Original subtitles

It's an invisible weapon.

Can't see it. Can't hear it.

Nobody knows you were there. To the world, nothing happened.

A family got sick.

Find the router. Find the family.

- Make the hit. - Leave.

And no wonder it's so hard to prove this.

Let's face it. There are so many

government conspiracies, it can be hard to tell

what's real and what's not.

My name is Andrew Bustamante,

and I am a former covert CIA intelligence officer.

And I'm going to pressure test the most sensational,

ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy theories out there

to help you separate fact from fiction.

It came just after the new year.

The American surgical attack on Venezuela that captured

President Nicolas Maduro.

We all remember hearing the story.

Nearly 100 foreign soldiers decimated by

a small strike team of special operators

in and out in less than 30 minutes.

But then in the aftermath, we remember hearing about

something else just as striking.

Venezuelan soldiers attacked

by some kind of invisible, powerful weapon

that left them on the ground bleeding

from their nose and vomiting blood.

As these reports spread online, it wasn't long before they were

tied to other strange attacks.

Attacks that began more than a decade ago.

Only this time, the targets weren't

foreign soldiers, they were Americans.

It's even got a name, "Havana Syndrome."

American diplomats serving in Cuba may have been the target

of deliberate attacks.

Several suffering symptoms that the State Department has

not elaborated on.

Since the attacks became public, the U.S.

has pulled out more than half its diplomatic personnel

from Havana.

Were American diplomats and intelligence officers

targeted by the same kind of invisible weapon that

could have been used in Venezuela?

Some U.S. intelligence agencies have downplayed the idea

for years, but other parts of the U.S. federal government

and the victims themselves believe otherwise.

Every single person I have met thinks it's real and thinks

that there is a culture of conspiracy to cover it up.

Are we really under threat from some kind of new,

devastating, invisible weapon?

What isn't the government telling us, and why?

On this episode,

I'll pressure test the plausibility,

capability, and evidence of such a weapon to separate

the fact and fiction.

I want a firsthand account of an attack from

a fellow former spy suffering from Havana Syndrome.

And as soon as I walked into the room,

I experienced vertigo. The room was spinning.

I'll track down one of the world's top experts

on this secret technology.

These are a wireless system for shaking in the brain.

Conduct never-before-seen targeting demonstrations.

It sees right through your walls.

I mean, that, that's just wild.

And meet an expert with a radical alternate take on

these conspiracy theories.

This is a global experiment in mass psychogenic illness.

All to answer the question, is Havana Syndrome the result

of secret, invisible weapon technology, like what's been

reported in Venezuela, or just a powerful story that

spread faster than the evidence?

One week after the Maduro capture,

the White House press secretary retweeted what appeared to be

an interview with a Venezuelan soldier with an account of

the mysterious attack, which may have been based on

this video posted online.

The response on social media was explosive.

Had the U.S. just deployed a new, secret weapon?

In situations like this, information often comes in

pieces from sources, officials,

and public statements.

And it's not always clear what's been confirmed

and what hasn't.

And when you strip it down, it all comes back to a single

unverified source.

No photos, no video, no independent confirmation.

Just a story that, at least online, is starting to

feel real.

So if I want to know whether this kind of weapon exists,

I need to go back to where it all began.

The mysterious attacks

targeting American diplomats in Cuba.

They get these really weird symptoms.

We don't know what it is.

In the fall of 2016, a number of American diplomats

based in Cuba came down with a mysterious illness

after incidents in which it felt like they were being attacked

by an invisible force.

We can confirm that at least 16 U.S. government employees

have experienced some kind of symptom.

Some said the attack began with a noise, followed by

a range of symptoms like vertigo, hearing loss,

loss of memory and focus.

I woke up with a full body convulsion.

The worst pain I have ever felt,

it felt like a Vise gripping my brain stem.

I could actually feel my brain shutting down, like it just,

everything kind of went black.

Respected State Department and CIA officials were

telling similar stories of being attacked.

But without anyone actually seeing a weapon, even some of

their colleagues had doubts.

You would expect at some point you would find something,

some type of evidence.

Meanwhile, as more victims emerged to tell their story,

many grew increasingly frustrated with

the government's muted response and its explanations,

which often pointed to environmental factors,

stress, or anxiety.

As a result, some began calling it a cover-up that reached

the highest levels of government.

The symptoms described were strikingly similar to

the Venezuelan soldier's account.

Neurological symptoms, sudden onset,

no visible weapon.

If there is a connection, I want to dig deeper into

a specific attack to determine the motive behind them.

And I've tracked down someone who is willing to

tell her story.

I'm here to meet with a woman named Alice,

who describes herself as a Havana Syndrome survivor

and a whistleblower.

She's only been out of the agency for a few years,

but she believes that she may have been pushed out

because of her condition.

Not every person who experienced Havana Syndrome effects

was in Cuba.

Alice was based in a West African country

when she claims she was hit.

Can you just take me back to

what life was like the day before everything started?

I was working for the whole day, and at night, I came home,

and then I heard the noise.

It was kind of a low, pulsating sound,

almost like a reverb.

And I asked my spouse at the time, like, "Hey,

do you hear that weird noise?" And he said, "What noise?"

And that should have been the first clue

that something was up.

And so I went back into the room that I had been in,

and as soon as I walked into the room,

I experienced vertigo. The room was spinning.

I had a lot of pressure in my left ear, a lot of pain.

I got less and less conscious.

My, like, field of vision was narrowing.

I knew I needed to get out of the house,

and I opened the door expecting to hear the sound outside,

and it was quiet.

And that was terrifying, because I assumed the sound was

coming from outside, of course, and that that was odd, too.

So I got back into the house and I went up the stairs,

turned the lights off and I stayed below the window

and tried to go to sleep.

And then next morning, I woke up and I had work to do.

By that afternoon, I couldn't walk straight.

I was really dizzy. I felt like I was on a boat

and I knew something was really wrong.

So the next morning, I went into the embassy medical unit,

and I'll never forget, this woman went immediately to

call my boss and start the process of medically

evacuating us to America straight away.

Wow.

What are some of the types of long-term physical symptoms?

For me, some of the biggest things are chronic migraines,

five days a week.

I've been in the ER a couple times in the last month.

Um, insomnia.

My cognitive processing is not what it used to be,

and that's really hard because it's so essential

to our identities.

I found out after the fact

that there had been multiple people affected

in the region, including in the country I was in before me.

But I didn't know it at that time.

Cases of American government officials experiencing

invisible attacks have been reported in about

a dozen locations after Havana, including Guangzhou, China,

Moscow, Austria, Colombia,

Syria, and even here in the U.S.

in Washington, D.C., just outside the White House.

For a lot of us, it became apparent from the get-go

just how consistent our experiences were.

So you're saying that, essentially, people reported

the experience of being attacked?

- Yeah. - Individualized, intentional.

But also there were a number of key trends in terms of

what people worked on.

There was an abundance of people that were experts on

the Russian target that had all served together in Ukraine

in 2014. Interesting, right?

- So among that group of people... - Mm-hmm.

...there's also parallels in what they were experts in?

- Correct. - I think the world talks about

these possible attacks as if

they are tactical attacks, right?

"I want to hurt you right now."

But you're layering in this question that makes me wonder

if it also isn't a strategic attack, a long-term

attack. - And I think you're spot on.

The Russians, they're incredibly creative

and quite good at doing things that can really affect a person,

but not necessarily kill them.

Because there's a psychological warfare advantage.

Yeah, for sure.

It's kind of a perfect weapon, right?

Russia is often the first suspect because they've done

things like this before. During the Cold War,

U.S. officials discovered that something was being directed at

the American embassy in Moscow from a nearby building.

Hidden somewhere in this apartment building across

the street are instruments American experts believe are

aiming microwaves at the upper floors of the embassy.

The incident became known as the Moscow Signal.

For decades, something invisible was aimed

at the embassy, but no one could say for sure why.

The motives are still being debated.

It may have been to jam our eavesdropping devices.

The official explanation was that the signal was too weak

to cause harm. But not everyone believed that,

because for years those signals weren't just filling the air,

they were focusing on a single building.

And that raises a much bigger question.

If decades ago, something like that could be aimed

at a building, could it be aimed at a person today?

And if something like that is behind what happened to Alice,

it would mean someone knew exactly who she was,

where she was, and knew when to strike.

Because a weapon that could have been used on Alice

and Havana victims doesn't just hit a building,

it hits a person.

So I need to find out whether someone could actually track

and target a person like Alice without her ever knowing.

And that's something I can test.

Coming up,

a private investigator who specializes in tracking

and targeting individuals.

If you're connected to technology in any way,

I will find you. - Will show me

how people like Alice could find themselves in

the crosshairs of a dangerous secret weapon.

2 I'm testing the connection between top-secret weapons

like the one used in Cuba and Havana Syndrome.

Alice, a fellow former covert CIA operative,

makes a plausible case that the attacks were not

environmental or imagined incidents.

But now I'm going to push that further and test

if you're a foreign adversary

bent on attacking American operators

living and working undercover around the world,

how would you identify them, track them, and target them?

I'm on my way to meet with a good friend of mine who lives

a very private life.

He's got a job that's pretty high stakes, so he keeps

a very small digital online footprint intentionally.

So to truly carry out an experiment that tests

whether or not an individual can be targeted when they don't

want to be targeted, he's the perfect candidate.

Matt, give me a sense of what you think your level

of security, your level of privacy is?

My whole household, my wife, myself, my kids,

we're pretty under the radar, at least I think so.

I have no social media accounts.

I really try to stay off of online platforms

just in general.

You're one of the most private people that I know, so I would

love to fold you in on this. - I'd be happy to help.

So just live your daily life like normal.

And then what we'll do is we'll meet up again in a couple days,

and I'll tell you what we are or are not able to find out.

If you want to locate someone who doesn't want to be found,

Jake Gray is your man.

Welcome, man.

Thanks for having me.

A former law enforcement officer, he's hunted

terrorists, cartel members, and sex traffickers,

and now works in private intelligence.

I'm really trying to dig deeper into the Havana attacks that

have been reported, not only by the press,

but also by individuals in government.

Can you tell me how technical evidence kind of cascades,

how you build a big picture from just a little bit

of information?

We start targeting signals interception, right?

It's tracking cellular devices, watches, tablets.

Then we start doing dump-and-breach datas.

Then we send guys out and figure out what the area

is like, what their house is like.

Is surveillance an option? Is a single target an option?

Where we use tech like RF sniffers to track people

in their houses.

Utilizing all that information brings together a totality of

the target and how we would act after that.

What percentage of people would you say actually have

a technical profile that you couldn't identify?

Outside of your tribesmen, right, like that don't even

know what technology is, you know, it's probably

less than a percent that we can't touch. - Less than 1%?

Yeah, basically if you're connected to technology

in any way, I will find you.

Many Havana Syndrome victims were living overseas

and undercover, in other words, tough to find,

but not that tough for Jake to find.

He's showing us how with our guinea pig, Matt.

The first step is geolocating Matt's phone

and tracking its movements.

Then Jake puts boots on the ground to follow

the digital breadcrumbs to identify him.

From there, Jake can begin to unlock his online history

and create a profile, which may be enough to target him.

So, we have here geolocation data that

we talked about before.

Able to target devices from that phone number you gave me.

If we zoom in here, this is where he lives.

If you follow these dots that were dropped from the device,

he takes this route here down this road

all the way till he gets

to where we've established his place of employment's at.

- Wow, look at all that data. - Just here.

And we think these are lunch spots right down the road.

What else did this give you?

So, we have a few interesting places

which you have these signals here which goes to a school,

you know where his kids are, and if he's gone and we wanted

to target that, we could.

I know this guy, his number one priority is

protecting his kids, and you found his kids' school.

- Yep, - That's like every person's nightmare.

- Yeah, - What do we do next?

Physical surveillance, at this point.

We go to his house, his work, figure out

where we can truly target him and something that we can use

to do that as an RF sniffer.

What does that mean in layman's terms?

So, everybody that has internet has a Wi-Fi router, right?

That Wi-Fi router just pushes out RF frequencies, which are

like little, you know, imagine like little waves

moving through your house at all times.

The RF sniffer measures the disturbance in those waves,

and I can follow those disturbances or that person

through their house.

- In real time? - In real time.

And we're gonna do that to our target?

Yep.

Most Havana Syndrome victims say they were hit at home

and targeted very precisely.

Remember Alice heard the noise

her husband standing next to her didn't hear?

And I asked my spouse at the time, like, "Hey,

do you hear that weird noise?" And he said, "What noise?"

Assuming there was a weapon, it must have had

pinpoint accuracy.

So we're heading to Matt's house, where Jake is going to

show me how he uses his RF sniffer to target individuals

room by room. - It's right up here.

Yep, right up here on the other side of that truck.

I see it.

This feels creepy, man. That's my friend in there.

And I'm in a blacked-out car across the street.

All right. What's next?

We're gonna break out the RF sniffer, see if we can

capture some movement. - All right.

- You ready? - Yeah, let's do it.

What is the sniffer doing right now?

Right now, I'm setting up the, uh,

the prompt for it to attack the router to then run

its code, run its script to send us back the signals that

we're looking to intercept.

So here you go, OK?

Jake's showing me how each green dot represents

a different person in the house.

We can tell where they are based on how close they are to

the red dot, the Wi-Fi router.

This isn't a weapon, it's a tracking tool,

but it proves how precisely a house's occupants can

be mapped. - You see how it's going down?

Exactly. That lower right quadrant is

very clearly that corner

of the house. - Yep.

Every time that red dot jumps, it's essentially picking up on

another movement in the house. - Correct.

So it's always a red dot, but it could be jumping from

person to person. - Person to person.

So if we wanted to hit a target

with some kind of weapon,

we would want to aim for the room with the router,

and we want to aim now because that's where the most activity

is happening.

If your goal is to not care about collateral damage, yeah.

Wow. But this is what it looks like.

We don't see a face.

We don't see a physical description.

- We get a dot. - You get a dot.

I can see how an adversary would take the shot.

This is an invisible weapon, so

to the world, nothing happened. A family got sick.

Can't see it, can't hear it. Nobody knows you were there.

If we wanted to hyper-isolate our target even more...

- Mm-hmm. - ...how would we do that?

Find a choke point to where it's strictly him.

Do you see a choke point in his pattern of life?

- I do. - Where?

Where he parks every single day when he goes to work.

He parks in the same spot every day?

Same spot, and it's basically three walls and one exit.

So you want to try to get him at work instead?

That's where I would do it.

Nobody expects it in the middle of the day, either.

Man, he's in a, he's in a kill box.

Coming up, Matt learns just how vulnerable we all are.

We did find a potential school.

Yeah, that's where my kids go to school.

- And then... - Could it be possible

that these types of things

could have been so rapidly weaponized, so easily scaled,

and so covertly used?

Well, I think the answer is evident.

2 It will be the very next left down, down to a parking area.

And his car is usually parked all the way to the right.

It's a black SUV. Right there.

- See that black SUV? - Yeah.

- That's him. - OK.

We're demonstrating how to find and target someone

who doesn't want to be found.

The case in point is my friend Matt, who's about to discover

just how vulnerable he is.

Sorry to interrupt lunch hour.

I know, that was a surprise. I'm glad it was you.

So I want to introduce you to Jake.

- Hi, Jake. - Jake, Matt.

- Nice to meet you. - Nice to meet you, Jake.

So I tasked Jake with doing what he could to try to collect

as much as possible off of you. - Yeah, OK.

And I'm just gonna let Jake present what he found.

All right. I'm curious.

Yeah, so we were able to see quite a few things.

So, if we scroll down here, you know, like you have this

kind of stretch of where your office building is.

- Wow. - Right?

You can see where I have lunch.

- See where you have lunch. - Where I get coffee.

Where you get coffee.

The interesting thing that we did find is

a potential school that you're dropping your kids off at.

Yeah, I mean, that's where my kids go to school.

Yeah, so, and this is what we use to say, like,

"Hey, you think you're being locked down, it only takes

a few things for us to be able to target you or your family."

One of the things I asked Jake to do was to treat you like

a true target.

We were actually at your house, and we use what we call is

a RF sniffer, which connects to your Wi-Fi router, attacks it,

and tracks you walking around your house.

It sees right through your walls.

I mean, that it's just wild.

Based off of what you've seen today, how confident are you

that a person can be targeted individually?

Um,

It makes me think that it would be relatively easy

to target someone with that level of detail.

That's disconcerting, I would say.

It can be shocking to learn how vulnerable we all are

to a technologically advanced adversary.

This test shows me that if someone wanted to target

a person like Alice, they could.

Tracking them is possible.

But that doesn't answer the question, what kind of

invisible weapon could effectively debilitate

a human being?

Which means we're not just looking for a weapon,

we're looking for a form of energy.

So the question is, what kind?

Could sound be part of the answer?

We already know it can be weaponized.

Over the past two decades, police departments

across the United States have deployed what's called an LRAD,

or long-range acoustic device, which basically makes

a painfully loud noise.

Just recently, the Minnesota State Patrol has

been accused of using an LRAD against ICE protesters.

I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly.

Immediately disperse.

Officials maintain that this is only being used for

crowd control, not as a weapon. But the internet disagrees.

Hey guys, on today's episode of Fascism in America,

we're gonna be talking about the latest shiny toy

in the authoritarian tool belt

that's being deployed against citizens.

So, on the surface, this looks like

exactly what people are describing.

A device that uses sound to target and disperse a crowd.

But there's a difference between something that's loud

and something that can actually cause the kind of damage

reported in Havana.

I'm reaching out to Dr. Joe Pompei,

a man who's created

an acoustic tool that's used for commercial purposes,

to find out if an acoustic weapon could be created

that's strong enough to bring an army to its knees.

I don't think there's ever such thing as a sonic weapon.

For airborne sound waves, 99.99% reflect

right off of you. They can't go through windows.

They can't go through walls in any substantial sense.

So they're not going to be received by somebody indoors,

and they're certainly not going to penetrate the body enough to

cause any physiological damage other than perhaps to

the hearing system.

It's interesting because you can understand

how people would be afraid of a weapon they can't see,

and audio and sonic weapons are very clearly something that

you wouldn't be able to see.

Another possibility is radio frequency.

That could absolutely do damage, and those would go

through walls, and those could go into the body, absorb

and cause all kinds of problems.

Here's where this leaves me.

Sound can be directed, it can be powerful, but it doesn't

appear to match the kind of injuries being reported

in Havana.

Radio frequency can penetrate the body and potentially cause

real damage, but is there anything else that can

scramble our brains?

To find out, I tracked down a neuroscientist who examined

the original Havana victims.

I was contacted in late 2016 by some folks in

the Department of State and said, "Look, we've got these cases,

about two dozen individuals, and we really don't know

what's happened to them.

They all seem to have very similar signs and symptoms.

They seem to be evidencing what appears to be a concussion,

but no concussion. - What conclusions did you reach

after this two-year study?

Well, we ruled a lot of things out.

I mean, there are a lot of things that could be possible.

Is it possible they were exposed to some chemical,

some environmental chemical, a pesticide, for example?

Is it possible they were exposed to something at work,

some device?

No, no, because the rooms in which they were working,

other individuals were not coming up with the same

signs and symptoms.

So the only probabilities that these individuals are exposed

to some form of energy, microwaves, for example.

Microwaves can become a very cryptic form of attack

because microwave energy essentially disrupts

the actual mechanisms of the neurological membranes

and in so doing can,

quote, "rewire," if you will, the brain.

Could it be possible that these types of things

could have been so rapidly weaponized, so easily scaled,

and so covertly used?

I think the answer is evident.

Recall the Moscow signal when microwaves were believed to be

directed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow

during the Cold War.

A secret weapon that can't be seen,

does neurological and physiological harm.

What it essentially does is it changes the battlescape.

The nature of conflict remains the same,

but its character changes.

Dr. Giordano is saying that the science is there,

but science alone doesn't prove a weapon exists.

At this point, here's what holds up and what doesn't.

There's evidence that microwaves can affect

the human body.

They can be directed and they could explain some of

the symptoms we've seen.

But we still don't have direct evidence of a weapon being used

in the real world.

Even though most people will claim to have never seen

the kind of weapon that was reported in Havana, I'm about

to meet with a scientist who says he understands

the microwave technology the Russians have been using

and may even have evidence of the weapon itself.

Coming up...

This thing looks like a shoulder-fired weapon.

You can be hit, you can't protect yourself

under the circumstances that they choose to hit you.

And then an expert who sees things very differently.

This is a global experiment in mass suggestion.

2 In our quest to determine if Havana Syndrome is the result

of an advanced, secret and invisible microwave technology,

or a powerful story that's spread faster than

the evidence, I need to know whether or not that energy can

be targeted to focus on a single individual.

So I've invited one of America's top scientists

specializing in pulsed microwave technology.

When somebody talks about a high-power microwave,

how is that different from

the microwave that sits in my kitchen?

Really high-power microwaves are made to operate at

extremely high powers.

Tens, hundreds, thousands of megawatts,

but because of that, short pulses.

And that's the basis of what's happening, I believe,

with Havana Syndrome.

Imagine you have this intense power and it hits the side of

your brain and you get an almost instantaneous heating

of a thin layer in your brain. It will initially expand.

It'll overshoot like a spring.

It'll come back and then it'll return

and you can oscillate for a while.

That can basically convert the incoming

electromagnetic energy into a sound wave.

These pulsed high-power microwaves are

a wireless system for shaking the brain.

And that would do so much damage over time.

You can go all the way from damage

to lowercase disorientation

and some of the other cognitive effects

that they've experienced.

It's obviously, according to some of the sufferers of

these attacks, done some real, long-term damage to them.

Dr. Swegle tells me that even though microwaves are silent,

the oscillation they cause in the brain can be experienced

as a sound, which may be why many Havana Syndrome victims

describe having heard a noise.

How mobile are these devices really,

and what do they look like?

This is an example sitting on a desktop of a commercial device

that's being sold by the Russians.

This is not that large a system sitting there.

You can make it to operate off a car generator.

A friend of his took this picture

where devices like this are made.

This device can generate intense pulses of radiation

and be optimized for anti-personnel operations.

This thing looks like a shoulder-fired weapon,

which means for sure I could position it in a van,

put it in a car, put it in a room,

in a window across the street from a target.

You can be hit.

You can't protect yourself under the circumstances that

they choose to hit you.

When you hear about victims of Havana Syndrome,

do you believe their story? Do you doubt their story?

They have suffered something.

Do I believe it could be high-power microwaves?

I believe there's a very good chance microwaves could have

produced this and that devices that are out there could have

been adapted to do that job.

The idea of the government beaming something into

your head is one of the oldest conspiracy theories out there.

As far back as 1927, a science fiction novel called

"The Tissue-Culture King" imagined a man who wore

metallic headgear to protect himself

from outside mental influence,

what would eventually evolve into the pop culture image

we all know today-- the tinfoil hat.

Today, those ideas show up in online communities that believe

they're being targeted by so-called energy weapons

and had thoughts beamed into their minds.

But there's little evidence to support those claims at scale.

And that's where things get complicated.

How do you investigate, let alone prove something,

when the injuries are in people's heads?

When symptoms are real, but the cause is invisible,

it becomes incredibly difficult to separate what's possible

from what's provable.

In a case like Havana Syndrome, that line matters.

And once that line starts to blur, even experts can disagree

on what's really happening.

I've come across somebody who studies how rumors

turn into mass hysteria and is poking holes in

the Venezuela story--

medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew.

Dr. Bartholomew, I'm trying to better understand what may have

happened in Venezuela and how, if at all, it's different from

what has been reported about Havana Syndrome.

The media report, which was endorsed by the White House press secretary,

claimed that when the U.S.

went in there in early January, they used a sonic weapon,

and it made Maduro's troops

bleed from their noses and their ears, and they fell

to their knees and incapacitated them.

When you look at the actual interviews on state TV

of the soldiers who were there

when the explosions occurred,

the symptoms that happened were

not examples of some type of sonic device.

We seek out patterns.

We're meaning- oriented creatures.

And that's what happens here.

What happened in Venezuela is a great example of

what's been happening with Havana Syndrome.

When it first came out, the doctors at

the American State Department went for

the most exotic hypothesis early on.

And they've issued alerts to their diplomats

all over the world to be on the lookout

for mysterious symptoms.

And they had this laundry list of symptoms-- headache,

nausea, insomnia, ringing in the ears,

depression, nosebleeds, and on and on.

Most people have these symptoms in any given week

in their life.

And lo and behold, people started reporting

these symptoms.

This is a global experiment in mass suggestion.

They're just redefining an array of ambiguous symptoms

that people have all the time.

There's a great saying that I think applies

to Havana Syndrome-- "Speak of the devil

and he is bound to appear."

It was nothing to do with pulse microwave radiation.

You know, for me, this is the power of a story,

the power of belief.

And at the end of the day, you have to follow the facts,

not as we hope them to be or want them to be,

but as they are.

Bartholomew's theory is that there just isn't hard evidence

that the Russians or our own government have ever used

a weapon like this.

They've never been caught in the act.

On the other hand, I've heard from multiple

credible witnesses, including my own former colleagues,

who believe that they were under some kind of attack,

not just experiencing heartburn or vertigo.

And if that's true, it raises a second question.

If something like this is happening, why hasn't it

been acknowledged? One possibility?

Escalation.

Acknowledging an attack like this could be real

would potentially escalate a conflict

with an adversary like Russia.

The other possibility?

That we have a weapon like this ourselves, and we want to be

able to use it.

Which brings us back to Venezuela,

where the White House suggests that

we did use just such a weapon.

The claim of a so-called mystery weapon traces back to

a single anonymous account, one that was amplified online...

Whatever was sent at them made them fall to their knees

and vomit blood.

...and was echoed at the highest levels,

but was never independently confirmed.

So, whatever happened that night,

there's no clear evidence that it was

a new kind of weapon at all.

Which means that if I'm going to figure out if a weapon

like this could be real, I need real evidence.

Not just other claims, but something that's actually

been tested.

And I'm about to get a major piece of intel

that might finally provide it.

I'm sending you the link to the article right now.

OK.

"Researcher skeptical of Havana Syndrome tested the weapon

on himself?" Is this real? - It's amazing.

2 So far in my investigation, I've tested how someone

like Alice could be targeted and whether sound

or microwave energy could explain what people experienced.

But there are still gaps in what I can actually prove.

At CIA, my wife Jihi

was what's known as a clandestine targeting officer,

which means she doesn't hunt people

in the field. She identifies targets,

maps their world and figures out how we can reach them

without ever being caught.

When we were stationed together and I was operating in

the field, I always had perfect confidence knowing that Jihi

had already built a clear profile and picture of

whoever I was chasing.

So when she tells me that she found something, I know

it's worth paying attention.

- Hey, girl. - Hey, babe.

So I found this super interesting article that

talks about the pulse weapons

that we were talking about earlier.

I'm sending you the link to the article right now.

OK.

"Researcher skeptical of Havana Syndrome tested the weapon

on himself?" Is this real? - It's amazing.

Yes!

"In 2024, a Norwegian researcher

"skeptical that pulsed energy weapons could do damage to

human brains built a device and tested it on himself."

And what kind of device did he build?

A machine capable of emitting powerful pulses

of microwave energy.

He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of

Havana Syndrome.

Who would test this on themselves?

He tested it because he was convinced that it didn't work,

that you couldn't actually affect somebody biologically

with one of these machines.

Oh my gosh, I doubt he is skeptical anymore.

This is the strongest laboratory evidence that

I've seen yet, that this weapon not only exists,

but that there are people with symptoms

tied to exposure to the weapon.

Wow.

The Norwegian researcher gave us the strongest evidence yet

of what a pulsed energy device can do, but that's in

a controlled setting.

It proves that this kind of effect is possible,

but it still leaves the biggest question unanswered.

Is this happening in the real world now?

So after investigating, here's where I land.

On the topic of Venezuela, until the U.S. government

acknowledges the details of the weapon,

we'll never know.

In reality, it traces back to a single anonymous claim

amplified online and echoed at the highest levels of

government for what could plausibly be

propaganda reasons.

But Havana is different.

I've spoken to people I trust, and their experiences

are consistent.

Their symptoms are real, and those symptoms are

only happening to specific people

who held sensitive positions in operations around the world.

Something happened to them.

It wasn't just in their heads.

Now, the question is, what? A sonic weapon?

As we've learned, that's unlikely.

But what about microwave energy?

That's where things get interesting, because we've

learned that pulsed microwave energy can affect the human body,

but possibility is not proof.

If a weapon like this were being used, we'd expect to find

something concrete.

A device, a signal, some kind of physical evidence

that appears again and again.

And so far, we haven't.

We have a theory that makes sense.

We have a technology that could explain it.

But we don't have any evidence to close the case.

And without proof, you can't act,

and without action, whatever caused this

could still be out there.