Nightly Nuance - May 25, 2021

Hello, my friends. I hope you found today’s episode valuable, and I hope it’s valuable to take a hard turn here to discuss something entirely different.

For most of my life, the vast majority of crimes have been explainable on some level. Even after the worst terrorist attacks, we’ve pretty quickly understood who did it. We usually know something about why -- at least to the extent that we can ever understand each other’s motivations. I can’t recall a crime occurring in my life that we’ve not fairly quickly understood how it was done.

I think that’s why Havana Syndrome is so interesting to me. We know that since 2016, diplomats, CIA personnel, other government officials and their families working in Cuba, Uzbekistan, Russia, and China have experienced strange sickness: pounding headaches, dizziness, nausea, vertigo, ear pressure. They’ve sometimes heard strange piercing noises. Scientists who have observed these individuals find real neurological damage. At least one career CIA official had to retire early due to brain damage.

There are theories about what’s happening that range from “it’s an amalgamation of a bunch of different illnesses” to “this could be a sophisticated microwave weapon secretly developed by the Russian GRU.” There are suspicions that the Chinese government could be behind these attacks. We just don’t know.

Congress is fed up with “we just don’t know,” especially after years of extreme secrecy and poor interagency coordination during the Trump administration. Hopefully, we’ll have more answers soon. -beth

P.S. On the topic of things-we-don’t-understand, I’m waiting with baited breath for the UAP report expected next month. We will definitely be talking UFOs then!

Resources:

CNN

Foreign Policy

Politico

Science Vs 

Health.com  

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