Biologists say a sound suspected to have caused headaches, nausea, and possible brain damage among diplomats is actually of insects chirping.
Jan 7, 2019
KERRY GRENS

A recording of a high-pitched sound thought to be connected to a possible “sonic attack” on diplomats in Cuba is actually the calls of a cricket, scientists who analyzed the tape reported last week (January 4) at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Tampa, Florida.

“There’s plenty of debate in the medical community over what, if any, physical damage there is to these individuals,” Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley, tells The New York Times. “All I can say fairly definitively is that the A.P.-released recording is of a cricket, and we think we know what species it is.”

The Associated Press (AP) distributed the recording of the sound in October 2017. The news outlet did not disclose where it had received the tape, which it noted at the time “sounds sort of like a mass of crickets.” During that year and the one prior, US diplomats in Cuba had complained of headaches, nausea, dizziness, and other symptoms. Some also reported hearing a piercing noise—the one caught on tape.

Doctors found that the diplomats had suffered brain injuries. For instance, in JAMA last year, physicians concluded that the patients they examined “sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma,” and that all had been exposed to unidentified “audible and sensory phenomena.”

More:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/recording-of-sonic-attack-in-cuba-was-crickets--scientists-65292