Been reading about Havana Syndrome. Honestly, the existence of this technology does not surprise me too much.

One year, I flew to China from SFO. I too experienced this thing where I felt aural pressure and a “silent sound” that kept on getting louder and louder. It’s like that feeling you have in the classroom, where a sound somehow just pushes your eye lids down and down and head down lower and lower, and you are like completely lucid, except the head and eye lid cannot lift.

Then a darkness follows.

Except on this plane flying, they had problem with the equipment, so it pushed me down for a while but let up, and I woke up after 10 seconds and remembered that experience. The crew realized that the system is not quite right, so they recalibrated it, and turned it on again at higher gain. But since I still remembered what happens half a minute ago, I lifted my eye lids and head with my hands. I didn’t fall asleep this time. They discovered that I was keeping my self awake, so they turned it off, and I woke up immediately.

After recalibrating, they tried again and just left it on at high. After a while–on the order of maybe 60 seconds, my arm kind of gave out too. I fell asleep.

Then abruptly, I woke up. I think the calibration is finally complete. That pressure on my ear was gone, I felt as refreshed as ever. It seems the pre-flight check list is done because the plane began to taxi just after I woke up.

Mid-flight, I saw my seat neighbor bow his head down on the seat back in front of him in Islamic prayer.

That finally makes sense.

The technology is not new, but it must be new to Cubans and Chinese. Perhaps a secret group of humans always had access to this technology to knock people out remotely. Maybe that group of humans were Americans.(because it’s kind of hard to imagine that Chinese or Cuban were doing this for Americans secretly on my flight) Well, I am convinced of it for sure.

But even believing that the American Embassy staff and I and concocting these experiences in our heads, one has to think–what if some one has a black pool of money and resources and actually made such a thing? Would they dispossess me the use of mental faculties in order to ensure that they can calibrate a sure way to disable the Muslim sitting next to me?

This is the kind of knowledge that drives some people to think about morality and safety of technologies. This is the kind of power that scares intelligent people into giving money away to ensure that no individual or small group of individuals can have too awesome a power–irrespective of their ethical principles.

This doesn’t stop me from dreaming about creation of disruptive technologies. But with all these sound waves flowing through the air, maybe that truly disruptive technologies will not materialize in our life time.

the next Martin Luther King jr. may have a different dream… he might dream that a person is assessed by his living behavior and not by his DNAs… Maybe he will dream about a world where everyone retains their faculties to think awake no matter his belief or proximity to other beliefs.

Let freedom reign!

Let’s all be free at last!

Ps if you wonder, I’m writing this possibly in repetition of several other posts because I am about to embark on a trip involving flight on another airplane out of SFO. I am having vivid memories recalling that particularly harrowing departure from SFO. I mean I suppose I should be grateful for the safety this technology provided us. But I’d really rather not experience that technology again if possible?