Speculation that diplomats stricken with mysterious medical symptoms at the American Embassy in Cuba were attacked by some kind of sonic weapon is more fantastic fiction than plausible reality, scientists told The New York Times.
And investigators might have missed their chance to find out what really happened, the Times reported.
"I'd say it's fairly implausible," physicist Jurgen Altmann of the Technische Universitat Dortmund in Germany, and an expert on acoustics, told the Times.
Not that military researchers have not tried.
"Why go in there with batons and guns when you can go in with something simple, like a sound generator?" Dr. Geoffrey S. F. Ling, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins University and the former director of the Biological Technologies Office of the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told the Times.
Infrasound, which produces sound outside the rage of human hearing, is a possibility, the Times reported, but "the data is very slim," according Timothy Leighton, a professor of ultrasonics and underwater acoustics at Southampton University.
If a mysterious high-tech ultrasound weapon were used against the U.S. diplomats, it ought to have been easy to get the evidence while the attack was underway, Steven Garrett, retired teacher of acoustics at Penn State University told the Times.
"I think they missed their chance" to find the cause, he told the Times. "It should be a piece of cake."
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