Here's why scientists are questioning whether 'sonic attacks' are real
Using a sound wave to cause neurological damage would be hard to do
BY TINA HESMAN SAEY 7:00 AM, JUNE 1, 2018
An account of another alleged sonic attack has surfaced, this time from a U.S. government employee in China. The employee reported subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure, according to a U.S. Embassy health alert. The episode mirrors reports from American diplomats in Cuba in late 2016, and fuels the debate among scientists about what, if anything, is actually happening.
Last year, 24 of the diplomats who reported sonic attacks in Cuba were tested to gauge whether lasting harm had occurred. In March, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia reported in JAMA that the people had balance and thinking problems, sleep disturbances and headaches, and that some had widespread injury to brain networks.
But some scientists and engineers have been questioning whether such attacks are possible, and if the diplomats symptoms could have been caused by a sonic attack.
The attacks were supposedly committed with sounds outside the range of human hearing. But generating enough acoustical energy to cause hearing loss and brain damage from those types of sound waves would be no easy feat, says Andrew Oxenham, a hearing researcher at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The intensity of very low frequency infrasound or very high frequency ultrasound drops rapidly over distance, so attackers would need enormous loud speakers to have enough intensity to do neurological harm.
More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-are-questioning-whether-sonic-attacks-are-real