time. Oh, I have another Glenn Frey story if you want to hear it.

I got it all the time in the world. So, you and me and I were traveling in our car, and this Eagles song was on. Which one? The one about the wheels driving you crazy. Take it easy. Okay. And I hate the Eagles to begin with, from start to finish i hate their entire catalog every every moment of it oh good lord that song in particular is one of the ones i really hate

and um we have a pause button on our radio and so i paused it because this is live radio and um i unpaused it and you know there's the song still i'm like man it's still this is a really long song we do this like five times before i like realize that our radio can actually pause live radio and that we're not like in some new concentric circle of hell there was a moment there we're like did we die or is this is? Are we in purgatory? Because this is awful. That's really funny. Well, I am back loving the Eagles after many years of not. And so I wanted to thank

Stuff You Should Know listener Clayton Janes, who invited me and Emily to the Eagles concert last time they came to Atlanta. And I got to go backstage there and stand on the stage of Phillips Arena and touch Don Henley's drum kit and look at Joe Walsh's and Glenn Fry's guitars that his son now plays in his absence. Yeah, I think I think he told us about that one. It was awesome.

And I know now why you weren't there. Yeah. Yeah. But Clayton's a good guy. He does. He does other bands like I think he works with Kiss a lot. So you probably enjoy that. I would definitely go see Kiss for guy. He does other bands. I think he works with Kiss a lot, so you'd probably enjoy that tour. I would definitely go see Kiss for sure.

Yeah. For sure. So if Clayton's listening, we want to go to the next Kiss show backstage. Yeah, please, Clayton, come on. I want to meet those guys. Okay. They scare me still. There was another guy named Josh who's a cool guy I've lost touch with,

but he used to invite us to the New Kids shows because he was like a production designer. It's like you're talking about with Clayton. He doesn't just work with the New Kids, but he's like this in-demand production designer. Well, one of the shows that he's done for multiple years in a row is New Kids, and he kept inviting us to the New Kids show. And not because I didn't want to go see the New Kids, but there was no, I couldn't go to the new kids every time. But we turned out to be friends, so he's a cool dude. I haven't heard from him in a while. That's awesome.

I guess if you're listening, Josh, get in touch. Yeah, because we want to go. That's the first show I want to see when this whole thing is over. The new kids? Oh, yeah. Then Kiss. Okay. So the Fry effect, boy, that was a good long segue, or not segue. Tangent?

What do we call those? Tangents? Irritations? It's the lifeblood of the show. The Frye effect basically is when pulse microwaves directed at a target can make a clicking sound in the target's ears, and only the person can hear that sound. So they kind of go back to those, I don't know how many people, but some of the people said they did hear a clicking sound before all this stuff happened. So they kind of were like, all right, it's the Fry effect. So here's the problem with that.

At this point, the National Academy of Sciences, the people, the group they impaneled, are just now just ticking off the scientific community because they're like, oh, there's this one quality that can happen from this one weird random thing. That's probably what it is. We'll just completely ignore everything else in favor of that one little piece of information. And so it's really kind of interesting if you read articles on the Havana syndrome, there's a lot of cattiness going on. Like you can get a scientist to call somebody else basically a clown with this stuff. It's really interesting to read, a lot of like flame war stuff. But the problem with the Fry effect, well, there's multiple problems. One, they recorded the sound. There's a recording of it out that the AP leaked that you can hear, which would discount the fry effect because only the person being targeted by microwaves hears the clicking. That's a big problem.

experts, say to produce that clicking in the person's ears, you would cook them to death. Like the amount of energy it would take to make that fry effect happen would kill the person. It wouldn't just, you know, create the clicking in their ears. But that's kind of one of the things that they settled on as a potential explanation. Well, the State Department was like, sounds good to me. I buy it. Yeah. And I mean, the NAS said, like, we're considering all these other things. This is what we think is the most plausible, which is actually really the least plausible. Yeah. And, you know, some of the people in the flame war were like, why did they, like, they have these medical experts, basically, and neurology experts.

What you need if you're going to investigate something like this is a lot of different kinds of experts. You need some acoustic experts. You need, like, apparently didn't even engage acoustic experts talking about this acoustic stuff. And they were like, you need a multidisciplinary team in here in a lot of different fields if you're going to investigate something like this. And they just never did. Yeah, and one of the interpretations I saw was that, again, they were working backward from the Rubio FBI State Department idea, theory, that it was a sonic attack. That that was what the premise they were really going on. That was what the premise they were really going on. And then they were trying to work backward to figure out, you know, what the attack was made of rather than, okay, maybe it was intact. Maybe it was also from Ben Gurion University that said, you know what,

we studied some of these Canadian diplomats and based on their data, we think it was pesticide poisoning. But then a lot of people, and it seems like the most popular, including the Cuban Academy of Sciences, take that for what it's worth. But a lot of them came back and said, and I hate to say it, but this was maybe mass hysteria and some sort of psychological either illness or mass hysteria episode going on. Yeah, a lot of people agree with them on that. And Cuba, by the way,

has a very, like a really good healthcare system and a really solid scientific community. So the Cuban Academy of Sciences is not like the Banana Republic Academy of Sciences or anything like that, from what I understand. I've never been to Cuba. But that seems to be the most widely subscribed to theory, that it was what's called conversion disorder, where you basically have a psychogenic illness.

Somebody is told what the suite of symptoms is. They start developing it themselves. And then this tight-knit community, it starts to seem to spread. And the thing about it is called conversion disorder. You are actually experiencing, your body is experiencing those symptoms, just like in the placebo effect, where you take a pill and it actually does make you healthy, even though it's not an active ingredient. But your body, your mind can make your body do things if it thinks something is going on. This is the kind of like the mirror image of that, where you start to suffer because your mind tricks you into thinking that you have these symptoms. And it seems to spread because people are, it's like fear is the contagion in an instance like this. Yeah. And this stuff has happened before. I think we talked about at least one of

these. The Portugal one. Yeah. In 2006 in Portugal. Gosh, we were doing this in 2006? No, we talked about it after for sure. No, we definitely were. That was two years before we were born. We were just embryonic at that point. Yeah, a twinkle in Adam Curry's eye. Gross. Yeah, 2006 in Portugal, those students in high school, I think it was high school, right?

Or was it college? I think it was high school. Yeah, there were hundreds of students in 14 school, I think it was high school, right? Or was it college? I think it was high school. Yeah, there were hundreds of students in 14 different schools, all developed these weird symptoms, rashes and dizziness and breathing difficulties. And then it happened again in New York in 2011. 12 high school students developed what they thought was Tourette's syndrome, or at least symptoms of Tourette. That sounds made up. If I were a principal, I'd be like, you're all suspended for even trying this. Yeah, because all they did was yell at the teachers.

Right, exactly, yeah. There was another one in Oklahoma in 2017 that actually was happening about the same time as a Savannah syndrome outbreak, where there was actually, the kids were paralyzed. They were getting, they thought that there was some sort of crazy like mold or autoimmune disorder or something like that. And they were suffering paralysis. And that's the thing about conversion disorder is these kids were paralyzed, but it was their mind that had paralyzed them because they thought they'd been exposed to something that was making them paralyzed. And it turns out it was their mind that had paralyzed them because they thought they'd been exposed to something that was making them paralyzed. And it turns out it was just in their minds. And that's what a lot of people think Havana syndrome is, that it was just a psychogenic illness.

Yeah, so I think we should take a break, but we'll leave you with this little cliffhanger. break, but we'll leave you with this little cliffhanger. In this NAS report, they referenced data from an earlier report by the CDC that was commissioned and completed. And Congress and everyone else looked around and said, what CDC report? What are you talking about? So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about this mystery right after this. That's a nice cliffhanger. I'm Jason Flom. And you're Maggie Freeling. Hey, Jason. Every day we learn about another person who shouldn't be in prison.

58 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. So glad you're home. If you want to be part of this work, listen to Wrongful Conviction. The podcast where we hand the mic to innocent people to hear their stories. How do you send someone innocent to prison? Listen to new episodes of Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling and Jason Flom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you death? This road is not on any map. How much for a ticket? All I ask for in payment is a tail.

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So I do pepper. This season we're diving deep into some of McCartney's most beloved songs. Yesterday, Band on the Run, Hey Jude and McCartney's favourite song in his entire catalogue here, there and everywhere. Listen to season two of McCartney, favourite song in his entire catalogue, here, there and everywhere. Listen to Season 2 of McCartney, A Life in Lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

This second season of El Flow is here, available como a ti te guste, in both English and Spanish. This season, we dive deeper into the vibrant world of reggaeton, featuring interviews with both reggaeton legends and exciting new talents. He's the undisputed king of reggaeton, no doubt. And he's been cited as an inspiration by multiple Latin stars, including J Balvin, Bad Bunny, Osuna, Mati Natasha. Explore the evolution of this dynamic genre and what makes it resonate globally. How you consume reggaeton, how you share and distribute reggaeton, those are

all an important part of the story. It's the way that the people are experiencing trayatong along with the musicians. Listen to El Flow as part of the My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so everybody's saying, wait, wait. This is December of 2020 when the Journal of the American Medical Association published the NAS's findings finally. Mere months ago. Yeah. And in that, they made mention of a CDC report that no one else had heard of, and like you said, including Congress.

And it turns out that the State Department had initially commissioned the CDC shortly after this outbreak began and said, can you guys figure out what's going on? And so it turns out that there was actually the NAS study was the second scientific study done on this. And the CDC didn't really come up with much more than the NAS did. Yeah, they issued an 18-page report titled, uh-uh. And they spent half the time trying to figure out how to spell uh-uh. Yeah, there was a vigorous debate over that. No, it was really called Cuba Unexplained Events Investigation. And like you said, they kind of came up empty too. They were hamstrung in a lot of the same ways that the NAS was and had a State Department that had dragged its feet and didn't have the protocols in place for the investigation.

have the protocols in place for the investigation. I think one of the only things that kind of came out of the CDC report that was helpful, which I guess is why the NAS used it in the first place, was it did fill in a few of the details about what happened to whom. Yeah. So, they managed to nail down patient zero who first reported some neurological symptoms in mid-December of 2016, and that was a CIA officer in Havana. That CIA officer mentioned their symptoms to a second CIA officer who, like a couple months later, developed the same symptoms. See where this is going? Yep. later, developed the same symptoms. See where this is going?

And so after that time, so apparently patient zero, the first CIA officer who this happened to, was really instrumental in like spreading the word about this and was, seems to have been very convinced that they had been attacked, that there was a sonic attack going on and that the word needed to be spread about this. And so as a result, I think the Havana embassy held a meeting and basically said, listen out for weird sounds. And if you start to get this huge, weird collection of symptoms, let us know because we're probably under sonic attack. That solves that and went back to bed. That's right. And maybe not coincidentally, a lot of incidents happened after that happened. And at the end they said, you know, if you want to go home, here's one way to fast track that. Although Cuba, I think it one way to fast track that. Although Cuba, I think it's supposed to be very nice.

So maybe they weren't trying to get out of there. But in the end, 95 people were seen for these symptoms. In the CDC report, it said that 15 of those had a two-stage illness. First was the noise that we talked about and those acute symptoms. And then second, a few weeks later, a couple of weeks later, they had that neurological damage. I think 31 of the cases were maybes, 49 were unlikely. And then of those 15 who had that two-stage syndrome, while the report was issued, there were six of them still getting treated. So it wasn't even like their treatment was complete. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing,, whether it's psychogenic illness or a sonic attack or, you know, fumigation poisoning from, you know, Zika pesticides.

Like, there were still people that were still being treated for symptoms for over a year. And these are nasty symptoms. Like, vertigo is nothing fun. Or vomiting or dizziness or inability to concentrate. There's a lot of terrible stuff that people were having to deal with, whatever the reason for the symptoms were, which makes a lot of people think like, no, this is a real thing and these people were attacked and we need to find out what it is. The CDC at least said, we have no idea. Like, we cannot figure it out. They said like,

in their conclusion that they couldn't possibly put forth any kind of explanation. They just mainly documented everything, which is certainly a mark in the CDC's favor and a mark against the NAS that the CDC resisted, you know, saying, yes, it was microwaves and it was probably the Ruskies. Yeah, and that all came about, you know, after everyone, a lot of scientists, that is, rejected the findings. Cuba rejected the findings. A lot of scientists, that is, rejected the findings. Cuba rejected the findings. We told you earlier that they got all up in arms and said, hey, listen, we tried to help. We take this stuff seriously.

We weren't a part of this. But in that NAS panel, somebody said something about Russia. And, you know, obviously Russia is in bed with Cuba. And they said, you know what, maybe it was Russia. We do know that in the 70s they were trying to weaponize microwaves. They, in fact, for like three years straight, three and a half years, pounded the American embassy in Moscow with microwaves. I don't even know if they had an endgame there. I think they were just like, hey, let's see what this does.

Hey, turn it on. And I don't think it really did anything if it went on for three and a half years. And apparently, of course, we'll never know because it's Russia, but supposedly they kind of gave up all that stuff decades ago. Yeah, this is the 70s when they were shooting microwaves at the American Embassy in Moscow. And, yeah, as far as anybody knows, that that technology wasn't pursued any further. So if there is any kind of sonic weapon that is concealable, that is capable of producing the suite of symptoms, it is news to the world. And there are people who say, like, you know, security experts, that kind of group, who say, yeah, it's entirely possible that somebody has developed this without the U.S. being aware of it. I saw a quote that America tends to be very surprised that not that certain things exist, but that other people have caught up to America's technology.

Yeah, hubris. Yeah. But at the same time, it's kind of like it's suggesting that America or certain quarters of America are fully aware that this is possible, which is why they're pursuing that sonic attack thing. But they can't just be like, it's this. See, everybody, we've had this for 20 years now. We just didn't know that the Cubans had it kind of thing. So the U.S. still seems to be, you know, with the expulsion of the Cuban, two Cuban diplomats, is basically saying if Cuba doesn't know, if they didn't do it, they know who did it and they maybe even let it happen. Because apparently diplomatic residences in Cuba are owned and maintained by the Cuban government. So it's not like they just had no opportunity to do this kind of thing. But Cuba, like you said, is extremely adamant that they had nothing to do with this and that they would never let this happen to any accredited

diplomat in their country. And if you step outside of the United States, it's really kind of funny because the rest of the world is totally fine with Cuba. It's really just the United States that's, you know, at odds with Cuba. And Cuba is cool with everybody else. Like apparently a million Canadians go to Cuba every year on vacation. something that they're not really happy about, the idea that if you go to Cuba, you might suffer this sonic attack that could at the very least hurt their tourism industry, if not just, you know, impinging their, you know, how they treat diplomats from other countries or allow them to be treated. It's a real insult in that respect. Yeah. And I think also one of the end results was the U.S.

Yeah. And I think also one of the end results was the U.S. government was kind of exposed a little bit of dragging their feet and not being coordinated and not maybe having their ducks in a row. And I think if anything like this were to happen again, I think they had enough egg on their face to sort of get it together to at least sort of be coordinated from the get-go and have a multidisciplinary investigation going on. Yeah. And this whole thing, like the big argument and push and pull among the scientific community is still very much ongoing. There was a paper published that examined some brain scans of some of these diplomats that were taken at Penn State, I believe. And the authors of the study concluded that, you know, a lot of them showed evidence of trauma. And then other scientists responded and said, like, this doesn't show trauma at all.

This is exactly what you would find from a random sample of the population. Other people, remember I said that they recorded the sound that they heard? Apparently a couple of biologists ran that sound through spectral analysis and showed that it exactly matches a specific kind of cricket that's native to Cuba and the Caribbean. So, there's just like, it's still being hammered out. Like we said at the beginning, that this is not, it's not settled. No one has any idea yet exactly what it is. And it seems like the most satisfying answer would be psychogenic illness. But even still, I mean, that doesn't seem to really explain everything necessarily. Yeah. Well, a pretty good mystery.

Still a good mystery. Yeah. And who doesn't love that, right? I know Glenn Frey hated mysteries. I don't care what Glenn Frey liked or didn't like. Oh, gosh. If you want to know more about the Havana Syndrome, go check out the copious amounts of articles about it.

There's a lot of stuff out there. It's really interesting and engrossing stuff. See what you think. And since I said see what you think, it's time for Listener Mail. When you think about that H is O story, do you go, the H is boom, boom, boom, boom, O? Nope. You know? Right.

Isn't that from Beverly Hills Cop? I think The Heat Is On was. Yeah, that was the one where he's like hanging off of the back of the semi. Yeah, yeah. He did a few of those soundtracky type things and he was an actor on miami vice which is one of your favorite shows i'm what do you hate miami vice it's fine i refuse to watch the episodes with clem fry all right i'm gonna call this just a nice email from a listener who has kind of grown up with us uh hey guys i'm

writing to say that i first discovered your podcast way back in 2010 when I was in the seventh grade. I had just moved away from many of my neighborhood friends and your podcast was a source of information and comfort during that transition. Having always been a nerd, I was immediately hooked on your podcast and have listened to it on many of my travels for sports teams, college trips, and international adventures. on many of my travels for sports teams, college trips, and international adventures. In fact, your podcast had a major impact in keeping my curiosity alive and well throughout my life. I just accepted an offer for grad school in Georgia and wanted to write to say that although we have never met, you two have positively impacted my life for more than the past decade. So thank you for everything.

I hope you're well. And that is from Abigail. That is a fine listener mail. Thanks a lot, Abigail. It's very sweet. I love it. And best of luck in grad school. That's great. Yeah. Go kill it. Yeah. But not literally. No, no, no. That's a figure of speech, meaning go do the best you can and do a great job.

Okay. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Abigail. Abigail's new nickname. Not Frank Abagnale. No. Abadale. Master Forger. Formerly known as Abigail. Yes.

Yeah, we talked about Frank Abagnale in the five successful counterfeiters episode. He was number one, wasn't he? He was up there for sure. Yeah. He was number one, wasn't he? He was up there for sure. That guy was good. Well, anyway, if you want to get in touch with us like anybody, including Abigdale, Abigdale, or Abigail,

you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Jason Flom. And you're Maggie Freeling.

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