Cuban Embassy in Havana. (photo credit R. Douglas Fields)

The alarming story that a mysterious energy beam caused traumatic brain injury to US Embassy personnel in Havana has consumed the media in an anxious frenzy not seen since the UFO hysteria of the 1950’s.   Many possible suspects in this cruel affair have been fingered, but the perpetrator remains elusive.  That, in my opinion, is because the true culprit in the “Cuban Sonic Attack” is journalism.  Unanchored by fact-based reporting, the public are swept adrift in hysteria or they are sucked into authoritarian currents as the press succumbs to its darker weakness—propaganda.

I have already reported on the scientific evidence that discredits each of the theories for this alleged attack published in Scientific American.  My article is based on science and my investigation on-location in Cuba where I interviewed primary sources and examined the sites of the alleged attacks.  There is no need to rehash that here.

The argument I make in my Op-Ed just published in Undark Magazine  is that the “Sonic Attack” terror campaign is sustained by the press as though they were champions sleuthing out a great mystery instead of what they are really doing:  spreading rumor.

The media present as fact the premise that these people were attacked and suffered traumatic brain injury, but the factual evidence documents no traumatic injury and no syndrome.  The actual clinical reports were not provided to the public, journalists, or even to the teams of scientists investigating the matter.

Last week a delegation of 9 physicians and high-level scientists from Cuba, who have been investigating the incident, came to Washington, DC at the invitation of the US State Department to meet with officials and physicians to identify what neurological conditions the embassy employees have suffered and to try to determine what may have caused them.  To their great disappointment, the Cuban scientists and diplomats were given no new clinical information.  The doctors who examined the US diplomats were not in attendance.

Delegation of Cuban scientists and physicians investigating the “sonic attack” speaking last week in a press conference at the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC

Why, if the US government had evidence that American citizens had been injured abroad by a dastardly weapon deployed by a hostile force, would it not provide that evidence to the public the way it would if the attack were by a bullet, bomb, or bottle of Novichok? Why didn’t the government immediately marshal the world’s most powerful biomedical institutions — the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the National Academy of Sciences ? Why is the fact that an FBI investigation of the incident has turned up no evidence of an attack being widely dismissed? And why is the State Department alarm over this supposedly threatening new weapon while the nation’s watchdogs, its military, remain silent?

While they were in Washington DC, the Cubans met with members of congress and scientists on a mission to press for the NAS, NIH, and CDC to undertake a detailed investigation into the matter, and they offered to host a meeting with US scientists and physicians in Havana to work together to get to the bottom of this.

It is a remarkable step for the suspected perpetrator to seek what journalists call fact-finding, sourcing, and verification.

Follow this link to read my Op-Ed in Undark Magazine:  https://undark.org/2018/09/27/root-cuban-embassy-mystery-bad-science-journalism/