Sonic weapon, spying equipment malfunction, and microwave attack (those poor microwaves get a lot of accusations, probably because they don’t defend themselves), were considered as possible causes of the evil sounds that bombarded US Embassy diplomats living in Cuba. The “persistent, deafening, high-pitched” noises were blamed for insomnia, dizziness, headaches, memory problems, and other troubles. One group of medical specialists examined 21 affected people and determined they had widespread neurological damage. Other experts said that determination was based on shoddy data analysis and proved it. But medical experts couldn’t identify a cause for the symptoms.
Initially, in late 2016, people reported the sounds as something ordinary — annoying but not evil. But after a few months, the situation was speculated to be an intentional attack.
“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.’” [...] In February, the nightly racket finally began to fade. Then 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 thirties, 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.
This is an actual recording of the “nightly racket.”
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Investigations by FBI and CIA specialists went on for over a year without identifying a source of the sounds that affected 24 US citizens and 8 Canadians. Ultimately the CIA determined there was no attack with a sonic device. This decision didn’t end the worries though because — oops — the “US diplomats” themselves were really CIA undercover spies.
Intelligence officials, for their part, have continued to emphasize a pattern they see as anything but coincidental: The first four Americans to report being struck by the phenomenon — including the fit-looking man in his 30s — were all CIA officers working under diplomatic cover, as were two others affected later on.
Trump and his administration blamed Castro and Cuba.
Despite the many unanswered questions, Trump administration officials have repeatedly blamed Raúl Castro‘s government for failing to protect the diplomats, if not actually attacking them. Early last fall, the State Department withdrew more than half of the diplomatic staff assigned to Havana, while ordering a proportional number of Cubans to leave Washington. The department also warned U.S. citizens they could be “at risk” of attack if they visit the island. “I still believe that the Cuban government, someone within the Cuban government, can bring this to an end,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last month.
Finally, early in 2019 an answer was discovered — not by the medical experts, the intelligence community, nor by the government. The answer required a different type of specialist — a biologist.
...when the biologist Alexander Stubbs heard a recording, uploaded by the Associated Press,[ i.e., the one embedded above] he heard not mechanical bugs, but biological ones. He realized that the noise sounded like the insects he used to hear while doing fieldwork in the Caribbean.
Together with Fernando Montealegre-Z, an expert on entomological acoustics, Stubbs scoured an online database of insect recordings. As first reported by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times, they found that one species—the Indies short-tailed cricket—makes a call that’s indistinguishable from the enigmatic Cuban recording. The duo have written a paper that describes their findings and are set to submit it to a journal for formal peer review.
Crickets
Somewhat ironically, one of the first diplomats to hear the noise was tantalizingly close to the right answer. As reported by ProPublica, he blamed cicadas (which are not crickets, but do also sing). “Cicadas don’t sound like that,” his neighbor reportedly said. “It’s too mechanical-sounding.” But the Indies short-tailed cricket is no ordinary singing insect. It has the fastest pulse-repetition rate of any cricket in the Caribbean or North America. Have a listen. It sounds pretty mechanical!
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Perhaps if the diplomats (and spies) were members of the Daily Bucket, they’d know enough about their yards to realize the sounds were nature. I’m hearing gulls in my new yard and it’s a thrill because I’m reminded the sea is my neighbor.