There remains no clear evidence to that the symptoms are the result of an attack by a covert weapon.

While 'Havana Syndrome' remains contentious, a psychological origin is still the most likely explanation.

Dr Eric Haseltine's thoughtful review should be tempered with the evidence against a directed energy attack.

Dr Eric Haseltine, a former American intelligence officer and neuroscientist, has expressed skepticis in his Psychology Today blog (Long Fuse, Big Bang), that “mass hysteria… does not explain much of the data from studies of victims, and remains an unproven hypothesis.” ‘Havana Syndrome’ refers to an array of health complaints first reported by U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers stationed in Havana, Cuba in 2015. Technically, it does not fit the definition of a syndrome since the symptoms and course were so variable, but to avoid confusion, we have placed quotation marks around the term.

Dr. Haseltine's column is more measured than most criticisms of the psychogenic explanation, which we appreciate, but several of his objections rest on a version of our argument that we never made, and others are answered in our book he cites [1].

Neurologist Robert Baloh and I have never claimed that all or even most of the reports of Anomalous Health Incident (AHIs) share a single cause, or that those affected are malingering (feigning illness). Psychogenic illness can affect anyone, and the symptoms are real. The conclusions of the two “prestigious expert panels” that Dr. Haseltine cites as suggesting microwave radiation as a likely cause, were both chaired by the same person and their findings were rejected in 2023 and 2025 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [2, 3]. The intelligence community consensus judged it “highly unlikely” that a foreign adversary was responsible, and that the symptoms were probably the result of preexisting conditions, conventional illnesses and environmental factors.

The two panels cited by Dr. Haseltine were flawed. The National Academy of Sciences panel stated that there was no epidemiological evidence on the social patterning of cases, making it impossible to adequately assess psychogenic illness as an explanation [4]. However, they failed to acknowledge an investigation which detailed the early social patterning starting with ‘patient zero.’ This information was first published in February 2018 by two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who travelled to Cuba and conducted over three dozen interviews [5, 6]. The second panel cited by Dr. Haseltine, dismissed the psychogenic explanation on the erroneous grounds that intelligence officers and diplomats were not prone to experiencing psychogenic illness due to their training [7].

Dr. Haseltine writes that “Several medical studies reported objective clinical findings, including vestibular and oculomotor abnormalities.” This is misleading. The most........

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