Yes...I did go down several avenues at once. That's how my brain works to solve things.
I said to you at the time "Haha! Yes, well I have competing theories dueling it out in my own head.
That is as it should be. The alternative to that is to stick to one explanation, the desired one, and look for evidence that confirms that one explanation only, which is what the official U.S. American science investigators, in particular those in Pennsylvania, did, i.e.
the people with access to the actual data! (And from the very beginning, the Cubans have complained about the unwillingness of U.S. authorities to share these data!)
For me, the thing that has caused me to rethink the possibilities is the fact that no one with knowledge of it has come out with a skeptical view. Not even as an anonymous source. It's been presented as this extraordinary claim without any solid evidence of who or what it could be. Where is the usual debate?"
That is not at all true, but it may have been less false at the time when you still participated in the thread. Before anything else, however, you should consider who the guys
“with knowledge of it” are! They are the ones who have monopolized the knowledge they had access to, and
you suggested that they did so motivated by nothing but noble intentions – like preventing WW3! (posts 325, 326, 335, 339-41; the insecticide posts: 314-319:
And if you go back - this is a long thread by now - you will find that some people in the know actually
did "come out with a skeptical view," so your use of the word
fact is as dubious as the president’s!
The ones who did
“come out with a skeptical view:”
First and foremost, senior investigator
R. Douglas Fields, Section on Nervous System Development and Plasticity, NIH, who has been adamant that the data that he had access to didn't say what the Administration and its mercenary scientists wanted them to say and who has also complained about the willingness of the fake-news media to jump to the very worst conclusions in this case.
There is also the medical sociologist
Robert E. Bartholomew, who has also criticized the official JAMA studies and the 'sonic attack' idea from the beginning.
And they have been doing so openly.
There is U.S. Senator Jeff Flake:
Jeff Flake says there's "no evidence" Cuban government attacked American diplomats (CBS News, Jan. 6, 2018)
And even the FBI
“has steadfastly refused to even use the term “attacks.”” The Strange Case of American Diplomats in Cuba: As the Mystery Deepens, So Do Divisions in Washington (ProPublica, Nov. 9, 2018)
But there are also the anonymous sources that a few investigative journalists dug up, the actual embassy workers and spies who experienced conditions at the U.S. embassy in Havana.
The Sound and the Fury: Inside the Mystery of the Havana Embassy (ProPublica, Feb. 14, 2018)
In April 2017, the embassy clued in all members of its diplomatic corps and advised people to sleep in the middle of a room, away from windows.
"Everybody was in a frenzy about it," says a second U.S. diplomat who was stationed in Havana at the time with young children. "We had a big window in the front of the house. It was a horrible feeling. We just thought, ‘Oh my God, we're in harm's way,’" she says. "You start to feel paranoid."
(…)
People's state of mind determined whether they developed symptoms, the first diplomat asserts. "I don't know anybody who at one point thought we were under no risk and then subsequently decided that they were a victim."
He himself heard a mysterious sound one night last June. "Standing in the atrium of my house, it was so loud and metallic, my brain literally hurt," he says. He called the embassy security officer, who came over and recorded the sound. But his housekeeper knew right away it was a Jamaican field cricket. "She grew up on a farm. She's like, ‘Oh yeah, they drive people crazy.’"
The second diplomat echoes that experience. The sound, she says, "was eerie. A really nasty sound. Not like your head is going to explode, but it's very unpleasant." Then she and her family heard it on several more occasions outdoors. "That was reassuring. We realized it had to be the crickets."
She acknowledges that over time, a divide widened between "the true believers" and those like her who are skeptical that there was an attack.
Sonic attack or mass paranoia? New evidence stokes debate over diplomats’ mysterious illness (Science Mag, June 20, 2018)
If you retrace the key events and anomalies of the outbreak at the embassy in Havana, every step of the way corresponds to those in classic cases of conversion disorder. The first few staffers hit by the symptoms were C.I.A. agents working on hostile soil—one of the most stressful positions imaginable. The initial conversation between Patient Zero and Patient One referenced only the odd sound; neither experienced any symptoms. Then, a few months later, a third embassy official reported that he was losing his hearing due to a “powerful beam of high-pitched sound.”
As word spread quickly throughout the small, tight-knit complex of diplomats and other staff, Patient Zero helped sound the alarm. “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and to connect the dots,” says Fulton Armstrong, a former C.I.A. officer who worked undercover in Cuba.According to ProPublica, Patient Zero informed Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis, in a telling phrase, that
“the rumor mill is going mad.” So a meeting was called, which spread the word even further.
The Real Story behind the Havana Embassy Mystery (Vanity Fair, Jan. 6, 2019)
Maybe one day they will have a solid answer. I had fun thinking of all the possibilities back when it held my interest. Good luck to you!
<crickets!>
The answer seems to be growing increasingly solid, but in the meantime I recommend that you be careful with conspiracy theories – in particular the ones that makes you think that the U.S. government is conspiring to secure world peace and keep all well-intentioned people out of harms way when the sinister forces of the world, the evil empires, attack their poor, innocent spies.
