Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. By Robert W. Baloh and Robert E. Bartholomew. Springer International Publishing, 2020. ISBN 9783030407452.
Why am I reviewing a book published two years ago? Because it was largely ignored by reviewers in 2020. Now, with claims in the news such as “no one is safe even at the White House,” it is more important than ever to educate yourself on this subject, and this book is a great way to do that.
For those of you unfamiliar with the topic, let me start with an overview of the ongoing story and effect known as Havana Syndrome. Beginning in late 2016, the U.S. government claimed there were ongoing attacks against its embassy personnel and their families in Havana, Cuba, by unknown forces using unknown weapons. The Canadian government followed America’s lead and made similar claims about their citizens at its own Cuban embassy. In subsequent years, the scope of these claimed attacks broadened to include intelligence agents and other government officials, and even family members, all stationed in an ever-growing list of countries around the world. Recently, White House staff working in Washington have made claims of falling victim to these attacks on the White House grounds and elsewhere in D.C.
The symptoms of the attacks, which have collectively become known as Havana Syndrome, include everything from tinnitus to insomnia to supposed brain damage. The mysterious, unidentified weaponry blamed for these “neurological attacks” has been diverse and transformed over time. It has included ultrasound, infrasound, pulsed electromagnetic energy, microwaves, and even pesticides.
My skeptical alarm bells were triggered by virtually every media report I came across after the story of sonic attacks in Cuba broke. So in early 2019, I reached out to an expert on the subject of mass psychogenic illness (MPI) for a Skeptical Inquirer interview. Dr. Robert Bartholomew made it clear that he believed that there were in fact no actual attacks causing these symptoms. One statement made his position at the time particularly clear: “Any talk of a sonic attack is science fiction. … I have no doubt that the Trump Administration, which has consistently claimed that an attack took place (including Trump himself), now realize that they have made a mistake, but they do not want to admit it.”
Over three years have passed since I did that interview. And it is over five years since the “attacks” began, and there is still no good evidence that any such thing has ever occurred. In 2020, Baloh and Bartholomew published their book subtitled Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria. The book explained why the government’s claims and the story being disseminated in the media are plain wrong, and it proposed another hypothesis: mass psychogenic illness.
I had hoped that the official government position on this topic would have become less credulous over time. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The Biden administration could have changed course and hit the reset button, but its position is in lockstep with that of Trump. This is epitomized by a new law from late 2021, the “HAVANA Act,” which authorizes financial support for the “victims” of “neurological attacks” associated with Havana Syndrome.
Just a few months ago, CBS’s 60 Minutes ran a report claiming that low-level government employees at the White House have been attacked by unknown weaponry. (It clearly implied that if that could happen there, then no one—including the president—is safe!) In the YouTube video with over 1.5 million views as of this writing, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, is asked if Havana Syndrome symptoms have been caused by deliberate attacks, and he said “I don’t think there is any other hypothesis.” Worse, current CIA Director William Burns presented the Biden administration’s position that the attacks are real and ongoing. When asked why his agency had not proved anything after all these years, his apologetic response was: “It’s a very complicated issue.”
There is no hint of the possible (likely?) psychogenic nature of Havana Syndrome raised by anyone interviewed in the report. In fact, there isn’t even a hint that any skepticism about the attack claims exists in the scientific community. Watching this report, one would think that the Havana Syndrome attacks are as unquestionable as the globe earth model and that any skeptics must be in the same tinfoil-hat-wearing club as flat-earthers, thus not worthy of being interviewed or even mentioned.
The credulous media coverage over the past five years has certainly allowed Havana Syndrome to enter the public consciousness as a real, undisputed thing. This is exemplified by a 2022 episode of Law and Order (season 21, episode 8) in which a CIA agent murders his wife and having Havana Syndrome was his successful defense strategy. (He’s found not guilty by reason of mental defect.)
Searching for online reviews of Baloh and Bartholomew’s book, I was surprised to find precious few. Although the book was reviewed in the pages of Skeptical Inquirer (May/June 2021), the reviews were mostly on websites such as Amazon and Goodreads; why had media such as the New York Times or Washington Post passed on doing reviews? It’s almost like the book was largely ignored because it conflicted with the fear-mongering storyline that the media has been engaged in ever since this all began. (Wow! I sound like a conspiratorialist now.)
I was very curious as to whether the MPI hypothesis Bartholomew related to me in 2019 would seem dated due to the story’s evolution over the past two years, which has included different weapons being blamed and the ever-growing claims of attacks in new locations all over the world. Was my thinking on this maybe out of step with reality? It turns out that the book just made it more apparent to me that, to quote the authors, Havana Syndrome “is an extraordinary tale of bad science, political ineptitude, public confusion, and the nature of the media which is prone to promoting false narratives, because most journalists … are not experts on exotic and highly specialized subjects—like neuroweapons.”
The book starts off by detailing the evolution of Havana Syndrome, beginning with the initial American and Canadian government claims of attacks in Cuba. It explains the political pressures leading to the official attack declarations and details how and why the medical investigations and studies went so wrong in backing up the attack hypothesis.
Two studies published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association concluded there was unexplained brain damage in some of the Havana diplomats, thus confirming the attack hypothesis for the U.S. government. These reports are the best evidence that physical attacks occurred. But the authors comprehensively examine and refute the results, characterizing the studies’ claims as pseudoscience, explaining that they are “a set of theories and claims that appear to be grounded in science and facts but do not follow the scientific method.”
Unfortunately, the MPI diagnosis is badly misconstrued and routinely disparaged; indeed, the book describes MPI as one of the most misunderstood conditions in all of medicine, having been discounted by medical professionals, politicians, and the media. To diagnose MPI is seen as ridiculing the people reporting symptoms by in essence saying that they are imagining or even fabricating their ailments. To counter this, the book provides a thorough explanation of MPI: what it is and, perhaps more importantly, what it is not (hysterical, weak-minded, or dishonest people all just making up symptoms). The truth is that physical symptoms attributed to the believed attacks can result from a number of sources, including the nocebo effect or from real but unconnected causes.
To put Havana Syndrome in historical context, the book details the most prominent MPI cases of the thousands that have occurred throughout history. These include cases experienced in societies all around the world, from the distant past to the present.
Because an acoustic attack was the initial claim (the Wikipedia “Havana Syndrome” article was initially titled “Cuba Sonic Attack”), the book spends a fair amount of time reporting on a plethora of historical and modern cases of supposed harm caused by sounds from a huge variety of sources. These include Ben Franklin’s armonica, early telephones, wind turbines, “the hum” heard almost everywhere, and even (mostly silent) giraffes at a British zoo.
Claims of attacks by unknown agents with unknown weapons is an integral part of the Havana Syndrome narrative. Therefore, the book expounds on other cases in history when groups of people firmly believed they were under attack by unknown assailants. Many involved villains and situations that modern audiences would now clearly see as ridiculous, such as witches cursing neighbors and a “monkey man” stabbing, clawing, and biting people at home all over a crowded city late at night.
Oh wait, the monkey man case is not that old; it dates to 2001. And persecution of witches is still going on in many parts of the world. As the authors point out: “One of the poignant lessons from this book is how easily people living today as in the past are susceptible to being led astray from objective reality.”
Once you recognize the similarities of the MPI cases detailed in the book to Havana Syndrome and learn that the medical evidence used to validate the current claims is deeply flawed, it’s difficult to justify maintaining belief in the official position on this matter. I have to wonder: if John Bolton were to read this book, would he still maintain that attacks are the only possible hypothesis? Would CIA Director Burns realize that his agency has not cracked the case in over five years—not because “it’s a very complicated issue” but because, having heard hoofbeats, they are assuming the sound was caused by unicorns instead of horses? To extend the metaphor, they have spent five years expending untold resources looking for those imaginary creatures when there are actual horses in their paddock.
As a skeptic, I feel obligated to admit that Baloh and Bartholomew could well be wrong. It is not absolutely impossible that eventually a highly advanced weapon or weapons (breaking the laws of physics as we currently understand them) will come to light that can actually cause all of the unrelated symptoms termed Havana Syndrome. It is also not absolutely impossible that a team or teams of agents from foreign adversaries have used such weapons and flawlessly coordinated their attacks on U.S. (and sometimes Canadian) officials (plus some family members), sparing any collateral damage to other civilians nearby, all over the world, for five years without an obvious goal and without ever leaving any evidence the CIA can find.
But unless and until credible evidence is found that any of those unlikely possibilities are true, the more rational assumption is that Havana Syndrome represents just the latest case of mass psychogenic illness. The likely truth seems to be, as the authors describe it: “Havana Syndrome” is actually “the story of how much of the world came to believe in something that never happened.”