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(LifeSiteNews) — Former high-level U.S. national security officials have gone public this week with stories of unexplained, acute-onset neurological symptoms, including on White House grounds, that experts say resemble the effects of a targeted electromagnetic weapon.

The reported experiences of the government officials, publicized for the first time on this week’s episode of 60 Minutes, show a similar pattern: suddenly and without clear explanation, and sometimes along with a loud noise, they said they began experiencing acute symptoms such as vertigo, nausea, head pain, and impaired thinking; sometimes followed by long-term neurological issues such as with memory, eyesight, and balance.

The “attacks” occurred in all different kinds of places: at their place of work, at home, while on a street, or at a hotel.

The CIA, FBI, and State Department are currently investigating the theory that they’ve been targeted with an electromagnetic weapon, shared 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley.

The story of Olivia Troye, former homeland security and counter-terrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, was typical among the reports for the symptoms she experienced.

Troye said that in the summer of 2019, as she was descending the stairs of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, near the West Wing of the White House, she began to experience a “piercing feeling” on the side of her head. At the same time, she felt dizzy and nauseous, and tried to steady herself as she continued down the stairs. But the “piercing” feeling continued as she passed by an entrance to the West Wing.

“It was almost like I couldn’t really process. It was like a paralyzing panic attack. I’ve never felt anything like that. I thought to myself … “Do I have a brain tumor out of the blue? Is this what happens? Am I having a stroke?” Troye told Pelley.

Troye said similar incidents happened again, about a year later, “a couple of times” as she walked to her car on the Ellipse, just south of the White House. These incidents, she said, were similar, with a very distinct sensation of vertigo.

“I felt like I couldn’t really walk … it was like I had a depth perception issue where I couldn’t figure out where the ground was … I felt like I was just gonna fall right into the ground,” Troye said.

Troye was emotional as she explained why she didn’t report the incidents: “There is a human aspect of it of shame. And do you really want to admit you’re sick? Do you want to come forward and tell someone that, especially as a member of the intelligence community?”

Pelley noted that similar clusters of neurological symptoms experienced by U.S. officials became known as “Havana Syndrome,” because the first public reports of the affliction came from officials stationed in Havana, Cuba, in 2016.

New CIA director William Burns pointed out that there have been over 1,000 such incidents “that have been reported since Havana in 2016,” where more than two dozen embassy officials “icroreported injury.” But such reports were initially dismissed in an FBI report as mass hysteria, said Pelley.

Some afflicted individuals have reported lasting effects, such as a senior member of the National Security Council who “says he was stricken in November 2020 on the same steps by the West Wing” where Troye experienced her symptoms.

Former national security adviser John Bolton, who said a colleague of his who would like to remain anonymous, shared that the man experienced “disorientation,” ringing in his ears, and an inability to “speak or think clearly.”

He went to the emergency room, and now, more than a year later, he is “still recovering and suffering from headaches and other symptoms,” and he has been “diagnosed with two other medical conditions that are believed to be the result of the attack … ”

Bolton also shared that two members of his national security staff became ill in a hotel during a 2019 trip by former President Donald Trump to London. “And that it was on the floor where we’d completely taken up with personnel from the White House and White House agencies struck me as being pretty good evidence of a deliberate attack,” he told Pelley.

Several individuals shared that their symptoms were accompanied or preceded by a loud noise. Miles Taylor, former deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff of the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security, said he experienced the same symptoms described by Troye.

In his case, a strange noise is what he first noticed. He was at his apartment on Capitol Hill in the middle of the night, just after having become deputy chief of staff, when he was awakened by a noise he described as a “sort of a chirping, somewhere between what you would think is a cricket or sort of a digital sound.”

It was about 3 or 3:30 in the morning, said Taylor. “I went to the window, opened up my window, looked down at the street … and I see a white van. And the van’s brake lights turned on, and it pulled off and it sped away.”

The next day, he felt sick enough to want to take the day off — and he said about five weeks later, it happened again, this time just before he was to leave to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “have some sensitive conversations with the Israelis on important cybersecurity issues.” He was experiencing “concussion-like” symptoms and said he thought as he arrived at his airplane, “I’m already nauseous. I don’t know if I can do this flight.”

Taylor added, “I became aware of a U.S. government official more senior than me who’d experienced similar episodes at their place of residence.”

Commerce Department official Robyn Garfield shared that he, his wife, and his two children were “repeatedly” being attacked in China, and that his daughter was falling down “multiple times a day.”

They were “evacuated and enrolled in a State Department treatment program at the University of Pennsylvania” but experienced an incident again when an “extremely loud, painful sound” woke his wife up. They moved to a hotel, but there it happened again — this time, Garfield saw his children “thrashing” in their beds while asleep, and noticed a sound “sort of like water rushing” near their heads. The family is now stationed abroad, where they’re working “ to improve balance, eyesight and memory.”

One man (who wished to remain unidentified) explained to Pelley that although publicly sharing his story was “probably” one of his “worst nightmares,” he felt compelled to do so to help others, including friends of his.

“I’m here because I’m tired of the gaslighting that keeps happening from the U.S. government. I’m tired of this yo-yoing. Because I’m watching new colleagues and friends that I’ve trained with, and friends that I’ve known for years that are being sent to these countries and coming back a shell of their former selves. We need to help them, and we need to stop this,” he said.

Reports of injuries among U.S. officials have occurred more recently in Vienna, Austria, and in India, during a visit by CIA director William Burns.

Burns said that a CIA task force is focusing on investigating about two dozen particular cases involving unexplained brain injury.

Dr. David Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University who helped lead two government panels that investigated the injuries, said they have found what they believe is “clear evidence of an injury to the auditory and vestibular system of the brain. Everything, starting with the inner ear where humans perceive sound and sense balance, and then translate those perceptions into brain electrical signals.”

Dr. Relman’s committees focused on one subset of patients with a “so-called acute sensory event, an experience that consisted of the abrupt onset of intense pressure or vibration in the face or head sometimes with the abrupt onset of sound.”

They concluded that the cause of these experiences was most likely “pulsed electromagnetic energy.”

“In other words, a focused beam of microwaves fired from a distance,” said Pelley.

James Benford, a physicist who co-wrote a book on microwave transmission, believes the “best” and “most plausible” explanation for these incidents is a “high-power microwave weapon.”

He displayed examples of “portable microwave transmitters of the kind that could damage the tissues of the brain,” and explained that “there are many kinds,” which range “anywhere in size from a suitcase all the way up to a large tractor trailer unit.”

He said the technology has been studied for over 50 years, and has “been developed widely” in about a dozen countries, primarily in the United States, China, and Russia.

Pelley confronted Burns about an interim CIA report from January that said, “We assess it unlikely that a foreign actor, including Russia, is conducting a sustained, worldwide campaign harming U.S. personnel with a weapon or a mechanism.”

Burns explained, “The intelligence community assesses now that there’s not a single cause that — it would explain the more than 1,000 incidents that have been reported since Havana in 2016. We’ve also not yet been able to link a foreign state actor or an external device or mechanism to any of those cases.”

“What line is crossed if a hostile actor is doing this in Washington, D.C.?” Pelley asked.

“That would be a pretty profound line to be crossed … if we were ever able to develop concrete evidence that that were the case. But we do not have evidence of that at this point,” Burns replied.

“You understand how frustrating your comments must be to some of these people who believe they know exactly what happened to them, on what day and at what time, and what happened to their children,” Pelley responded. “And yet, the director of the CIA is saying we can’t connect the dots. We don’t know enough yet.”

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