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Sonic attacks on US embassy in Cuba ‘just crickets’
Scientists claim source of mysterious noise attributed to headaches and nausea not an acoustic weapon
The source of a mysterious sound that is believed to have caused headaches, nausea and other ailments among US embassy staff in Cuba has been revealed to be local crickets.
The US diplomatic mission in Havana more than halved its number of staff in 2017 after diplomats complained of penetrating high-pitched noises believed to be from an acoustic weapon “possibly from the Russians”, reports the New York Post.
Medical testing of nearly two dozen embassy staff by doctors at the University of Pennsylvania last year revealed signs of concussions or other brain injuries.
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In September, NBC News reported that communications intercepts, known as “signals intelligence,” that point to Russia as the culprit had been collected as part of an ongoing investigation by the FBI, CIA and other agencies in the US.
The unexplained incidents have worsened diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba, which has repeatedly denied any involvement.
Now fresh analysis of an audio recording made by embassy staff in Havana has revealed what US and UK scientists believe to be the cause of the mysterious, high-pitched drone: the song of the Indies short-tailed cricket, known formally as Anurogryllus celerinictus.
Fernando Montealegre-Zapata, a professor of sensory biology at the University of Lincoln and co-author of the study first published on the website bioRxiv, said:
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“The recording is definitively a cricket that belongs to the same group. The call of this Caribbean species is about 7 kHz, and is delivered at an unusually high rate, which gives humans the sensation of a continuous sharp trill.”
“The identification of the sound source does not mean that an attack of some sort did not happen,” says The Guardian, “but it casts doubt over the sound being responsible for the diplomats’ health problems.”
“The cause and nature of their illnesses remains unclear” the paper adds.
Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley admitted the pairs’ conclusion does not rule out an attack on US diplomats, but claimed the sounds linked to the initial complaints may have been a “red herring”.
“It’s entirely possible that they got sick with some other completely unrelated thing that was not a sonic attack, or that they were targeted in some other way,” he said.
With the pair set to submit their paper for peer review in the coming days, others are less convinced.
Dr Douglas Smith, who led the medical examination of the US diplomats last March, questioned how much a single recording could reveal about the experience.
Some patients did not report hearing anything unusual, he noted, while others heard a range of sounds.
“I would like to know what the sounds are, but for us the more important thing is really what’s going on in the patients’ brains and what we can do about it” he said.
