Pentagon report investigated lasers that put voices in your head
A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed
an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential
methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report
investigated include putting voices in people's heads, using lasers to
trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body
to a point of feverish confusion - all from hundreds of meters away.
A US citizen requested access
to the document, entitled "Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons,"
under the Freedom of Information Act a little over a year ago. There is
no evidence that any of the technologies mentioned in the 10-year-old
report have been developed since the time it was written.
The report explained several
types of non-lethal laser applications, including microwave hearing,
disrupted neural control, and microwave heating. For the first type,
short pulses of RF energy (2450 MHz) can generate a pressure wave in
solids and liquids. When exposed to pulsed RF energy, humans experience
the immediate sensation of "microwave hearing" - sounds that may
include buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking that originate within
the head.
Studies with guinea pigs and cats suggest that the mechanism
responsible for the phenomenon is thermoelastic expansion. Exposure to
the RF pulses doesn´t cause any permanent effects, as all effects cease
almost immediately after exposure ceases. As the report explains,
tuning microwave hearing could enable communicating with individuals
from a distance of up to several hundred meters.
"The phenomenon is tunable in that the characteristic sounds and
intensities of those sounds depend on the characteristics of the RF
energy as delivered," the report explains. "Because the frequency of
the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF
energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to
the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken
word, except that it could only be heard within a person´s head. In one
experiment, communication
of the words from one to ten using ´speech modulated´ microwave energy
was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person
experiencing the voice could not pick up these sounds. Additional
development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities."
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