US intelligence is investigating possible on-air attacks in recent months, one of which may have taken place near the White House on a US administration official.
Dozens of diplomats had already been affected in Cuba and China between 2016 and 2017.
Have national security officials in the White House been victims of sound wave attacks?
It's a sci-fi storyline that the FBI is investigating, when a senior US presidential official may have fallen victim to an astonishing new weapon while walking around Washington.
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Several similar cases in Cuba and China
At Ellipse Park, located south of the White House - and therefore extremely frequented by presidential staff - a National Security Council official had a strange experience last November, just after the elections.
A hissing sound echoed in his ears and in his head, quickly transforming into a series of buzzing, amplifying until it became unbearable.
The manager collapses, loses his balance, suffers from dizziness and headaches.
The following days, new symptoms are added to the list: tinnitus, sleep disorders, severe cognitive slowdown ...
Secret Service agents, who are responsible for the security of the White House, remember a strange precedent.
In 2016, in Cuba, 21 American diplomats presented exactly the same symptoms.
The following year, diplomatic personnel in Canton, China, were also struck by the same mysterious ailment.
A series of episodes that led to the opening of an investigation, led by the best American medical specialists.
Result: these experts found brain damage in all of the patients examined, probably caused by too much exposure to high intensity pulsed sound waves.
Aggressive surveillance operation
From these examinations emerges the hypothesis of a sound cannon attack. A type of equipment that does exist: the Long Range Acoustic Device, for example, equips the American police force, and has already been used in Pittsburg, in 2009, against rioters who attacked the G20 summit. This technology uses very concentrated infrasound which will act like a loud punch so loud that it can even cause vomiting.
However, this does not cause the symptoms seen in the case of diplomats. In their case, what is much more likely is that they were subjected to a bit too aggressive surveillance operation, probably due to spies constantly listening to them with interception equipment, such as directional microphones. These tools would then have ended up creating around their target, a sort of "Faraday cage", the overexposure to the waves causing in this case head traumas without there being any direct physical shock.