Hello, everybody. So this is the second episode, and this is Havana
syndrome and Iranian schoolgirls mass poisoning reports. We're actually going to be talking about
an article I wrote for Skeptical Inquiry which is called Iranian school girl a gas
attacks and Havana Syndrome A conversation with Robert Bartholomew, and both of the subjects
there, which is Iranian schoolgirl gas attacks and Havana syndrome, have their own
Wikipedia articles with those names, and you could look those up too. So
I'm going to ask the people on with me, as well as those listening
and watching, what do they think these two situations haven't common? Situation one,
Beginning in late twenty sixteen, the US government claimed there were ongoing attacks
against its embassy personnel in Cuba by unknown forces using unknown weapon. In subsequent
years, the scope of these claimed attacks brought in to include intelligence agents,
other government officials, and even family members stationed in a very very long list
of countries, eventually even happening on the White House ground. The symptoms of
these attacks work collectively eventually called Havana syndrome, and they included everything from brain
fatigue to brain damage. The mysterious unidentified weaponry. Blame for these attacks included
ultrasound, infrasound pulse, electromagnetic energy, microwaves, and a bunch of other
things. So that's the first situation. Situation two. In November twenty twenty
two, just a few months ago, reports surfaced about a poison gas attack
at a girls school in Iran, affecting two hundred students. Reports of gas
attacks then happened all across the country of Iran. As of early this year,
the count of victims stood at nearly seven thousand young girls. The victims
were mostly girls, there were some teachers and extraneous victims that mostly schoolgirls was
out over a hundred schools in nearly that many cities, So speculation ranged like
who could have caused this? Well, the villains range from either the Iranian
government seeking revenge for the recent and ongoing he job protests, or the government
said it was a false slag operation, but people who wanted to look like
it was the government doing it right. And of course the government made mass
arrests. So what do you folks think? These two situations that sound nothing
alike have in common. Helen hysteria and people jumping to conclusions for no good
reason, the usual usual stuff. So when I read this article in or
Not Sana Rob, I really wanted to see, like if this was an
actual thing. So I decided to do some other research on Havana syndrome.
And there is actual legitimate study into what it could possibly be because there were
US military personnel that were reporting similar symptoms and over there was over a thousand
people that reported having symptoms of what they thought was Havana syndrome. Now there's
a budget different theories out there. There was a review them by Yale at
the met RXIV review that talked about havana syndrome among amongst Canadian diplomats and the
symptoms that they suffered. There was another one that was done by there's a
researcher that's part of Northwest Western University that is also looking at this as a
cause from of a certain type of cricket. Now I'm and they're just looking
at all possible avenues of what this might be. Am I making a statement
on anything about that like this, you know what the actual cause was?
No? But we but we as skeptics like to explore as many things as
possible of how to explain this issue. But I do want to point out
that the government, r US government decided to paint it as you know,
it was a biological attack against you know, the United States and people that
were associated with That's gross. So this is a lot more complicated than we're
going on about. But there is This is a conversation we need to have.
So I do have more to say about this, but I really want
to pass it to Jimmy and give his kind of perspective on this art,
on Rob's work, the article, and you know, his kind of perspective
on things. Sure, So I think that maybe maybe the no good reason
thing, while that's valid there, what we fail to accept or or maybe
investigate, is that there are some other reasons on the fringe that maybe we
don't we don't go over enough. So, for example, in the military,
I had thirteen years of military experience and I've been overseas, and I
have to plagiarize Jason Sherwood when we first talked about this issue back in March,
but he he was in the military as well, and he'd traveled overseas.
He had drank the water and breathed in new environments and things like that.
And you know, felt some physiological effects from that. So that is
certainly probably probably a case in at least some of these that we could attribute
to some of these symptoms. I think also, and and I hate to
say this because I love our military. I'm still in the military. Uh,
but some people kind of just make this stuff up. They hear about
something going around and they figure, oh, that's what I got, you
know. Uh. And and maybe there's some nefarious purpose for that. Maybe
in some of these circumstances they figure out, well, I'll get I'll get
some kind of maybe i'll get some time off, or maybe i'll get some
medical benefits when I separate from the military. So these are are also some
possibilities I do I dare bring them up, because I do think they are
fringe. Most likely, I would say that these reek of mass hysteria.
And I think that when you have a group of diplomats that are feeling something,
then it's likely to encourage other diplomats to maybe say, well, well,
maybe maybe that's what I'm feeling too, maybe we actually are under attack,
when in reality, you know, it's it's it's something else completely.
And I think that these two stories where we talk about the the Iranian girls
being poisoned and then the the US diplomats slash military members. They do have
two kinds of things going on, so, uh, the mental effects and
the physiological effects uh that associated with mass hysteria and the other uh I escapes
me right now. What what Rob Bartholome you called it? But basically,
uh, happens a lot among close knit groups, and I think functionally the
diplomats have kind of this close knit tie to one another, right, so
they perform the same job, they're going through the same things, they're they're
separated from, uh, their natural environment, while the girls in these schools
they have more of a close knit, uh close knit relationship in proximity,
and so I wanted to point out that difference. And yeah, see what
you guys wanted to say about that, Aaron, what do you think?
I'm not a scientician. I don't I don't understand this. Yeah, this
stuff too well. Uh. I know that the technical term I guess on
Wikipedia for this is called mass psychogenic illness, and psychogenic psychogenic means it comes
from your brain. And I really I kind of wish this was most used.
What's called mass agnosed Those illness. I just made that up. I
just coined it agnosed those says, you know, means unknown because we don't.
Honestly, we don't really know from what I've from what I've read,
we don't really know where this is coming from or why it's really complicated.
Our brains are super complicated. They do weird things. They do weird things
by ourselves, they do weird things when we're together, where I think we're
barely beginning to understand how our brains work, how we work together as communities.
If we look back one hundred years from now at the mental health and
the regular medical care, it kind of seems barbaric the things people did,
and people would look back on us in a hundred years and kind of say
they did what to treat this or they didn't understand this. So I think
we have a lot to learn. And the difficult thing about this particular thing
is it's really hard to reproduce in the lab, Like you can't do a
study. And at least I've never heard of somebody, uh, you know,
trying to get people to experience mass psychogenic illness. So you have to
kind of in the wilds, So you have to go out and find out
when it's happening, and do lots more work and try and figure out root
causes and patterns and things like that. It took us thousands of years to
figure out discover germ theory and that germs were a thing. Bacteria worth thing,
virus is worth thing, and that's what caused illness. And maybe it's
going to take us another few thousand years to figure out what the heck is
actually going on with this. Rob Well, so I have written about this
and investigated it since it started in twenty sixteen. Jimmy mentioned Robert both allomeal,
so I've intivied him several times. We actually communicate about these things.
He's the guy who told me about He said, did you know what's going
on? And I ran with the poisonings because it really wasn't covered very well
in the news here. So that was the first I heard of that.
I have worked extensively on both of those Wikipedia articles using putting the scientific insensus
on it, meaning the skeptical perspective, because there was none. The Havana
syndrome article was initially called signic attacks in Cuba right, and the Iranian School
Little Poisoning reports name of the article Wikipedia was poisoning school or poisonings as if
it was real, and there was no question that these are real, right,
But there were people saying that, oh, there's problems, there's red
flags here, and none of that was on the page. So me and
the group of people I work with a grilloskeptics and Wikipedia who put more scientific
information on Wikipedia and fight pseudoscience worked on those articles. So yes, mass
psychogenic illness is likely for both of those things. And I'm going to read
the Wikipedia description of what that means. So mass psychogenic illness, also called
mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria, involves the spread of illness symptoms through a
population where there is no infectious agent responsible with the contagient or weapons. It's
the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group originating
from the nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss, alteration of functions whereby physical
complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic causes that are known. And
one of the terms I think Jimmy was searching for it might have been hypervigil
like if you're if you're looking for something to happen, the smallest thing that
happens to you, which may have nothing to do with anything. It's just
a random occurrence of life. You now associate for this. And Helen mentioned
the crickets, Well, they weren't thinking that the crickets called the analyst.
The thing was some of the original attacks which happened in Cuba, hence the
name Havana syndrome, when people started to think they were being attacked by sonic
weapons, started to record those sounds, and then many months later, it
might have been a year later, they finally got to etymologists, the people
who study insects, and it says, oh, that's just the sound of
the crickets in Cuba. This is a common sound, and those people probably
heard that all the time they were stationed there, never give it a second
thought. But as soon as they were told by the United States government that
other people were being attacked by sonic weapons, oh wait a minute, I
heard that noise and I felt a little dizzy tonight. Now you make a
report. So that's the most likely explanation. And the mass poisonings of schoolgirls
in Iran. Unfortunately, there have been these through recent history. You can
go back a decade than two decades and three different countries, and it very
often, if not exclusively, is in Muslim majority ruled countries, and it's
always a schoolgirls. And there's something about if you if you're in an environment
and you're in a population that has no control, and you feel that you
can't control things and you're under other people's thumbs, as happened to the people
in Cuba, by the way, because they were in hostile territory, always
under surveillance by the Cuban government. I mean, that's a real thing.
You know. You put two in two together and then the smallest thing illnesses
of life. You get tonitis, you get a really bad a headache,
and you feel that it's because of this one thing, Helen. So I
want to emphasize that I was not making a claim. I just wanted to
point out that there might be other avenues to explore, because that's one thing
you have. Because we've all heard the person that claims that they know the
truth and then we find out later they're like, Nope, you had a
mass mass psychosis. What you thought it was wasn't actually what it was.
And also there have been people that have illnesses that can't be explained and they're
brushed away, and then we find out later there was actual legitimate illness.
So and these things are very hard to suss out. And the reason why
I'm playing I was kind of playing Devil's advocate because I want everybody to understand
that you kind of have to in these certain situations and really do the work.
Because we are very reactionary. We hear a news story or a conversation
that aligns with our ideas and how we think things go, but it may
not actually be truth, and you have to look at all avenues. And
one thing I really appreciate about the stuff that I kind of I looked up
was that people were looking for alternative explanation. Ultimately, if it leads to
a mass hysteria sort of thing, that is an actual cause for what is
going on. But it's not anything external. This is group psychology, group
think, you know, because every we all do this to a certain extent
because we're empathetic creatures, and it will happen. And I really like what
you mentioned about this was happening to Iranian school girls because the first thing that
went into my brain was the saale On witch trials where we had a bunch
of young girls, you know, claiming to see demons, claiming that they
are possessed and writhing on the floor. And you know, because if you
if you're young and element and repressed society, and you're an underrepresented sex,
you're and to get attention. Because these girls were given attention. So let's
just flip it and we'll move it to Iranian girls living under a suppressive government
where they don't have a voice, and now they're suddenly getting attention, and
you're going to feed into that too. So I think that's something we should
we should explore all avidges. And that was one of the things I wanted
to bring up when we were talking about this article. Jimmy, do you
have any further thoughts? Yeah? I do, So that is actually a
great point. So you kind of have to take this stuff seriously, don't
you write? I mean, even even if there's kind of no telling what
it could be, uh, you you can't just ignore it. And so
I think you know, it being unexplained but still reporting it and having these
kind of mass accounts of not knowing what's going on, uh, is a
necessary thing. I think as a society we bought hit in COVID. I
can't even tell you how many people I sent home from work because they just
were like, hey, I think I lost my sense of smell. And
it's like, okay, well, uh, congratulations, take five days off
of work. You know kind of thing. And you have to treat it
seriously because you know, uh, we just don't know what we're dealing with.
Sometimes, to Rob's point, you know, members of a cohesive group,
you know, dealing with this or or experiencing these things, and uh,
and us knowing, you know, just as a society in general,
or just as like you know, people who have an expertise on this,
uh, knowing that cohesive groups, close knit groups, uh, like Rob
Bartholomy explains, and both in these articles, uh, experiencing this. This
goes all the way back through the Middle Ages, like we were, people
were dealing with this, you know, when the plague broke out. Everybody
had the plague even though they didn't you know, and we see it now,
you know, people who speak in tongues and people who shake on the
floor because God's in the room with them doing whatever. And so I think
it's kind of interesting that we could come up with conclusions of mass hysteria for
things that are like non religious almost, but then when it comes to religion,
people are a little bit hesitant to accept mass hysteria as the cause for
some of these experiences. And I just kind of wanted to inject that to
tie this back to uh, you know, religious and skepticism and atheism,
because I think it holds weight there. And so those are my final thoughts
on that. Aaron, Yeah, do you ever do you ever feel sicker
when someone else around you is sick? Like maybe you come a little there's
throats, a little scratch here when someone else, you know, a scratch
you feel like if a fever when they're sick. Aaron, don't tell me
I'm having psychosic Okay, And that's a great word, psychosomitic. Our brain
and our bodies there it is connected, and our brain a sick, there's
no virus, there's no bacteria. Our brain could do wonderful, amazing,
crazy, stupid, dumb things to the rest of our body. And like
I said earlier, we're just kind of beginning to understand that connection and what
that means. And as my and I just have to point out I found
this out and it just cracks me up. I don't know, want to
crack it's it's kind of dark humor. But the word hysteria comes from a
Greek word hysteria, which is the word for womb in Greek. Yeah,
there you are. Every time I hear the word hysteria or hysterical, I
just kind of have to go, oh, English, oh, English language,
you poor thing. Rub Well. So that, interestingly, Aaron,
is one of the reasons that people who are trying to diagnose this and don't
understand what mass hysteria actually is. They basically say, oh, they can't
be making these things up because they have real symptoms and you're just saying hysterical
or you're saying they're insane, and that's not the that's just not the case.
That was actually said by Marco Rubio in the twenty seventeen I think it
was investigation of what was going on in Cuba, and he refused to believe
that that diagnosis, and people were actually thrown off medical committees doctors who said
we may be having to look at mess hysteria. No, no, no,
it can't be that people aren't making these things up. You know,
and that person likes thrown off the committee. So that's largely the reason why
all the initial uh you know, reasons for this happening were put at microwave
weapons and sonic weapons e fithel. Physicists were saying, none of that makes
any sense. And the last thing I want to say on this is a
good point. This has happened through history. I'm going to just rattle off
a few things. There was a thing called a glass harmonica and Benjamin Franklin's
time, it was. It was a musical instrument that people initially loved and
they thought the sound was making them healthy. One of the one of the
musicians playing it got sick and died, and then all of a sudden,
the belief was the sound was killing people, and the instrument disappeared within like
if years, because you know, can make you and make it pretty bad,
you know. It was the Martian invasion of Earth. Everybody remember that
in nineteen thirty eight. People smelled the gas coming off of the Martian weapons,
you know, And it was a radio play. When the telephone was
introduced, the initial operators were getting crackles in their ears and they would thought
they were getting brain injuries from it, and you know, they may have
been getting sick, but it wasn't from the crackles in their ears. So
there's a lot of connectivity in these things and the things. It's a very
hard thing for people to accept. So final way, I'll say, the
US government actually made an act called the Havana Act, and you know that
actually stood for helping American victims afflicted by neurological attacks, and Biden signed it
so that that put it into US law that this is a thing that there
was neurological attacks affecting us. Of course the acronym did. Of course,
everybody left at acronym. So if you want to learn more acronyms and learn
not to suffer from mass hysteria, click above you and see more nonprofits